Progressive America Rising

Chicago Cops Score 'One for Our Own'

2012-01-29T08:44:00.001-08:00

Shocking Verdict in Morgan Trial

Photo: Morgan with his wife, Rosalind

By Ted Pearson
Progressive America Rising

People were stunned yesterday afternoon when jurors, after only 3 hours of deliberation, returned a verdict of “guilty” on all counts against Howard Morgan for the attempted murder of four policemen. Morgan had been shot 28 times by these same policemen after a routine traffic stop at 1:00 am on February 21, 2005 in the Lawndale community on the West Side. His $1 million bail was immediately revoked and he was taken away by Sheriff’s police, who refused to allow him to even hug his daughters in the courtroom.

The more than 25 mostly white uniformed Chicago policemen who had packed the courtroom before the verdict celebrated the racist verdict. The Fraternal Order of Police web site posted also celebrated their “victory,” which they called “justice for our own.”

Observers noted that it is not uncommon in state criminal cases that bail is revoked pending appeals. Attorneys representing Morgan said they would immediately file a motion for a new trial and were considering appeals of the verdicts in both state and federal courts.

Morgan was taken to Cook County Jail’s Cermak Hospital due to his damaged condition resulting from the police shootings. He requires assistance in walking and regular medication.

I witnessed much of the trial testimony. Upon learning of the verdicts, it is clear that this jury of ten white people and only two African Americans did not take any time to reviewing nine full days of testimony by witnesses for the prosecution or the defense. They simply wanted to go home, so they did what was expected of them by the system – they quickly brought back the verdict of ‘Guilty.’ That in itself ought to be grounds for Morgan to be granted a new trial.

The police who tried to murder Howard Morgan should be dismissed from the force and the U. S. Attorney should immediately launch an investigation into the conspiracy to cover-up this heinous crime against humanity. No one, including the Chiefs of Police, Chicago’s Mayors, and the State’s Attorneys responsible for this ongoing conspiracy should be exempt from this investigation. Current State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez especially should be brought before the bar of justice for her role in prosecuting this racist case.

This case reeks of the kind of white supremacy that shocked the nation 80 years ago when nine Black teenagers were falsely accused and sentenced to death in Alabama for the rape of two white girls on the flimsiest of evidence. This case calls for the same level of national and international outrage that ultimately saved the lives of those men. People who care about democracy and fairness will demand that Howard Morgan be freed immediately on bail, that he get a new trial, or that the ridiculous charges against him be dropped.

Only a loud massive public outcry can free Howard Morgan at this point. The criminal justice system will not do it if left alone. Just as in the case of Angela Davis, who inspired the founding of our organization 39 years ago and who was granted bail while being held on a capital murder-conspiracy charge, it will take a broad and irresistible demand by the people that Morgan be allowed to make bail during his appeals, and that the charges against him be dropped.

For the jury the case came down to whom to believe: four white rookie policemen who did all the shooting or Howard Morgan, the young African American woman who witnessed the police crime, and Morgan’s attorneys, both of whom are Black. The testimony given by all the witnesses was essentially the same as that given in Morgan’s first trial 5 years ago, at which he was acquitted of aggravated battery with a firearm in the cases of all but one of the officers, but at which the jury was deadlocked over whether or not he had attempted to murder them.

Charice Rush was a young teenaged woman who was out late that night in February 2005. She testified at the trial that she witnessed what happened as she sat in her parked car in front nbear the incident. She saw the police pull Morgan’s minivan over and with their guns drawn forcibly pull him from the driver’s seat and throw him to the ground. She said she saw them open fire on Morgan as he lay on the ground. She said that she did not see Morgan with a gun in his hands at any time.

Morgan is an eight-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department and a thirteen year career policeman for the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad. He was required to carry a weapon on his job, and he normally carried it when on his way to and from work, as proscribed by Illinois law.

Morgan himself testified that he had been on his way to a family home he was remolding before he had to report for work at 6:00 am that day. He pulled over to let a police squad car with its lights flashing behind him pass, and was surprised when instead they pulled up, got out of their car and approached his vehicle. He said they pulled him out of his mini-van in an unprovoked attack, grabbed the gun he carried for work from his belt, and started shooting. He tried to tell them he was a policeman to no avail. He said he lost consciousness after several shots.

In contrast to the story told by Rush and Morgan, Policemen Timothy Finley and John Wrigley said they first observed the mini-van driven by Morgan going the wrong way down a one way street with its lights off. They followed the van with their lights flashing as it made only “rolling stops” at three stop signs after turning onto 19th St. Another squad car with Policemen Nick Olsen and Eric White came on the scene. When the van finally pulled over Morgan got out of the van. They got out of their car with guns drawn and ordered Morgan to place his hands on the side of the van. As they patted him down he turned on them, drew a gun from his waistband and opened fire on them. They ran for cover behind their cars and returned fire until Morgan ran out of bullets.

However, the testimony of the police, along with a lot of the evidence presented by the prosecution, was contradictory. Some of the police testified that Morgan ended up lying on his back. Some of them testified he ended up lying on his stomach. No one testified that they had turned him over.

Photographs of the van taken by police evidence technicians all showed that the van was parked with its lights on. The police testified that the lights were off all the time, which is why they said they were first drawn to the van.

The police said they stopped firing when Morgan ran out of bullets. Officer Eric White, however, testified that he had stood over shot Morgan and shot him in the back and struck him in the head after the shooting stopped “to protect my fellow-officers,” as he lay on his stomach in the street.

The police all testified that several hours after the shooting they each engaged in “roundtable” discussions about the incident with police officials and attorneys from the State’s Attorney’s office.

The prosecution guaranteed that the jury would not pay attention by presenting a seemingly endless account of every shell casing and ever bullet fragment found at the scene in the greatest possible detail. These included some casings and bullets fired from Morgan’s own gun. Significantly, the police identified only three of the twenty-eight bullets taken from Morgan’s body by the surgeons who treated him at Mt. Sinai Hospital. They did not say what happened to the other 25 bullets or if they had been kept. They also did not keep or indentify any of the many bullets that pierced the mini-van, which they confiscated and had destroyed (crushed) before any forensic investigation of it could be done.

Since Morgan testified that the police had taken his gun immediately, and when everything was over that gun’s bullets had all been fired, it was a major error not to have preserved the bullets that hit Morgan and could have established that some of them came from his own gun fired by police.

An independent observer of the proceedings would have come away with a picture of what happened very different from that accepted by the jury. Howard Morgan, after a dinner at home with his family where they were living on the South Side, decided to go to the family home he was renovating in Lawndale on his way to work that February 21 in 2005. On his way he was pulled over by four very young, white rookie policemen just before 1:00 am. They had been hyped up with warnings from their superiors that Lawndale was all Black, and was a “high risk” neighborhood.

They got out of their cars with guns drawn and pulled Morgan from his car. They threw him to the ground. One of them saw the pistol that he was legally carrying and shouted “Gun!” Perhaps he or another officer grabbed it from his belt. The others immediately started firing and continued firing until they thought Morgan was dead.

They were terrible shots in their panicked state. In addition to the 28 bullets that went into Morgan’s body collapsed on the ground they fired wildly. Countless rounds pierced the side and rear of the van, and others ended up in furniture and walls in nearby apartments. Two of their shots wounded their fellow officers.

In other words, they panicked and went on a rampage. It is only because of their poor shooting and, as Morgan’s wife Rosalind always pints out, the grace of God that can be responsible for the fact that Morgan was not murdered.

Once they realized that Morgan was not dead and others arrived on the scene they had to invent a story to explain their behavior. The “roundtable” discussions they held later that day with representatives of the State’s Attorney and the Fraternal Order of Police helped them get their stories straight.

They charged Morgan with attempted murder of the police and conspired to convict him, to save their careers, their department, and the City from the millions that would otherwise be due to their victim for the permanent damage and terrible suffering they have put him, his family, and his community through.

Morgan’s attorneys are Randolph Stone and Herschella Conyers are both Professors of Clinical Law at the Mandel Legal Clinic of the University of Chicago. Stone was, for many years, the chief Public Defender of Cook County.

Ted Pearson is Co-Chairperson of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression,

People can support Morgan’s legal defense by sending checks or money orders to the Howard Morgan Defense Fund, c/o Church of God, 1738 W. Marquette Rd, Chicago 60636.

Morgan’s address is Howard Morgan 2012-0127254 Cook County Jail P.O. Box 089002 Chicago, Illinois 60608

Jodi Kantor's ' The Obamas' Misses the Point:

2012-01-19T08:11:00.001-08:00

Michelle Obama Could Be This

Generation's Eleanor Roosevelt

By Rebecca Sive
Progressive America Rising via The Sive Group

Jan 11, 2012 - As she made clear yesterday morning in an interview with CBS' Gayle King, the clear-headed and brilliant, knows-what-she-wants-at-all-times Michelle Obama is no kind of stereotypical “angry black woman.” In fact, Michelle Obama is no kind of (publicly) angry woman of any kind. Quite to the contrary (her “MO”: hug everybody). And therein lies the teachable moment to draw from the hours of conversation stirred-up by the publication of Jodi Kantor’s “The Obamas.”

There are many different vantage points from which to examine the Obamas. Millions of words have been written, and thousands of pages have been printed doing just that. But, separating the wheat from the chaff, what I find most interesting about them is from this vantage point: The Obamas' choice to present themselves as a conventional 1950s family, so at-odds with the American family norm of today.

Lest you doubt this, see the mind-boggling cover drawing for USA Weekend, November 25-27, 2011 (Thanksgiving weekend) edition. It's a drawing of the Obamas, derived quite literally from a Norman Rockwell painting, in which drawing Princeton and Harvard-educated Michelle Obama, apron on, is serving turkey. It’s preposterous, really. We know Michelle Obama doesn’t spend her time putting her apron on and cooking turkey. We know the Obamas have had cooks for years. So what’s up with that?

Another image conjured-up by this Rockwellian drawing is American wife, who, if publicly engaged, is only engaged in homespun activities benefiting women and children -- like gardening, reading to children, and teaching children how to be healthier. Just what Michelle Obama is doing as First Lady. More 1950s in the 2000s.

And one final image from USA Weekend: Only the President, perhaps needless to say at this point, is all suited-up, ready to venture out into the “real” world.

