Well Put. . .

(from http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-reich-free-market-20130924,0,4661170.story   Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of "Beyond Outrage," now available in paperback. His new film, "Inequality for All," will be out September 27. He blogs at http://www.robertreich.org)

". . . One of the most deceptive ideas continuously sounded by the right (and its fathomless think tanks and media outlets) is that the "free market" is natural and inevitable, existing outside and beyond government.

So whatever inequality or insecurity it generates is beyond our control. And whatever ways we might seek to reduce inequality or insecurity — to make the economy work for us — are unwarranted constraints on the market's freedom and will inevitably go wrong.

By this view, if some people aren't paid enough to live on, the market has determined they aren't worth enough. If others rake in billions, they must be worth it. If millions of Americans remain unemployed or their paychecks are shrinking or they work two or three part-time jobs with no idea what they'll earn next month or next week, that's too bad; it's just the outcome of the market.

According to this logic, government shouldn't intrude through minimum wages, high taxes on top earners, public spending to get people back to work, regulations on business, or anything else, because the "free market" knows best.

In reality, the "free market" is a bunch of rules about (1) what can be owned and traded (the genome? slaves? nuclear materials? babies? votes?); (2) on what terms (equal access to the Internet? the right to organize unions? corporate monopolies? the length of patent protections?); (3) under what conditions (poisonous drugs? unsafe foods? deceptive Ponzi schemes? uninsured derivatives? dangerous workplaces?); (4) what's private and what's public (police? roads? clean air and water? health care? good schools? parks and playgrounds?); (5) how to pay for what (taxes? user fees? individual pricing?). And so on.

These rules don't exist in nature; they are human creations. Governments don't "intrude" on free markets; governments organize and maintain them. Markets aren't "free" of rules; the rules define them. Without such rules, we're back to social Darwinism, where only the toughest and biggest survive.

The interesting question is what the rules should aim to achieve. They can be designed to maximize efficiency (given the current distribution of resources), or growth (depending on what we're willing to sacrifice to obtain that growth), or fairness (depending on our ideas about a decent society). Or some combination of all three — which aren't necessarily in competition with one another. Evidence suggests, for example, that if prosperity were more widely shared, we'd have faster growth.

The rules might even be designed to entrench and enhance the wealth of a few at the top, and keep almost everyone else comparatively poor and economically insecure.

Which brings us to the central political question: Who should decide on the rules and their major purpose? If our democracy were working as it should, presumably our elected representatives, agency heads and courts would be making the rules roughly according to what most of us want the rules to be. The economy would be working for us.

Instead, the rules are now made mostly by those with the power and resources to buy the politicians, regulatory heads and even the courts (and the lawyers who appear before them). As income and wealth have concentrated at the top, so has political clout. And the most important clout is determining the rules of the game.

Not incidentally, these are the same people who want you and most others to believe in the fiction of an immutable "free market."

As I emphasize in "Inequality for All" — a new film out this week in which I explain the savage inequalities and insecurities now undermining our economy and democracy — we can make the economy work for us rather than for only a few at the top. But in order to change the rules, we must exert the power that is supposed to be ours. . . "

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State of the Union. . .

 . . . schmate of the union. . . sounds good. . . can it all be done? . . . I'm listening not watching. . . are all the republicans stone-faced, sitting with their arms folded? . . . I can only picture it. . .

For the Obama record, here are some facts regarding promises made and goals accomplished. . . (based upon story By Tom Curry, msnbc.com National Affairs Writer)

'. . . Sometime this spring, the Supreme Court will determine whether Obama’s signature accomplishment – the law which expands and fundamentally redesigns health insurance in the United States – will survive. If the Supreme Court permits the law to stand, Obama will have accomplished much of what he pledged to do in his Feb. 10, 2007 speech in Springfield, Ill., when he formally launched his presidential campaign: “We will have universal health care in America by the end of the next president's first term.  But the Obama plan won’t be fully implemented until 2018. The major overhaul of the nation’s health care system stands as one of the largest legislative achievements in decades.

The presiden hasn’t closed Guantanamo Navy Base as a prison camp for al-Qaida members and other terrorist suspects, as he pledged to do in an executive order he signed on the day be took office in 2009. But this was largely to due to Republican opposition.

When Obama signed the $825 billion economic stimulus plan into law in February of 2009, there were 141.7 million Americans working and 12.5 million unemployed.By February of 2011, two years after the stimulus was enacted, there were 139.5 million Americans working and 13.7 million unemployed.

Between the month he signed the stimulus into law and February of 2011, the unemployment rate went from 8.1 percent to 8.9 percent. These numbers explain Republican criticism of the stimulus as a squandering of taxpayer money that didn’t result in increased employment. In recent months, the jobs data has improved but there were still almost one million fewer people employed last month than when Obama signed the stimulus into law. Obama’s critics on the left, such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, argue the stimulus was too small, while Obama’s defenders say it prevented a far worse economic slump.

The Obama administration also decided to spend $80 billion to keep General Motors and Chrysler alive, and as of last November, according to the Congressional Budget Office, $35 billion of that money had been repaid to the Treasury, $7 billion had been written off as a loss, and $37 billion was still outstanding. The two car companies are still operating; in fact, GM reported a few days ago that it has reclaimed its title as the world’s largest seller of automobiles.

Obama himself said in his speech accepting the Democratic nomination in 2008, “We measure progress in the 23 million new jobs that were created when Bill Clinton was president when the average American family saw its income go up $7,500 instead of down $2,000 like it has under George Bush.” Clinton served for eight years and Obama has served so far for only three, but the Census reported that median household income, adjusted for inflation, declined by 2.3 percent between 2009 and 2010. This was part of longer-term trend that predates Obama’s presidency: since 2007, median household income has declined 6.4 percent and is 7.1 percent below the peak ($53,252) that occurred in 1999.

The Census also reports that the poverty rate in 2010 was 15.1 percent—up from 14.3 percent in 2009, the third consecutive increase in the poverty rate. When Obama launched his candidacy in Springfield in 2007, he portrayed these economic woes as Bush Era problems, about which the Republicans were in denial: “For the past six years, we've been told that our mounting debts don't matter. We've been told that the anxiety Americans feel about rising health care costs and stagnant wages are an illusion.”

One sector of the economy where Obama appears to have fallen short is housing. In his first debate with John McCain in 2008, he said: “We've got to make sure that we're helping homeowners, because the root problem here has to do with the foreclosures that are taking place all across the country.”

In the face of Republican opposition, Obama has been unable to fulfill his promise to enact legislation reducing use of tax deductions by upper-income taxpayers and raising income tax rates for those with incomes over $250,000. But as part of the health care law he did increase Medicare taxes on upper-income people. The law also other imposes other major tax increases including the penalty on people who choose to go without insurance and the tax on high-cost “Cadillac" health plans which takes effect in 2018.

Obama promised in 2008 to cut taxes for “95 percent of working families.” The 2009 stimulus included more than $300 billion in tax cuts and credits — including the Making Work Pay Credit, a big tax cut for workers earning less than $75,000 and couples making less than $150,000 a year. Making Work Pay has now been replaced by the payroll tax cut.

Although the House passed a cap-and-trade greenhouse gas bill in 2009, Obama along with Sen. John Kerry, D- Mass., Sen. Joe Lieberman, I- Conn., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R- S.C., the three Senate leaders on the issue, failed to come up with the compromises needed to pass a bill. The effort died in the summer of 2010. The Obama administration has made grants and loans to alternative energy companies, but it was embarrassed when $535 million in taxpayer money was lost in a loan to Solyndra, the California solar company that went bankrupt last September.

Obama shored up the liberal wing of the Supreme Court by appointing Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to replace retiring Justices David Souter and John Paul Stevens.

And he pleased gay rights advocates when he ended the legal defense of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which allows states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. Obama also ended the Clinton Era “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy on gays serving in the military.

He also made recess appointments to National Labor Relations Board, which helped fulfill a campaign pledge he made in 2007 to help union organizers “lift up this country’s middle class again.”

As Obama promised to do in 2008, he has withdrawn American troops from Iraq. He has also ordered the killing of Osama bin Laden and American-born Moslem cleric and al-Qaida organizer Anwar al-Awlaki. He has continued and expanded the use of drones to kill alleged terrorists in Yemen and elsewhere.

When Obama took office there were 32,000  troops in Afghanistan. In March 2009 he announced he’d send an extra 4,000.  On Dec. 1, 2009, he increased U.S. troop numbers in Afghanistan by another 30,000, bringing the total to 100,000. “After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home,” he said.

He lashed out at “the cynics, the lobbyists, the special interests who've turned our government into a game only they can afford to play.”  And on the night he won the Iowa caucuses, he said that he and his supporters had “beat back the politics of fear and doubt and cynicism … .” But the Washington reform groups Common Cause and the Center for Public Integrity have accused him of falling short of his anti-lobbyist rhetoric.

Obama signed an executive order on his first day in office which imposed limits on former lobbyists and others who worked in his administration. An ex-lobbyist working in the administration could not for two years after his appointment be involved in any policy matter on which he’d lobbied in the two years before his appointment, or work in a federal agency that he had lobbied within the two years before being appointed.

But the executive order provided a waiver from the rules if it was deemed in the national interest. Former Clinton administration Defense Department official and former Raytheon lobbyist William Lynn was given a waiver to serve as deputy secretary of defense. And the New York Times reported in 2010 that White House officials regularly met with lobbyists at the Caribou Coffee shop down the street from the White House, avoiding disclosure on the public White House visitors’ log.
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Common Cause president Bob Edgar, a former Democratic congressman, chided Obama last year for accepting campaign funds for his 2012 run which were raised by “bundlers” working for Washington lobbying firms. '

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