Obama's debt reduction plan to call for tax increases

Polls have consistently shown that Americans back a tax hike on the plutocracy, and it looks like President Obama is again poised to seize the bully pulpit:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- President Obama unveiled a plan on Monday to cut the national debt by roughly $3 trillion over the next decade.

Obama's plan reflects his vision for how best to put the country on a more fiscally sustainable course, so it is different in nature than the kind of legislative compromise he was trying to broker this summer during thedebt-ceiling debate, a senior administration official said.

A driving principle behind the proposal is that high-income individuals and corporations should pay more in taxes than they do currently so that they will bear some of the burden of debt reduction going forward.

Indeed, in remarks on Monday morning, the president threatened to veto any debt-reduction legislation that cuts benefits and doesn't include higher taxes on the wealthy. "I will not support any plan that puts all the burden on ordinary Americans," he said.

Obama even introduced the "Buffett Rule" for millionaires -- named after investor Warren Buffett, who has frequently argued that the very rich are not taxed enough.

The president's debt reduction proposal is likely to placate -- at least a little -- those in his Democratic base who have been adamant that they want the rich to pay more and they don't want Medicare or Social Security benefits hit.

Many within Obama's base gave him flak for being unable to secure the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts, which is how the President plans to raise more than half of the $1.5 trillion in new revenue to cut the deficit. But this time around, Republicans cannot block his efforts by threatening debt-ceiling inaction or withholding unemployment benefits. This time the GOP will have to argue that the haves should continue having at the expense of the have-nots without the aid of blackmail - and sadly, it's already begun:

Rep. John Fleming (R-LA) appeared on MSNBC with Chris Jansing this morning to attack President Obama’s new deficit reduction plan, which includes some tax increases on the wealthy. Taking up the typical GOP talking point, Fleming said raising taxes on wealthy “job creators” is a terrible idea that kills jobs because many of these people are small business owners who pay taxes through personal income rates.

Fleming is himself a businesses owner, so Jansing asked, “If you have to pay more in taxes, you would get rid of some of those employees?” Fleming responded by saying that while his businesses made $6.3 million last year, after you “pay 500 employees, you pay rent, you pay equipment, and food,” his profits “a mere fraction of that” — “by the time I feed my family, I have maybe $400,000 left over.”

How much could you buy with $400,000 in your pocket? If you're John Fleming, it would appear not nearly enough.

GOP's "nonsensical" Reagan Library debate

Wow, the level of crazy within the leading field of Republican presidential candidates has remained incredibly consistent throughout the string of irreverent debates. However, cutting through the side issues, the primary GOP PR strategy for the election centers on economic issues: government debt and job creation.

While the potential presidential candidates largely agreed on many issues, the hot topic of job creation resulted in some major talking points clashing into an unintelligible word salad. As The Nation's Ben Adler writes, the arguments the candidates are pushing in order to at least rhetorically position themselves as job creators are just "nonsensical":

The only major back and forth occurred around a curiously meaningless debate: which governor on stage presided over the most job growth and who would create the most jobs as president. For a party that claims government does nothing as well as the private sector and that efforts to improve society are a fools errand, it’s an odd obsession. If you believe, as Mitt Romney has repeatedly asserted, that it is business rather than government that creates jobs then how can you argue that you will do so as president?

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The governors all came prepared with job-related factoids to hurl at each other. “Michael Dukakis created jobs three times faster than you did, Mitt,” said Perry, while Huntsman told Perry that forty-seventh best “just won’t cut it.” Romney countered that Texas created more jobs under Perry’s predecessor, George W. Bush, than under Perry. He also defended his record and minimized Perry’s by noting that Massachusetts and Texas have different political and economic conditions.

