Monthly Archives: April 2011

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The view from outside Washington …Jim Messina


The President’s speech began a new conversation in Washington about how to reduce the deficit while protecting crucial investments in our country’s future.

But as we seek to build an organization based outside of Washington, President Obama’s speech also provides an unusually stark contrast — one all of us can use to start conversations with our friends and neighbors about what’s at stake in this election.

He spoke about things you don’t generally hear in Washington conversations too often dominated by special interests: He’ll cut waste and excess at the Pentagon — particularly spending that is requested not by our military, but by politicians and corporate interests.

He’ll eliminate tax cuts for Americans in the highest tax brackets who don’t need them, including himself — and he will reform the individual tax code so that it’s fair and simple and so that the amount of taxes you pay isn’t determined by what kind of accountant you can afford.

Some cuts he proposed are tough. But they’re also smart and surgical — helping us balance our books while still doing the right things to win the future. President Obama’s plan would protect the middle class, invest in our kids’ education, and make sure we don’t protect the wealthiest Americans from the costs of reform at the expense of the most vulnerable.

The other side has presented a very clear alternative: End Medicare as we know it, privatizing the program that millions of seniors rely on for health care. Make deep cuts to education. Slash investments in clean energy and infrastructure. All to pay for tax cuts for people making over $250,000 a year, and all while actually raising our national debt.

In short, their plan will please a special interest donor base and those who put ideology before results rather than reduce deficits over the long term. And let’s be clear: They think they can get away with it because, fundamentally, they don’t think you’ll do anything about it.

That’s where I know we can prove them wrong. Because we can respond right now by building an organization that will stop them — not just in this deficit battle, but in the next election so they never have the chance to enact these proposals.

Here’s the first step. Join our fight for a deficit reduction plan that will actually reduce the deficit — with a goal of shared prosperity through shared responsibility. Add your name to support President Obama’s plan — and then help bring more people into the conversation:

www.BarackObama.com    2012

President Obama made a promise in his speech today. He said that we won’t have to sacrifice programs like Medicaid and Social Security — programs that millions of Americans rely on — as long as he’s President. He’s committed to seeking serious solutions to the problems we face while still upholding the larger responsibilities we have to one another. So it’s our job to build the organization that’s going to keep him in the White House.

More soon,

Messina

Jim Messina

Campaign Manager

Obama for America

P.S. — If you missed President Obama’s speech earlier today, some excerpts are below:

1. “Our approach lowers the government’s health care bills by reducing the cost of health care itself.

“Already, the reforms we passed in the health care law will reduce our deficit by $1 trillion. My approach would build on these reforms. We will reduce wasteful subsidies and erroneous payments. We will cut spending on prescription drugs by using Medicare’s purchasing power to drive greater efficiency and speed generic brands of medicine onto the market. We will work with governors of both parties to demand more efficiency and accountability from Medicaid. We will change the way we pay for health care — not by procedure or the number of days spent in a hospital, but with new incentives for doctors and hospitals to prevent injuries and improve results. And we will slow the growth of Medicare costs by strengthening an independent commission of doctors, nurses, medical experts and consumers who will look at all the evidence and recommend the best ways to reduce unnecessary spending while protecting access to the services seniors need.”

2. “But let me be absolutely clear: I will preserve these health care programs as a promise we make to each other in this society. I will not allow Medicare to become a voucher program that leaves seniors at the mercy of the insurance industry, with a shrinking benefit to pay for rising costs. I will not tell families with children who have disabilities that they have to fend for themselves. We will reform these programs, but we will not abandon the fundamental commitment this country has kept for generations.”

3. “In December, I agreed to extend the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans because it was the only way I could prevent a tax hike on middle-class Americans. But we cannot afford $1 trillion worth of tax cuts for every millionaire and billionaire in our society. And I refuse to renew them again.”

4. “This is my approach to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the next twelve years. It’s an approach that achieves about $2 trillion in spending cuts across the budget. It will lower our interest payments on the debt by $1 trillion. It calls for tax reform to cut about $1 trillion in spending from the tax code. And it achieves these goals while protecting the middle class, our commitment to seniors, and our investments in the future.

