Dear President Obama

Open Letter to President Obama

Mr. President:

When I cast my first vote as a Democrat in 1988, I was only 18 years old.  I admit that didn’t know much about politics and I mindlessly registered as a Democrat.  My dad was a Republican and my mom was life-long Democrat.  I felt much more aligned with the DNC and in my eyes there were only two parties to choose from in the US.   I continued to vote Democrat, without passion or interest until you ran in 2008.  I was still fairly young and I had two small children.  When I heard your speeches and I saw your face, I felt hope…I saw hope…I heard hope.  It felt like for the first time in my life, my vote could make a difference.  It seemed like you would make a difference.   Life was not easy at the point. The recession was just starting and we were barely surviving.  I was a stay at home mom, with a severely asthmatic child and health issues of my own.  Medical bills, mortgage payments and credit card bills were piling up.  I was beginning to wonder how we were going to make it. 

I went to the polls with my kids that November day and proudly cast my ballot.  Maybe I was naive and drank too much of the Koolaid, but I expected changes.  Three years later, changes weren’t coming quickly enough and in four years my life wasn’t much better.  In fact, life was harder.  My husband was working multiple jobs and I was working odd jobs and selling off possessions on Ebay.  I was feeling frustrated and I had marched with the Occupy Movement and I was becoming more active in progressive movements.  I saw a sign at the first March.  It said: 2012 Pres Dream Team Sanders and Warren.  I started to research more on Elizabeth Warren now, as well.  The more I learned, the more I saw that you weren’t very progressive. 

Did I vote for you again in 2012? Of course I did.  I did what all good Democrats did. I voted Blue, no matter who. 

Bernie Sanders was on my radar in 2011 and I watched as he became more vocal, especially when it came to Wall Street Reform.  When I saw the he was running for President and no less on the Democratic ticket a glimmer of hope sparked in my darkness.  Could we have the change we so desperately needed? 

I listened to his speeches and I watched as he became more and more popular. He was connecting with people on a level that even you didn’t do in 2008 nor in 2012.   Thousands of people were showing up to listen to him speak. By January and February of 2016, lines snaked around city blocks with people desperate to hear his message.  When a large march took place in Pasadena, CA I took my children and mother to march with me.  When we returned home, my kids excitedly put the news on to see the coverage of the march.  Why wouldn’t it be on tv?  The Los Angeles news shows coverage of celebrities, animals, and endless news of Trump and Clinton.  As we watched, only one station showed a spot.  

 It was a 5 second spot that said “a few hundred” people showed up.  My 13 year old looked at me confused.  “A few hundred people? There were a few thousand.  It was a big deal.  Why aren’t they talking about it”.  It took that comment for me to realize what was happening.  I started to pay attention.  The news was blatantly not paying attention to Sanders and when they did it was negative or minimal.  The more people that showed up to march or see him, the less coverage he received.  I attended a rally in Palm Springs, CA and left with such hope and inspiration.  Yet, something wasn’t right.  We weren’t getting equal media time, there were polling/voting issues, claims of debate schedule issues, fraud accusations and more.    

Any time I brought this up or anyone I know spoke of this, we were treated like Fox Mulder from the X-Files.  We were treated like Conspiracy Theorists. 

Flash forward to the convention.  The first Wikileaks emails were exposed.  I read them and you could almost cut my anger with a knife.  We began to see that we weren’t crazy.  We WERE Fox Mulder and if you watched X-Files, you know he wasn’t crazy. He was actually right the whole time.  We were right the whole time.  I could barely bring myself to watch any of the convention.  When I saw Elizabeth Warren begin to speak, literally a piece of my heart broke away.  She had been a champion of our cause for many years.  Was she paid off? Was she threatened? Was she part of the game to begin with?  Then the unthinkable happened.  Bernie Sanders “conceded” to Hillary Clinton.  He did it without a real fight and in light of what the DNC did to him and to us.  Were we angry? Did we feel betrayed by the system? Hell yeah we did and we had every right to feel that way.  This is the kind of betrayal and anger that can't be swept away and forgotten.  

