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Tag: auto bailout
Eight Years Later, ‘Yes, We Can’ Became ‘Yes, He Did’

Eight Years Later, ‘Yes, We Can’ Became ‘Yes, He Did’

This is the lull between presidencies when we traditionally debate the issue of legacy.

Those who hate Barack Obama rant about all the awful things he’s done, while those who like him praise all the great things he’s done.

Obama himself is understandably concerned about edifying his legacy, which will be attacked with relish by the new president and the Republican-led Congress. That’s the politics of our day, and Obama can’t do much about it.

Ex-presidents are helpless to choose their places in history, a process that unfolds with time and perspective. Obama needn’t worry. He’ll be treated well.

When he entered the White House in January 2009, he basically was handed a steaming bag of crap — two endless and costly wars, skyrocketing national debt and an economy skidding toward a doomsday cliff.

He also faced hostile Republican leaders who, even before his first full day on the job, had met privately vowing to fight everything he proposed — including policy ideas that had originated with the GOP.

That’s the unwelcoming scenario that greeted the first African-American president eight years ago. Yet, in less than two weeks he’ll leave office with popularity ratings comparable to those of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

Most of our troops are home from Afghanistan and Iraq. Much of the al Qaida leadership — remember the maniacs who attacked us on 9/11? — has been decimated by drone strikes.

Oh, and Osama bin Laden is dead. (If a Republican president had ordered that raid, he would have been coronated.)

One other thing that happened during Obama’s presidency: The economy didn’t tank. In fact, a major recovery began.

More than 15 million new jobs have been added since 2010. Unemployment is way down, and so is the poverty rate. Incomes are rising even for the middle class. Gas prices are low and, for the first time in decades, America isn’t dependent on foreign oil.

The U.S. auto industry, on the brink of bankruptcy when Obama took office, is now roaring. Most of the bailout money has been paid back.

And lots of people have gotten richer on Wall Street, as stock prices soared with corporate profits.

Obama shouldn’t get credit for all of this, but the people who hate him give him no credit for anything. Some of them never came to grips with the fact there was a black guy in the White House. They just couldn’t deal with it, and still can’t.

History will.

It will also deal with the frightening rise of ISIS (should Obama have left more troops in Iraq?), the carnage in Syria (should Obama have sent arms sooner to the moderate rebels?) and the surge in mass shootings in the United States (should Obama have worked harder on gun control?).

It’s fashionable to say Obama’s “signature” achievement was the Affordable Care Act, which he did a terrible job of explaining and defending. That’s a big reason the Democrats lost the House of Representatives in the 2010 mid-term elections.

At the time, Republican leaders thundered that Obamacare would destroy the economy. It didn’t, of course.

It also didn’t work nearly as well it was supposed to. Now Donald Trump and Congress must figure out how to fix it without eliminating health insurance for 20 million working-class people (lots of whom probably voted for Trump).

For the first time in years, Republicans must shed their obstructionist mission and actually pass a few laws. The pressure is huge; only Charlie Manson has lower public approval ratings than Congress.

Now it will be the GOP’s turn to scramble for a miracle way to help all those Americans who haven’t been lifted by the economic recovery. Many of them abandoned the Democratic ticket in November, out of a justified frustration.

That’s the paradox of Obama’s resurgent popularity. It couldn’t save his party, or its presidential candidate, from a rural wave of disillusion they never saw coming.

(Republican bigshots didn’t see it coming, either. Look what happened to Jeb Bush and all the other “serious” candidates.)

At the end, when it mattered most, Obama couldn’t bring the country together. The politics of fear, hate and division cashed in.

As a result, the keys to the White House are being handed to a man who couldn’t be more different from his poised and deliberative predecessor.

Trump is starting with a much stronger hand than the one dealt to Obama. There are many challenges ahead, but nothing like the dire mess that confronted a new young president eight years ago.

That will be Obama’s legacy, the steady way he worked through it. The country is dramatically better off now than it was in January 2009, and that’s what the history books will say.

IMAGE: U.S. President Barack Obama speaks on the third night of the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S., July 27, 2016.  REUTERS/Jim Young
#EndorseThis: Seth Meyers Sifts Truth From Lies In Trump’s Carrier Rescue

#EndorseThis: Seth Meyers Sifts Truth From Lies In Trump’s Carrier Rescue

Donald Trump’s approval rating shot up in the wake of the deal that he and Mike Pence made with Carrier Corp. to keep jobs from moving jobs at an Indianapolis furnace factory from moving to Mexico. Media coverage repeated Trump’s claim that he and Pence, still governor of Indiana, had saved more than 1,000 jobs.

