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In the years before becoming a full-time writer, Sirota worked as the press secretary for Vermont Independent Congressman Bernard Sanders, the chief spokesman for Democrats on the U.S. House Appropriations Committee, the Director of Strategic Communications for the Center for American Progress, a campaign consultant for Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer and a media strategist for Connecticut Senate candidate Ned Lamont. He also previously contributed writing to the website of the California Democratic Party. For more on Sirota, see these profiles of him in Newsweek or the Rocky Mountain News. Feel free to email him at lists [at] davidsirota.com Note: this online publication represents Sirota's personal views, and not the official views of the organizations he works with.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, April 13, 2009 Feeling Sorry for Yourself?
It's called graft - a surefire wealth creator that takes your investments, modifies laws, and delivers returns that the best stock trader could never dream of. This is the ShamWow of strategies, the Flowbee of economics, the Ronco of investing. Just look at the profits it generates!
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, April 6, 2009 Hands-Off Attitude Towards Financial Regulation - Cause & Effect?
Was there a quid pro quo whereby Summers took cash from Wall Street and then entered the administration and did Wall Street's bidding? Not explicitly, no. Bribery in our country most often operates in the world of the implicit - Summers got the cash because he was a solid Wall Street investment
(18 comments) SHARE Monday, March 30, 2009 Why Can the Auto Industry CEOs but Spare Bank CEOs?
I'm genuinely asking this question, and not in a way aimed at defending Rick Wagoner. I just want to know what possible public explanation there could be as to why the White House would push auto company CEOs around while coddling banking CEOs?
(6 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 18, 2009 Lying Or Incompetent - Either Way, Geithner Needs to Be Fired
This comes on top of Geithner and Summers dishonestly insisting that they are unable to stop the AIG bonuses because of Sen. Chris Dodd's (D-CT) executive compensation legislation that exempted AIG-style bonuses from limits. In fact, as the Wall Street Journal and Hill newspaper long ago reported, Dodd's original bill would have limited such bonuses
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 17, 2009 America Is Really Angry - Obama Aides Still Fretting About Elite Opinion
This was the reason why Obama was originally right when he said "change doesn't come from Washington, it comes to Washington" - because Permanent Washington is predisposed to see public passion and anger as a threat rather than an opportunity.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 11, 2009 Is U.S. Trade Policy About to Change?
Because of mixed messages from President Obama on trade, many are looking to his nominee for U.S. Trade Representative, former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk, to clarify things and answer the fundamental question on trade policy: Which side is the president on? There are encouraging signs.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 10, 2009 Um, No - We're Not Governed "In A Way That Is Entirely Consistent With Free-Market Principles"
What's not a good thing is Obama effectively validating the right wing's frame. In going out of his way to insist he's for the "free market," the president is signaling that he believes that the "free market" must always be worshiped and publicly glorified, even though this is an historic opportunity to reframe the entire debate on far more pragmatic, less ideological, terms.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 3, 2009 "Swinging for the Fences": The Major League Moment In American Politics
Yes, the budget has some bad "business as usual" ideas in it, including more increases in defense spending, and what amounts to a second $700 billion bank bailout. But on the whole, Republican Sen. John Thune (SD) is (gasp!) actually right: the administration is "really swinging for the fences" on progressive policy. That's a paradigm shift from a past era that pretended We the People didn't even exist.
(14 comments) SHARE Friday, February 20, 2009 The Growing Anger In the Heartland
[His]passion exemplifies a level of rage out in the country that isn't being fully appreciated in Washington, D.C., as evidenced by everything from the continued no-strings-attached bailouts to the criticism of the most basic "Buy America" laws. The anger out here is real and it is breaking through the Beltway din. It is only going to get worse if genuine change doesn't happen in short order.
SHARE Wednesday, February 18, 2009 Announcement of Audie Award
A feather in the cap of an OEN member:
I wanted to let you know the good news - my 2008 book, The Uprising, was nominated for an "Audie" - the publishing industry's most prestigious set of awards for best audiobooks of the year. You can download the audiobook at Audible.com or order the CD at this link:
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 10, 2009 The 4.6% Truth: How Absurdly Small Stimulus Spending Really Is
Of course, that doesn't mean the stimulus bill should be rejected, even in the overwhelmingly mediocre state it's in - but it does mean that we should have a little perspective and stop judging everything by conservatives' know-nothing parameters.
SHARE Monday, February 9, 2009 Energy Taxes' Faustian Bargain
Revenuewise, it's easy to see why severance taxes are an attractive target in an era of belt-tightening. Energy companies are making big profits, and severance receipts have doubled in the past five years to almost $11 billion nationwide.In an age of money-dominated politics, that warning may, indeed, be valid - at least in the short term. The trick for severance tax reformers, then, will be to find ways of making deals
(8 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 3, 2009 Blacklisting Progressives: The Untold Story Beneath the Daschle Headlines
Leo Hindery, one of the few business leaders to use his wealth to challenge deregulation, corporate trade deals and anti-worker policies was blacklisted by the Obama administration well before the Daschle flap ever happened.
(9 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 29, 2009 There's Something Happening Here
Suddenly, we have a Congress pushing the executive branch to be more progressive - and that's a big deal.
If......we're going to close the gulf between the rhetoric of hope and the real action of change, it will be through our work continuing to create the conditions for this new dynamic to thrive. The bolder the Democratic Congress, the more it can reject czarism and reassert its constitutional role.
(12 comments) SHARE Friday, January 23, 2009 U.S. Moving Toward Czarism, Away From Democracy
[T]his culture of "presidentialism," as Vanderbilt Professor Dana Nelson calls it, has justified the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretaps and a radical theory of the "unitary executive" that aims to provide a jurisprudential rationale for total White House supremacy over all government. But only in the past three months has American czarism metastasized from a troubling slow-growth tumor to a potentially deadly cancer.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, January 19, 2009 Busting myths that FDR prolonged Great Depression
...the truism we must all remember in 2009: As conservatives try to obstruct a new New Deal, they're not making any arguments that are remotely serious.
"Excepting 1937-1938, unemployment fell each year of Roosevelt's first two terms (while) the U.S. economy grew at average annual growth rates of 9 percent to 10 percent," writes University of California historian Eric Rauchway.
SHARE Wednesday, October 29, 2008 The Sign I've Been Waiting For
Many of have our own "signs" - the things we take from our lives that seem to suggest a deeper force in the universe. Most of these signs are mundane - a breeze here, a coincidental encounter there.
This week, though, I found my superstitious sign that something very different - very special - is happening. That sign came in the form of the Philadelphia Phillies.
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, October 19, 2008 Here Comes the Onslaught
This Newsweek cover piece is the starting gun of the elite pushback against what could be a new progressive era. Penned by one of the most reliable peddlers of Establishment talking points, Jon Meacham, it argues that a President Obama will have to govern America as a slightly more moderate Ronald Reagan.
SHARE Friday, August 8, 2008 West will be where it's won
From Butte, Montana, David Sirota considers how the West is listening to Democrats. His syndicated column appears in the Denver Post.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, April 28, 2008 Clinton Criticizing Closure of Indiana Factory That Clinton Helped Close
Clinton is airing a television ad in Indiana, bemoaning the closure of a defense contractor Magnequench's manufacturing plant in Valparaiso (she is also echoing this line in her stump speeches). Looking at the camera, she tells us she's upset that the 200 jobs that were sent to China, and that "now America's defense relies on Chinese spare parts." Problem is, it was Bill Clinton who could have stopped it.