Day: January 12, 2009

Ron Paul Speaks On Gaza

The following is Rep. Ron Paul’s statement on H. Res. 34, “Recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza, reaffirming the United States’ strong support for Israel, and supporting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.”

Madame Speaker, I strongly oppose H. Res. 34, which was rushed to the floor with almost no prior notice and without consideration by the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The resolution clearly takes one side in a conflict that has nothing to do with the United States or U.S. interests. I am concerned that the weapons currently being used by Israel against the Palestinians in Gaza are made in America and paid for by American taxpayers. What will adopting this resolution do to the perception of the United States in the Muslim and Arab world? What kind of blowback might we see from this? What moral responsibility do we have for the violence in Israel and Gaza after having provided so much military support to one side?

As an opponent of all violence, I am appalled by the practice of lobbing homemade rockets into Israel from Gaza. I am only grateful that, because of the primitive nature of these weapons, there have been so few casualties among innocent Israelis. But I am also appalled by the long-standing Israeli blockade of Gaza – a cruel act of war – and the tremendous loss of life that has resulted from the latest Israeli attack that started last month.

There are now an estimated 700 dead Palestinians, most of whom are civilians. Many innocent children are among the dead. While the shooting of rockets into Israel is inexcusable, the violent actions of some people in Gaza does not justify killing Palestinians on this scale. Such collective punishment is immoral. At the very least, the U.S. Congress should not be loudly proclaiming its support for the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza.

Madame Speaker, this resolution will do nothing to reduce the fighting and bloodshed in the Middle East. The resolution in fact will lead the U.S. to become further involved in this conflict, promising “vigorous support and unwavering commitment to the welfare, security, and survival of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.” Is it really in the interest of the United States to guarantee the survival of any foreign country? I believe it would be better to focus on the security and survival of the United States, the Constitution of which my colleagues and I swore to defend just this week at the beginning of the 111th Congress. I urge my colleagues to reject this resolution.

Obama’s Stimulus Plan

Sounds good on the surface but a closer examination, it only helps those who started the whole thing–banks.

Obama’s proposed solution—the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan—will allocate hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds, the bulk of which will flow into the coffers of the very banks and corporations that reaped massive profits from the policies that precipitated the crash of 2008.

In a number of interviews leading up to Thursday’s speech, Obama made a point of stressing that in formulating his stimulus plan he had consulted Republican politicians and economists—that is, the very forces who have been the most ferocious advocates of the “free market” policies that contributed to the crisis and who most directly aided and abetted the corrupt practices he criticized in his address.

The modus operandi of Obama’s speech mirrored that employed three months ago to rush through Congress the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), which transferred $700 billion in taxpayer funds to the banks. At that time, Bush took to the airwaves to issue dire warnings of recession and mass unemployment should Congress fail to act immediately to bail out the banks. The aim was to create an environment of anxiety and preempt any public discussion of the causes of the financial crisis or the merits of the bailout bill. Obama, then the Democratic presidential candidate, joined with the Democratic leadership in Congress to support the Republican administration’s rescue of Wall Street.

Of course, the TARP windfall for the financial elite has done nothing to prevent the disaster it was supposed to avert. The stimulus plan announced by Obama on Thursday will likewise do nothing to solve the economic crisis. Once again, a dire economic crisis is being exploited to implement policies favorable to big business that could otherwise not be implemented.

In his speech, Obama did not put a price tag on his plan, generally estimated to total between $675 billion and $775 billion over two years. Indeed, his transition team has repeatedly delayed submitting an actual plan to the new Democratic-dominated Congress, while Obama has sought to accommodate its provisions to the most right-wing factions in both parties. Earlier this week he let it be known that some $200 billion initially allocated as part of infrastructure funding will instead go toward tax breaks, bringing the total in tax windfalls to $300 billion, half of which will go to business. Ordinary families will get a mere $1,000 year in tax relief.

The “recovery” Obama envisages will, in fact, do little to relieve the distress and suffering of working class families. He declared his plan would “create or save at least 3 million jobs over the next few years.” But the US economy lost nearly 2.5 million jobs in 2008 alone and, as Obama hinted, it will continue to lose millions of jobs in the coming years. “It will take time—perhaps many years” before “we can restore opportunity and prosperity,” he declared, adding at another point that “it is altogether likely that things may get worse before they get better.”

Sorry, but my optimism has left the building.  Early in the electoral process, I suggested that Obama was not the agent of change that others thought he was, I was chasitized, especially on Daily Kos, but so far he has proven me right and the more he talks the more he continues to make my prediction accurate.  Thank you, Mr. President-elect.

Plight Of The American Worker–Part 2

Concessions From The American Worker.

Just days after the Bush administration approved federal loans totaling $17.4 billion to stave off the collapse of General Motors and Chrysler, the United Autoworkers union is set to begin talks with the automakers to impose the wage and benefit concessions demanded by the government.

Under the terms of the bailout, an agreement for such concessions must be in hand by March 31, 2009 or the government can revoke the loans, throwing the automakers into bankruptcy.