 I watched as you didn’t condemn what your party had done.  You quietly thanked Debbie Wasserman Schultz for her service and ignore everything going on in your own Party.    You ignored the Bernie Sanders delegates in the crowd sobbing. The media mentioned them with contempt and mocked them.  They were not sobbing because they lost. They were sobbing because they realized their party was never really going to let Sanders win. They were sobbing because their party lied to them.  They were sobbing because you lied to them. They were sobbing because they were being treated like shit inside and outside the convention hall. They were sobbing because outside the hall, people were marching in anger and no one was talking about it.  They were sobbing because that iconic photo of you, with the word HOPE written in the background was now a faded piece of paper, crumbling.  They were sobbing because you had failed them and all of us.

As thousands of Wikileaks files are being released daily, you continue with your silence. You have lost more followers than you will ever know. We aren’t “just” millennials.  We are moms, dads, Generation X’ers, sisters, brothers, Americans.  We are fed up and we aren’t taking this anymore. 

Your silence now extends to other progressive issues.   I have watched the nightmare of the Standing Rock issue since it began.  I have waited for your action and yet there is silence.  You are quietly waiting for November 8^th to come and go.  When Hillary Clinton is elected, you will let the pipeline continue and then it won’t affect your party’s chances of being elected.  It is a cowardice move.  Regardless of who is right or wrong on the matter, people are wrongfully being detained and hurt. There are innocent people that you are supposed to be protecting.  Your job is to stop what is going on and at least pretend to care.  Your job is to have it investigated further. Do your job. 

You may think that this will not follow you when you leave the White House.  But it will follow you.  This will be a part of your legacy.  When my 14 year old doesn’t trust his own government, you should know that you haven’t done your job.  My job as a parent, is to teach him respect, love, discipline, educate them and to be a truth teller.  A truth teller.  That means even when that truth hurts.  I have done my job. Do your job.

So IF Trump wins, don’t blame us.  Blame yourself and your party.  You had the chance to make this right.  You had the chance to clean out dirty laundry in your party, even if that laundry was your candidate.  Blaming us-the people that supported you until you didn’t support us-is the move of a 10 year old.  One of the first lessons I taught my kids was to accept responsibility for their actions.  We are acting like Trump is the only bully and bad influence for our kids in this election?  He definitely is both.  But so is your party.  The lessons you are teaching are youth is it is ok to lie, cheat, cover it up and pretend like it is ok, as long as you don’t get caught or admit it. 

If Clinton wins, know that we are not rejoicing.  She will not be my President.  The media can try to control the stories 24 hours a day to us and change the truth, but it can’t change what we know. I will vote for a woman I can trust. I will vote Green.  Jill Stein has my vote. 

And to the MEDIA…. I have a special message for you.  You are nothing but a joke at this point.  What happened to unbiased new coverage? What happened to journalists doing a job that entailed research, honesty and integrity? What happened to having the courage to do what is right?  You have failed us, as well.  You are a part of the problem. 

You should take notes from journalists such as Jordan Chariton and Jimmy Dore from TYT, Bernie Sanders Delegates who reported from the ground like Jeff Day, Claudia Stauber, Progressive show creator-Tim Black at Night, truth teller Josh Fox and MANY others I have encountered on social media,  in the past two years. Media- DO YOUR JOB. 

Farewell Mr. President.  Sleep well knowing that many people, especially  kids who looked up to you will remember you for these things.  A new generation of activism and revolution will be born from this.  A viable third party will be born from this.  The Green party will get the 5% it needs and this is just the beginning. 

I once read that you recommended The Matrix to Scifi fans.  I will leave you with this.  Please know that we have taken the red pill and we are never going back. 

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

Sincerely,

The Late Great Middle Class

The end result of unfettered Free Market Capitalism is the distruction of the "Middle Class"

The Middle Class Is Not ''Normal''

Wednesday, 16 April 2014  By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed

The tax cuts introduced during the term of President Ronald Reagan prompted the Federal Reserve to push interest rates to extreme levels to suppress inflation. (George Tames/The New York Times).