While I understand why the Obamas drew this picture of themselves, and why they will continue to make political calculations, and create political images of this sort, especially when it comes to Michelle Obama; while I even understand why the First Lady is portrayed, as part of “Our 2011 Holiday Letter,” as significantly shorter than the President — just because that “angry black woman” stereotype is so potent—to put it mildly, I, like many other admirers of Michelle Obama, chafe at it.

And I don’t chafe because I wish the First Lady were, instead, running some Fortune 500 corporation. Far from it. I chafe because I, like millions of other American women voters, love the fact that this First Lady (only the second) comes to the job with male-world-gained, powerful professional credentials, along with a superlative education in a male-dominated profession. Consequently, we revel in the notion of what this First Lady is capable of; oh, say, making this world of ours a much better place, with almost just a wave of the hand. (Wal-Mart, say, can do lots of things for her that it's not yet doing.)

While we also recognize that Michelle Obama’s education and experience aren’t requisite to our gold standard First Lady (think Eleanor Roosevelt, whose formal education ended at age 17), we wonder: What’s up with this? It doesn’t make sense, either. Even without her education Roosevelt became an activist and outspoken proponent of social justice.

I’m clear on this because, like Eleanor Roosevelt’s, Michelle Obama’s arc bends towards justice. Kantor’s book is tantalizing on this point: She writes that Michelle Obama is interested in transformational public policies, e.g., healthcare reform, not politics as usual.

So, the questions arise: Is Michelle Obama doing what she really wants? Is she OK with her current public image and public activities? If she is OK, and doing (publicly) what she wants, is this because she is, as many Chicagoans could attest, a smart political (with a small "p") operative, in this case the political operative as political wife who always “has her husband’s back?” Or has this old-timey image been foisted on her by her husband’s political advisers, making her go so far as to have to set up the straw (wo)man, the "angry black woman,” to beat back presumptively bad press for a president who can’t win re-election without pulling “independent” (read: white, not-hard-core Democrats) to his side? (They need to be reassured she's one of them.)

I don’t know the answers to these questions. But I do know that when I worked with Michelle Obama, she had a GREAT presence and commitment to social justice. So while the stereotype of the “angry black woman” is one which, twenty history-making years in from those days, a would-be second-term First Lady and President would do well to steer clear of, I also think that the American public would welcome and participate in, as Chicago did, Michelle Obama’s compelling invitation to helping make the world a better place.

A note to the President’s political handlers: You have nothing to fear from this new Michelle Obama as First Lady, one whose arc bending towards justice would be apparent to all. Why? Because, uniquely, First Lady Michelle Obama has the power and the platform to make the rest of us feel better, and, then, as a consequence, to do better for the country we love. Working at a food pantry every week; visiting a homeless shelter every week; leading a neighborhood clean-up project every week; counseling young people looking for jobs every week, the mind (again) boggles; this time at the opportunities to do good that we could all undertake, led by this new Michelle Obama as First Lady.

A further note to you political handlers: I can tell you that, based on conversations I've had with all kinds of women—from sophisticated Upper West Side New York, and Gold Coast Chicago plutocrats, to blue-collar housekeepers in poor, rural Michigan, to inner-city social workers--I’ve heard the same thing, admiration for Michelle Obama. She is everything they aspire to be: smart, beautiful, a good mother and daughter, a loving partner, loved always by her husband, no questions (apparently) asked. Thus, in my view, if Michelle Obama takes on another substantial activity, public leadership for the greater good of the least among us, they will follow her, in droves.

It is in this winning (public opinion and votes) context that Michelle Obama could be this generation’s Eleanor Roosevelt, not the stereotypical “angry black woman,” but yes, an angry black woman. She could be just as angry as her angry white, brown, yellow and red sisters, who in this campaign year would stand with her and say: “Yes, we are angry. Angry because American still has hungry and homeless people. Angry because America has too many people who want to work, but can’t find jobs. Angry because America these days works for few, when it’s supposed to work “…for all.”

Come this Election Day, with this campaign plan, I believe American voters will admire Michelle Obama even more than they do today, for she will have stood tall (she knows no other way) and said what time it is: time to help America, all of America. The voters will flock to her husband in droves. We will all have his back. Just what our First Lady wants most of all. . . . . . .

Madness and Disaster: No War with Iran!

2012-01-15T08:55:00.001-08:00

What are We to Make of The USA,

Israeli, Iranian Dance Of Death?

By Bill Fletcher
Progressive America Rising via BlackCommentator.com

Jan 15, 2012 - In watching the USA/Israeli vs. Iranian tensions play out, I found myself thinking about the similarities with the British/Argentine war in the early 1980s over the Falkland/Malvinas Islands. Talk about a useless, purposeless war. Except for one thing. The ruling elites of both countries needed it.

In the early 1980s the Argentine military government was in trouble and they knew it. Their regime was unraveling and they desperately needed a means to hold things together. Presto!! They began a pseudo-nationalist campaign to regain control over the desolate Falkland/Malvinas Islands that were occupied by Britain (since 1833). Hoping to distract the Argentine population from the economic crisis that combined with the savagery of the military dictatorship, the junta carried out a military operation that under other circumstances would have been the basis of a comedy. Unfortunately the loss of life that accompanied this war was nothing to laugh at.

Britain, under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, needed its own distractions. The Falklands/Malvinas Islands did not possess any strategic importance to Britain but a nice little war did hold importance. A quick, dirty, little war could, and did, distract the British population from its own political and economic difficulties. It also represented an opportunity for the citizens of a dying empire to reassert themselves, much in the way that a bully picks on a weak neighbor in order to reinforce their own feelings of superiority.

There were no good-guys in that war. It was a war that should never have happened.

In today's situation the USA, Israel and Iran all need distractions. All three countries have been in the midst of severe economic crises. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have protested economic conditions in an unprecedented display of antipathy toward the Israeli political establishment. Iran has been unsettled ever since the emergence of the massive opposition "Green Movement," that followed the questionable elections of 2009. The political challenges faced by the Iranian theocracy accompany growing economic challenges which preceded Western-imposed sanctions (though have been accelerated by those sanctions). And, of course, we in the USA are in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

The USA cannot really afford a war with Iran (though this will not necessarily stop the US from initiating one), a point demonstrated just this past week with Obama's announced cuts to the Pentagon, the clear result of the impact of the aggressive US wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. Israel, which claims an existential threat from Iran, knows full well that such a threat does not exist. The only nuclear power in the Middle East is Israel, and any threat to Israel from Iran would be met by a terrible response from both Israel and the USA. But carrying out an attack or encouraging the USA to carry out an attack on Iran would both distract the Israeli population from domestic concerns as well as provide a cover for Israeli military operations closer to home, such as against Hezbollah in Lebanon or against Hamas in the Gaza.

A war with Iran would be a disaster for everyone. For the Iranians, war would be used, much as with the Argentine junta thirty years ago, to clamp down on dissent and wrap everyone in the flag of nationalism. It would be a chance to breathe more life into what appears to be a dying, reactionary theocratic regime that has carried out brutal repression for years, all the while claiming to be an anti-imperialist force.

A war would create greater instability in the Middle East and more than likely encourage some countries that currently do not possess nuclear weapons to seek them in a hurry!

Such a war could very likely lead to an even deeper global economic crisis if the Straits of Hormuz are blocked by the Iranians, thereby cutting off about 20% of the world's oil. It would also be a war that the West cannot, literally, afford to conduct.

There are many reasons to believe that a war will not happen precisely due to the potential catastrophe. That said, there are elements in all three countries that wish to militarily settle accounts with someone on the other side and/or find an opportunity to use "patriotism" - the last refuge of scoundrels, according to 18thcentury British author Samuel Johnson - as a means of suppressing domestic conflicts, particularly the growing demands for political and economic justice.

Let's not get hood-winked.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfricaForum and co-author of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice (University of California Press), which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA.

Obama’s Advantage: Divisions in the GOP

2012-01-04T07:19:00.001-08:00

Iowa Results Bad News for GOP

By Robert Creamer
Progressive America Rising via HuffPost

Jan 4, 2012 - To maximize their odds of reclaiming their hold on the White House, the Republican establishment believes they need two things:

• To nominate Mitt Romney;

• To effectively end the Republican nominating process as soon as possible.

Last night's results from Iowa lower the odds they will get either.

In fact, what we saw in Iowa last night was the Republican base gagging on the Presidential candidate the Republican establishment is trying desperately to cram down their throats.

Romney - and Republican Super Pacs - spent millions of dollars trying to convince Republican caucus-goers that Romney should carry the Republican banner next fall. But in the end 75% said no. MSNBC's Chis Matthews went so far as to argue that Romney is being rejected by the Republican electorate the way a body rejects foreign tissue.

In fact, most rank and file Republicans are so repulsed by Romney that they have test-driven virtually every possible alternative in the show room. Rick Santorum's turn came just at the right time to catapult him into the position of the "anti-Romney" - giving him the right to carry the anybody-but-Romney banner in the battle ahead.

Here are the reasons why the Iowa results are such bad news for Republicans:

1). Sometimes when a candidate has a hard time winning the support of his base, the reasons actually make him more electable in a general election. That's not true of Romney. The major factors weighing on his candidacy are just as toxic with persuadable General Election voters as they are with voters in the GOP primaries.

In interviews and focus groups, anti-Romney voters use words like "phony," "fake," "robotic," "cold." They think Romney has no core principles - that he will say anything to be elected - that he's a flip-flopper. One Republican went so far as to say, "He's Kerry without the medals." That, of course, is an insult to Kerry - who has strong core principles - even though Karl Rove's consistent attacks on his character gave a not-so-popular George Bush a second term in 2004.

And it doesn't help - even with rank and file Republicans - that Romney is, in fact, the candidate of the Republican establishment - which, let us remember, is basically Wall Street and the CEO class. Romney is the poster boy for the 1%. He is the cold, calculating guy who made his fortune dismantling companies and laying off workers. He is a guy whose painted-on smile is set in concrete as he hands you your pink slip. Mitt Romney is about as empathetic as a rock.

2). The fact that one anti-Romney contender consolidated enough votes to fight him to a virtual tie in Iowa was a big blow to Romney's chances for a quick victory. His forces had hoped to keep his opposition divided and appear as the obvious front runner even with 25% of the vote. Instead, Rick Santorum comes out of Iowa with the "big Mo."

