Open Letter to President Obama

Dear Mr. President:

You are a brilliant and disciplined man, and I'm glad you are president. However, I'm concerned about how you see your role in the current economic fight between a wealthy few and the rest of the nation.

Your insistence on bipartisanship and compromise that is not reciprocated hark back to the passive protests of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. You seem to want to be a role model of peace and persistence. They were great men, but you are not called upon to play that role.

Dignity and passive resistance was an effective tool for civil rights in the 1960s because there were powerful people in the government (Harry Truman, JFK, LBJ, the Supreme Court) willing to stand up for the oppressed. As President, you need to step up and be the champion that the middle class has been waiting for.

You have already moved some wealth through the Stimulus and extensions of unemployment, but the wealth redistribution was positioned as other things. Health care was also helpful, but it did not change the fundamental problem. Wealth distribution is an ideological and moral issue--in this it is like Civil Rights--and in our current state of inequality, redistribution is a worthy end in itself. You need to change your language to reflect this.

Studies show that average people think our wealth distribution is closer to Sweden's than what it really is. As Champion, you must bust that myth and decry the economic inequality that exists here today (and do it frequently). You must take advantage of the easy opportunities to put things right and build momentum.

1. Let the tax cuts for the rich expire. The public supports this, and even favors letting all Bush tax cuts expire.

2. Add a greed tax to the large bonuses given to bank employees and the incomes of hedge fund managers. Hedge fund managers have wangled a capped tax that has to go.

3. Don't be afraid to shame Congressmen. Who in Congress would stand up for banker perks if they knew they would be publicly branded for it? I know the media is not your friend, and you have found clever ways to deal with this, but some of them are only after a juicy story. If you can give it to them, they'll switch sides easily enough.

There is one fundamental difference between Civil Rights and the current economic fight. Granting the same human rights to everyone lifts everyone. In contrast, there is only so much money to go around. Giving it to some means taking it from others. More wealth equality does lift the whole economy, but greedy people will never see it that way.

But not everyone is greedy. Warren Buffett has already spoken out against the unfairness of his own low tax rate. There are more millionaires who would be willing to say the same. Use them to spread the word.

It is not enough to stand against something. You need to stand for something the way you stood for health care. You have the power to change how we talk about wealth distribution in this country and to start to undo 30 years of propaganda by conservatives.

Start by refusing to extend tax cuts to the wealthy. This is not negotiable. Bail on this, and you signal that the wealthy own you.

Why It is Still Bush's Fault

In the building meme to give President George Bush a better place in history than he deserves, the first shot fired across the bow was, "How can you say the economy is still Bush's fault after Obama has been in charge for two years?"

Well, let's take a look at how that works.

The responsibility for causing a problem is not the same thing as the responsibility for solving a problem. Calvin Coolidge was POTUS for most of the 1920s. He overspent, he let the balance of wealth get tipped, he oversaw the accumulation of unsupported paper wealth, and a lot of other familiar things. The Wall Street crash that launched the Depression happened less than a year after he left office. Thus, Coolidge is blamed for eight years of policies that led to the Crash.

His successor, Herbert Hoover, completely underestimated the scope of the problem left to him. He called on volunteers to help with economic problems. He let banks and other businesses go out of business, contributing to public fear and instability. He did not put more money into circulation after the crash sucked out a substantial portion of the money supply (though in fairness, the gold standard and Coolidge's overspending limited how much he could have added). Over three years, his policies turned a recession into a Great Depression, and he gets the historical blame for the Depression.

Franklin Roosevelt spent a lot longer dealing with the Depression than did Hoover: almost a decade of high unemployment, anemic economic conditions, and false recoveries. And yet, at no time did it ever change from Hoover's Depression to Roosevelt's Depression.

That's because the responsibility for causing a problem is not the same thing as the responsibility for solving a problem. Causation is fixed in the past, and the past does not change. Coolidge gets blame for the 1929 Crash even though Hoover was President at the time of the actual crash. Hoover made the economy worse, and he gets the blame for that. Roosevelt spent much longer bringing the economy back, but overall his policies caused steady economic improvement, so he gets credit for that.

Though the economic trends that led to the recent crash had built for decades, George Bush was President for the last eight critical years when the worst damage could have been prevented. Even preventing wealth siphoning starting in 2006 and limiting subprime real estate loans starting in 2007 could have turned a crash into a simple real estate slump. He absolutely deserves the blame for the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and time won't change that.

However, just to make the contrast clear, President Obama's policies have helped the economy. After the 1929 Wall Street crash, the economy went on a four-year slide. President Obama came into office less than a year after the 2008 crash. Within months, his policies were producing measurable improvements. Had the timing been different, it could have been much worse for us.

Yes, it is still Bush's fault, it will ALWAYS be Bush's fault, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.