CAF In The News

washingtonpost.com — In the Washington Post, Reporter Ezra Klein weighs in on the conservative and liberal views on Austerity in the United States. Ezra Klein quotes the liberal side with Robert Borosage, director of Campaign for America’s Future, where Robert warns of what could happen in the United States, “Take a good look at Europe — bloody riots in Athens and Madrid, rising unemployment, spreading poverty and suicide, and a deepening recession — because the current American elite consensus bizarrely wants to drive America down that same path.”

huffingtonpost.com — Quiz: What's responsible for the lousy economy most Americans continue to wallow in?

A. Big government, bureaucrats, and the cultural and intellectual elites who back them.

B. Big business, Wall Street, and the powerful and privileged who represent them.

These are the two competing stories Americans are telling one another.

Yes, I know: It's more complicated than this. In reality, the lousy economy is due to insufficient demand -- the result of the nation's almost unprecedented concentration of income at the top. The very rich don't spend as much of their income as the middle. And since the housing bubble burst, the middle class hasn't had the buying power to keep the economy going. That concentration of income, in turn, is due to globalization and technological change -- along with unprecedented campaign contributions and lobbying designed to make the rich even richer and do nothing to help average Americans, insider trading, and political bribery.

washingtonpost.com — The leaders of President Obama's fiscal commission released a final report Wednesday that is full of political dynamite, including sharp cuts in military spending, a higher retirement age and tax reforms that could cost the average taxpayer an extra $1,700 a year.

But as commission co-chairmen Erskine Bowles and Alan K. Simpson unveiled the plan at a Capitol Hill hearing, it was unclear whether they would be able to build a convincing bipartisan consensus among the panel's members before they are scheduled to vote on it Friday.

The final plan to rebalance the federal budget would cut government spending even deeper than the commission's original proposal, while offering more help to some retirees. It offers an aggressive prescription for reducing deficits by nearly $4 trillion by the end of the decade.

usatoday.com — If Americans aren't prepared for the hard choices needed to control the national debt, most voters here must have missed the memo.

If the Tea Party movement that helped sweep Republicans to greater power this month is to have an impact in Washington, getting control of the national debt would be a logical place to start. A bipartisan presidential commission reports its findings Wednesday, Obama delivers his proposed 2012 budget early next year, and Congress must vote to raise the $14.3 trillion debt limit before it's breached next spring.

Cutting the deficit and debt is the preferred prescription for the economy among 39% of Americans, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll conducted Nov. 19-21 shows. That tops other options, including raising taxes on the wealthy, cutting taxes and increasing stimulus spending.

wbur.org — A proposal by a bipartisan task force co-led by Brookings Institute fellow and former Clinton budget director Alice Rivlin, like the one the chairmen of President' Obama's deficit commission released last week, has something for everyone to hate: spending cuts and tax hikes. And it will probably be attacked the same way that first proposal was -- by advocates on the left and right

In this interview with NPR's Mara Liasson, Roger Hickey sees the deficit commissions as a trap for Democrats. "Starting this deficit commission, it has shifted the entire discussion away from 'how do you get jobs' to 'how do you get deficits under control,' " he says. "It would be the worst thing in the world for the Democrats to allow conservatives to mousetrap them into embracing cuts -- draconian cuts, really -- to Social Security."

cleveland.com — (AP) — c ()-2010, The Washington Post

WASHINGTON-President Barack Obama's domestic policy agenda, which defined him as a leader seeking to restore faith in government, is imperiled by his call for a "freeze" on spending, many advocates said Tuesday, as federal agencies scrambled to determine the proposal's impact.

The freeze would hold steady for the next three years the government's discretionary budget-the portion of spending that Congress decides every year-except for spending on the military, homeland security, the State Department and Veterans Affairs.

seiu.org — The First Amendment was never intended to protect corporations...until now?

Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the floodgates and started dismantling century-old restrictions on corporate electoral activity in the name of the 'free speech rights' of corporations. With less than 11 months before the fall elections, SCOTUS's Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission ruling overturns rules against direct and indirect corporate financial involvement in federal elections.

huffingtonpost.com — What, you ask, do political writers really mean when they refer to "The Village"? What does that political term mean in practice, rather than in theory? Here's about as good an example as I have ever seen:

Jeffrey Birnbaum, one of the premier lobbying reporters, joined a leading K Street firm Tuesday.
Birnbaum has gone to BGR Group, formerly known as Barbour, Griffith & Rogers, as president of its public relations practice, BGR Public Relations.

huffingtonpost.com — I'm looking forward to the 2010 elections. We need them.

Many dread how badly the election is shaping up. Commentators predict double digit Democratic losses in the House and further retreat from the sixty vote threshold in the Senate. We fear a progressive era strangled in its infancy.

businessandmedia.org — “When The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart grilled CNBC's Jim Cramer last week, he did what few others in the traditional media were willing to do: Expose CNBC's strategy of climbing in bed with the CEOs who created this financial crisis, instead of aggressively reporting on them,” an e-mail from Bill Scher, the online campaign manager for CAF said. “But one decent interview is not enough to ferret the truth out of those now clamoring for taxpayer bailout money.”