Santorum will carry that momentum into New Hampshire where he will begin to pick up the votes of the "also-rans." Most Perry and Bachmann votes simply aren't going to Romney. Since everyone thinks that Mitt is way ahead in his adopted home state of New Hampshire, Santorum is under no pressure to win. Romney is left competing with his own expectations - anything but a blowout will be considered a defeat.

If Santorum's numbers materially improve from his pre-Iowa single digits - as they most certainly will - he will continue to carry that momentum into South Carolina where he should win handily. That's particularly true if Perry officially drops out of the race and Bachmann continues to fade.

3). Gingrich as much as announced last night that he would be playing blocking back for Santorum. He will attack Romney viciously in the coming debates - while having nothing bad to say about his apparent rival for the "anti-Romney" mantel. A wounded Gingrich could be a great deal more dangerous to GOP prospects than frontrunner Gingrich was a few weeks ago.

4). Ron Paul has every incentive to continue his crusade to reshape America in Ayn Rand's libertarian image. Paul probably hit his high water mark in Iowa, but he certainly has no reason to leave the race anytime soon and shows every inclination to continue to use his platform to promote "Austrian" economics and the gold standard. He has plenty of money and a solid core of activist support.

5). Much of Romney's pitch to voters has been premised on his "electability" and "inevitability." At the very least the "inevitability" argument is now gone.

Politics and momentum are often about self-fulfilling prophesies. The argument that "Romney is bound to be the nominee, so get with the program" is now toast - at least for the near term.

6). The new Republican delegate selection rules make it more likely that the nomination process will drag on for some time. Many states that used to have "winner take all" primaries now allocate delegates in proportion to the percentage of each candidate's votes.

If Romney continues to top out at 25% or 30%-- which nationally seems to be his ceiling - it's hard for him to wrap up the nomination in the near future. You need 50% plus one of the delegates to seal the deal. If Paul and Santorum continue in the race - not to mention Gingrich - that isn't going to happen any time soon. And if Santorum continues to surge, all bets are off.

7). From the Republican point of view, nothing good can come from a long, drawn-out nominating process.

His opponents will continue to pound Romney for being a phony flip-flopper - a charge that will devastate him in a General Election.

Romney will continue to tack to the right to compete for base voters. That will lead to more and more positions that disqualify him with big chunks of the electorate - like his recent statement that he would veto the DREAM act.

The DREAM Act is an iconic issue for Hispanics. According to a recent Pugh Poll, ninety-one percent of Hispanic voters support the DREAM act and 51% consider a immigration the most important issue facing their community. In a general election, Romney - or any other Republican - simply can't win a majority of electoral votes without states with heavy Hispanic voting populations. Yet to win primary votes from Perry, Romney positioned himself as the most anti-immigration Republican candidates in recent American history.

Santorum has positions on reproductive rights that are way outside the American mainstream. Not only does he oppose abortion in virtually any circumstance, he wants to give states the right to ban contraception. That's right, contraception - which is used at one time or another by 98% of American women. A long primary fight with Santorum will inevitably require Romney to tack in his direction on these issues as well.

8). Before it's over, the Republican race will inevitably get more negative. Romney and his Super-Pacs used a fusillade of negative ads to stop Gingrich in Iowa. Presumably they will try to do the same to Santorum - and maybe even Paul. Santorum, with the help of his lead blocker Gingrich in the debates - will inevitably have to fight back.

In fact, the odds have just increased that the Republican nominating circus is about to become a vicious, no-holds-barred dog fight.

No, Wall Street's "masters of the universe" and the other Republican poobahs cannot be pleased with the outcome of last night's caucus in Iowa.

One thing is for sure, it's not time to take down the GOP "Big Top." This show will be in town for some time to come.

Robert Creamer is a long-time political organizer and strategist, and author of the book: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, available on Amazon.com. He is a partner in Democracy Partners and a Senior Strategist for Americans United for Change. Follow him on Twitter @rbcreamer.

Tough Sell for War and Austerity Candidates

2011-12-27T08:02:00.001-08:00

Why Obama's Re-election Will

Depend On the Youth Vote

By Ruy Teixeira
Progressive America Rising via The New Republic

Dec. 26, 2011 - Americans are polarized like never before as we head into the 2012 presidential campaign, and the greatest dividing line of all seems to be age. Indeed, President Obama has astoundingly consistent support from Americans less than 30 years old, the so-called Millennial generation. In a recent Pew survey, this cohort favored Obama over Romney by 24 points, 61-37. The generation least likely to support Obama, on the other hand, is the "Silent generation"—the generational group slighter older than Baby Boomers, and the group now dominant among the ranks of seniors. He trails Mitt Romney in this generation by 13 points, 41-54. This is the same generation that moved so sharply against Democrats in the 2010 election, contributing heavily to the GOP wave that swept the country.

Those polling numbers clearly dictate an electoral strategy: What Obama needs to do is perform a kind of generational pincer movement on the GOP, driving up support and turnout among the Millennial generation while breaking into GOP support among the Silent generation. There’s also a straightforward way for him to accomplish both goals.

Fortunately, the White House already seems to be thinking along these lines. On the Millennial side, Obama’s recent Osawatomie speech may be read as an opening bid to establish a campaign narrative with special appeal to this generation. Millennials are exceptionally sympathetic to the Occupy Wall Street movement and its goals. Obama’s attack on inequality and the way that an unfair economy thwarts economic mobility strikes a very responsive chord among these voters.

In addition, Obama’s argument that government must play a strong role in reestablishing healthy economic growth also plays well among this group. In the same Pew poll, Millennials are most likely to select jobs as their top election issue. And, in distinction to older generations, they still believe government spending helps the economy recover—indeed, they believe spending should be a higher priority for the federal government than deficit reduction. Also in distinction to older generations, Millennials say they prefer a bigger government with more services to a smaller government with less services. Finally, a whopping two-thirds of this generation believes the Affordable Care Act should either be expanded or left as is, rather than repealed.

The Silent generation, of course, is a different story: While Millennials are predisposed to support activist government, the Silents are not. But they do feel strongly about certain aspects of activist government like Social Security and Medicare. That should be the other side of Obama’s pincer movement. He needs to draw a very strong contrast between his approach and that of the GOP, which proposes to replace the current Medicare system with underfunded vouchers. Silents, more than any other generation, believe it is more important to keep Social Security and Medicare benefits as they are (64 percent) than reduce the budget deficit (27 percent).

This pincer movement will be key to Obama’s chances, both nationally and in a wide variety of target states. Nationally, he could break-even or a bit worse among middling age groups (30-64) but still win if he carries 18 to 29-year-olds by significantly more than he loses seniors, as he did in 2008, since the two groups tend to be of roughly similar size in presidential elections. But if he carries 18 to 29-year-olds by significantly less than he loses seniors, as congressional Democrats did in 2010, he will lose. Hence the need for both parts of the pincer movement.

On the state level, in contrast to 2008 where the youth vote put Obama over the top in only two states, North Carolina and Indiana, there could be many instances where the youth vote makes the difference in 2012. Consider Ohio. Obama carried 18 to 29-year-olds with 61 percent against John McCain’s 26 percent in 2008, while losing seniors 44-55. Both groups were 17 percent of Ohio voters. Thus, if Obama splits 30 to 64-year-old voters roughly evenly in 2012—significantly worse than he did in 2008—he will likely still win the state if youth voters continue to be more pro-Obama than seniors are anti-Obama.

Virginia and Nevada follow the same pattern. Obama carried 18 to 29-year-olds by 60-39 while losing seniors 46-53 in Virginia. Keep that relative relationship, fight the GOP candidate to a draw among middling age groups, and the state is his. Likewise, in Nevada, Obama carried 18 to 29-year-olds by a lop-sided 67-31 while losing seniors 42-55. In this state, fading to the break-even point among 30-64 year olds would represent a big loss relative to 2008, but Obama could survive it provided, again, he wins 18 to 29-year-olds by significantly more than he loses seniors.

All over the country, in other words, from the Midwest to the New South to the new swing states of the Southwest, Obama’s generational pincer movement could be key to his electoral prospects. Motivate and inspire youth while giving seniors second and third thoughts about the GOP. It’s a good game plan and Obama’s already made an excellent start at implementing it.

Ruy Teixeira is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Source URL: http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/98937/why-obamas-re-election-campaign-will-depend-the-youth-vote

Five Ways OWS Can Stay Powerful

2011-12-22T06:49:00.001-08:00

Revolutions Don't Happen in a Day:

5 Ways OWS Can Stay Powerful

and Truly Build a Movement

By Yotam Marom

Progressive America Rising via Alternet.org

Dec. 21, 2011 - On September 17, we took Liberty Square, used it to begin to create the social norms and institutions of a society to come, and became the Occupy movement. We hit the streets fiercely, abandoning the metal barricades they once contained us in, rejecting the marching permits they offered us, refusing their sidewalks. We were dragged -- handcuffed -- into the front pages of people’s minds, and brought with us a story many were trying to silence; a story about the massive profits made by the tiny few through the exploitation of the many, a story about deep and systemic economic, political and social injustice. We danced in the streets and parks we reclaimed, and then in the jail cells they took us to when they realized we weren’t going home. We were confident, invincible; it’s hard to be afraid when the sun is out.

But the season has changed. Autumn has ended and winter is upon us. We’ve lost Liberty Square, and each day brings news from across the country that another occupation has been evicted. Winter is here, and with it the cold; but it’s more than that. Winter brings the sober understanding that we won’t be in the headlines every day, that we need to be more than a string of events or actions or press releases, more than an endless meeting. Winter is the nagging truth that the next decade of organizing must be more sustainable than the first months we spent in the sun; that this is a struggle for the long-haul, that burn-out and martyrdom are no good for anyone and no good for the cause. Winter tells us to see our families and take a day off when we are sick, because the movement has to be healthy if it’s going to last. Winter is here to remind us that revolution is not an event but a process, and that social transformation means not only harnessing a moment, but building a movement.

Winter is here. But winter is not sad, and it’s not tragic; it’s just real. We do not fear the cold, and we will not hibernate. We will use the winter to become the movement we know is necessary.

