Need some good news today? Here you go. Elizabeth Warren has jumped into the lead in the Massachusetts Senate race over Scott Brown. Granted, it’s very early in the race, but initial polls had her down 9 points over Brown, and now she leads 46-44. Via PPP : Warren’s gone from 38% name recognition to 62% over the last three months and she’s made a good first impression on pretty much everyone who’s developed an opinion about her during that period of time. What was a 21/17 favorability rating in June is now 40/22- in other words she’s increased the voters with a positive opinion of her by 19% while her negatives have risen only 5%. The surprising movement toward Warren has a lot to do with her but it also has a lot to do with Scott Brown. We now find a slight plurality of voters in the state disapproving of him- 45%, compared to only 44% approving. We have seen a steady decline in Brown’s numbers over the last 9 months. In early December his approval was a +24 spread at 53/29. By June it had declined to a +12 spread at a 48/36. And now it’s continued that fall to its current place. Brown’s position has always been a little tenuous as a Republican in a strongly Democratic state, making him very dependent on the support of Obama voters to stay above ground. In June he was at 72/17 with McCain voters and now he’s at 74/18, pretty much the same. But with Obama voters he’s gone from 35/48 to 27/62, accounting for the entire drop in his overall approval numbers. It’s a similar story when you look at the horse race numbers. Last time Brown led Warren 87-6 with McCain voters and now it’s 87-9. But with Obama voters Warren’s turned what was only a 47-24 lead into a 68-20 one. Despite his difficulties with Warren, Brown does continues to hold a wide advantage over the rest of the Democratic field. He’s up 15 points on Alan Khazei at 48-33, 15 on Setti Warren as well at 47-32, 18 on Bob Massie at 49-31, and 19 on Tom Conroy at 50-31. The non-Elizabeth Warren Democratic contenders have only 19-36% name recognition so they could conceivably become more competitive if one of them were to win the nomination and become better known- but primary numbers we’ll release later this week show that the contest for the Democratic nod might be over before it’s even really started. Blue America has a page to support her campaign . Please help us help her defeat Scott Brown.
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Singer Tony Bennett has sold over 50 million album copies but that success doesn't seem to have required much common sense or decency. In a recent interview, the veteran crooner sounded appalingly similar to controversial left-wing minister Jerremiah Wright, stating, among other things that America “caused” 9/11 to happen. In what was supposed to be an interview about his latest music collection, Bennett took a turn far afield when he began lashing out at U.S. foreign policy, creating a grotesque moral equivalence between Al Qaeda terrorists who deliberately inflict mass civilian casualties and America:
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International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook says slow, bumpy recovery could be jeopardised by Europe’s debt crisis or over-hasty attempts to cut America’s budget deficit • IMF cuts growth forecast for UK The International Monetary Fund warned on Tuesday that the United States and the eurozone risk being plunged back into recession unless policymakers tackle the problems facing the world’s two biggest economic forces. In its half-yearly health check, the Washington-based fund said the global economy was “in a dangerous place” and that its forecast of a slow, bumpy recovery would be jeopardised by a deepening of Europe’s sovereign debt crisis or over-hasty attempts to rein in America’s budget deficit. “Global activity has weakened and become more uneven, confidence has fallen sharply recently, and downside risks are growing,” the IMF said as it cut its global growth forecast for both 2011 and 2012. The IMF also cut its growth forecasts for the UK economy and advised George Osborne to ease the pace of deficit reduction in the event of any further downturn in activity. The IMF’s World Economic Outlook cited the Japanese tsunami and the rise in oil prices prompted by the unrest in north Africa and the Middle East as two of a “barrage” of shocks to hit the international economy in 2011. It said it now expected the global economy to expand by 4% in both 2011 and 2012, cuts of 0.3 points and 0.5 points since it last published forecasts three months ago. “The structural problems facing the crisis-hit advanced economies have proven even more intractable than expected, and the process of devising and implementing reforms even more complicated. “The outlook for these economies is thus for a continuing, but weak and bumpy, expansion.” The IMF said it expected the strong performance of the leading emerging nations to be the main driving force behind growth in the world economy of 4% in 2012, 0.5 points lower than it had been anticipating three months ago. China’s growth rate is forecast to ease back slightly, from 9.5% in 2011 to 9% in 2012, while India is predicted to expand by 7.5% in 2012 after 7.8% growth in 2011. Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to continue to post robust growth, up from 5.2% in 2011 to 5.8% in 2012. The rich developed countries, by contrast, are forecast to grow by just under 2%, slightly faster than the 1.6% pencilled in by the IMF for 2011. “However, this assumes that European policymakers contain the crisis in the euro periphery area, that US policymakers strike a judicious balance between support for the economy and medium-term fiscal consolidation, and that volatility in global financial markets does not escalate.” “The risks are clearly to the downside,” the IMF added, pointing to two particular concerns – that policymakers in the eurozone lose control of the sovereign debt crisis, and that the US economy could weaken as a result of political impasse in Washington, a deteriorating housing market or a slide in shares on Wall Street. It said the European Central Bank should consider cutting interest rates and that the Federal Reserve should stand ready to provide more “unconventional support”. It said: “Either of these two eventualities would have severe implications for global growth. The renewed stress could undermine financial markets and institutions in advanced economies, which remain unusually vulnerable. Commodity prices and global trade and capital flows would likely decline abruptly, dragging down growth in developing countries.” The IMF said that in its downside scenario, the eurozone and the US could fall back into recession, with activity some three percentage points lower in 2012 than envisaged. Currently, the fund is expecting the US to grow by 1.8% in 2012 and the eurozone by 1.1%. “In the euro area, the adverse feedback loop between weak sovereign and financial institutions needs to be broken. Fragile financial institutions must be asked to raise more capital, preferably through private solutions. If these are not available, they will have to accept injections of public capital or support from the European Financial Stability Fund, or be restructured or closed.” The IMF urged Republicans and Democrats in Washington to settle their differences: “Deep political differences leave the course of US policy highly uncertain. There is a serious risk that hasty fiscal cutbacks will further weaken the outlook without providing the long-term reforms required to reduce debt to more sustainable levels.” IMF Global economy Economics Larry Elliott guardian.co.uk
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enlarge Credit: Center for American Progress On Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner peppered his address to the Economic Club of Washington with a dozen mentions of America’s so-called “job creators.” But in claiming that high taxes and unnecessary regulations have “pummeled” his supposed job producers, Boehner willingly misrepresented the source of and solutions to the nation’s economic problems. After all, recent surveys show that regulations and taxes are not killing small business. With corporations flush with cash and the total federal tax burden at a 60 year low, the U.S. instead faces a demand crisis fueled by staggering household debt . But John Boehner perpetrated the biggest fraud of his address when he declared, “Job creators in America are essentially on strike.” If so, they’ve been on the picket line for a decade. As it turns out, George W. Bush’s tax breaks for the wealthy sadly coincided with the worst period of job creation of any president since Herbert Hoover. Like his lieutenant Eric Cantor , John Boehner has been regurgitating the “job creators” talking point for months. (Arguably, the sound bite dates back to 1993 , when Republicans deployed the same “job killing” language against the Clinton upper-income tax increases that preceded the 1990′s economic boom.) In May, Boehner served up the “job creators” line seven times in a speech to the Economic Club of New York . Contending that “the mere threat of tax hikes causes uncertainty for job creators — uncertainty that results in less risk-taking and fewer jobs,” Speaker Boehner explaine d that same month just who his magical job creators are: “The top one percent of wage earners in the United States…pay forty percent of the income taxes…The people he’s [President Obama] is talking about taxing are the very people that we expect to reinvest in our economy.” If so, those expectations were sadly unmet under George W. Bush. After all, the last time the top tax rate was 39.6 percent during the Clinton administration, the United States enjoyed rising incomes, 23 million new jobs and budget surpluses. Under Bush? Not so much. On January 9, 2009, the Republican-friendly Wall Street Journal summed it up with an article titled simply, ” Bush on Jobs: the Worst Track Record on Record .” (The Journal’s interactive table quantifies his staggering failure relative to every post-World War II president.) The meager one million jobs created under President Bush didn’t merely pale in comparison to the 23 million produced during Bill Clinton’s tenure. In September 2009, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee charted Bush’s job creation disaster, the worst since Hoover: That dismal performance prompted David Leonhardt of the New York Times to ask last fall, “Why should we believe that extending the Bush tax cuts will provide a big lift to growth?” His answer was unambiguous: Those tax cuts passed in 2001 amid big promises about what they would do for the economy. What followed? The decade with the slowest average annual growth since World War II. Amazingly, that statement is true even if you forget about the Great Recession and simply look at 2001-7… Is there good evidence the tax cuts persuaded more people to join the work force (because they would be able to keep more of their income)? Not really. The labor-force participation rate fell in the years after 2001 and has never again approached its record in the year 2000. Is there evidence that the tax cuts led to a lot of entrepreneurship and innovation? Again, no. The rate at which start-up businesses created jobs fell during the past decade. The data are clear: lower taxes for America’s so called job-creators don’t mean either faster economic growth or more jobs for Americans . It’s no wonder Leonhardt followed his first question with another. “I mean this as a serious question, not a rhetorical one,” he asked, “Given this history, why should we believe that the Bush tax cuts were pro-growth?” Or as Mark Shields asked and answered in April: “Do tax cuts help ‘job creators’ or ‘robber barons’?” Just days after the Washington Post documented that George W. Bush presided over the worst eight-year economic performance in the modern American presidency, the New York Times in January 2009 featured an analysis comparing presidential performance going back to Eisenhower. As the Times showed, George W. Bush, the first MBA president, was a historic failure when it came to expanding GDP, producing jobs and even fueling stock market growth. Apparently, America’s job creators can create a lot more jobs when their taxes are higher – even much higher – than they are today. (It’s worth noting that the changing landscape of loopholes, deductions and credits, especially after the 1986 tax reform signed by President Reagan, makes apples-to-apples comparisons of effective tax rates over time very difficult. For more background, see the CBO data on effective tax rates by income quintile.) The epic failures of the Bush tax cuts for America’s supposed job creators hardly end there. The U.S. poverty rate began rising in 2005 , well before the onset of the December 2007 Bush recession. As David Cay Johnston document, average household income fell after the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, dropping to about $58,500 in 2008 from $61,500 in 2000. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) found that the Bush tax cuts accounted for almost half of the mushrooming deficits during his tenure , and, if made permanent, over the next 10 years would contribute more to the U.S. budget deficit than the Obama stimulus, the TARP program, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and revenue lost to the recession put together . As the data show, the Bush tax cuts provided a massive payday for the wealthy , helping fuel record income inequality . For Republicans, this predictable result of the Bush tax cuts was a feature, not a bug. As the Center for American Progress noted in 2004, “for the majority of Americans, the tax cuts meant very little,” adding, “By next year, for instance, 88% of all Americans will receive $100 or less from the Administration’s latest tax cuts.” But that was just the beginning of the story. As the CAP also reported, the Bush tax cuts delivered a third of their total benefits to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans . And to be sure, their payday was staggering. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities showed that millionaires on average pocketed almost $129,000 from the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. Despite that record failure, House Republicans want to give the job creators who don’t create jobs another jaw-dropping tax cut. In May, Speaker Boehner and House Republicans updated their ” Pledge to America ” with another gilded-class giveaway they called their ” Plan for America’s Job Creators .” As Ezra Klein , Paul Krugman and Steve Benen among others noted, the “Plan for America’s Job Creators” is simply a repackaging of years of previous proposals and GOP bromides. (As Klein pointed out, the 10 page document “looks like the staffer in charge forgot the assignment was due on Thursday rather than Friday, and so cranked the font up to 24 and began dumping clip art to pad out the plan.”) At the center of it is the same plan from the Ryan House budget passed in April to cut the top individual and corporate tax rates to 25%. The price tag for the Republican proposal is a jaw-dropping $4.2 trillion. And as Matthew Yglesias explained, earlier analyses of similar proposals in Ryan’s Roadmap reveal that working Americans would have to pick up the tab left unpaid by upper-income households: This is an important element of Ryan’s original “roadmap” plan that’s never gotten the attention it deserves. But according to a Center for Tax Justice analysis (PDF), even though Ryan features large aggregate tax cuts, ninety percent of Americans would actually pay higher taxes under his plan. In other words, it wasn’t just cuts in middle class benefits in order to cut taxes on the rich. It was cuts in middle class benefits and middle class tax hikes in order to cut taxes on the rich. It’ll be interesting to see if the House Republicans formally introduce such a plan and if so how many people will vote for it. If this all sounds hauntingly familiar, it should. When it comes to using the tax code to line the pockets of the wealthiest people in America, John Boehner and Congressional Republicans simply want the next decade to look like the last one. That is, gargantuan tax cuts for America’s so-called “job creators”; no jobs for Americans. (This piece also appears at Perrspectives. )
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enlarge Credit: Center for American Progress On Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner peppered his address to the Economic Club of Washington with a dozen mentions of America’s so-called “job creators.” But in claiming that high taxes and unnecessary regulations have “pummeled” his supposed job producers, Boehner willingly misrepresented the source of and solutions to the nation’s economic problems. After all, recent surveys show that regulations and taxes are not killing small business. With corporations flush with cash and the total federal tax burden at a 60 year low, the U.S. instead faces a demand crisis fueled by staggering household debt . But John Boehner perpetrated the biggest fraud of his address when he declared, “Job creators in America are essentially on strike.” If so, they’ve been on the picket line for a decade. As it turns out, George W. Bush’s tax breaks for the wealthy sadly coincided with the worst period of job creation of any president since Herbert Hoover. Like his lieutenant Eric Cantor , John Boehner has been regurgitating the “job creators” talking point for months. (Arguably, the sound bite dates back to 1993 , when Republicans deployed the same “job killing” language against the Clinton upper-income tax increases that preceded the 1990′s economic boom.) In May, Boehner served up the “job creators” line seven times in a speech to the Economic Club of New York . Contending that “the mere threat of tax hikes causes uncertainty for job creators — uncertainty that results in less risk-taking and fewer jobs,” Speaker Boehner explaine d that same month just who his magical job creators are: “The top one percent of wage earners in the United States…pay forty percent of the income taxes…The people he’s [President Obama] is talking