“So this is our vision for America — a vision where we live within our means while still investing in our future; where everyone makes sacrifices but no one bears all the burden; where we provide a basic measure of security for our citizens and rising opportunity for our children.”

5. “But no matter what we argue or where we stand, we’ve always held certain beliefs as Americans. We believe that in order to preserve our own freedoms and pursue our own happiness, we can’t just think about ourselves. We have to think about the country that made those liberties possible. We have to think about our fellow citizens with whom we share a community. And we have to think about what’s required to preserve the American Dream for future generations.

“This sense of responsibility — to each other and to our country — this isn’t a partisan feeling. It isn’t a Democratic or Republican idea. It’s patriotism.”

Thank you,

Messina

Jim Messina

Campaign Manager

Obama for America

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Ds support Medicare. Rs don’t


The GOP is trying to break a promise we made to seniors almost 50 years ago. That promise is simple: we’ll make sure you have the basic medical care you need.

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Democrats who fight were proud to hear President Obama vow that he wouldn’t let them break our promise on his watch. He took on Rep. Paul Ryan‘s budget, which ends Medicare as a guaranteed program for seniors. Instead, it takes that money and gives the wealthiest Americans still more tax cuts.

 We’re Democrats who fight, and we need you to join us today. Tell the Republicans to keep their hands off Medicare. This is bigger than balancing the budget. It’s a fight for who we are and what we believe.

Thanks again for all your support,

Anthony

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Gitmo -The Neverendin​g Story


Yesterday, the New York Times and other news outlets reported on a “trove of more than 700 classified military documents” that provide “new and detailed accounts of the men who have done time at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba, and offers new insight into the evidence against the 172 men still locked up there.” The documents were obtained by the open government website WikiLeaks but obtained by the Times through another source. The documents reveal details about detainee behavior and treatment, but are “silent about the use of the harsh interrogation tactics at Guantánamo — including sleep deprivation, shackling in stress positions and prolonged exposure to cold temperatures — that drew global condemnation.”

THE DETAILS: The Times editorializes today that the documents serve as “a chilling reminder of the legal and moral disaster that President George W. Bush created” at Gitmo and “describe the chaos, lawlessness and incompetence in his administration’s system for deciding detainees’ guilt or innocence and assessing whether they would be a threat if released.” “Innocent men were picked up on the basis of scant or nonexistent evidence and subjected to lengthy detention and often to abuse and torture,” the Times editorial notes, adding that suicides there “were regarded only as a public relations problem.” The documents show that there were 158 detainees “who did not receive a formal hearing under a system instituted in 2004. Many were assessed to be ‘of little intelligence value’ with no ties to or significant knowledge about Al Qaeda or the Taliban.” The Guardian notes that 212 Afghans at Gitmo were either “entirely innocent,” “mere Taliban conscripts” or “had been transferred to Guantanamo with no reason for doing so.” Among inmates who proved harmless were an 89-year-old Afghan villager, suffering from senile dementia, and a 14-year-old boy who had been an innocent kidnap victim. The so-called 20th 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed Qahtani, “was leashed like a dog, sexually humiliated and forced to urinate on himself.” And U.S. forces held Sami al-Hajj, a Sudanese cameraman for Al-Jazeera, for 6 years before finally letting him go. Hajj had insisted he was just a journalist and he went back to work for Al-Jazeera after his release.

DOUBLE GUANTANAMO?: The idea of Guantanamo has become so toxic internationally that even military leaders such as Gen. David Petraeus want it shut down. “Gitmo has caused us problems, there’s no question about it,” Petraeus said in 2009, adding, “I oversee a region in which the existence of Gitmo has indeed been used by the enemy against us.” Yet at the same time, others sing Guantanamo’s praises. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R), who will likely run for president next year, said in his last campaign for the White House that the prison needs to be expanded, not closed. “I want them on Guantanamo, where they don’t get the access to lawyers they get when they’re on our soil. I don’t want them in our prisons, I want them there,” Romney said during a 2007 presidential debate. “Some people have said we ought to close Guantanamo. My view is we ought to double Guantanamo,” he later added.