A To-Do List for the Winter

1. Grow. We will continue to build relationships with communities that have been fighting and building for decades already, from tenants organizing eviction defense in Bed-Stuy, New York to AIDS activists on Staten Island. We will grow by joining struggles that protect people from the daily assaults they experience, from austerity to police brutality, and by waging struggles to meet peoples’ needs, like reclaiming foreclosed homes. We will transcend the open calls to action and the expectation that they are enough to build a movement; we will organize the hard way, because the hard way is the only way. We will have the million one-on-one conversations it takes to build a movement, door-to-door if we have to, and we will do it out in the open, because we have nothing to fear.

2. Deepen. We will take the time to learn how to do what we are doing better, from those who have been doing this for so long – from the land liberation movements in Brazil to the women on welfare building community power in Yonkers. We will also teach, because we are reinventing the struggle as we go, and we have learned a lot already. We will ask each other difficult questions: How do we organize in a way that is inclusive and liberating? How do we build a movement led by those most marginalized and oppressed? How do we use decentralization to actually empower people and address the imbalances we face in society? We will think radically about what systems and historical processes led us to where we are now, dream deeply about the world we want and the institutions we will need in order to live it out, and plan thoroughly for the building and the fighting it will take us to get there.

3. Build. We will continue to build systems for decentralized coordination and decision-making, because liberation means participation, and participation demands structures for communication, transparency and accountability. We will take our cue from the neighborhood assemblies in Sunset Park, and the university assemblies at CUNY, which are pioneering a shift from general assemblies to constituent assemblies – assemblies in neighborhoods, workplaces and schools. We will build there, because that’s where people actually live and work, where we have direct, concrete and permanent relationships with a space, the institutions in it and the people around us. We will create stable platforms for organizing and growth, and the foundations necessary for a concerted long-term struggle – from complex things like participatory decision-making forums and systems for internal education, to simple things like office space and phone trees. We will create mechanisms to meet people’s needs using the skills we honed at Liberty Square to provide things like food, legal aid, shelter, education, and more. We will do it all in a way that is in line with the values of the world we are fighting for.

4. Liberate. We will take new space, indoors and outdoors. We will do it because the movement needs bases in which it can create the values of a free society, begin to build the institutions to carry them out, meet peoples’ needs, and serve as a staging ground for the struggle against the status quo. We will take space for the movement to have a home and a workplace, but we will also take space back for the communities from whom it has been stolen, and for the families who need it in order to survive. We mean not only to take space for its own sake, but to liberate it; we will transform foreclosed houses into homes, empty lots into gardens, abandoned buildings into hospitals, schools and community centers. We will use the space we win for dreaming up the world to come.

5. Fight. We will continue to use direct action to intervene in the economic, political and social processes that govern peoples’ lives. We will use our voices and our slogans, our banners and our bodies, to shine a spotlight on the classes and institutions that oppress and exploit. We will make it so that the tyrants who are ruining this planet cannot hold conferences or public events without our presence being felt. We will fight in a way that is not only symbolic, but also truly disruptive of the systems of oppression we face. We will block their doorways and their ports, interrupt their forums, and obstruct the systems of production and consumption they depend on. We will do it until they will have no choice but to disappear.

Spring Will Come

The conditions that brought us here – the brutal and systemic oppressions we face – aren’t going to disappear on their own. The window we have opened to the world being born can’t be closed. Now winter is here, but we are not afraid. We will face the cold with intention and wisdom, using it as an opportunity to grow our movement, deepen it, and build structures that can carry it forward. We will continue to build the world we want while fighting to topple the institutions that stand in its way.

It will take some time for the seeds we have planted to grow into the beautiful flowers they are meant to be. Patience. Spring will come.

Yotam Marom is an organizer, educator, musician, and writer. He is a member of the Organization for a Free Society, and can be reached at Yotam.marom@gmail.com. © 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/153529/

Occupy! Finds a Toehold in Congress

2011-12-15T08:57:00.001-08:00

OWS Activists Meet With Progressive Caucus

By Jessica Brady
Progressive America Rising via Roll Call Staff

Dec. 12, 2011 - An Occupy Wall Street group will take to the House later this week, only this time the meeting is a planned occasion with the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Ten organizers from New York’s OWS group will speak to the caucus about their legislative priorities, according to an email sent to Members and obtained by Roll Call.

“This is the very first meeting of national occupy organizers and members to discuss specific legislation in the country,” the email to Members states.

An aide with knowledge of the meeting said the protesters “are uniquely concerned with getting money out of politics and with a jobs agenda.” The aide also said OWS representatives “may be reaching out to other caucuses both Republican and Democrat in the future.”

Although OWS supporters quickly note they are not affiliated with a political party, Democrats have sought to embrace the movement just as Republicans successfully channeled the energy behind the tea party movement for electoral success.

The Progressive Caucus held a meeting featuring three D.C. protesters in October, and in recent weeks Democratic leaders have talked up issues of interest to the OWS.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), for example, has renewed her own push for campaign finance reform legislation in recent weeks. Reps. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), co-chairmen of the CPC, issued a release last week praising the movement for protesting Congress and reminding “lawmakers that people are facing very serious problems.”

Borrowing from the Occupy group’s rhetoric, members of the CPC will also unveil Tuesday a jobs bill dubbed Restore the American Dream for the 99% Act. JessicaBrady@rollcall.com | @jessicalbrady

Occupy! Impact on Obama's 2012 Campaign

2011-12-07T05:17:00.001-08:00

By Ezra Klein
Progressive America Rising via Washington Post

Dec 7, 2011 - In 2004, Obama gave a keynote speech at the Democratic Convention. The speech didn't just launch his career as a national politician -- it foretold the message that would carry him through the 2008 election.

The theme was political division. "Even as we speak," Obama said, "there are those who are preparing to divide us." And then came Obama's famous formulation, the one that launched a thousand pastel-colored posters: "There is not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America -- there’s the United States of America." He even talked of the "audacity of hope."

Yesterday, in Kansas, Obama gave a speech foretelling his 2012 campaign. The theme this time is economic division -- perhaps better known as inequality.

"For most Americans, the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded," Obama said. "Long before the recession hit, hard work stopped paying off for too many people. Fewer and fewer of the folks who contributed to the success of our economy actually benefited from that success. Those at the very top grew wealthier from their incomes and their investments -- wealthier than ever before. But everybody else struggled with costs that were growing and paychecks that weren’t -- and too many families found themselves racking up more and more debt just to keep up."

"There are some who seem to be suffering from a kind of collective amnesia. After all that’s happened, after the worst economic crisis, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, they want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess. In fact, they want to go back to the same policies that stacked the deck against middle-class Americans for way too many years. And their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules. I am here to say they are wrong."

And then he updated the formulation that won him the presidency in the first place: "These aren’t Democratic values or Republican values. These aren’t 1 percent values or 99 percent values. They’re American values." Actually, he updated it twice. "This isn’t about class warfare. This is about the nation’s welfare."

There's much to say about this speech. It is, for instance, Obama's clearest attempt to weave an economic narrative that can carry him through the campaign. But perhaps the most obvious thing to say about it is that this isn't Obama's narrative. It's Occupy Wall Street's narrative. The speech is substantially about inequality. Consider the facts and figures Obama chose to include:

- "The average income of the top 1 percent has gone up by more than 250 percent to $1.2 million per year...For the top one hundredth of 1 percent, the average income is now $27 million per year. The typical CEO who used to earn about 30 times more than his or her worker now earns 110 times more. And yet, over the last decade the incomes of most Americans have actually fallen by about 6 percent."

- "A few years after World War II, a child who was born into poverty had a slightly better than 50-50 chance of becoming middle class as an adult. By 1980, that chance had fallen to around 40 percent. And if the trend of rising inequality over the last few decades continues, it’s estimated that a child born today will only have a one-in-three chance of making it to the middle class -- 33 percent."

- "Today, the wealthiest Americans are paying the lowest taxes in over half a century. This isn’t like in the early ‘50s, when the top tax rate was over 90 percent. This isn’t even like the early ‘80s, when the top tax rate was about 70 percent. Under President Clinton, the top rate was only about 39 percent. Today, thanks to loopholes and shelters, a quarter of all millionaires now pay lower tax rates than millions of you, millions of middle-class families. Some billionaires have a tax rate as low as 1 percent. One percent."

Inequality has not been a major theme in Obama's economic addresses over the last year. But it looks like it will be the major theme in his reelection campaign. And it's hard to believe that's not in response to Occupy Wall Street's success in turning the national conversation towards inequality.

Which sets us up for an unusually populist election -- on both sides. Republicans have taken their message from the Tea Party. Democrats are borrowing their theme from Occupy Wall Street. In both cases, citizen-driven grassroots groups are setting the agenda. So all together now: Mic check!

Top stories

1) Obama delivered a speech on economic inequality, reports David Nakamura: "President Obama came to this tiny middle American town Tuesday to invoke the spirit of a long-ago Republican president...Obama called for a return to modest, middle-class values and said the recent rise in populist anger -- from the tea party movement to the Occupy Wall Street protests -- was evidence of the need to remedy the growing economic inequality in American life...Theodore Roosevelt...used the same location to call for a strong central government that would protect ordinary Americans from what he called the greed and recklessness of big business and special interests...Obama, in a 55-minute address, moved beyond the specifics of his recent jobs proposals to issue a searing indictment of Republican economic theory, framing the debate as one of right and wrong, fairness and unfairness."

Read the speech: http://1.usa.gov/ta6tX3

Birth Control Rights Under Fire Again

2011-11-30T10:06:00.001-08:00

When Men Are Deciding What Women

Are Entitled to, It's Time to Occupy

By Rebecca Sive
Progressive America Rising via Huffpost

No. 30, 2011 - So, what have we got in this latest reproductive rights crisis? The one where the Catholic bishops and the president are debating and deciding what rights we American women will have? Well, sadly, ad nauseum, and once again, what we've got is no woman sitting at the decision-making table.

What year is this? Oh, you say it's almost 2012? Yikes. If I were an ostrich, I'd bury my head in the sand. But I'm not. I'm an organizer. And, I never say "die." So, I'm thinking it's time to head for the hills with a group of girlfriends, and figure out the next occupy movement. Maybe it's OPA, Occupy Pennsylvania Avenue, or maybe it's OC, Occupy Churches. Whadaya you think, girlfriends?