about taxing are the very people that we expect to reinvest in our economy.” If so, those expectations were sadly unmet under George W. Bush. After all, the last time the top tax rate was 39.6 percent during the Clinton administration, the United States enjoyed rising incomes, 23 million new jobs and budget surpluses. Under Bush? Not so much. On January 9, 2009, the Republican-friendly Wall Street Journal summed it up with an article titled simply, ” Bush on Jobs: the Worst Track Record on Record .” (The Journal’s interactive table quantifies his staggering failure relative to every post-World War II president.) The meager one million jobs created under President Bush didn’t merely pale in comparison to the 23 million produced during Bill Clinton’s tenure. In September 2009, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee charted Bush’s job creation disaster, the worst since Hoover: That dismal performance prompted David Leonhardt of the New York Times to ask last fall, “Why should we believe that extending the Bush tax cuts will provide a big lift to growth?” His answer was unambiguous: Those tax cuts passed in 2001 amid big promises about what they would do for the economy. What followed? The decade with the slowest average annual growth since World War II. Amazingly, that statement is true even if you forget about the Great Recession and simply look at 2001-7… Is there good evidence the tax cuts persuaded more people to join the work force (because they would be able to keep more of their income)? Not really. The labor-force participation rate fell in the years after 2001 and has never again approached its record in the year 2000. Is there evidence that the tax cuts led to a lot of entrepreneurship and innovation? Again, no. The rate at which start-up businesses created jobs fell during the past decade. The data are clear: lower taxes for America’s so called job-creators don’t mean either faster economic growth or more jobs for Americans . It’s no wonder Leonhardt followed his first question with another. “I mean this as a serious question, not a rhetorical one,” he asked, “Given this history, why should we believe that the Bush tax cuts were pro-growth?” Or as Mark Shields asked and answered in April: “Do tax cuts help ‘job creators’ or ‘robber barons’?” Just days after the Washington Post documented that George W. Bush presided over the worst eight-year economic performance in the modern American presidency, the New York Times in January 2009 featured an analysis comparing presidential performance going back to Eisenhower. As the Times showed, George W. Bush, the first MBA president, was a historic failure when it came to expanding GDP, producing jobs and even fueling stock market growth. Apparently, America’s job creators can create a lot more jobs when their taxes are higher – even much higher – than they are today. (It’s worth noting that the changing landscape of loopholes, deductions and credits, especially after the 1986 tax reform signed by President Reagan, makes apples-to-apples comparisons of effective tax rates over time very difficult. For more background, see the CBO data on effective tax rates by income quintile.) The epic failures of the Bush tax cuts for America’s supposed job creators hardly end there. The U.S. poverty rate began rising in 2005 , well before the onset of the December 2007 Bush recession. As David Cay Johnston document, average household income fell after the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, dropping to about $58,500 in 2008 from $61,500 in 2000. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) found that the Bush tax cuts accounted for almost half of the mushrooming deficits during his tenure , and, if made permanent, over the next 10 years would contribute more to the U.S. budget deficit than the Obama stimulus, the TARP program, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and revenue lost to the recession put together . As the data show, the Bush tax cuts provided a massive payday for the wealthy , helping fuel record income inequality . For Republicans, this predictable result of the Bush tax cuts was a feature, not a bug. As the Center for American Progress noted in 2004, “for the majority of Americans, the tax cuts meant very little,” adding, “By next year, for instance, 88% of all Americans will receive $100 or less from the Administration’s latest tax cuts.” But that was just the beginning of the story. As the CAP also reported, the Bush tax cuts delivered a third of their total benefits to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans . And to be sure, their payday was staggering. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities showed that millionaires on average pocketed almost $129,000 from the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. Despite that record failure, House Republicans want to give the job creators who don’t create jobs another jaw-dropping tax cut. In May, Speaker Boehner and House Republicans updated their ” Pledge to America ” with another gilded-class giveaway they called their ” Plan for America’s Job Creators .” As Ezra Klein , Paul Krugman and Steve Benen among others noted, the “Plan for America’s Job Creators” is simply a repackaging of years of previous proposals and GOP bromides. (As Klein pointed out, the 10 page document “looks like the staffer in charge forgot the assignment was due on Thursday rather than Friday, and so cranked the font up to 24 and began dumping clip art to pad out the plan.”) At the center of it is the same plan from the Ryan House budget passed in April to cut the top individual and corporate tax rates to 25%. The price tag for the Republican proposal is a jaw-dropping $4.2 trillion. And as Matthew Yglesias explained, earlier analyses of similar proposals in Ryan’s Roadmap reveal that working Americans would have to pick up the tab left unpaid by upper-income households: This is an important element of Ryan’s original “roadmap” plan that’s never gotten the attention it deserves. But according to a Center for Tax Justice analysis (PDF), even though Ryan features large aggregate tax cuts, ninety percent of Americans would actually pay higher taxes under his plan. In other words, it wasn’t just cuts in middle class benefits in order to cut taxes on the rich. It was cuts in middle class benefits and middle class tax hikes in order to cut taxes on the rich. It’ll be interesting to see if the House Republicans formally introduce such a plan and if so how many people will vote for it. If this all sounds hauntingly familiar, it should. When it comes to using the tax code to line the pockets of the wealthiest people in America, John Boehner and Congressional Republicans simply want the next decade to look like the last one. That is, gargantuan tax cuts for America’s so-called “job creators”; no jobs for Americans. (This piece also appears at Perrspectives. )
