Progressive Media Advocates
Walter Brasch: Since you like hunting, and they like hunting, your banker friends will let you buy all the guns and ammunition you want. But, they can’t help you on your health bills, or even lower the insurance premiums and co-pays. And, they can’t do much for that inflated mortgage payment. Or to help you find another job.
Ted Vaill: Seventy or eighty arch-conservative Tea Party members of the House and Senate have held this country hostage to their right-wing demands that we sacrifice entitlements belonging to ordinary, hard working Americans for the benefit of their rich friends. What is the mood of the ordinary American? Disgust.
Brent Budowsky: House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) could not deliver enough Republican votes. He was some 40 votes short. At the very moment when Democrats had leverage, they still caved and asked for and received nothing in return.
Vijay Prashad: In the Progressive Caucus there was unanimity in the critique, but some hesitation over the way ahead. A few people felt that the far right was dangerous, and it seemed unsafe to unhinge what appeared to be Obama’s walkover in 2012.
Robert Reich: Anyone who characterizes the deal between the President, Democratic, and Republican leaders as a victory for the American people over partisanship understands neither economics nor politics.
Denis Campbell: Many economists predict a failure to act before Asia markets open Sunday or Monday night could see an immediate stock market loss of up to 5% and wipe out 10% of US GDP by Tuesday night. It’s that serious.
Adam Eran: The metaphors that frame the current Federal budget and debt ceiling debates are completely inaccurate, and if the media coverage is any indication, the public has swallowed them hook, line and sinker, too.
Sharon Kyle; President Obama has the wrong team Cornel West told a reporter. The poor, particularly blacks and browns are suffering under his leadership.
Tom Hall: The mainstream media has had little to say about Obama’s accomplishments. Why would they? The mainstream media is owned by, and serves, a handful of huge corporations in New York.
Robert Reich: Standard & Poor’s insists any deal must also contain a credible, bipartisan plan to reduce the nation’s long-term budget deficit by $4 trillion — something neither Harry Reid’s nor John Boehner’s plans do.
Paul Loeb: Obama has forgotten the basic lesson of negotiation — you don’t hand everything over before you start, particularly to people who have utter contempt for your values and goals.
Robert Reich: The only way out of the vicious economic cycle is for government to adopt an expansionary fiscal policy — spending more in the short term in order to make up for the shortfall in consumer demand.
Tanya Acker: There is a lot of discussion these days about the detriments of compromise. When you compromise, for instance, certain people may claim you don’t stick to your guns and decide not to vote for you.
Ted Vaill: Every Member of Congress who voted against increasing the debt ceiling should be targeted for defeat in the 2012 election. If that is not successful in changing the makeup of Congress after 2012, I may follow the lead of my ancestor Pelatiah Everett, and begin a new revolution.
Tina Dupuy: Their real goal is the pyrrhic victory of making the President fail because they think the GOP will rise from the country’s ashes.
Brent Budowsky: The extreme hard-line attitude of many Republicans has significantly raised the prospects for a national default and rating agency downgrades that would sweep across the nation and many states, causing an economic cataclysm and public outrage unlike anything ever seen in the history of the republic.
Robert Reich: The GOP’s experienced actors – House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell – have been upstaged by juveniles like Eric Cantor and Michele Bachmann, who don’t know the difference between playacting and governing. Washington has gone from theater to reality TV – a game of hi-jinks chicken that could end in a crash.
Sikivu Hutchinson: As Middle America shuffles out of its hangover from the Casey Anthony trial and into the debt ceiling morass, the war on women has been fueled by an insidious 21st century cult of true womanhood.
Walter Brasch: After significant compromise with the recalcitrant Republicans who want to continue to give the wealthy tax advantages while cutting significant social programs, President Obama has finally taken a stand on debt ceiling negotiations. However, in labor, wildlife management, and the environment he is still compromising rather than coming out forcefully for the principles he and the working class and environmentalists believe.
Robert Reich: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s compromise on the debt ceiling is a win for the President disguised as a win for Republicans. But it really just kicks the can down the road past the 2012 election – which is what almost every sane politician in Washington wants to happen in any event.
Randy Shaw: Obama ran for president preaching hope and rejecting appeals to fear, but now has become exactly what he railed against.
Tom Degan: In a move that is as transparent as it is outrageous, our Republicans representatives are so desperate to take back the White House and the senate in 2012, they are within twenty-six days of sending the American economy – along with the American people – into the abyss.
Ted Vaill: In less than a month, unless they relent in their effort to destroy the American (and the world) economy to curry favor with their Tea Party wing, the Republicans in Congress will cause the American government to default on its debt, on August 2, 2011 or thereabouts.
Brent Budowsky: On this July 4 the Republican Party is divided between the hope America fails Republicans, who appear to actively want joblessness to rise to seek political gain, and the radical Republicans who adore Ayn Rand.
Robert Reich: Our representatives in the nation’s capital continue to obsess about future budget deficits and games of chicken over raising the debt ceiling — neither of which has anything at all to do with the stalled recovery and the carnage on the Street.
Robert Reich: If the Democrats remain silent, the vacuum will be filled by the Republican snake oil of federal spending cuts and cut taxes on big corporations and the wealthy.
Dick Price: Thursday, a hundred or so veteran agitators gathered in Will Rogers Park on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills to protest the conjectured sale of the Los Angeles Times to Charles and David Koch, plutocrat owners of the $115-billion-annual-revenue Koch Industries, who have expressed interest in using the paper to spread their drown-government-in-the-bathtub invective.
Walter Brasch: The failure to maintain records in an easily searchable method continues to allow the DEP to withhold public information from the public by burying the requested data within piles of irrelevant documents, most of which need interpretation from scientists.
Brent Budowsky: Let’s escalate the effort to eliminate the backlog of benefits due to wounded warriors and disabled vets by devoting whatever resources are necessary to complete this mission, and enlisting a major business leader.
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What’s Next for Obama and Democrats?
Tom Hayden: Launch a campaign progressive to the core, with no compromises on ending tax cuts for the rich and trillion-dollar wars.