This situation is patently ridiculous. Really.

You want proof? Just consider the alternate scenario: Say, all the bishops were women, and the president were a woman. Would that group be conjuring up ways to limit the ability of their sisters to control the number of children they have, or when they have them, or with whom? Nope. Not a chance: In fact, this alternate scenario is impossible to imagine as anything but a spoof.

Speaking of spoofs, here's who those bishops really are: Thugs. (No one explained it better than Monty Python.)

Yes, I know, movies about thugs can be good, and, sometimes, they can even be funny (like this Monty Python one). But politics by thugs is an all together different thing; a thing that's never funny, for thugs aren't supposed to get to make the decisions in a democracy.

Thoughtful people of goodwill are.

But denying women birth control is no kind of goodwill. Not by a long shot. No matter how it's couched. No matter if the male who makes that decision (trying to cover up his true feelings about women's equality -- not) talks about "conscience," or "morality," or "ethics," say. Nope, not hardly.

Girlfriends: Grab your pocketbook when you hear those words; the thugs are about to hit you over the head with their scepters (see above), and you'll need your pocketbook to hit them back.

I'm fond of the phrase, "all politics is local," because I think bearing it in mind helps us to understand policy discussions and decision-making and develop strategies that defeat efforts to hold us girls back. At the same time, I always bear in mind a corollary mantra, "all politics is personal."

Of course, this latter truth can cut both ways. It cuts badly when the personal experiences and knowledge of women aren't at hand and taken into account. It cuts well when our presence and experience (are accounted for).

How do I know this? Well, let me count the ways of four decades and counting.

For instance, it's no coincidence that anti-rape and anti-domestic violence laws were first (and only) proposed (and passed) when women achieved meaningful numbers in state legislatures. Because these women knew personally about rape and domestic violence, they did something about it, to end it.

Another proof point is the actions of the U.S. Senate. When push comes to shove there, when it comes to protecting women's health, it's the women senators (and only they) who stand-up, and say what needs to be said; wonderfully, sometimes led by a Catholic member of the group, Senator Barbara Mikulski.

Senator Mikulski's website notes her "...lifetime commitment to women's health." To prove it, she lists numerous accomplishments. But, my favorite is this one: "Ending gender discrimination by insurance companies, so being a woman is not considered a pre-existing condition."

I like that one the best because it states so clearly what's going on with the bishops right now: It's being a woman that's the problem for them, too.

Two centuries of American political annals ago, Abigail Adams said it first, about not forgetting the women, and what we need and deserve. But the bishops and their co-conspirators have, and continue to, these men sitting behind closed doors making life and death decisions about our lives.

Yes, it really is only when women are the decision makers that things go well for women. It really is only when the politics is personal to us and by us, meaning it includes us sitting at the decision-making table.

I'm hoping that Sen. Mikulski and her colleagues will call out the bishops sometime soon, and demand that the President ignore them, and do the right thing. Meanwhile, however, it's up to the rest of us girls. For, know this: as surely as we are sitting around wishing that the next few weeks could be nothing but fun and games, the bishops are having big fun, but they are playing a game we can't abide: Scheming how to keep us barefoot and pregnant, back in those hills with no way to escape. That's not a game we can allow them to win. So, let's remind this president not to forget the women either, even if the bishops would.

Follow Rebecca Sive on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RebeccaSive

Elections and the Emerging Popular Front

2011-11-09T15:36:00.001-08:00

Victories in Ohio, Mississippi, Maine and Arizona Provide Seven Key Lessons for 2012

By Robert Creamer
Progressive America Rising via Huffington Post

Nov. 9, 2011 - A year ago the Empire struck back. Right Wing money capitalized on anger at the economic stagnation that their own policies caused just two years before. They brought a halt to the hard-won progressive victories that marked the first two years of Barack Obama's presidency.

Last night the progressive forces tested some of the weapons and tactics they will use in next year's full-blown counter offensive. They worked very, very well.

Progressives won key elections in Ohio, Maine, Mississippi, and Arizona.

The importance of yesterday's labor victory in Ohio cannot be overstated. It could well mark a major turning point in the history of the American labor movement -and the future of the American middle class.

The people of Ohio rejected right wing attempts to destroy public sector unions by an astounding 61% to 39%. Progressives in Ohio won 82 out of 88 counties.

In his "concession," the author of the union-stripping bill, Governor John Kasich, looked like a whipped dog. He was.

Last night's victory will have a direct and immediate impact on the livelihoods of thousands of middle class state employees in Ohio. It will stall similar attempts to destroy unions in other states. It will turbo-charge the campaign to oust Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker who jammed a union-stripping measure through his own legislature. And it will massively weaken Kasich and other Republicans in Ohio.

But last night's victory also carried critical lessons for the progressive forces throughout America as we prepare for the crossroads, defining battle of 2012.

Lesson #1: Creating a Movement. The industrial state labor battles that culminated in last night's overwhelming Ohio success transformed the image of unions from a large bureaucratic "special interest" that negotiates for workers and are part of the "establishment" -- into a movement to protect the interests of the American Middle Class.

The Republican Governors who began these battles hoped to make a bold move to destroy union power. In fact, they have succeeded in creating their worst nightmare -- the rebirth of a labor movement.

That is critically important for the future of unions - which by any measure provide the foundation of progressive political power in the United States. It also provides an important lesson for every element of the Progressive community.

These battles put the "movement" back in "labor movement."

And the importance of "movement" can't be overstated. Particularly at a time when people are unhappy with the direction of the country and desperately want change -- they don't want leaders who appear to be embedded parts of the status quo. They want to be part of movements for change.

Movements have three critical characteristics:

They make people feel that they are part of something bigger than themselves.

They make people feel that they themselves can play a significant role in bringing about that larger goal.

They involve "chain reactions" -- they go viral. You don't have to only engage people in movements one by one or one or group by group. They begin to engage each other.

Because they make people feel that they are part of something larger than themselves -- and that they can personally be a part of achieving that larger goal -- movements inspire and empower. And for that reason they give people hope.

To win, Progressives must turn the anger and dissatisfaction with the present into inspiration and hope for the future.

The labor movement turned the battle in Ohio into a fight for the future of America's middle class. It turned the battle into a fight over the dignity of everyday working people -- and their right to have a say in their future. Instead of being about "contracts," it was about "freedom."

Lesson #2: It's much easier to mobilize people to protect what they have than to fight for something to which they aspire.

Every one of the big victories yesterday involved battles that had been framed as attempts by the Right -- or their allies on Wall Street - to take away the rights of everyday Americans.

In Ohio, it was the right to collectively bargain about their future. In Maine, it was the right to same-day voter registration. In Mississippi it was the right to use contraceptives -- once it became clear that the so-called "personhood" amendment was not just about abortion, but ultimately about a woman's right to use birth control. In Arizona, it was the rights of Latino Americans.

And of course, that's why the Republicans' plan to privatize Social Security and eliminate Medicare are so toxic for them in the election next year.

Among referenda yesterday, the one progressive setback came in the largely symbolic vote -- once again in Ohio -- against the Health Care Reform Act's mandate to buy insurance. The very same people who had voted against taking away the rights of their neighbors to join a union -- also voted against being "forced" to buy health insurance.

The whole issue of the "mandate" is the major card the Right has played against the critically important Health Care Reform Act. Of course the whole issue could have been framed differently. The "mandate" to start paying Medicare premiums when you're sixty-five isn't framed as a "mandate." People do it, both because they really want to get on Medicare, and because if they wait to pay premiums until they need it, their premiums go way up.

That's why a Public Option was so popular with the voters. You got to choose to join something you wanted. But it's also the way we should have framed the overall "mandate" to get insurance -- with premium penalties if you fail to "opt in."

Once the health care law becomes a fact on the ground that benefits ordinary people, every day, it will certainly become very popular. But that will wait until 2014 when most of its provisions go into effect. Once it does goes into effect, if they try to take away those benefits and the Right will run into a firestorm of opposition.

Of course if Romney is the Republican candidate next year, we don't have to worry about the "mandate" issue at all. In fact, our attitude should be "go ahead, make my day." It will be simple to neutralize any attack by Romney or Super-Pacs on Democrats about "mandates" by simply pointing out that the entire question is just one more example of how Romney has no core values -- since he authored and passed the Massachusetts health care law built around "mandates." In the end, Romney's lack of core values is a much more powerful message than anything having to do with "mandates."

Lesson #3: Framing the battle is key. In every one of these issue referenda, Progressives won the framing battle.

In Ohio, Progressives made the fight into a battle for the rights of the middle class -- part of the overarching battle between the 99% and the 1%.

In Maine, Progressives made the battle into a fight over the right to register to vote. Of course the right wing frame was that eliminating same-day registration provided protection against "voter fraud." That was pretty hard to sustain given the fact that there had been exactly two instances of "voter fraud" involving same-day registration in 28 years.

The Mississippi "personhood amendment" was framed as a battle over the rights of women to use birth control - not to make "miscarriage" a crime.

Lesson #4: Turnout is king. In Virginia, a Republican candidate leads his Democratic opponent by only 86 votes, so a recount will determine whether the Republicans there take control of the State Senate.

Turnout in the Virginia contests was low.

In Ohio, by contrast, 400,000 more voters went to the polls yesterday than in the elections in 2010. That's one big reason why Progressives won.

And it wasn't just inspiration and great messaging that turned them out. Rank and file union members and Progressives of all sorts conducted massive get out the vote efforts in every corner of the state.

After all, victory isn't just about great strategy, mostly it's about nuts and bolts -- it's about great execution. In Ohio they had both.

In Arizona, the Latino community mobilized to defeat the author of Arizona's "papers please" law, State Senator Russell Pearce. He lost a recall election, by seven points, 52.4% to 45.4%. The Pearce defeat is just one more example of how the Republicans play the "immigration" card at their peril -- and how important the Latino vote will be to the outcome next year in critical states like New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, Florida -- and Arizona.

Pearce didn't count on Latinos going out to vote. They did.

Lesson #5: Progressives win when we stand up straight. We won last night where we stood proudly for progressive values -- planted the flag -- mobilized our forces and took the offensive.

People in America are not looking for leaders who apologize for their progressive beliefs or are willing to compromise those principles even before they enter the fight. They want leaders who will fight for the middle class, and fight for change; who stand up against the big Wall Street banks and the CEO class that they believe - correctly - have siphoned off the nation's wealth, and whose greed has caused the economy to collapse.

