We have a party that failed to make the argument, and a President clearly following the blueprint of his deficit hawk ex-budget director, with the emphasis on extending the tax cuts, “fixing” Social Security through benefit cuts and rapprochement with the business community. This is not, then, just about negotiating. It’s about policy, a policy that liberals see as completely misguided, at odds with the real problems facing the country (the continuing unemployment and housing crises) and simply more concerned to pleasing banks and elites than making the economy better for working people.

On November 17, my mother died. She was the last surviving grandparent of my children, so her death was in a very real sense the death of a generation in our family. However, as I look back on the lives of my parents, I see that their generation represented a unique bridge in the American cultural landscape. Both of my parents were born in 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, and yet their early adult lives saw the very best of economic times for a huge middle class. Sadly, at their passing, that middle class now also is dying, as the distribution of wealth returns to its concentration into only a few hands, just as it was in the 1920′s prior to the Depression.

There’s a lot to despise about David Axelrod’s announcement of Obama’s capitulation to the oligarchs on tax cuts, not least that he made this announcement on the same day Obama’s Catfood Commission Chairs started the process of stealing from seniors to “fix” our deficit.

As the economy fails to improve, as we chart the rise of the Tea Party and the Republican Party’s ability to express disdain for unemployment benefits without significant political cost, Americans lack a roadmap for the role of class and gender in the new American landscape. Joan Williams’ book, Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter (Harvard 2010), supplies that roadmap. The book creates an innovative framework for examining the relationship between law, work and family in the post-industrial economy.

We’ll see what the announcement brings, but there is a good deal of confusion surrounding Treasury’s ability to stand up the agency based on how the law was drafted. You can interpret it as saying that they have full ability to regulate and write new rules, or that they basically have administrative capability and the transferring powers from separate agencies. There’s probably enough in the way of structural planning to do before rulemaking gets going, but Dodd-Frank didn’t exactly make this easy. Warren makes it pretty clear: her task is to “get the CFPB started.”

Paul Street’s new book, The Empire’s New Clothes, closely examines the first year of the Obama administration, critically evaluating it within a context of strong liberal-Democratic support and fierce – even hysterical right-wing opposition. Barack Obama is seen very differently by Americans. Many see him as a symbol of how far America has come since the days of openly-supported racial segregation and the terroristic violence directed against the black community. Others see Obama as a dangerous “socialist/Marxist” who is threatening the American middle class and crippling future generations with “big government” and “unsustainable” debt.

Last week I noted that Kent Conrad, the chair of the Senate Budget Committee and a member of the cat food commission, appeared to support extending all of the Bush tax cuts, including those on the top 1% of earners. This would cost hundreds of billions of dollars and not stimulate the economy in any way.

In an interview with Mike Stark, Conrad backtracked on that claim somewhat, saying that he was misinterpreted in his comments, and that he would prefer an extension of the lower-end tax cuts before those on the wealthiest.

When I was leaving Las Vegas (don’t break into song), I encountered a guy on the elevator who was talking to his friend about his loss of home equity. “It’s like playing at the casino,” the man said. “You have a bunch of chips, and after a few hands, you look down, and they’re gone.”

This was a common theme at the Netroots Nation conference. Not specifically a guy relating home equity to a loss of blackjack chips, but attendees casually mentioning their interactions with people in Nevada who are struggling.

The American Small Business League (ASBL) has released the first analysis of the government’s fiscal year (FY) 2009 small business contracting data, and found 61 percent actually going to corporate giants.

The American public knows what most lawmakers in Washington and policymakers around the country have yet to figure out: The nation is losing its middle-class backbone and bifurcating into a have/have not country.