There's nothing "normal" about having a middle class. Having a middle class is a choice that a society has to make, and it's a choice we need to make again in this generation, if we want to stop the destruction of the remnants of the last generation's middle class.

Despite what you might read in the Wall Street Journal or see on Fox News, capitalism is not an economic system that produces a middle class. In fact, if left to its own devices, capitalism tends towards vast levels of inequality and monopoly. The natural and most stable state of capitalism actually looks a lot like the Victorian England depicted in Charles Dickens' novels.

At the top there is a very small class of superrich. Below them, there is a slightly larger, but still very small, "middle" class of professionals and mercantilists - doctor, lawyers, shop-owners - who help keep things running for the superrich and supply the working poor with their needs. And at the very bottom there is the great mass of people - typically over 90 percent of the population - who make up the working poor. They have no wealth - in fact they're typically in debt most of their lives - and can barely survive on what little money they make.

So, for average working people, there is no such thing as a middle class in "normal" capitalism. Wealth accumulates at the very top among the elites, not among everyday working people. Inequality is the default option.

You can see this trend today in America. When we had heavily regulated and taxed capitalism in the post-war era, the largest employer in America was General Motors, and they paid working people what would be, in today's dollars, about $50 an hour with benefits. Reagan began deregulating and cutting taxes on capitalism in 1981, and today, with more classical "raw capitalism," what we call "Reaganomics," or "supply side economics," our nation's largest employer is WalMart and they pay around $10 an hour.

This is how quickly capitalism reorients itself when the brakes of regulation and taxes are removed - this huge change was done in less than 35 years.
The only ways a working-class "middle class" can come about in a capitalist society are by massive social upheaval - a middle class emerged after the Black Plague in Europe in the 14th century - or by heavily taxing the rich.
French economist Thomas Piketty has talked about this at great length in his groundbreaking new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. He argues that the middle class that came about in Western Europe and the United States during the mid-twentieth was the direct result of a peculiar set of historical events.

According to Piketty, the post-World War II middle class was created by two major things: the destruction of European inherited wealth during the war and higher taxes on the rich, most of which were rationalized by the war. This brought wealth and income at the top down, and raised working people up into a middle class.

Piketty is right, especially about the importance of high marginal tax rates and inheritance taxes being necessary for the creation of a middle class that includes working-class people. Progressive taxation, when done correctly, pushes wages down to working people and reduces the incentives for the very rich to pillage their companies or rip off their workers. After all, why take another billion when 91 percent of it just going to be paid in taxes?

This is the main reason why, when GM was our largest employer and our working class were also in the middle class, CEOs only took home 30 times what working people did. The top tax rate for all the time America's middle class was created was between 74 and 91 percent. Until, of course, Reagan dropped it to 28 percent and working people moved from the middle class to becoming the working poor.

Other policies, like protective tariffs and strong labor laws also help build a middle class, but progressive taxation is the most important because it is the most direct way to transfer money from the rich to the working poor, and to create a disincentive to theft or monopoly by those at the top.
History shows how important high taxes on the rich are for creating a strong middle class.
If you compare a chart showing the historical top income tax rate over the course of the twentieth century with a chart of income inequality in the United States over roughly the same time period, you'll see that the period with the highest taxes on the rich - the period between the Roosevelt and Reagan administrations - was also the period with the lowest levels of economic inequality.
You'll also notice that since marginal tax rates started to plummet during the Reagan years, income inequality has skyrocketed.

Even more striking, during those same 33 years since Reagan took office and started cutting taxes on the rich, income levels for the top 1 percent have ballooned while income levels for everyone else have stayed pretty much flat.
Coincidence? I think not.

Creating a middle class is always a choice, and by embracing Reaganomics and cutting taxes on the rich, we decided back in 1980 not to have a middle class within a generation or two. George H.W. Bush saw this, and correctly called it "Voodoo Economics." And we're still in the era of Reaganomics - as President Obama recently pointed out, Reagan was a successful revolutionary.

This, of course, is exactly what conservatives always push for. When wealth is spread more equally among all parts of society, people start to expect more from society and start demanding more rights. That leads to social instability, which is feared and hated by conservatives, even though revolutionaries and liberals like Thomas Jefferson welcome it.

