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Tag: frustration

The Beginning Of Something Big…Maybe

Five dollars? Really? To use your own money? Wow.

Bank of America’s decision to impose that fee for debit card use did not precipitate the Occupy Wall Street protests. But it does seem to embody much of what has driven thousands of people to the streets, first in the New York financial center and now in Boston, Los Angeles and other cities across the nation.

The fee carried an odor of pecuniary pettiness not dispelled by B of A’s claim that it was needed to recoup losses caused by a new federal regulation limiting the amount banks may charge retailers when you use a debit card. It felt like just another ding for consumers already dinged like the new car in a parking garage.

You pay a fee now to check your bags. You pay a fee to have an unlisted number. You pay a fee to buy show tickets. In some towns, you pay a fee for a plastic bag to carry your purchases. You pay a fee to pay your bills using the “pay by phone” feature from certain service providers.

So this decision to charge consumers for using their own money was the straw that put the camel in traction. It hacked people off.

Occupy Wall Street, then, feels like the right thing at the right time, like the harbinger of a new Zeitgeist — though not everyone is convinced.

Some observers dismiss the protests as “street theater,” an easy charge, given the loopy eccentrics who have been attracted to the movement like iron shavings to electromagnets. On the other hand, much of the anti-war movement, the women’s movement and the civil rights movement (rest in peace, Fred Shuttlesworth) was also street theater and those seem to have turned out fairly well.

The protesters have also been criticized for a lack of focus.

The proudly leaderless movement, organized (if that is the word) on social media, has yet to articulate its demands, even as individual demonstrators have advocated causes as disparate as saving the environment and ending the drug war. They don’t seem to get that when you try to say everything, you end up saying nothing.

But one suspects (or maybe just hopes) it would be a mistake to write off these events too quickly. “There comes a time,” Martin Luther King once said, “when people get tired.” When you spend evenings with pad and pen, trying to get the numbers on one side of the paper to line up with those on the other, when you spend nights not sleeping, wondering how long your job will last, when you spend days paying more money for less service, when it begins to seem as if the government that should be working for you is a wholly owned subsidiary of American business, when billions of dollars of your taxes goes to bail out money pigs who were too big to fail, when your fears are met with a tone deafness bordering on contempt (“Corporations are people,” says Mitt Romney; “If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself,” says Herman Cain; B of A has “a right to make a profit,” says CEO Brian Moynihan) … when that is your reality, you have good reason to be tired. Indeed, sic
k and.

So, like Arab potentates in the spring, one dismisses this autumn of American discontent at one’s own peril. Granted, we don’t yet know what’s happening here, but one thing seems apparent: Something is.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

The New Old Obama Fights Back

WASHINGTON — For President Obama, these are the days of never hearing an encouraging word. Not since his own supporters were losing faith in his presidential campaign in the summer of 2007 has Obama confronted so many bad reviews and such widespread frustration and angry criticism from his own side.

Now, the censure is reinforced by terrible tidings from the outside in the form of wildly swinging stock markets, persistent unemployment and divisions in the nation’s capital so deep that they make the period around President Clinton’s impeachment look like an era of good feelings

For Obama’s lieutenants, his comeback from the ’07 summer doldrums provided an over-learned lesson that encouraged them to ignore external criticism and cruise along with complete confidence in their man’s almost magical powers of restoration.

The president’s loyalists still have faith in him and still love to criticize media narratives they think underestimate him. But this time, both he and they are expressing a level of frustration that may be the healthiest thing happening to Obama in what is an otherwise dismal moment in his presidency. A White House crowd often too sure of itself is fully aware of the ferocious fight Obama faces and the seriousness of the problems he confronts. Their mood and past experience suggests that a new Obama — or, in many ways, the old Obama of 2008 — is about to reappear.

The biggest factor is the end of the default threat. Make no mistake: The administration was petrified that conservatives in Congress really would push the country over the cliff in the debt-ceiling fight. GOP leaders may have realized the dangers involved, but Obama worried that if he miscalculated, House Republicans might not muster a majority to prevent the worst from happening.

Obama’s aides say he understood liberal anger over the Republicans’ irresponsibility in using the default threat to strengthen their own bargaining position. But while progressives wanted the White House to call the right wing’s bluff, Obama insisted that this was not a risk a president could take. He preferred to escape this box with the best flawed deal he could get, provided he could take the lethal debt-ceiling weapon out of Republican hands.

Having done so, the White House now sounds liberated. Even a government shutdown would be a day in springtime compared with the economic Armageddon that default might have let loose. Obama has a margin for maneuver and action he didn’t have before.