Continue reading …Dick Cheney Rewrites Iraq War History and Claims Disbanding Saddam’s Army Influenced Nothing
September 19, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media (h/t Heather at VideoCafe ) Dick Cheney is still on his book tour and Sunday he disgraced CBS with an appearance on Face The Nation . Not only has he proclaimed that he was the Decider in Chief of the Bush administration during the 9/11 attacks in his book and the military refused his order to shoot civilian planes down, but he had the audacity to lie about how the Iraq invasion escalated into a full blown civil war after the invasion was over. He responded to Colin Powell’s criticisms of the job he did as VP. COLIN POWELL: “He says that I went out of my way not to present my positions to the President but to take them outside of the administration. That’s nonsense. The President knows and I had told him what I thought about every issue of the day. Mister Cheney may forget that I’m the one who said to President Bush ‘If you break it, you own it, and you’ve got to understand that if we have to go to war in Iraq, we’ve to be prepared for the whole war, not just the first phase.’ And Mister Cheney and many of his colleagues were not prepared for what happened after the fall of Baghdad. Remember, Cheney was the one who kept telling America that the Iraq conflict was in its last throes (as far back as 2005) over and over again as the violence kept escalating. Schieffer actually asked the right question. SCHIEFFER: Let me just ask you this…was it a mistake to get rid of all the people in the army? To disband the army as they did? CHENEY: Well, it may have been a mistake. It wasn’t as though we had total control over everything. In effect, what happened for a large part of it was they just packed up and went home. They disappeared back into the countryside and went back to their private lives. So they weren’t there, it wasn’t as though they’d all found a place where they were waiting for us to come in and take command of the army. What was that? The army’s response to being disbanded by the Bush administration immediately destroyed what fragile peace there was and turned the Sunnis Muslims against the Shiite Muslims, leading to a horrifying blood bath. Probably the single decision that triggered the hostilities was when Paul Bremer was appointed in Iraq and he unceremoniously told Saddam’s former army members that they were not allowed to be part of the newly forming government . Sweeping away remnants of pre-war Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, on Friday dissolved the Iraqi Armed Forces, the ministries of Defense and Information, and other security institutions that supported Saddam Hussein’s regime. An American senior coalition official said the move effectively disbands the Army, the Republican Guard and the Revolutionary Command Council, among others, and cancels any military or other ranks conferred by the previous regime. — It also put an estimated 350,000 to 400,000 soldiers out of work, as well as an estimated 2,000 Information Ministry employees. A deal had been brokered to keep the fragile peace in Iraq by the military leadership and Bremer, who has a history of destabilizing countries by defaulting on their promises without even consulting them. Gen. Peter Pace, then the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations in February 2004 that the decision to disband the Iraqi Army was made without the input of the joint chiefs. “We were not asked for a recommendation or for advice,” he said. These troops were angry and didn’t take their Tonka trucks and go home as Cheney depicted here. They picked up their guns started the civil war. Director Charles Ferguson explained much in his excellent documentary “No End In Sight” The worst mistake, however, was the disbanding of the Iraqi Army in May 2003, two months after the invasion. This was a decision made by only a few men — specifically Bremer in his capacity as the head of the occupation authority, and his aide Walter Slocombe — and against the advice of just about everyone with any on-the-ground knowledge of the situation. (According to Ferguson, it’s unclear if President Bush approved of the idea.) Bremer and Slocombe apparently believed that the Iraqi Army had to be rendered powerless, though others explain to Ferguson that Bremer and Slocombe were confusing the army with the Republican Guard. The Guard consisted of Baath Party loyalists; the Iraqi military was a professional force that had always tried to keep its distance from the Hussein regime. When the war began, the army had faded into the countryside, leaving the Guard to do the bulk of the fighting. Once the Americans prevailed, according to Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s chief of staff, Iraqi military officers indicated their willingness to work with the occupiers, but instead they and their troops were stripped of their positions and careers. An estimated 500,000 to 800,000 men, 7 to 10 percent of the Iraqi work force, lost their jobs. And they had guns. “More than any other single action,” Ferguson says, the order to disband the army “created the Iraqi insurgency.” C&L had Charles Ferguson on for a live chat when his film was released in 2007.
