I hope it’s a call to man the barricades!

Progressive Caucus Calls Emergency Meeting

A Democratic source on Capitol Hill tells The Huffington Post that the Congressional Progressive Caucus will hold an “emergency meeting” on Monday to discuss the final deal to raise the nation’s debt ceiling.

The meeting will take place at 2:00 p.m. and there will be “a formal vote on the Caucus’ position to the deal.” Members have been urged to attend.

Earlier on Sunday, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), a co-chair of the caucus, put out a statement harshly opposing the deal as it has been described in press reports.

“This deal trades peoples’ livelihoods for the votes of a few unappeasable right-wing radicals, and I will not support it,” the statement read. “Progressives have been organizing for months to oppose any scheme that cuts Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security, and it now seems clear that even these bedrock pillars of the American success story are on the chopping block. Even if this deal were not as bad as it is, this would be enough for me to fight against its passage.”

How progressive lawmakers come down in the final vote may be the key to its passage. There are 76 members of the CPC, including one senator, Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Should House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) bleed a good chunk of votes from his party — a perfectly conceivable outcome — he will be forced to rely heavily on Democratic votes.

Progressives have swallowed their complaints about major pieces of legislation before, including health care reform and the extension of the Bush tax cuts, but they do hold some leverage going into the debt ceiling vote, which will be held Monday or Tuesday.

— Sam Stein

What Happens When You Accept a Neoliberal Frame — or How Obama Joined the ‘Gang of Six’ and Became a Reverse Robin Hood

By Carl Davidson

Only one of the Gang of Six pictured above has done something positive recently, Illinois’s Dick Durbin, when he blurted out that ‘the banks own the place’ in reference to Congress

Otherwise, this crew just cooked up a deal, under a false flag, that claims the US economy is going to recover by taking from the poor and giving to the rich—and now Obama has signed on to it.

It all follows from the false frame, that our main problem is ‘deficits.’

No, there’s plenty of money if you go after it in the right places, and our main problems are lack of jobs, unjust tax codes and the lack of a progressive clean energy and green manufacturing industrial policy.

But neoliberal finance capital has suckered our political class, with some exceptions, into its false framework.  Once you accept the notion that there’s no money, that deficits can’t be corrected without cuts, and that tax cuts create jobs in a down economy, you’re on the road to perdition. Jobs are created by increasing demand, and these measures just decreased demand from both consumers and government. Ask your local deficit hawks to explain how decreased demand creates more jobs, and then try to keep from laughing out loud before they finish.

The ‘exceptions’ just noted in our political class are the 70+ votes in the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and the real solution to the crisis is in the ‘Peoples Budget’ they have promoted to counter both the White House and the GOP-far right alliance. Be sure to help them win in 2012, and to their ranks.

Progressive Democrats of America is the main group supporting the good guys here, speaking truth to power and calling mass meetings locally around left-progressive solitions. Go to http://pdamerica.org and hook up. We need to grow its size tenfold.

Going to one of the hundreds of meetings around the country called by Van Jones and MoveOn.org?

What should we do when we get there? First, listen, assess views and count. But if you don’t have a strategy, you’re part of someone else’s strategy.

Overall, we are going into these things to develop a popular front vs neoliberalism and its rightist allies. That means organizing forms at the grassroots with platforms that that can unite a progressive majority—Progressive Democrats of America, Working Families Party, Greens in some cases—and then using these as a base community to build broader coalitions with labor and community and youth groups outward and upward.

We have to develop these base organizations and coalitions, using central labor councils where appropriate, to have both an electoral and a mass action capacity to put heat on the local reps of the more backward forces. At key goal is to build the strength of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

For jobs, we push HR 870 and mass local meetings to define its local specifics and to fight for the tax policies that will fund it, framing it with a ‘jobs not war’ and ‘windmills not weapons’ outlook.

All that we already agree on. Once we get into these meetings, take stock, we can make adjustments and additions or subtractions. Let me know how things work out.

Gap between Expenses and Revenues? The Solution is Economically Simple but Politically Hard

CarlD’s simple but hard solution to it all:

1. Take the $106,000 cap off FICA.
2. Transfer tax on stocks, bond and derivatives
3. Stop the Wars, Bring the Troops Home
4. End the Tax Breaks for those over $250,000
5. Replace ObamaCare with Medicare for All

This also creates jobs as well as bringing deficits down