Ben White of Politico’s Morning Money points out a piece by Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post where he calls for both Republicans and Democrats to suck it up and accept outcomes they don’t like around the debt ceiling and reducing the deficit. Robinson:

Democrats are right that this is a terrible moment for spending cuts. Republicans are right that this is an awful moment for tax increases. The only reasonable thing to do is kick the can down the road – but in a purposeful, intelligent way. … Republicans must swallow an increase in the debt ceiling, and Democrats must accept painful spending curbs that kick in when the economy is off its sickbed. It means conservatives have to be patient in bringing expenditures down and progressives have to be patient in returning tax rates – even for the wealthy – to what many of us consider appropriate levels.” [Emphasis added]

Eugene, that is not a compromise. There are two areas of debate here – the first is if we should raise the debt ceiling and if so, by how much. The second is what should the federal government do to reduce the budget deficit. The GOP has sought to tie these together and by all accounts has been completely successful. But as long as the sober outcome and outcome demanded by Wall Street happen to be raising the debt ceiling, it’s hard for me to think about this as truly paired in the way the GOP is trying to get this done.

In that light, Robinson’s proposal is not a compromise any Democrat should think about accepting. If Democrats have to concede that Republicans will not allow a tax hike on the rich to close the deficit gap, then the appropriate Republican compromise would be that they would not get to cut spending on social programs to close the deficit gap. Or to put it differently, we just raise the debt ceiling now and deal with the deficit afterwards! Republicans accepting raising the debt ceiling isn’t a compromise, it’s an economic necessity and it must be treated as such, otherwise the GOP will get what they want and be allowed to hold a gun to the US economy and say, “Cut Medicare or the economy gets it!”

I don’t know why the administration and congressional Democratic leadership aren’t out there making the case that there must be a clean debt ceiling vote, that they will fight for raising it, and then we can deal with the deficit. That would be a sober way to kick the can down the road. Instead we’re having a debate with a Polish hostage and it isn’t going well for the rest of us.

Back when the austerity (I mean, fiscal responsibility) debate was starting, it was pointed out that the United Kingdom went with a 2:1 ratio of spending cuts to revenue increases. The result has been disastrous for the UK economy and painful to working people there.

When President Obama kicked off his push, he proposed a 3:1 cuts to revenue plan:

Balance Between Spending Cuts and Tax Reform: The President’s framework would seek a balanced approach to bringing down our deficit, with three dollars of spending cuts and interest savings for every one dollar from tax reform that contributes to deficit reduction. This is consistent with the bipartisan Fiscal Commission’s approach.

Amazingly with the GOP walking away from talks, we now find out that a devastating 5:1 ratio of spending cuts to revenue increases was not good enough for them. Ezra Klein reports:

A bit more information has trickled out over the last few days detailing the exact state of the budget negotiations when they collapsed. Both sides, as they often said, were shooting for about $2.4 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years. They’d already agreed on around $1 trillion in spending cuts and were making good progress on the rest of it. But Democrats insisted that $400 billion — so, 17 percent — of the package be tax increases. And that’s when Republicans walked.

This is bat shit insane. I hope someone on the Democratic side is pointing it out…

This is a real great clip from Van Jones’ speech at Netroots Nation earlier this month (the full video is here). And here’s a bit of Van from the launch of Rebuild the Dream this weekend:

Van Jones is doing really important work here, elevating and combining the conversations of job creation, racial equality, and the political empowerment of working people.

Van Jones at Netroots Nation 2011:

Live roll-out event:
http://www.rebuildthedream.com/livestream_widget_320x180.html

Last night I visited the town of Segovia, about an hour and a half outside of Madrid. The town square sits in the shadow of a stunningly preserved 2,000 year old Roman aquaduct (the Romans built Big Things). As in Madrid, a collection of young people – Los Indignados – were camped out in the town square, protesting for accountability in the government, job creation for the young and unemployed, and an end to selling their future to banksters and multi-national corporations. Here are two of the big signs I saw, with translations:

Translation:

Thank you for waking us up. We want you to fall.

Translation:

Manifesto Segovia:
We are outraged (indignant) citizens without face, without political identity, that are showing as a spontaneous peaceful and necessary movement. This reaction begins as an answer to this country’s social situation within the global crisis.

We demand:

– A reform of electoral law that allows equality in the weight of the votes because current law doesn’t represent real democracy.
– A realization of fundamental rights of work, home, education and health.
– Separation of powers: executive, legislative and judicial
– To make it easier for citizens to participate in politics and transparency in public administration

Translations in this post have been slightly updated for more natural English

What Duncan Black said:

If the European Central Bank is worried that some of its banksters might miss a happy hour or two if Greece defaults, they can print up a bunch of free money for their bankster pals and call it a day. Instead they’re trying to inflict mass suffering on the people of Greece, with the enthusiastic cooperation of Greek leaders.

Awful people run the world.

“Tough choices” really just is a synonym for elites are going to steal your money and make you suffer.

I’m at a union communicators conference in Spain and in the current session, organizers from the US, Ireland, and Spain have talked about the impacts of financial collapse on workers and how systemic failure happened. This video has well over 3.5 million views across various languages. It’s an incredibly good explanation of how the Spanish economy was built on a house of cards and what caused the collapse that is still ongoing here in Spain. Just this Sunday, I got to see a protest by the 15M movement and Pirate Party of hundreds of thousands of workers, young people, and the unemployed. It reminded me of Wisconsin, but on a larger scale. Truly impressive responses are happening in Europe (particularly Greece, Spain, Portugal and France) to the lack of accountability by elites for destroying economies, destroying public services, and stealing wealth from working people.