Continue reading …Voluntary Taxes? Obama Will ‘Ask the Rich’ to Pay More, Claims New York Times
September 19, 2011 No Comment
Sunday’s lead New York Times story by White House correspondent Jackie Calmes pushed the president’s new plan to raise taxes on “the wealthy.” The president, in what the Times seems to think is a bright idea, is calling his proposal the “Buffett rule,” after the billionaire who made waves with his complaint, printed in the Times, that uber-wealthy investors like him were not being taxed enough. Here is the stack of headlines: “ Obama Tax Plan Would Ask More Of Millionaires – Called ‘Buffett Rule’ – Populist Sales Pitch to Press the G.O.P. in Budget Talks .” Why write “Ask More of Millionaires”? Are these tax increases going to be voluntary? President Obama on Monday will call for a new minimum tax rate for individuals making more than $1 million a year to ensure that they pay at least the same percentage of their earnings as middle-income taxpayers, according to administration officials. …. Mr. Obama, in a bit of political salesmanship, will call his proposal the “Buffett Rule,” in a reference to Warren E. Buffett, the billionaire investor who has complained repeatedly that the richest Americans generally pay a smaller share of their income in federal taxes than do middle-income workers, because investment gains are taxed at a lower rate than wages. Mr. Obama will not specify a rate or other details, and it is unclear how much revenue his plan would raise. But his idea of a millionaires’ minimum tax will be prominent in the broad plan for long-term deficit reduction that he will outline at the White House on Monday. Mr. Obama’s proposal is certain to draw opposition from Republicans, who have staunchly opposed raising taxes on the affluent because, they say, it would discourage investment. It could also invite scrutiny from some economists who have disputed Mr. Buffett’s assertion that the megarich pay a lower tax rate over all. Mr. Buffett’s critics say many of the rich actually make more from wages than from investments.
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NBC Relays ‘Palestinian Deam’ of State to Be ‘Free,’ Ignores Calls for Removing Jews from Palestine
September 19, 2011 No CommentAndrea Mitchell on Friday and Martin Fletcher filed reports on the NBC Nightly News filling in viewers on the Palestinian Authority upcoming plan to go to the United Nations and seek recognition of statehood or at least U.N. membership as the U.N. convenes this week. Both reports ignored last week's prediction by the Palestinian Authority's envoy to the U.N. that Jews would be removed from a Palestinian state. While Mitchell conveyed Palestinian complaints that ” they've had negotiations before, decades of them, and they have nothing to show for it,” and Fletcher similarly relayed that “Their leaders say they have no alternative but to try something new – the 20 years of peace talks have gotten them nowhere,” neither report informed viewers that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has been the major obstacle in the resumption of negotiations as he has refused to engage in talks unless the Israeli government halts constructions within the borders of already existing Jewish settlements. Although Fletcher's report did at least include a clip of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu calling for talks with the Palestinian Authority, the NBC corresondent still seemed to suggest both sides were resisting talks as he recounted that “American negotiators are still trying very hard to get Israel and the Palestinians back to the negotiating table.” And, in spite of the authoritarian nature of the Fatah-run West Bank and the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, Fletcher began his report by relaying the spin that a Palestinian state would be a place for Palestinians to be free: MARTIN FLETCHER: Palestinians call this their moment of truth. Bethlehem today kicked off a week of West Bank rallies in support of their bid to join the United Nations as a full member state, the Palestinian dream. Flag makers are working around the clock. Fawad Anid wants the Palestinian flag to hang from every car and house. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: I'm so happy and excited at the same time because I want to have a Palestinian country to live in and to be free. Notably, in recent months, polls have shown that many Arabs living in East Jerusalem would be willing to leave their homes to remain within the borders of Israel if East Jerusalem were to be handed over to the control of a Palestinian state. Below are complete transcripts of the reports from the Friday, September 16, and Sunday, September 18, NBC Nightly News: #From Friday, September 16: KATE SNOW: Now to a threat that could put the United States in a difficult position on the world stage when the U.N. meets here in New York next week. The biggest issue on the table, Palestinian statehood. Today Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas threatened to bring the issue to the Security Council for a vote, which sets the stage for a potential showdown the U.S. and Israel are eager to avoid. Our chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell is at the State Department tonight. Andrea, what is the U.S. trying to do to stop this proposal? ANDREA MITCHELL: Well, Kate, the U.S. is working frantically in the next couple of days to try to persuade the Palestinians not to go to the Security Council. They're telling President Abbas that the way to statehood is through negotiations, through overcoming all of the remaining obstacles with Israel – like what will the borders of a new state be and who will control what parts of Jerusalem – but not by just declaring a state. That said, the Palestinians say that they've had negotiations before, decades of them, and they have nothing to show for it. The U.S. is promising this time to get those talks restarted and to fast track them. If it does go to the Security Council, the U.S. says it will veto it, but it doesn't want to be put in that isolated position, siding with Israel