Although, Texas Governor Rick Perry and Mitt Romney had a "my state had more jobs than your state" pissing contest during the debate, both candidates easily play into the myth the Republican party relies on for votes: that government ... no. THE government, our government, is bad. Not only bad, but that it, and its most vital democratic institutions are not to be trusted. Controlling the political discourse on the economic issues plays well into the GOP 2012 electoral strategy. By constantly demonizing government and the positive roles it plays in our lives, a theme of deep seated mistrust of government and it's institutions emerges. Among some voters, an outright hatred of the government emerges. The apparent surge of extreme politicians in both the states and Congress, along with their determination to obstruct democratic processes at every turn, has opened the door to policies which undermine our democratic institutions to the benefit of powerful corporations. Former Republican Congressional Staffer, Mike Lofgren, describes how the Republican party essentially gets away with winning their self-perpetuating war on language:

You know that Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy when even Democrats refer to them as entitlements. "Entitlement" has a negative sound in colloquial English: somebody who is "entitled" selfishly claims something he doesn't really deserve. Why not call them "earned benefits," which is what they are because we all contribute payroll taxes to fund them? That would never occur to the Democrats. Republicans don't make that mistake; they are relentlessly on message: it is never the "estate tax," it is the "death tax." Heaven forbid that the Walton family should give up one penny of its $86-billion fortune. All of that lucre is necessary to ensure that unions be kept out of Wal-Mart, that women employees not be promoted and that politicians be kept on a short leash.

 It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not the case in the present economic crisis. After a riot of unbridled greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors' looting expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At "Washington spending" - which has increased primarily to provide unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those economically damaged by the previous decade's corporate saturnalia. Or the popular rage is harmlessly diverted against pseudo-issues: death panels, birtherism, gay marriage, abortion, and so on, none of which stands to dent the corporate bottom line in the slightest.

Governor Rick Perry (TX) and Representative Ron Paul (TX) during commercial break.

Needless to say, the focus on stoking populist rage while bolstering polices that help businesses more than American citizens is no way to create jobs. It is almost laughable that such circular logic packaged in punchy soundbites can convince anyone that these candidates and their ideas should be taken seriously. However, I personally, cannot laugh at these people until everyone else is laughing too. Because we all should be. The real world implications of the GOP PR strategy translating into actual policies are already coming to fruition in dozens of states via union busting, de-funding or underfunding government services, and tightening voter registration requirements.

A Troll in Central Park

Today is September 11, a date which needs no introduction. Likely you've been hit with a week-long array of coverage related to the terrorist attacks of 2001.

I struggle to think of any single event in recent history that was so simultaneously heinous and polarizing. Many New Yorkers showed their best and brightest colors that day, heroically digging through the charred rubble of Ground Zero, paying little mind to the enormous struggle they themselves would face upon later trying to get treatment for their own injuries suffered in the first response.

Others exploited the massacre for their own personal and lucrative gain (Rudy Guiliani, for example, carved himself out a healthy post-mayor career on the speaking circuit playing up his "America's Mayor" credentials). Still others have used the attack as justification for their xenophobia, unleashing a new wave of anti-Muslim sentiment that our country still struggles to combat on a daily basis.

Of this latter group, none is more craven and universally despised than the Westboro Baptist Church. Even those as opposed to homosexuality and secularism as the Topeka, Kansas group cannot justify celebrating the deaths of American civilians and soldiers alike as some kind of proof of the Christian god's judgment for our apparent wickedness.

It is with this in mind that I re-submit to a new audience an encounter I had with group leader Margie Phelps last March, which was also my first visit ever to New York. Enjoy!

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The following story, to the best of my recollection, is completely factual.

Last week I went to a journalism convention in New York City. By far, the highlight of the convention was a Q & A panel featuring Margie Phelps, chief member and attorney of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church.

There were somewhere between 200-300 people crammed into this ballroom at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. The convention had been offering workshops all weekend, but this was the main attraction, as everyone packed themselves into a standing-room only crowd to witness what was going to be a raucous affair.

Recently, Phelps won a U.S. Supreme Court Case that ruled 8-1 in favor of their right to picket the funerals of killed U.S. military personnel. She was invited to speak at this convention under the pretense that she would be sharing her thoughts on what it was like to argue for her 1st Amendment rights under the Supreme Court; the very same 1st amendment rights that every journalist invokes for entirely different reasons.