FAILING TO CLOSE GITMO: Just three years ago, closing the Guantanamo Bay prison had broad bipartisan support. While Obama campaigned on closing Gitmo, even Republicans, including President Bush and Obama’s opponent, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), agreed. But Attorney General Eric Holder’s recent announcement that alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed would be tried in a military tribunal instead of a civilian court all but ended any hopes that the prison would be closed anytime soon. Yet, as the Washington Post chronicled last weekend, “For more than two years, the White House’s plans had been undermined by political miscalculations, confusion and timidity in the face of mounting congressional opposition.” Who’s fault is it that Gitmo is still open? While Democrats in Congress largely abandoned the President, the White House didn’t exactly put a lot of political capital on the line either. As former White House counsel Greg Craig noted, “There was a real serious problem of coordination in this whole thing.” Indeed, the administration had planned to transfer some uncontroversial detainees to Northern Virginia but abandoned the move at the last hour after Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) discovered that Gitmo detainees would be moving to his district. The White House never cleared their plan with Wolf. Since then, as Obama noted last year, Gitmo has “been subject to a lot of…pretty rank politics.” And as “Not In My Backyard” cries from members of Congress intensified, the legislative branch eventually cut off funds to close Gitmo and approved a measure to bar any detainees from being relocated to the United States.

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Energy:The High Costs Of Oil

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Although Wall Street traders and oil company executives are enjoying record returns, most Americans aren’t seeing the benefit of that economic success. Working families are still struggling to find steady employment while Tea Party officials cut taxes for corporations and services for everyone else. As the Progress Report warned a month ago, gas and food prices, inflated by international speculators, hammer the middle class. Rising gas prices are expected to inflate ExxonMobil‘s profits by more than fifty percent. Meanwhile, catastrophic weather fueled by decades of oil pollution is uprooting lives and adding to the uncertainty of the much-needed economic recovery. Rep. Paul Ryan‘s (R-WI) 2012 budget passed by the House Republicans compounds the threats by keeping billions of dollars in subsidies for oil companies while slashing investment in clean energy by 70 percent. While the GOP maintains a single-minded focus on subsidizing new oil drilling, even Goldman Sachs has admitted that “the price of oil has grown out of control due to excessive speculation.” President Obama has taken notice, laying out his “plans to address rising gas prices over the short and the long term” in his weekly Saturday address. “Instead of subsidizing yesterday’s energy sources, we need to invest in tomorrow’s,” Obama said. “We need to invest in clean, renewable energy. In the long term, that’s the answer.”

CURBING SPECULATORS: “Speculators today have about 70 percent of the open interest in the commodity markets,” explains hedge fund manager Michael Masters, who has founded the financial reform group Better Markets. “Ten years ago – they controlled roughly 30 percent of the market.” Commodities “index funds,” “which allow investors to bet on the price of several commodities at once,” have exploded in value from “about $15 billion in 2003 to $200 billion in 2008, and are currently valued at over $250 billion.” What the administration and others should do, which they have the power to do quickly, is impose position limits, which would stop excessive speculation now,” says Better Markets’ Dennis Kelleher. The Dodd-Frank legislation signed into law by Obama last year requires the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to set “position limits” on speculation, but the agency is planning to implement its proposed limits only by “early 2012, a year after the deadline set by lawmakers.” The CFTC has found that there are only about ten energy traders who are large enough to be affected by these position limits. “On CBS’s Face The Nation, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) “called for an aggressive federal probe — including a possible grand jury — into whether rising gasoline prices stem from illegal manipulation of energy markets.” On Thursday, Obama “unveiled a new working group to combat any fraud or manipulation in the oil and energy markets” led by the CFTC and the Department of Justice. “If we can work more closely with the DOJ folks, we may be able to put more people in jail,” CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton told The Huffington Post. By swamping the market, even without any deliberate fraud, these oceans of money swamp the traders who actually need to buy and sell the underlying commodities, such as oil producers and gasoline distributors. “A ban of both commodity index funds and exchange-traded funds that use commodity futures, removing much of this investment, would be an important and instantly measurable first step,” believes former oil trader Daniel Dicker. At a minimum, a transaction fee on speculators would keep the oil markets more reliable.