against the rest of the world. The fallback position for the Palestinians would be to go to the General Assembly, the much larger group. That said, it would be largely symbolic, and the U.S. doesn't want that to happen either. So this is, as you say, shaping up as quite a showdown next week. #From Sunday, September 18: LESTER HOLT: There will be high drama here in New York this week as world leaders converge for a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly. Tonight, U.S. and European diplomats are scrambling to avoid a showdown after the Palestinians announced plans to ask for statehood and U.N. membership. More now from NBC's Martin Fletcher. M ARTIN FLETCHER: Palestinians call this their moment of truth. Bethlehem today kicked off a week of West Bank rallies in support of their bid to join the United Nations as a full member state, the Palestinian dream. Flag makers are working around the clock. Fawad Anid wants the Palestinian flag to hang from every car and house. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: I'm so happy and excited at the same time because I want to have a Palestinian country to live in and to be free. FLETCHER: But many Israelis think no good can come of this. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: They don't want peace. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: I think it will be war. FLETCHER: Israel and America warned Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas not to call for a Palestinian state in the Security Council. BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER: I call on President Abbas to resume peace negotiations, direct negotiations, right now without any preconditions. FLETCHER: Inspired by people's revolts in Arab neighbors – Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Yemen – Palestinians also want change. Their leaders say they have no alternative but to try something new – the 20 years of peace talks have gotten them nowhere. MOHAMED SHTAYEH, SENIOR PALESTINIAN OFFICIAL: We will take all measures to assembly, channel it in a way that does not lead into bloodshed. FLETCHER: This puts Palestinians into a direct confrontation with the United States. Washington has said it wants more peace talks and will veto a call for a Palestinian state. JOHN BOEHNER, HOUSE SPEAKER: Our commitment to Israel should be no less strong today, and, if anything, it should be stronger than ever. FLETCHER: American negotiators are still trying very hard to get Israel and the Palestinians back to the negotiating table. President Obama is aware that any American veto will certainly satisfy Israel but would also pit America against most of the rest of the world. Martin Fletcher, NBC News, Tel Aviv.
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video platform video management video solutions video player Former President Bill Clinton appears on This Week With Christiane Amanpour to talk about the upcoming Clinton Global Initiative and its focus on job creation . I was part of a group of bloggers that got to meet with him a few years ago, and he was talking about green retrofits then. As I recall, the energy savings numbers he said could be created by retrofits were jaw-dropping, so this makes more sense than ever: AMANPOUR: Now, sir, your mantra right now is jobs, jobs, jobs. What do you think can happen to radically shift the unemployment picture and also pass muster in Washington in these very partisan times? CLINTON: Well, I don’t know that I’m the best person to answer the second part of that question. But I believe that we, those of us who aren’t in government, can think of ways to create jobs which will reinforce what I believe are the positive suggestions coming out of Washington. Essentially, the president’s plan has big payroll tax cuts in it, which will benefit the economy by lowering the average family’s tax bill by 1,500 dollars. And then they can have that to spend. That will help. And then by lowering payroll taxes for employers, will make it more attractive for them to hire new people. But those of us who aren’t in government, we don’t have anything to do with that. So what we should do is focus on possible areas of job creation that will free up some of the corporate money that’s in Treasuries now, that could be invested in America, and make bank loans more attractive to create jobs. So that’s what we try to do. We try to go around thinking about ways to specifically to do that. And if you look at the way the CGI program is set up this year, we also are trying to create more jobs around the world by focusing on the possibilities of green energy elsewhere, because it’s not just in America that the green tech jobs are growing at twice the rate of overall employment. It’s — that’s true around the world. And by focusing on trying to empower women and girls, because in many other countries, they’re left out of the economy. And that’s dragging the economic prospects of everyone down. AMANPOUR: So what will tell the CEOs and the world leaders who come to your Clinton Global Initiative meeting this next week? CLINTON: Well, I will ask them to put aside for the moment whatever their recommendations are to Washington about changes in the corporate tax laws or the trade bills or, you know, the tariffs that are imposed on component parts that some manufacturers use here but have to import from overseas, and just think about where we are now and what we can do now with the resources we now have. For example, I think we’ll have an update on an announcement we made in Chicago, where the AFL-CIO and a couple of its affiliate unions are going to put some of their own pension funds into putting people to work retrofitting buildings and doing other things that will create jobs for their members and for other Americans in a way that will actually make more money for the pension funds than just putting it into the stock market will today. And they’ll be in partnership with business instead of having a Washington political fight with them. AMANPOUR: Where do you see — obviously, this is all about this stubborn unemployment rate. Where do you see the