People are willing to compromise when it seems to advance the common good -- but only after their leaders have done everything in their power to defend their interests -- and have mobilized them to defend their own interests.

Lesson #6: The face of the battle in Ohio was your neighbor.

The Republicans bet that they could make public employees the "Welfare Queens" of our time. They bet that they could make public employees the scapegoats for all that has gone wrong with the American economy -- that they could divide the middle class against itself.

They bet wrong.

Turned out to be impossible to convince everyday Americans that firefighters, cops, and teachers were greedy villains. Normal voters recognized them as their neighbors -- as people just like themselves.

The 99% versus the 1% frame is critical to making clear that the problem with our economy has nothing to do with how much teachers, or firefighters, or steel workers, or home care workers, or Social Security recipients make for a living. It has everything to do with growing economic inequality, the exploding financial sector, and an unproductive class of speculators and gamblers who don't make anything of value but siphon off all of our increased productivity.

Lesson #7: Progressives win when we frame the issue as a moral choice.

In Ohio, Progressives did not frame the debate as a choice between two sets of policies and programs. They posed the question as a choice between two different visions of the future.

It was a choice between an America with a strong, vibrant, empowered middle class, where every generation can look forward to more opportunity than the one that went before - or, a society with a tiny wealthy elite and a massive population of powerless workers who do their bidding.

It was posed as a choice between a society where we're all in this together -- where we look out for each other and take responsibility for our future as a country -- or as a society where we're all in this alone -- where only the strong, or the clever, or the ruthless can thrive.

If given a clear, compelling choice, Americans will chose a progressive vision of the future every time.

Follow Robert Creamer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rbcreamer

Professor Warren as Working-Class Hero

2011-10-30T05:19:00.001-07:00

Energize the Left, Win the Center

Elizabeth Warren’s Winning Formula

By Dana Milbank
Progressive America Rising via WashPost

SPRINGFIELD, Mass, Oct 28 2011 - What was that about a Democratic “enthusiasm gap”?

Whichever pollster coined that phrase neglected to consult with the citizens converging last week on the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union hall here. They filled the parking lot, then the one next door, then the one across the street.

“I couldn’t contain myself when I heard she’d be here,” said Matt Szafranski, a blogger at the event.

“I’ve already donated twice, and I’m looking to go to a rally,” said Fran Miffitt, a retired nurse.

By the time the candidate arrived for the meeting – a prosaic organizing session for volunteers — there were nearly 300 people crammed into Local 7 to catch a glimpse of her. When she took the stage, a sea of cameras and smartphones rose, as if at a rock concert.

All this for a law professor who specializes in contracts? But Elizabeth Warren, the former adviser to President Obama who is now trying to unseat Republican Sen. Scott Brown, is no mere professor, or candidate. She is a phenomenon.

The source of the ardor is no mystery: Warren’s unapologetic populism and her fervent belief that corporations should be held to account for the economic collapse. Part Pat Moynihan, part Erin Brockovich, she has revived the energy of the left in a way no other Democrat has, including President Obama.

“We live in an America that has hammered, chipped and squeezed the middle class,” she told a crowd in Newton, Mass., while the government “has said to large corporations that you don’t have to pay anything in taxes.”

“Elizabeth,” a woman in the crowd gushed during the question time, “I’m so excited.” But what, the woman asked, would Warren do about the dysfunctional Congress?

Warren recounted her work creating Obama’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in defiance of “the largest lobbying force ever assembled on the face of the earth.” Instead of heeding advice to settle for “something at the margins,” Warren said, “my view on this was [to] get out there and fight for it.”

The questioner could not contain herself. “Yes!” she cried out.

Warren is the first candidate of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the liberal equivalent of a Sarah Palin or a Jim DeMint. She has tapped the enormous anti-corporate resentment on the left and become a lightning rod for the right.

In her first few weeks as a candidate, she raised well over $3 million from more than 11,000 people — more than double the amount raised all quarter by the incumbent Brown. All serious competitors have dropped out of the Democratic primary, and polls show her neck-and-neck with Brown.

Warren has no interest in going to Washington to be “slow and polite,” she told me. She wants to go to fight corporate excess, because “the people who brought us the financial collapse have now doubled down” by resisting attempts to re-regulate business.

“The idea of going to the Senate to be the hundredth least senior person in a nonfunctional organization is not what attracts me,” she said. “I see going to the Senate as an opportunity to expand the platform” and as a way of “leading the charge.”

That’s a good thing and a bad thing. Bad, because it means Democrats are beginning to embrace the Tea Party notion that Washington should be a place of polarization and warfare. Good, because it means Democrats will no longer play by Marquess of Queensbury rules while their opponents disembowel them.

For better or worse, Warren’s fighting ways are more successful than Obama’s in generating enthusiasm. Obama, she says, “is much cooler than I am.” And what dispirited liberals are looking for is heat — somebody who believes, as Warren often puts it, that “some fights are worth having.”

That’s what brings her supporters out by the hundreds. “You got to have somebody to fight,” said University of Massachusetts student Patrick Kenney. “We need to go up against the big boys: I hate corporations,” said Joanne Burke, at the Newton event.

Warren, who describes herself as “a maintenance man’s daughter [who] made it to be a fancy-pants professor at Harvard,” has been too impressed with her own success; she had to walk back a claim that she “created much of the intellectual foundation” for the Wall Street protest movement.

But clearly she has found a way to rally the left. Would other Democrats, including Obama (who tried to placate Republicans and business interests but still got branded a socialist), be in a better place if they followed her populist model? “I’m going to take a pass on that question,” Warren told me.

That’s okay. The answer is obvious.

danamilbank@washpost.com

More U.S. ‘Humanitarian’ War in Africa? No!…

2011-10-27T06:25:00.001-07:00

Sending Troops to Uganda?

Photo: Terrorist of the ‘Lord’s Army’

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
NNPA Columnist, Blackvoicesnews.com
via Progressive America Rising

(NNPA Oct 27, 2011) Reports that the Obama administration is planning on sending U.S. troops to Uganda to hunt down the so-called Lord's Resistance Army sent chills up my spine. The Lord's Resistance Army, a group of maniacal terrorists running around Uganda for years, has been a major thorn in the side of the people of Uganda. Their atrocities are countless and it is in every one's interests that they are destroyed. That said, I ask myself, why is the U.S.A. sending troops there?

If the Obama administration wants to help Uganda defeat the LRA, they should limit themselves to advising and training Ugandans to fight their own war. Better yet, they should support the African Union in carrying out a coordinated, multi-country assault on the LRA (since the LRA crosses borders, including back and forth to what is now the South Sudan). They could also supply Uganda other forms of assistance to help the areas that are blighted by the LRA. But sending U.S. troops to Uganda starts to feel like an old film we have all seen, i.e., Vietnam.

Once U.S. troops are on the ground in Uganda, it almost automatically changes the dynamics of a struggle. The LRA, as terrorist as they are, can claim, much as the Al Shabab terrorists in Somalia, that they are fighting not just the Ugandan government (in this case) but the U.S. government and its intervention. As we witnessed in Somalia, when Ethiopia invaded with the active support of the U.S.A. in 2006 in order to crush the Union of Islamic Courts (a conservative Islamist force that had stabilized the situation in part of Somalia), this inflamed the situation even more. Instead of crushing Islamists, the Ethiopian/U.S. invasion provoked the growth of dangerous terrorists and warlords, a fact that author Jeremy Scahill has recently documented in The Nation. A similar danger could await the U.S.A. through the deployment of troops to Uganda. While it is only alleged to be 100 troops, as we know from previous U.S. interventions, there is no reason to believe that the intervention will stop there, particularly if there are U.S. casualties. Therefore, as the intervention grows, the battle cry against the U.S.A. will grow and with it the very real possibility of a prolonged engagement in Uganda.

The Obama administration needs to rescind it proposed deployment. It should support the African Union and other forces who wish to crush the LRA. But U.S. troops on the ground needs to be out of the question. Given the disasters in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, enough is enough.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum, and the co-author of Solidarity Divided. He can be reached at papaq54@hotmail.com .

‘Occupy Boston’ Meets ‘Occupy the Hood’

2011-10-22T05:48:00.001-07:00

Occupy Boston: Diversity,

Unity at rally in Roxbury

Photo: Denise Williams, who lost two nephews to gun violence in July, spoke at the rally. Denise Williams, who lost two nephews to gun violence in July, spoke at the rally. (ESSDRAS M SUAREZ/GLOBE STAFF)

By John M. Guilfoil
Boston Globe Staff

Oct 22, 2011 - In Roxbury, as Christians stood with Muslims and as white college students stood with a black woman who recently lost two nephews to gun violence, the voice of the Occupy Boston movement sounded more diverse than ever in the three weeks since protesters set up tents in the Financial District.

“We’re one family,’’ said True-See Allah of the Nation of Islam, addressing a crowd of more than 500 in Dudley Square during a rally for Occupy the Hood, a movement in Roxbury allied to Occupy Boston and other Occupy movements around the country.

“It’s not about black and white; it’s about who’s wrong and who’s right,’’ he continued. “The Nation of Islam stands with you 1,000 percent. This is a beautiful sight, and we want to take this moment, and we want to build from it and continue to grow and grow.’’

While the occupation in Dewey Square has been diverse, whites have been the majority. Yesterday’s Occupy the Hood Rally was nearly evenly divided between whites and non-whites, as students and Occupy Boston regulars joined local residents.

“The message of this movement, when you boil it down, is that we are the 99 percent,’’ said Brian Kwoba, 28, of Cambridge, one of the Occupy the Hood organizers. “There’s the top 1 percent, and the rest of us are denied a voice. But people of color are disproportionately denied a voice. Therefore, in order for us to unite all of the 99 percent, we need all of us to unite together, communities of color and other communities.’’

The crowd of many races and religions, whose politics ranged from libertarian to socialist, mingled and generally agreed with each other. With the diversity came an acknowledgment of differences.

“I am nowhere in the same bracket as the majority of people who live in this neighborhood,’’ said Lucas Koerner, 19, a sophomore at Tufts University who was part of a delegation of about 30 from the school. “I’m just here to be in solidarity with this amazing grass-roots community that is expanding into the marginalized communities. I think it’s demonstrating great potential to break out of its populist cage.’’