And, as Kirk and Buckley predicted back in the 1950s, this is exactly what happened in the 1960s and '70s when taxes on the rich were at their highest. The Civil Rights movement, the women's movement, the consumer movement, the anti-war movement, and the environmental movement - social movements that grew out of the wealth and rising expectations of the post-World War II era's middle class - these all terrified conservatives. Which is why ever since they took power in 1980, they've made gutting working people out of the middle class their number one goal.

We now have a choice in this country. We can either continue going down the road to oligarchy, the road we've been on since the Reagan years, or we can choose to go on the road to a more pluralistic society with working class people able to make it into the middle class. We can't have both.

And if we want to go down the road to letting working people back into the middle class, it all starts with taxing the rich.

The time is long past due for us to roll back the Reagan tax cuts.

Keep your eye on the shiny object!

It was March 2, 2014 and I was asked the inevitable question. “Are you going to watch the Oscars??!”.  My answer is the same every year, a resounding “No!”.  Don’t get me wrong, I love movies.  I love everything the movies have to offer.  I love the fantasy, the adventure, the comedy and most of all, the escape it gives to us.  However, spending four hours or more of my already scarce time to watch very wealthy stars pat themselves on the back,  is not how I choose to spend my evening.  I find it harder and harder to watch the very wealthy burn money on the most unimportant things, while I look at my budget to see what is left for groceries.  

I tried to watch our local morning “news” the other day and the headline was Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis’ engagement. The reporter was so excited and blabbering on about it, as if the cure for cancer had finally arrived.  I saw posts on Facebook about it, as if people knew them.  And then the Oscar “news” started.  Did I know that the stars would receive a gift bag with $80,000 worth of merchandise?  Yes, I said $80,000.  The reality that many of these stars spend between $75,000 and up to $1 million from beginning to end, to look good and arrive at the Oscars is not a secret. Yet, people devour this news like crazy.

All of this non-news, got me thinking.  I keep hearing that things are getting better and the economy is on its way to recovery.  I guess I should believe this, because the media tells me it is true.  Could the media really be wrong?  Yes, I am being sarcastic.  For my family, it has gotten slightly better, but not much better. We still work full time jobs and part time jobs. We will struggle to pay our bills, buy groceries, keep incurring thousands of dollars in medical expenses and maybe if we are lucky, take a camping trip in the summer.  I still shop at thrift stores for clothes and if I am lucky, get a haircut every 6 months. Do I deserve more? According to many people, no.

These people that can’t get enough of the celebrity news are the same people that look at me and tell me to stop complaining. If only I worked harder and were more positive, then I would be more successful.  If only I just thanked God for everything I had, I would be happier. So, let me get this straight.  Julia Roberts (for example), can spend $500,000 on a dress, jewels, transportation, makeup, etc. for one night and the world loves it. She deserves it! Good for her!  Or as Hollywood publicist Jack Ketsoyan said to a reporter, “You can’t put a value on the Oscars. It’s the biggest night in the world.” The biggest night?  Really? Certainly it wasn’t for my family.  I still had to worry about my family’s future, my job and the unexpected emergencies we can’t afford.  But, at least Julia Roberts looked good. Thank God for that.

All of this ridiculous spending for one night. According to some reports, last year’s Oscars cost $38.3 million dollars to stage the event.  However, if the people speak out about the minimum wage being raised, the need for adequate healthcare, better jobs or the banks to be regulated, we are whining and unappreciative. How dare we want so much and not just be grateful for what we have.  

All of this reminds me of a zombie movie. Yes, I love a good or bad, zombie movie.  The great George Romero’s Land of the Dead was showing recently.  It depicts the humans in the film, distracting the zombies from them, by shooting up fireworks into the sky. The sound and lights, mesmerize the zombies to stop and just stare.  They literally are unable to move, attack or do anything.  That is what we have become, paralyzed zombies.  We need more, but we literally can’t move.   As long as the people are focused on something else, anything else, except what is important we are controlled.  