According to the plan drawn up by the US Treasury Department, by December 31, 2009 the total compensation, including wages and benefits, of autoworkers at Detroit’s Big Three companies must be “competitive” with those of non-union workers at US plants operated by Nissan, Toyota and Honda.

The government is also demanding the “elimination of the payment of any compensation or benefits to workers who have been fired, laid off, furloughed or idled, other than customary severance pay.” This measure, which includes the elimination of the jobs bank program, already agreed to by the UAW, will deprive the tens of thousands of workers who lose their jobs in the downsizing of the industry of any significant income protection. The language suggests that, in addition to the jobs bank, UAW workers will be stripped of supplemental unemployment benefits.

In the restructuring plan GM submitted to Congress, the company announced plans to eliminate 31,500 jobs and close two dozen factories.

Finally, the UAW will have to accept shares of stock as payment for half of what the auto companies owe to the $50 billion retiree health care trust fund controlled by the union, known as the VEBA. Credit Suisse and Moody’s on Monday further downgraded GM stock, which has fallen from $43 to $3.52 a share over the last two years. A Credit Suisse analyst said in a report, “It will become increasingly clear that the enormous sacrifice of value on the part of the union (upwards of $10 billion) and bondholders (about $24 billion) will require the complete or near-complete elimination of the existing GM equity.”

WORKERS:  Read this closely!  If it is successful then ALL workers will be suffering at the hands of the corporations with the backing of the government.

The “New Deal” Was A Failure!

From a piece written in the NY Times by Adam Cohen.

Repubs are grasping at straws as usual trying desperately to find anything that will stop their party’s erosion.  This time the new talking point is the the New Deal of FDR was a failure and did little to help the country.  Sounds more like revisionists trying to rewrite history.

Conservatives have railed against the New Deal from the start. In 1934, H. L. Mencken was already decrying it as “a saturnalia of expropriation and waste.” When F.D.R. ran for re-election in 1936, a headline in William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers insisted that “Moscow Backs Roosevelt.”

But Americans were not fooled. They knew F.D.R. was on their side in a way that Herbert Hoover and his fellow free-marketers hadn’t been. They could see first-hand the good that Roosevelt’s jobs programs were doing for the Depression’s victims and the slow but unmistakable improvements in the economy.

Anti-New Deal rhetoric has never disappeared from American political life. When Barry Goldwater ran for president in 1964, he attacked President Dwight Eisenhower for having presided over a “dime store New Deal.” But in recent years, the attacks have heated up.

At the start of the Bush administration, conservatives talked openly about rolling back the New Deal. They were trying to unravel the regulatory state, including protections for workers, consumers and investors. They were also promoting a favorite cause of Wall Street’s: privatizing Social Security, the crown jewel of the New Deal.

These days the public is in no mood, given the high costs of deregulation in the mortgage industry and the Bernard Madoff scandal, for more talk about dismantling regulations and federal oversight. But today, the new focus is Mr. Obama’s stimulus package. If F.D.R.’s New Deal spending made things worse, it follows that the Obama administration should not make the same mistake.

The anti-New Deal line is wrong as a matter of economics. F.D.R.’s spending programs did help the economy and created millions of new jobs. The problem, we now know, is not that F.D.R. spent too much priming the pump, but rather that he spent too little. It was his decision to cut back on spending on New Deal programs that brought about a nasty recession in 1937-38.

The second problem is that the criticism overlooks the relief Roosevelt’s programs brought to millions. When F.D.R. took office, unemployment was 25 percent, and families were losing their homes, living in shantytowns, even fighting one another for food at garbage dumps.

War Comes To Gaza–Day 15 & 16

Israeli leaders trying to find a knockout blow against Hamas militants defying a 17-day-old assault on the Gaza Strip have sent army reservists into battle.

With the Palestinian death toll nearing 900 and international pressure for a ceasefire mounting, Israeli forces might launch a full-scale attack on Hamas smuggling tunnels on Gaza’s border with Egypt, and perhaps a wider urban operation.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni met late on Sunday and decided to tighten pressure on Hamas, Israeli media reported.

Livni told Army Radio that the Gaza offensive had “restored Israel’s deterrence” and “created a new equation … which says that when our citizens are attacked we respond with force.”

Busloads of Israeli reservists headed south toward Gaza on Sunday as fighting raged on in the Hamas-ruled territory in defiance of a U.N. Security Council demand for a ceasefire.

The reservists had been held back while Israeli leaders ponder an all-out ground offensive on Gaza’s towns and cities to try to destroy Hamas’s ability to fire rockets into Israel.

Such a move would risk higher Israeli military casualties as well as even heavier losses among the 1.5 million Palestinians packed into the tiny coastal enclave with no escape route.

Israel, which rejected last week’s U.N. ceasefire resolution as unworkable, wants a halt to rocket attacks and measures to stop Hamas from rearming via the cross-border tunnels.

Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal said his Islamist group would not consider a ceasefire until Israel ended its air, sea and ground assault and lifted its blockade of Gaza. A Hamas delegation is in Cairo for talks on an Egyptian truce plan.

Western and Israeli officials said diplomats were discussing a broad internationally assisted monitoring system to help Egypt stop weapons smuggling and intercept rocket shipments.