He Said, She Said?: Wikileaks vs. The Guardian

Someone sprung a leak! And it's still a bit difficult to tell where it came from.

According to Julian Assange, (and the lawyers representing Wikileaks), it was a reporter working for The Guardian. The Guardian has denied all responsibility. The trouble, Wikileaks alleges, all started when The Guardian's, David Leigh, published a lengthy encryption key in the February 2011 publication Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy. The key was given to Leigh by Assange so that he could access an online file containing more than 250,000 uncensored US State Department diplomatic cables.

The point of contention could simply be miscommunication between Assange and Leigh. The Guardian claims both parties agreed the diplomatic cables would be available on an online server in July 2010 for a period of hours, after which, the files would be removed and the temporary server turned off. Assange denied this account in a recent interview with New Scientist, "The only thing that was temporary was the website location the file was stored in. But the password is not used for the website – it is used for decrypting the file."

However, the plot seemingly thickens, as questions remain over where and when the first bittorrent leaks occurred and at what point Wikileaks became aware that the files had become public. The BBC bluntly stated, "It has long been known that Wikileaks lost control of the cables even before they were published and that encrypted files are circulating on the internet." The Guardian also claims that after the initial leaked file surfaced on bittorrent, "At about 11pm on Wednesday [Aug. 31] an anonymous Twitter user discovered the published password and opened a separate file – not the one shared with the Guardian – that had also been circulating on file-sharing networks for several months."

What is clear is that at some point, the encrypted files containing the diplomatic cables had found their way onto bittorrent. However, writing for The Guardian, James Ball reports that the bittorrent file had not yet been discovered by the public: "By 10am on Thursday [Sept. 1] it had been accessed once in the previous 31 days, despite mounting speculation about its existence."

The accusations flying between Wikileaks and The Guardian continue to mount. The news organization defended its publication of the encryption key:

It's nonsense to suggest the Guardian's WikiLeaks book has compromised security in any way. Our book about WikiLeaks was published last February. It contained a password, but no details of the location of the files, and we were told it was a temporary password which would expire and be deleted in a matter of hours. It was a meaningless piece of information to anyone except the person(s) who created the database. No concerns were expressed when the book was published and if anyone at WikiLeaks had thought this compromised security they have had seven months to remove the files. That they didn't do so clearly shows the problem was not caused by the Guardian's book.

Diversity is Key to Policymaking

FUN FACT: “Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.”

These words ring just as true today as they did when first uttered by Plato, commenting on the democracy of his time. Just as they in Plato’s time, politics today are off-putting. From pointless arguments and scathing rhetoric to underhanded tactics and outright corruption, most of us struggle to see the point in even voting, let alone ever holding public office. This leaves us at the mercy of those who fill the void, and a federal government that barely reflects the population it governs.

We’re all familiar with the lack of racial, gender, religious, and ethnic diversity within the halls of Congress compared to society at large. However, another largely unreported aspect is perhaps the biggest roadblock to Congress’ ability to function – the lack of occupational diversity.

On the August 5 edition of Real Time with Bill Maher, astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson presented the panel with some startling figures,“57% of the Senate, and 38% of the House [of Representatives], cite law as their profession,” Tyson reported. “In the courtroom, it doesn’t go to who’s right, it goes to who argues best. The act of arguing, and not agreeing, seems to be fundamental to that profession. And Congress is half that profession.”

Technically Congress is only 41% that profession, but Tyson’s point remains the same. Just as troubling is another figure: 39% of lawmakers list business as a profession. The next closest occupations are education at 15%, and health care professionals at 4%. Every other occupational background held by Capitol Hill lawmakers combines to form the remaining 1%.

The lack of occupational diversity is especially troubling for a governing body that is supposed to reflect and serve the interests of the American people. What’s more troubling, however, is that these numbers are indicative of a larger trend that has persisted for decades. According to the Congressional Research Service that provided the above occupational statistics, “in the overwhelming majority of previous Congresses, business has followed law as the dominant occupation of members.”