I am a proud American, but I am angrier every day.   I don’t want to look at the fireworks in the sky anymore.  Something has to change.  

Elizabeth Warren implies that AG Holder is Wall Street"s "Bitch" @ Justice

Elizabeth Warren Presses Eric Holder On Mortgage Settlement

. 08/21/2013

 

 

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder Wednesday questioning whether a major government settlement with the nation's largest mortgage companies is merely a way to absolve banks of malpractice under a "timid enforcement strategy."

The letter follows months of criticism from Warren over weak penalties imposed on banks accused of defrauding consumers and investors. She has denounced settlement strategies that allow financial firms to set aside past violations without acknowledging wrongdoing.

Wednesday's letter addresses a settlement among the U.S. Department of Justice, the Federal Housing Administration and 49 state attorneys general over charges that major banks submitted a torrent of false claims in pursuit of government benefits. In February 2012, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial agreed to pay $25 billion to settle allegations that they forged signatures, fabricated documents and engaged in other illegal practices during foreclosures.

The DOJ claimed the violations allowed banks to push through improper evictions, and receive government compensation for loans that homeowners did not repay. In the worst cases, homeowners were evicted without actually defaulting on their loans. In many others, banks instructed families to miss loan payments in order to apply for bank and government assistance, only to foreclose on them once the loan entered default proceedings.

"I am concerned that this might be yet another example of the federal government's timid enforcement strategy against the nation's largest financial institutions," wrote Warren. "I believe that if DOJ and our banking regulatory agencies prove unwilling over time to take the big banks to trial or even require admission of guilt when they cheat consumers and break the law -- either out of timidity or because of a lack of resources -- then the agencies lose enormous leverage in settlement negotiations."

Warren called on the DOJ to avoid "settling on the cheap," and said that "rushed and inadequate settlements fail to fully compensate victims and taxpayers, and insufficiently deter future misconduct."

While the headline dollar figure is the largest ever for a settlement against financial institutions, banks were able to reduce their liability with standard cost-saving business practices -- many of which they already were legally required to perform. In several cases, the government effectively paid banks to lower their own costs. Warren's letter takes specific aim at one type of violation included in the settlement deal, in which banks paid $225 million to get off the hook for submitting false mortgage insurance claims to the government. In Warren's calculations, the number of total insurance claims submitted by the banks between October 2008 and September 2010 would have subjected them to $37 billion in total liability, had every claim been fraudulent -- indicating that the government had only been compensated for 0.6 percent of the potential maximum. Although every claim was not likely fraudulent, failures in bank documentation were pervasive in the years following the financial meltdown, and continue to be problematic nearly 18 months after the settlement was announced.

We're Back

We have had a difficult summer and we are not in a good mood. The trials that the middle class now have to endure to keep their head above water have taken their toll on our good humor. So with that warning, let truth telling begin.

Republicrats in Gov. Make Great Strides In Creating Informant Society. Orwell Was Right.

America’s Informant Society

 

The seemingly endless “war on terror” has made government hostility to openness part of America’s permanent wartime mentality.

 

June 26, 2013 

 

 By Melvin Goodman

 

 

President Dwight Eisenhower’s Farewell Address more than 50 years ago is famous for its warning about the military-industrial complex, but he also warned that permanent war and a “permanent arms industry” would do great harm to American rights and liberties

Over the past decade, we have experienced a George W. Bush administration that deputized the Pentagon to spy on law-abiding citizens, with military officers attending antiwar rallies and staff sergeants engaged in the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping.

American World War II poster by Seymour R. Goff.
 

And now we have an Obama administration that has encouraged the creation of its own informant network among millions of federal employees and contractors to watch for “high-risk persons or behaviors” among co-workers.

The use of informant networks dates at least as far back as the Roman Empire. Delatores (informants) were recruited from all classes of society, including slaves, lawyers and philosophers. Prior to the death of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union used pervasive informant networks in the Communist Party’s efforts to eradicate so-called “crimes” against state property.