But when Seth Meyers took “a closer look” at the Carrier story — from the first commitment made by Trump on the campaign trail to the deal itself — he found the president-elect was “lying his ass off,” as a labor leader at the furnace plant put it.

Meyers also helpfully explores the hypocrisy of right-wing media figures, from Stuart Varney and Sean Hannity of Fox News to Rush Limbaugh, who shrieked about the dreaded “socialism” of President Obama’s auto bailout (which actually saved a million-plus jobs) – but praised Trump and Pence for their $7 million state payoff to Carrier. And he demonstrates what happens when Trump “lies his ass off,” which isn’t exactly unusual.

If you prefer truth, it’s still available on Late Night.

Remember When Obama Saved 1.5 Million Auto Industry Jobs?

Remember When Obama Saved 1.5 Million Auto Industry Jobs?

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters. 

Fox News and much of the conservative media slipped into messiah mode coverage this week when news broke that Carrier, the air conditioner giant, has decided to not move approximately 1,000 manufacturing jobs from Indiana to Mexico as the company had previously planned. President-elect Donald Trump took credit for having negotiated the respite.

Cheering Trump’s hands-on approach and his commitment to the working class, Fox talkers portrayed the Republican’s maneuver in relentlessly glowing terms. “A Big Win For Donald Trump,” announced Bill O’Reilly’s show last night.

Fox’s Stuart Varney claimed Trump had played hardball with Carrier and won: “He strong-armed them. What’s wrong with that?” (According to reports, it was likely the lure of additional tax incentives that convinced Carrier to keep the jobs in Indiana, not being “strong-armed” by Trump.)

Trump’s cheerleader-in-chief Sean Hannity was just gobsmacked by the whole thing, saying on his radio program that he “can’t think of a time in my lifetime where a president-elect or a president ever” did this.

Hannity loved the fact that Trump reached out to corporate America, which is fascinating because you know what Hannity didn’t love in 2009? He didn’t love when newly elected President Obama reached out to Detroit’s auto industry in the form of an $80 billion-dollar bailout. Back then, an unhinged Hannity called Obama every name in the book as conservative pundits accused the president of trying to destroy democracy and capitalism.

Fox News and the entire right-wing noise machine relentlessly denounced Obama as he tried to rescue American manufacturing jobs, which the federal bailout eventually did. One independent study estimated the aggressive government move saved 1.5 million jobs. “This peacetime intervention in the private sector by the U.S. government will be viewed as one of the most successful interventions in U.S. economic history,” the study’s author wrote.

Lots of people might forget, especially in light of the bailout’s stunning success, but Obama’s push to help the Detroit industry once served as a defining line of GOP attack. The bailout symbolized the dangers of Obama’s alleged socialist/gangster leanings. This, despite the fact it was actually President George W. Bush who unveiled the first phase of the bailout plan during the final weeks of his presidency, in order to “avoid a collapse of the U.S. auto industry.”

Nonetheless, the topic soon became a cornerstone of the Tea Party and its overheated attacks on Obama, amplified by Fox News.

Remember how Varney this week toasted Trump for having “strong-armed” Carrier? Back in 2009, the host was furious that Obama was allegedly trying strong arm the public into buying American cars: “[N]ow you’re in the position where the government somehow has to coerce or force us all into buying the small cars that it insists Detroit puts out.” (Varney routinely whined that Obama was a “bully” to business.)

Meanwhile, Glenn Beck, then with Fox News, claimed the bailout reminded him of “the early days of Adolf Hitler.” Fox favorite Michelle Malkin compared the auto deal to a “crap sandwich,” and a “lemon” the U.S. taxpayers would be stuck with “for life.”

Hannity himself berated Obama for engaging in what he called a “mission to hijack capitalism.” And in the infamous words of Rush Limbaugh, it was as if General Motors and Chrysler “bent over and grabbed the ankles.” (Limbaugh loves Trump’s Carrier deal, by the way.)