unemployment, after all of these suggestions, and if they’re implemented — where do you see it standing this time next year? CLINTON: Well, if you look at the program that the president has outlined, I think if we had the payroll tax cuts and the special incentives to hire the long term unemployed, and we did some of the things that I have been pushing very hard for, to invest building retrofits, which, if we did it right, could create a billions of jobs, the estimates are right across the economic board, including by Mr. Zandy who was an economic adviser to Senator McCain in the 2008 election. All of the estimates that it will create somewhere between 1.3 and two million jobs, and drop unemployment by approximately one percent, maybe a little more. That’s if they’re implemented. That’s — we can’t do much better than that right now, unless — unless there is an aggressive action, which seems unlikely in Washington’s political climate, to clean up this housing mess, because that’s freezing too much investment in place. So I think that it’s a very good program that he outlined. I think if the Congress seriously takes him up on it and they start trying to work through it and get anything approaching the amount of activity that was recommended, they could put about two percent more on the GDP growth of the coming year, and they could drop unemployment by somewhere between one to two million. Or they can create one to two million jobs. AMANPOUR: You have said in the past that this is not time for Mexican standoff or sort of macho politics. What can be done to make people in this city understand that the country faces a national emergency in this regard? CLINTON: Well, we need a little bit of help from the American people. I mean, conflict has proved to be remarkably good politics. And it — that sort of thing, you know, that — it’s very hard for the people in Washington, who got there based on pure conflict, pure attack, pure ideology, to take it seriously when their same constituents are saying please do something positive. That’s not how they got elected. We live in a time where there’s this huge disconnect between the way the political system works and the way the economic system works. If you look — there are places all over America, believe it or not, that have low unemployment, high growth, strong home prices, jobs being created, a shortage of skilled workers. And in every one of those places, they have networks of cooperation. San Diego has the largest number of Nobel Prized scientists in America. It’s become the biotech center of the country. Everybody knows Silicon Valley’s back. But look at what’s happening in Pittsburgh, where they’re trading steel for nanotechnology and other biomedical advances. Look at what’s happening in Cleveland, around the Cleveland Clinic. Look at what’s happening in Massachusetts, with the recovery of high-tech manufacturing around the MIT area. I can give you lots and lots of other examples. Every place the American economy is booming, cooperation is the order of the day. But conflict is still good politics in Washington. So until the American people make it clear that whatever — however they voted in past elections, they want these folks to work together and to do something, there’s going to be a little ambivalence in Washington. AMANPOUR: Let me ask you this, then: Mayor Bloomberg of New York has said this week that unless something is done to really address this unemployment problem, there could be riots in the street, unrest. Do you — do you agree with that? CLINTON: I don’t know. There have been demonstrations in many other countries where the same thing is going on. But if you — the most important thing Mayor Bloomberg said recently is to offer land on Governor’s Island or Roosevelt Island or the Navy Yard in Brooklyn for a new world-class science and technology research center. And he said that he’ll kick in $100 million worth of investment if a group of universities will put one there, because he wants New York, in effect, to rival Silicon Valley as a technology center. That’s the kind of thing that works. If you want put people to work, we’ve got to focus on what works, and what works is not all this back and forth fighting in Washington. I think, as I said, I think that if we can’t fix the housing crisis now — which is probably not politically possible, but should be done — we can’t return to full employment . But if we adopt the plan that the president outlined, according to all this economic analysis, it will create between 1.5, 2 percent increase in GDP growth. It will put a million or two million people to work, and we’ll be on the way back. We need some signal out of Washington that they understand that cooperation is good economics, even if conflict is good politics. AMANPOUR: Mr. President, obviously the current situation in various polls are suggesting that people aren’t satisfied with President Obama’s leadership on this. And there was a special election in New York in District 9 that the Democrats lost after holding it for nearly 100 years. What does that say to you? CLINTON: Well, the New York case is — I know that district very well, and they were good enough to vote for me twice. But, I think, Mayor Koch had a big impact on that election because of the controversy surrounding Israel and how they’re reacting to the proposal of the Palestinians to get the U.N. to recognize them as a state. I think that had a lot to do with it. I also think it’s a real blue-collar district that is suffering economically. So, it didn’t surprise me. And I don’t think — and the Nevada district was a Republican district. So it’s just — it is what it is. We won not very long ago that district in upstate New York that had been Republican for even longer than this district had been Democrat because of the Medicare plan, and the Republicans have stopped talking about their plan to voucherize Medicare. So I — there’s a lot of upheaval now. A lot of, you know, people are feeling disjointed because they’re hurting economically and they don’t see the country going forward.
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