Massive citizen informant networks were used throughout the Soviet Bloc in Eastern Europe to destroy perceived opposition to dictatorial rule, particularly in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary. The best example of an informant network in the communist world, of course, was in East Germany where the Ministry of State Security (or Stasi) controlled one informant for every 60 citizens. These informants were told that they were their country’s first line of defense against threats to national security.

The informant network of the Obama administration is similarly insidious, with federal employees required to keep close tabs on co-workers, and managers facing penalties, including criminal charges, for failing to report their suspicions.

According to Marisa Taylor and Jonathan Landay, reporting in McClatchyDC.com on June 20, there are government documents that equate leaks with espionage. A Defense Department paper issued in 2012 exhorts its employees to “hammer this fact home … leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States.”

The Obama administration’s initiative is called the Insider Threat Program and it is not restricted to the national security bureaucracy. The Department of Education has informed its employees that co-workers going through “certain life experiences,” such as divorce or “frustrations with co-workers,” could turn a trusted employee into “an insider threat.”

According to Taylor and Landay, the Department of Agriculture and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have produced online tutorials titled “Treason 101” to teach employees to recognize the psychological profile of spies. They say that the Peace Corps is implementing such a program.

The Bush administration initiated similar programs to conduct surveillance against American citizens, not merely federal workers. Vice President Dick Cheney encouraged the Pentagon to create the Counter Intelligence Field Activity (CIFA) in 2003 to conduct surveillance against American citizens near U.S. military facilities, particularly against those Americans who attended antiwar meetings. In the summer of 2004, CIFA monitored a small protest in Houston, Texas, against Halliburton, the giant military contractor once headed by Cheney.

At the same time, Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz created a fact-gathering operation called TALON (Threat and Local Observation Notice) to collect “raw information” about “suspicious incidents.” The unauthorized spying of CIFA and the computer collection on innocent people and organizations for TALON were illegal; both organizations were eventually shut down.

In addition to instituting the Insider Threat Program, the Obama administration has expanded the domestic reach of the intelligence community, perpetuated the culture of secrecy, and instituted a pervasive lack of transparency.

Although President Obama has stated that American citizens are not the targets of the NSA’s sweeping electronic collection system, it is possible that Britain’s G.C.H.Q., London’s counterpart to NSA, is collecting intelligence on Americans and sharing the information with Washington.
Under a program called Tempora, the British communications intelligence agency has an unequalled capacity to tap high-capacity fiber cables. Britain, moreover, has a weak oversight regime, and G.C.H.Q. has a unique and storied collaboration with NSA and CIA.

Our congressional intelligence committees have failed in their primary task – providing oversight over this pervasive and secret surveillance system. Oversight and accountability must be part of government, particularly the secret agencies within government, and congressional oversight is needed to correct the collective harm that has been done to the United States and its reputation at home and abroad because of the zealous actions of the past decade.

Vice President Cheney defended the Iraq War in 2003 on the basis of the infamous “one percent doctrine,” which justified the invasion on the grounds that if there was a one percent chance that something is a threat, it requires that the United States responds as if the threat were 100 percent certain.

This logic has been applied in many ways to the problem of terrorism with the Department of Homeland Security and the 16 agencies of the intelligence community assuming that “Today’s terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon.” As a result, the “war on terror” has become a permanent fixture in our national security architecture, and an economic cornucopia for private contractors.

Last month, President Obama told a high-ranking military audience at the National Defense University that our torture and detention policies “ran counter to the rule of law;” that our use of drones will “define the type of nation that we leave to our children;” that even legal military tactics are not necessarily “wise or moral in every instance;” and that we must repeal the mandate of the Authorization to Use Military Force to fight terrorism.

Referring to Guantanamo, he argued that holding “people who have been charged with no crime on a piece of land that is not part of our country” is not “who we are.” And that “leak investigations [that] may chill investigative journalism that holds government accountable” is not “who we are.”

If so, then massive surveillance programs at home and abroad as well as massive informant networks within the entire federal bureaucracy should also not be who we are. It is long past time for President Obama to address these issues with operational policies and not mere rhetoric. The audacity of hope requires that he do so.