ENDING DIRTY SUBSIDIES: In his weekly address, Obama reiterated his call to “end the $4 billion in taxpayer subsidies we give to the oil and gas companies each year.” Americans of all stripes recognize that tax breaks and giveaways to oil companies need to be eliminated, despite the industry propaganda that these subsidies are needed to prevent high energy prices. When asked about massive subsidies given to the oil industry, even Tea Party activists have agreed with progressives that there is a structural imbalance in the political system towards corporate power. Many of the oil-industry subsidies come in the form of passing corporate risks onto American families: there have been no laws passed to protect our nation from oil disasters like BP’s, and companies like Koch Industries enjoy the multi-billion dollar subsidy of being able to emit millions of tons of carbon pollution for free — while communities foot the bill for our increasingly dangerous climate. Far from raising prices at the pump, eliminating these subsidies would instead reduce oil companies’ outsized profits and corporate paydays. If this Congress wants to take on the pain at the pump, it will support legislation to build a national infrastructure of electric charging stations for electric vehicles, deploy 21st-century high-speed rail, and curb oil profiteering by Wall Street.

GOP CARRIES WATER FOR BIG OIL: The GOP answer to Wall Street and Big Oil taking over our economic future is to give them even more power. The Ryan budget slashes the CFTC budget by nearly two-thirds, and would “slash investments in the research, development, and deployment of the clean energy technologies of the future.” As they work to lose the future, they also plan to roll out a new iteration of the “drill baby drill” marketing campaign in May. “House Republicans are planning bill introductions, hearings, markups and floor votes on legislation aimed at expanding domestic oil production in response to high gasoline prices.” “Now, the GOP controls the floor agenda and plans to use it when they get back from the two-week spring recess.” According to House Speaker John Boehner’s spokesman, “The White House and the rest of the Democrats who run Washington are terrified about the political impact of gas prices, because many of their policies — like the national energy tax — are explicitly designed to raise energy prices.” In reality, big oil profits go up with higher gas prices, and the only “national energy tax” is the cost of our national oil dependence. Speaker Boehner‘s office has the “concern” that Democrats are calling for investigations of market fraud “to distract from the real issue” of the “need to increase the supply of American energy.” In other words, they’re worried that the American public agree that oil companies and Wall Street need to be reined in, not left in charge of our energy policy. Even members of Boehner’s own caucus — like Rep. Tom Graves (R-GA) and Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) — admit the time has come to cut oil subsidies

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a message from Senatory Patty Murray,


The GOP budget is a dagger in the heart of American families.

Under it, everyone would sacrifice – except billionaires and corporations. The social safety net working families rely upon would disappear. People remember life before Medicare. Many seniors’ lives ended in abject, heartbreaking poverty.

This is the GOP plan for America’s future. This time, we Senate Democrats can stop them. But this is just the beginning of their assault on our ideals, and our firewall – and ability to stop them – is in jeopardy. That’s why we’re launching the DSCC Rapid Response Project to expose their radical agenda. I’ve set a goal to raise $169,394 by April 30, and I need everyone in the fight.

If Republicans gain four Senate seats, their vision will become reality. We can’t let that happen.

Click here to give $5 or more, and help us raise $169,394 before April 30. Our Rapid Response Project is key to keeping our Democratic Senate firewall.

https://dscc.org/salsa/track.jsp?v=2&c=AOxvVFYJSiPbn085mj%2FYfi2tz4OZsI%2Fp

We’re not just defending Senate seats – we’re going on the offense, too. In states like Massachusetts, Nevada and Indiana, changing demographics and bloody Republican primaries offer opportunities to turn red Senate seats blue.

Our Rapid Response Project will help. By countering every GOP attack and letting voters know what Republicans are really after, we can go on offense in 2012. And going on offense gives us a better chance to keep our Senate majority – and stop the Republicans’ radical agenda.

We need your help! Click here to give $5 or more toward our April 30 $169,394 goal. Every dollar you give helps fight the Republicans – and save our Democratic Senate firewall.

https://dscc.org/salsa/track.jsp?v=2&c=AOxvVFYJSiPbn085mj%2FYfi2tz4OZsI%2Fp

The Republican budget shows what kind of America Republicans want. The Democratic Senate is determined to stop them. Give today, and help make sure we can.

Sincerely,

Sen. Patty Murray