Then there is Obama’s own character. He is both conflict-averse and highly competitive. On the one hand, he believes his old speech declaring there is neither a red America nor a blue America, and he trusted his own capacity to bring left and right together — an imprudent presumption, given the nature of the current GOP.

Allowing this side of himself a much longer run than seems reasonable is what unleashed all the recent commentary describing him as weak and indecisive. But no sane human being (and sanity is still an Obama hallmark) can pretend anymore that today’s Republicans remain the party of Bob Dole or Howard Baker. The proof came in last week’s Republican presidential debate when every candidate on stage raised a hand to declare unacceptable even a deficit deal involving 10 times as many spending cuts as revenue increases. This provides a handy new definition of extremism: When 90.9091 percent purity is not good enough.

Obama knows he’s reaching the end of the line on negotiating. Now he has to win. This brings out his competitive side. The rules of an election are similar to those of the sporting contests Obama so enjoys. Candidates are expected to be tough, to go after their opponents, to push and shove and throw them off balance. If you doubt Obama can do this, ask Hillary Clinton or John McCain.

The president’s speech last Thursday in Holland, Mich., was the first sign that the competitive Obama is re-emerging. His target, like Harry Truman’s in 1948, was an obstructionist Republican Congress. He condemned “the refusal of some folks in Congress to put the country ahead of party” and urged that it “start passing some bills that we all know will help our economy right now.”

With Obama, there is always the danger of a relapse into the passive, we’re-all-reasonable-people style. The fighting Obama has briefly appeared before, only to go back into hibernation. This time, the evidence suggests he’ll stick with it — and, in truth, he has no other choice.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.

(c) 2011, Washington Post Writers Group

Why Obama Must Lead To Keep The House GOP From Leading America Off A Cliff

Time is passing as the nation edges toward default, described candidly by the most anti-government and anti-tax conservative in Washington as a certain “disaster.” Yet no matter how many concessions on revenue and spending emanate from the White House and the Democrats on Capitol Hill, the Republicans who control the House of Representatives keep playing chicken, as if they actually want to crash the nation’s economy – and do permanent damage to America’s position in the world – for partisan gain.

Until last Friday, House Speaker John Boehner seemed to understand the enormous stakes in the debt-limit negotiations, even if his party’s loony freshman members did not.

Boehner humored the extremists with a ludicrous item of legislation — the “Cut, Cap and Balance” bill that actually sought to force a constitutional amendment through the Senate within less than two weeks – even as doomsday drew nearer. But the speaker simultaneously engaged in a serious effort to reach accord with President Obama, agreeing to revenue increases in those discussions. He lost this briefly attained courage, however, when he realized his members might reject that deal (and him).

Then Boehner walked out of the White House and vowed to reach a deal without the president by talking directly with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid — a silly notion that was blatantly designed to serve the Republican electoral agenda in 2012 rather than to achieve resolution on the debt and deficits. Now rather than work with Reid, Boehner is pursuing yet another direction with a strictly partisan bill that would raise the debt limit by only $1 trillion, forcing the Congress (and the markets) to resume the same stalemated argument next year. Meanwhile, Reid has proposed his own new scheme, offering $2.5 trillion in spending cuts with no revenue increases, in exchange for raising the debt limit by the same amount.

Every survey shows that most Americans feel infuriated by these fruitless maneuvers, even if they don’t always understand the motivations and ideologies of the players. Nearly every poll shows that most Americans fear the impact of default and want a truly balanced solution to the nation’s twin problems of growth and debt, notably including tax increases on those who can best afford to pay more (and not including punitive cuts aimed at the poor and working families).

Yet the House Republicans are willing to risk the worst possible outcome in order to enforce the political will of a small and fanatical minority. Their refusal to avert catastrophe through compromise in a divided capital is sufficiently irresponsible to invite comparisons with terrorism.

So it is long past time for President Obama to explain – in comprehensive but comprehensible detail – exactly how and why the House Republicans are endangering the nation. He needs to tell Americans why many of the most anti-government and anti-tax Republicans in Washington, notably including Grover Norquist, the lobbyist and activist, believe that defaulting on the national debt would portend economic ruin. He should elucidate the ridiculous proposals passed by the House Republicans so far, from the Ryan budget that would decimate Medicare to the Cut Cap and Balance bill, which not only demanded instantaneous passage of a wildly ill-advised constitutional amendment, but would have enshrined special protections for the wealthiest taxpayers in the founding document. That legislation eventually would have forced the complete destruction of the social safety net – and placed American security in jeopardy as well.

Obama seems to believe that bending to the intimidation of the Republicans will serve him politically, allowing him to portray himself as “bipartisan” or even “independent” of his own party. But he only looks weak at a moment when he could display great strength. Time is passing quickly, and his authority is ebbing — but it is not too late for him to lead.