Melvin A. Goodman is a former CIA analyst and the author of the forthcoming “National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism” (City Lights Publishing, January 2013).

In this Bizarro World we live in only the serial liars, always wrong pundits, corporate shills are taken seriously. check out who is always on the sunday news talk shows.

Ben Bernanke, Hippie

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: February 28, 2013

We’re just a few weeks away from a milestone I suspect most of Washington would like to forget: the start of the Iraq war. What I remember from that time is the utter impenetrability of the elite prowar consensus. If you tried to point out that the Bush administration was obviously cooking up a bogus case for war, one that didn’t bear even casual scrutiny; if you pointed out that the risks and likely costs of war were huge; well, you were dismissed as ignorant and irresponsible.

It didn’t seem to matter what evidence critics of the rush to war presented: Anyone who opposed the war was, by definition, a foolish hippie. Remarkably, that judgment didn’t change even after everything the war’s critics predicted came true. Those who cheered on this disastrous venture continued to be regarded as “credible” on national security (why is John McCain still a fixture of the Sunday talk shows?), while those who opposed it remained suspect.

And, even more remarkably, a very similar story has played out over the past three years, this time about economic policy. Back then, all the important people decided that an unrelated war was an appropriate response to a terrorist attack; three years ago, they all decided that fiscal austerity was the appropriate response to an economic crisis caused by runaway bankers, with the supposedly imminent danger from budget deficits playing the role once played by Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Now, as then, this consensus has seemed impenetrable to counterarguments, no matter how well grounded in evidence. And now, as then, leaders of the consensus continue to be regarded as credible even though they’ve been wrong about everything (why do people keep treating Alan Simpson as a wise man?), while critics of the consensus are regarded as foolish hippies even though all their predictions — about interest rates, about inflation, about the dire effects of austerity — have come true.

So here’s my question: Will it make any difference that Ben Bernanke has now joined the ranks of the hippies?

Earlier this week, Mr. Bernanke delivered testimony that should have made everyone in Washington sit up and take notice. True, it wasn’t really a break with what he has said in the past or, for that matter, with what other Federal Reserve officials have been saying, but the Fed chairman spoke more clearly and forcefully on fiscal policy than ever before — and what he said, translated from Fedspeak into plain English, was that the Beltway obsession with deficits is a terrible mistake.

First of all, he pointed out that the budget picture just isn’t very scary, even over the medium run: “The federal debt held by the public (including that held by the Federal Reserve) is projected to remain roughly 75 percent of G.D.P. through much of the current decade.”

He then argued that given the state of the economy, we’re currently spending too little, not too much: “A substantial portion of the recent progress in lowering the deficit has been concentrated in near-term budget changes, which, taken together, could create a significant headwind for the economic recovery.”

Finally, he suggested that austerity in a depressed economy may well be self-defeating even in purely fiscal terms: “Besides having adverse effects on jobs and incomes, a slower recovery would lead to less actual deficit reduction in the short run for any given set of fiscal actions.”

So the deficit is not a clear and present danger, spending cuts in a depressed economy are a terrible idea and premature austerity doesn’t make sense even in budgetary terms. Regular readers may find these propositions familiar, since they’re pretty much what I and other progressive economists have been saying all along. But we’re irresponsible hippies. Is Ben Bernanke? (Well, he has a beard.)

The point is not that Mr. Bernanke is an unimpeachable source of wisdom; one hopes that the collapse of Alan Greenspan’s reputation has put an end to the practice of deifying Fed chairmen. Mr. Bernanke is a fine economist, but no more so than, say, Columbia’s Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and legendary economic theorist whose vocal criticism of our deficit obsession has nonetheless been ignored. No, the point is that Mr. Bernanke’s apostasy may help undermine the argument from authority — nobody who matters disagrees! — that has made the elite obsession with deficits so hard to dislodge.

And an end to deficit obsession can’t come a moment too soon. Right now Washington is focused on the idiocy of the sequester, but this is only the latest episode in an unprecedented run of declines in public employment and government purchases that have crippled our economy’s recovery. A misguided elite consensus has led us into an economic quagmire, and it’s time for us to get out.