Question: Why would conservatives be so upset about saving American manufacturing jobs? Seems bizarre, right? But they were furious. So wrapped up in hatred for the new Democratic president, conservative pundits despised the government’s attempt to save GM and Chrysler from bankruptcies. They also seemed to despise the companies’ union workers, suggesting they were wildly overpaid. (Pundits even lied about how much the Detroit autoworkers made.)

Republican politicians were also angry. Mitt Romney, who’s reportedly being considered for a cabinet position in Trump’s administration, derided the auto bailout as a “sweetheart deal disguised as a rescue plan,” and guaranteed that if Detroit companies accepted the aid, you could “kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.”

In the end, the bailout that Obama championed saved more than one million jobs, and Fox News still hated it.

If only Obama had saved 1,000 Carrier jobs instead.

IMAGE: President Obama delivers remarks on the U.S. auto industry at the UAW-GM Center for Human Resources in Detroit, January 20, 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Can America Stand Rand? Cranking Up His ‘Libertarian’ Campaign

Can America Stand Rand? Cranking Up His ‘Libertarian’ Campaign

Platitudes typically litter the announcement speech of every aspiring president, and Rand Paul’s address in Louisville today was no exception. “We have come to take our country back,” he thundered—or tried to thunder—“from the special interests that use Washington at their personal piggy bank.”

Exactly what those special interests might be, he neglected to say — although they probably don’t include the oil or coal lobbies he tends to favor. He went on to rant against “both parties” and “the political system,” not to mention “big government,” deficit spending, and the federal debt. Naturally he prefers “small government” because “the love of liberty pulses in my veins.”

Yet Paul delivered these encrusted clichés with impressive energy, to an enthusiastic crowd featuring enough youthful and minority faces sprinkled among the Tea Party types to lend a touch of credibility to claims that he is a “different kind of Republican.” Speaking about urban poverty and education, the Kentucky Republican even name-checked Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — a gesture that too many elected officials in his party, especially from the South, still find difficult. (His father Ron Paul, watching from the audience, may have stifled a chuckle, recalling how his racist newsletters regularly excoriated the late civil rights leader as a “pro-communist philanderer” and worse, while blasting Ronald Reagan for signing the bill that made King’s birthday a national holiday.)

Appealing to younger and minority voters, Paul wisely emphasized his ideas about cutting back the machinery of surveillance and incarceration. Likewise, he kept the required paeans to economic “freedom” sufficiently vague to avoid alienating potential supporters, like students who might not appreciate his hostility to federal loans and grants, and families whose survival depends on food stamps and unemployment benefits that he would slash.

The upside of a Paul campaign may be that his dissenting perspective on issues such as Iran, Cuba, and the surveillance state brings a small degree of sanity to the Republican primary debate. Although he parroted much nonsense about the Obama administration’s foreign policy, he dared to say that the goal of diplomacy “should be and always is peace, not war.”

Equally beneficial would be a frank discussion of the libertarian delusions that underlie his economic platform – and the real effects that such policies would have on American communities, families, and workers.Paul still hates the auto bailout, although killing it would have cost another million jobs. While he rails against deficit spending and Obama’s economic stimulus, the clear consensus is that unemployment would have soared without those measures. No doubt he agreed with his father’s repeated warnings that government spending would lead to “hyperinflation” and depression, but we have seen precisely the opposite: a revived economy, recovering employment, and inflation that remains too low to worry any sane person.

Among Paul’s easiest targets today was the IRS, which he promises to diminish or even abolish with his favorite “new idea,” a flat tax. That was a fresh proposal, perhaps, back when right-wing academics Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka unveiled it in a 1983 book titled Low Tax, Simple Tax, Flat Tax. There is no reason to believe that Rand Paul’s flat tax would differ significantly from theirs in design or impact; namely, to worsen inequality, raising the burden on the poor and middle class while benefiting the very rich.

Mocking the federal proclivity to spend more than the IRS collects, Paul chortled today, “Isn’t $3 trillion enough?” But while he promises to “balance” the budget, his 17 percent flat tax wouldn’t collect even that amount — which means enormous cuts in every budget sector, from education and infrastructure to defense.

Authors Hall and Rabushka described their flat tax as “a tremendous boon to the economic elite” and noted, candidly, “it is an obvious mathematical law that lower taxes on the successful will have to be made up by higher taxes on average people.” We shall see whether Paul is as honest as the authors of his tax plan.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr