Morning in Blue America - Will the GOP Kill the Recovery?

Both the House of Representatives and Senate have passed budgets that will savage the social safety net, slash spending except for defense which will increase, and transfer wealth from the poor and working classes to the wealthy.  The budgets must still be reconciled, but the only thing that will protect the American public is a veto by the White House.   Throughout the Obama presidency, the Republicans have sought to sabotage the economy rather than allow Obama have a successfully presidency.  These budgets are the latest incarnation of this effort.  Ironically, despite all these efforts of sabotage  and obstruction, the economy has improved, albeit more slowly than might otherwsie have been the case.  A column in the New York Times looks at the derangement of the GOP agenda and the danger these madmen and women pose.  Here are excerpts:

Two impossible things happened to the U.S. economy over the course of the past year — or at least they were supposed to be impossible, according to the ideology that dominates half our political spectrum. First, remember how Obamacare was supposed to be a gigantic job killer? Well, in the first year of the Affordable Care Act’s full implementation, the U.S. economy as a whole added 3.3 million jobs — the biggest gain since the 1990s. Second, half a million of those jobs were added in California, which has taken the lead in job creation away from Texas.

What we’ve been seeing at both the national and the state level is mainly a natural process of recovery as the economy finally starts to heal from the housing and debt bubbles of the Bush years.

But recent job growth, nonetheless, has big political implications — implications so disturbing to many on the right that they are in frantic denial, claiming that the recovery is somehow bogus. Why can’t they handle the good news? The answer actually comes on three levels: Obama Derangement Syndrome, or O.D.S.; Reaganolatry; and the confidence con.

Not much need be said about O.D.S. It is, by now, a fixed idea on the right that this president is both evil and incompetent, that everything touched by the atheist Islamic Marxist Kenyan Democrat — mostly that last item — must go terribly wrong. When good news arrives about the budget, or the economy, or Obamacare — which is, by the way, rapidly reducing the number of uninsured while costing much less than expected — it must be denied.

At a deeper level, modern conservative ideology utterly depends on the proposition that conservatives, and only they, possess the secret key to prosperity. As a result, you often have politicians on the right making claims like this one, from Senator Rand Paul: “When is the last time in our country we created millions of jobs? It was under Ronald Reagan.”

Actually, if creating “millions of jobs” means adding two million or more jobs in a given year, we’ve done that 13 times since Reagan left office: eight times under Bill Clinton, . . . .  and three times, so far, under Barack Obama. But who’s counting? . . . . The economy added 23 million jobs under Clinton, compared with 16 million under Reagan, but there’s nothing on the left comparable to the cult of the Blessed Ronald. 

Conservatives, on the other hand, want to block such things and, instead, to cut taxes on the rich and slash aid to the less fortunate. So they must claim both that liberal policies are job killers and that being nice to the rich is a magic elixir.

One enduring puzzle of political economy is why business interests so often oppose policies to fight unemployment. After all, boosting the economy with expansionary monetary and fiscal policy is good for profits as well as wages, yet many wealthy individuals and business leaders demand tight money and austerity instead.

As a number of observers have pointed out, however, for big businesses to admit that government policies can create jobs would be to devalue one of their favorite political arguments — the claim that to achieve prosperity politicians must preserve business confidence, among other things, by refraining from any criticism of what businesspeople do.

[T]he fact that we’re now seeing mornings in blue America — solid job growth both at the national level and in states that have defied the right’s tax-cutting, deregulatory orthodoxy — is a big problem for conservatives. Although they would never admit it, events have proved their most cherished beliefs wrong.

Keystone Pipeline Goes Down to Defeat in U.S. Senate

While tonight's vote may seal the fate of Mary Landrieu (D-La.)in her upcoming run off election, the at least temporary defeat of the Keystone Pipeline is a win for the American people despite the PR efforts of the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel industry hacks and their political prostitutes.  The tar sands from which hydrocarbons to be transported by the Keystone Pipeline are produced are among the most environmentally damaging.  Yes, Canada and foul individuals like the Kochs would benefit from the pipeline, but if one cares anything about air pollution not to mention the dangers of pipelines in general, this is NOT something sane Americans should want.  And I say this as a former in-house attorney for an large oil company with knowledge of the oil and gas industry.  I would further add that America needs to reduce its dependence on oil and gas, not increase it. Here are highlights from the Washington Post on tonight's vote:

In a dramatic vote, the Senate rejected a controversial new energy pipeline Tuesday evening, dealing a serious blow to the re-election prospects of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and leaving Republicans itching for a fight next year on the issue. 

On a 59 to 41 vote, Landrieu lost her bid to pass legislation meant to compel the Obama White House to approve the nearly 1,700-mile, $7.6 billion Keystone XL pipeline, which if built would deliver 830,000 barrels of oil a day from western Canada into the American heartland.

Already six years in the making, the Keystone fight has become the rallying cry for Landrieu, a three-term senator facing a run-off election Dec. 6. For the past week she has placed a political bet on her ability to pass the legislation as a demonstration of her clout in the Senate.

Supporters said the new pipeline would lead to a more efficient delivery of oil into the domestic markets, helping boost the national economy by creating tens of thousands of jobs along the construction of the pipeline. Opponents said that the project would be harvesting oil from the environmentally dirty tar sands in Canada, leading to too many health risks and coming at a time when other domestic oil production has already shrunk gas prices to less than $3 a gallon in many regions.

A man identified as Greg Graycloud, with the Lakota Tribe in South Dakota, began chanting loudly after the vote ended. He was removed from the Senate Chamber by U.S. Capitol Police officers. Four other people opposed to the pipeline were also removed for speaking out.

Before Tuesday night’s vote, the White House was careful not to issue a veto threat even as officials made it clear Obama was likely to invoke one should the measure pass the Senate.

“It certainly is a piece of legislation that the president doesn’t support, because the president believes that this is something that should be determined through the State Department – a process that is in place to evaluate projects like this,” said White House press secretary Josh Earnest, adding that Obama’s senior advisers have recommended a veto on “similar pieces of legislation” that have been introduced in the past.