One of the speakers at the rally was Denise Williams, whose nephews, LaShon Washington, 39, and Joseph Winston, 26, were shot to death in Roxbury on July 5.

The college students were moved by Williams’s story. Her words also represented some of the core concerns of Occupy the Hood, which organizers said included crime, police relations, fair employment, and civil services.

“On July 4, my family went to a cookout that we have every year,’’ she said. “At 5 o’clock in the morning, there was a knock on my door.’’

Washington had served five years in jail. He turned his life around, but struggled to hold down a job because most employers would not hire a former convict. A security firm gave him an opportunity, and he worked nights as a bouncer. One of his daughters recently graduated from college.

Winston was a man with special needs who never seemed to get the services he needed, said Williams. He served time in jail for threatening to blow up a courthouse, despite pleas from his family that he did not know what he was saying.

Police said at the time that Winston was involved in gang activity and targeted and that Washington was not targeted.

“Most of the time in the hood, the first thing they say is ‘gang-related.’ ’’ Williams said. “LaShon Washington worked two jobs. Had four kids. And took care of them. How do two people leave a cookout and not even make it 5 miles, and they’re dead?’’

It was not a story the college students often hear.

“It was a very powerful and moving story,’’ said Spencer Demaris, 20, a junior at Harvard. “When you’re on campus all the time, it’s easy to forget what goes on in the bigger city. I think it was a powerful reminder that there’s a lot going on in Boston.’’

John M. Guilfoil can be reached at jguilfoil@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @globe_guilfoil.

Growing Roots ‘From Below and to the Left’

2011-10-17T04:34:00.001-07:00

Staughton Lynd Links 'Occupy'

with 'Solidarity of Time' in Ohio

From 'The Business Journal’,
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio, Oct 17, 2011

If there is one constant in the last 40 years of political activism in the Mahoning Valley, it's the presence of attorney and historian Staughton Lynd and his wife Alice.

The Lynds marched with civil rights leaders in the 1960s and were among the anti-war protesters gathered outside the Democratic Party's 1968 convention in Chicago. The couple moved to the Mahoning Valley in the 1970s and were front-and-center in the worker ownership movement that attempted to reopen the area's shuttered steel mills. In the years that followed steel's exodus, they became active in the Solidarity USA movement that focused on the loss of steel retirees' benefits, and then began studying the area's new prison industry and advocating for death-row inmates.

Both addressed the crowd assembled Saturday for the Occupy Youngstown protest downtown Staughton Lynd read from a seven-page speech he prepared.

Here is the full text of his remarks:

I want to say a few words about three things: 1. Solidarity; 2. Demands; 3. Life among the 99 PerCent.

1. SOLIDARITY

We feel solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, and rejoice that they maintain their physical presence at their chosen park.

We feel solidarity with the many, many Occupy This Town and Occupy That Town that have sprung up, spontaneously, all over the United States: all over this land that suddenly seems more like We feel solidarity with the occupation protests taking place today all over the world.

There is also solidarity over time. As a representative of Survivors Of the Sixties -- acronym, SOS -- I feel this kind of solidarity strongly.

Many of you have heard of Abbie Hoffman. He was in Mississippi, in 1967 he promoted the levitation of the Pentagon, and together with Jerry Rubin he started the Yippies.

I met Abbie twice. The first time was during the Chicago Democratic Party Convention, when I saw him wearing a black T shirt, lying face down on a cot, in a Chicago city jail. The second time, more than twenty years later, was in a Franciscan church in Managua, Nicaragua. There is a part of the Catholic liturgy known as the "peace of God" when each congregant greets every other. At the church of St. Mary of the Angels one circled the floor, greeting elderly women, small of stature, many holding photographs of their sons who had been killed in the contra war.

Suddenly a bearded figure bounded across the floor from the other side of the church and embraced me. It was Abbie.

Not long afterwards he committed suicide. Tom Hayden commented: "We are all waiting for the new Movement. I guess Abbie couldn't wait any longer."

Try to imagine what the past three weeks, this moment of awakening, this vista of new hope, would have meant to the trailblazers of the Sixties, to Dave Dellinger and Howard Zinn, to Stokely Carmichael and Jim Forman, to Barbara Deming.

Think also of Youngstown, Ohio, in the 1970s and 1980s, and the men and women who fought to substitute worker-community ownership for capitalist greed. Think of Bishop James Malone, of Ed Mann who led us down the hill to occupy the US Steel administration building, and his comrade, John Barbero. Think of Delores Hrycyk, wife of an LTV Steel retiree. Long before facebook and twitter, when LTV declared bankruptcy Delores called all the local radio stations and said there would be a retiree rally, here in Federal plaza, just as today at noon on Saturday. A thousand people came. A retiree direct action movement, Solidarity USA, was born.

Think of Bob Vasquez, president of Steelworkers local union 1330 at US Steel. Bob said: We lost, but my members told me over and over again that we fought, and because we fought, we preserved our dignity.

Finally, in the 1990s there came, first, the Zapatista insurrection in Chiapas, and then, from 1999 to 2001, what Naomi Klein has described as "the last time a global, youth-led, decentralized movement took direct aim at corporate power." Back then I felt that our protest activity was "summit-hopping." Two young men stayed overnight in our basement who had been in Seattle, went back to Chicago but were unsure what to do next, and were on their way to Quebec.

Speaking to the general assembly at Occupy Wall Street, Naomi Klein described how the new movement is different:

"Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, has chosen a fixed target. And you have put no end date on your presence here. This is wise. Only when you stay put can you grow roots. This is crucial. It is a fact of the information age that too many movements spring up like beautiful flowers but quickly die off. It's because they don't have roots. And they don't have long term plans for how they are going to sustain themselves. So when storms come, they get washed away.

"Being horizontal and deeply democratic is wonderful. But these principles are compatible with the hard work of building structures and institutions that are sturdy enough to weather the storms ahead. I have great faith that this will happen."

II. DEMANDS

As of course you know, the pundits, the commentators, the talking heads, have one fundamental criticism of Occupy Wall Street: What are its demands? How can you have a Movement without a specific program of things you are demanding?

They know not what they ask! Speaking for myself, I don't demand a list of specifics, I demand a qualitatively different kind of society. I seek the Kingdom of God on earth. I want to go back to the Book of Leviticus, Chapter 25, declare a Year of Jubilee and wipe out all debts. But since I am a practical, moderate sort of fellow, I say: Let's begin by declaring an end to student indebtedness, so that young people can pursue their dreams rather than go to work for corporate law firms in order to pay down their loans.

I think Jubilee is a practical program. Twenty years ago, my wife Alice and I were in some of the few Syrian villages that remain in the Golan Heights, occupied in 1967 by the State of Israel. People there make a living by growing apples. And the villagers told us: "We don't understand this idea of fixed property boundaries. Families vary in size from one generation to the next, and therefore, we adjust the amount of land allotted to a particular family, depending on the number of mouths to be fed."

At present, although few of us live in gated communities, this whole society lives with gated imaginations. Each of us is encouraged to build a little island of personal financial security surrounded by an electrified fence. The fence keeps others out and keeps each of us imprisoned.

But OK, we might agree to postpone the Kingdom of God for a little while longer. It's already been delayed 2000 years. And there are a couple of things that need to be done right now, in Ohio, that we should demand.

The first, of course, is to vote No on Issue 2 and repeal Senate Bill 5.

The second is to abolish the death penalty. Friends, the ice is breaking. Not long ago, Ohio executed more men every year than any other state except Texas. In 2010, Ohio was the only state in the nation that deliberately killed more human beings than it had murdered the year before. Presently, with to be sure a pause for Christmas, executions in Ohio are scheduled every month or two into the year 2013.

But the ice is breaking. Paul Pfeifer, the senior judge on the Ohio Supreme Court who helped to draft Ohio's capital punishment statute, has come out for abolishing the death penalty. Terry Collins, who as head of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction witnessed more than thirty executions, has come out for abolishing the death penalty. Former Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro and his wife have written a book about miscarriages of justice in Ohio courts. There has been introduced in the Ohio House of Representatives a bill, H.B. 160, to abolish the death penalty and substitute life imprisonment without parole. I can only say: Come, Lord, quickly come.

These are objectives of highest priority: repeal Senate Bill 5, abolish the death penalty.

But I want to make a final observation about demands. When our critics use the word "demands," they mean: Tell some legislator or administrator what you want him or her to do for you. Gather your own initiative, your self-activity, and your righteous outrage into a bundle, and give it to someone else to act in your place. Tell somebody else what you want them to do for you.

But I say: Yes, we should vote. Yes, we should support this bill and oppose that one. Yes, we should give President Obama some pressure from what Subcomandante Marcos calls "below and to the Left," and thereby give the President some excuse to do what, But this is not our highest priority. Our most urgent objective is not to give someone else the authority to act on our behalf. Our greatest need is not to hand over to somebody other than ourselves the responsibility to remake the world.

No, we need to remake the world ourselves, right now, from below and to the Left. I am appalled at the poverty of imagination that has been shown in the last thirty years in the Mahoning Valley regarding what is to be done. A "shrinking city"? What kind of development strategy is that for a community that is already losing its young people? Tearing down buildings without knowing what to put in their place? Give me a break. A bulldozer can do that. It is not a plan of action, a vision, worthy of human beings.

The Chamber of Commerce, besides sponsoring Senate Bill 5 without a democratic vote of its membership, is anxious to obliterate the memory of Youngstown's militant labor history. There used to be a plaque, right here in Federal plaza, commemorating the Little Steel Strike of 1937. When the streets through downtown were reconfigured for the fifth or sixth time, the plaque disappeared. Don't worry Staughton, I am told, it's in a museum. Yeah, I answer, and that's precisely the problem.

The fact is that new ideas are up and about in the Mahoning Valley but not in corporate boardrooms or in the corridors of power. Quickly, one example of a program that needs to be supported and developed is the idea of providing much of the Valley's food with produce grown locally. Let me be blunt: This is a wonderful idea. But it must become an activity that offers full-time employment to young people trying to grow up and survive in the inner city, or it will remain a middle-class fad, and those young people will leave the area in desperation or wind up behind bars.

III. LIFE AMONG THE 99 PERCENT

I am running out of time so I will just say this one more thing. In the late 1960s it was the thing to do to call police officers "pigs." I objected at the time, and I strongly object now. When I visit the state's first supermaximum security prison on Youngstown-Hubbard Road, often a correctional officer will call out: "Hello, Staughton! Remember me? I used to be your client." Steelworkers and truck drivers who have been unable to find work wind up in the Valley's many new prisons.

If we wish truly to be the 99 percent, we cannot call each other names. Nurses, teachers, and firemen want to repeal Senate Bill 5, but so do policemen and correctional officers.

Barbara Deming had a good way of putting it. She said: "Nature gives us two hands. With one of them, we must hold up a barrier to those we perceive as oppressors, and say: No further, or only over my body. With the other hand we must reach out to those same persons and say: Join us."

‘Occupations’ Energizing the Progressive Base

2011-10-12T06:08:00.001-07:00

Five Reasons the Occupy Wall Street

Movement Really Frightens the Right

By Robert Creamer
Progressive America Rising via HuffPost

Oct 12, 2011 - The Occupy Wall Street movement really frightens the Right Wing. It is not frightening to the Right because of Congressman Eric Cantor's feigned fear of "the mob" that is "occupying our cities." It is not frightening because anyone is really worried that Glenn Beck is correct when he predicts that the protesters will "come for you, drag you into the street, and kill you."

That's not why they are really frightened - that's the Right trying to frighten everyday Americans.

There are five reasons why the Right is in fact frightened by the Occupy Wall Street movement. None of them have to do with physical violence - they have to do with politics. They're not really worried about ending up like Marie Antoinette. But they are very worried that their electoral heads may roll.

All elections are decided by two groups of people:

--Persuadable voters who always vote, but are undecided switch hitters. This group includes lots of political independents.

--Mobilizable voters who would vote for one Party or the other, but have to be motivated to vote.

The Occupy Wall Street Movement is so frightening to the Right because it may directly affect the behavior of those two groups of voters in the upcoming election.

1). The narrative. People in America are very unhappy with their economic circumstances. As a result the outcome of the 2012 election will hinge heavily on who gets the blame for the horrible economy - and who the public believes, or hopes--can lead them into better economic times.

Political narratives are the stories people use to understand the political world. Like all stories, they define a protagonist and antagonist. And political narratives generally ascribe to those central characters moral qualities - right and wrong.

For several years, the Tea Party-driven narrative has been in the ascendance to explain America's economic woes. Its vision of the elites in government versus hard-working freedom-loving people has heavily defined the national political debate.

Of course at first glance it's an easy case for them to make. The President, who is the head of the over-powerful, "dysfunctional" government, is in charge. Things aren't going well - so he, and the government he runs, must be at fault.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has helped force the alternative narrative into the media and public consciousness. The recklessness and greed of the big Wall Street banks, CEO's and top one percent -- those are the culprits who sunk the economy and who have siphoned off all of the economic growth from the middle class. They and their enablers in Congress - largely Republicans - are the problem. To address the underlying economic crisis facing everyday Americans we must rein in their power.

This narrative is very compelling and, of course, it is true. It's not that many voices haven't framed the debate in these terms for years. But by creating a must- cover story, the Occupy Wall Street movement has forced it onto the daily media agenda. That is great news for Progressives. The longer it continues, the better.

Right Wing pundits have disparaged the Occupy Wall Street movement for not having specific "policy proposals" - but the Right knows better. The Occupy Wall Street movement is advocating something much more fundamental. It is demanding a change in the relations of power - reining in the power of Wall Street, millionaires and billionaires - the CEO class as a whole. It is demanding that everyday Americans - the 99% -- share in the increases in their productivity and have more real control of their futures - both individually and as a society. Now that's something for the Right to worry about.

2). Inside-Outside. Especially in periods when people are unhappy, the political high ground is defined by who voters perceive to be elite insiders and who they perceive to be populist outsiders. Who among the political leaders and political forces are actually agents of change?

In 2008, Barak Obama won that battle hands down. The Tea Party Movement muddied the water. It portrayed themselves as "don't tread on me" populist outsiders doing battle with President Obama the elite, liberal insider.

Of course this ignores that the Tea Party was in many ways bought and paid for by huge corporate interests - but in the public mind it was a very compelling image.

The Right Wing has always had its own version of "class conflict." Its "ruling class" is defined as the elite, intellectuals, bureaucrats, entertainers and academics that are out to destroy traditional values and undermine the well-being of ordinary Americans.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, coupled with the movements in Wisconsin and Ohio earlier this year, present an entirely different - and accurate -- picture of who is on the inside and who is not.

3). Momentum. Politics is very much about momentum. Human beings are herding creatures - they travel in packs. People like to go with the flow. Whether in election campaigns, or legislative proposals, or social movements, or football games - the team with the momentum is much more likely to win.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has put the progressive forces in society on the offense - it has begun to build progressive momentum.

4). Movement. The Occupy Wall Street movement has managed to turn itself into a real "movement." Movements don't involve your normal run-of-the-mill organizing. Normally organizers have to worry about turning out people - or voters - one person or one group at a time. Not so with movements.

Movements go viral. They involve spontaneous chain reactions. One person engages another person, who engages another and so on. Like nuclear chain reactions, movements reach critical mass and explode.

That's what makes them so potentially powerful - and so dangerous to their opposition.

Often movements are sparked by unexpected precipitating events - like the death of the fruit stand vendor in Tunisia that set off the Arab Spring. Sometimes they build around the determined effort of a few until that critical mass is reached.

In all cases movements explode because the tinder is dry and one unexpected spark can set off a wild fire.

Movements mobilize enormous resources - individual effort, money, person power - by motivating people to take spontaneous action.

The Occupy Wall Street movement in New York has spread to scores of cities - and the fire shows no sign of flaming out. It will fuel the engagement and remobilization of thousands of progressive activists and volunteers who had been demobilized and demoralized, but the sausage-making of the DC legislative process. That is a huge problem for the right that was counting on despondency and lethargy among progressives to allow them to consolidate their hold on political power in 2012.

5). Inspiration. More than anything else, in order to mount a counter-offensive against the Right wing next year, Progressives need to re-inspire our base. We need to re-inspire young people and all of the massive corps of volunteers who powered the victory in 2008.

Inspiration is critical to mobilization. It is also critical to persuasion. Swing voters want leaders who inspire them.

Inspiration is not about what people think - it's about what they feel about themselves. When you're inspired you feel empowered. You feel that you are part of something bigger than yourself, and that you - yourself - can play a significant role in achieving that larger goal.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has begun to inspire people all over America. That's because people are inspired by example. They themselves are inspired if they see others standing up for themselves - speaking truth to power - standing up in the face of strong, entrenched opposition. People are inspired by heroic acts - by commitment - by people who say they are so committed that they will stay in a park next to Wall Street until they make change. That's what happened in Egypt and Tunisia. That's what happened in Wisconsin this spring.

The legacy of the Occupy Wall Street movement could very well be the re-inspiration of tens of thousands of Progressives - and the engagement of young people that are so important to the future of the progressive movement in America.

Right-wingers will plant provocateurs in an attempt to stigmatize the Occupy Wall Street movement with violence - to make it look frightening. But if the Movement continues with the kind of single-minded purpose and commitment that we have seen so far, the Occupy Wall Street movement may very well make history. It has already become an enormous progressive asset as America approaches the critical crossroad election that could determine whether the next American generation experiences the American Dream or simply reads about it in their history books.

‘Occupy!’ Wave Hits the Windy City

2011-10-11T06:57:00.001-07:00

Thousands in Chicago

Protest Financial Industry

By Mary Wisniewski and Ann Saphir

CHICAGO, Oct. 10, 2011 (Reuters) — Thousands of people including teachers, religious leaders and union workers marched in downtown Chicago on Monday to voice mounting anger over joblessness and income inequality in protests that snarled rush-hour traffic.

Chanting "We are the 99 percent" and "Tax, tax, tax the rich," some demonstrators marched on Michigan Avenue and gathered outside the Chicago Art Institute where a U.S. futures industry trade group was holding an evening cocktail reception.

Others marched outside a luxury hotel near to where the American Mortgage Bankers Association was holding a meeting downtown.

Five separate "feeder marches" -- which converged into one giant march up Michigan Ave -- were inspired by, but not formally affiliated with, the Occupy Wall Street movement that began in New York last month and sparked smaller protests nationwide.

Police estimated a crowd of around 3,000 protesters at the events, organized by the "Stand Up Chicago" coalition with the stated goal of reclaiming "our jobs, our homes and our schools," according to the group's website.

"We really want to highlight the role the financial industry has played," said Adam Kader of Arise Chicago, an interfaith workers' rights group and part of the coalition.

"They're here in our backyard, so this is the time to send a message about how we're really hurting," he added, saying the demonstration would focus on foreclosures, unemployment and lack of municipal funding for key services.

Police arrested 26 demonstrators, many wearing Chicago Teachers Union T-shirts, who linked arms and sat down in Monroe Street as they chanted "Save our schools, save our homes!" They were ticketed and released. Another demonstrator was arrested and faces a charge of battery on a police officer.

Nearby, a crowd chanted "Shame on you!" to members of the Futures Industry Association who peered out from a balcony of the Chicago Art Institute, where they attended a party.

Several protesters paid $2,245 per badge to gain admission to the Mortgage Bankers Association event, organizers said.

One protester, dressed in a suit, got to a microphone during a panel discussion and asked Michael Heid, president of Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, a top national mortgage lender: "How do you sleep at night?"

The man asked Heid how could he even visit the Chicago area since so many been affected by foreclosures locally.

Heid answered that he felt like he was before a congressional panel with such a tough line of questioning.

Mortgage Bankers Association CEO David Stevens had advised conference attendees in the morning not to "engage or confront" the protesters, and to use pedestrian tunnels and other means to leave the building if needed.

"We all recognize that our industry faces a trust deficit with policymakers and the public, and that people in our industry contributed to the events that led to the financial crisis," the Association said in a statement.

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, speaking at an evening event on social trends, said the anti-Wall Street protests were tied to a lack of attention on jobs by Washington politicians.

"It grows out of the anger people feel. People want focus and attention and passion on jobs," Reed said.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, at the same event, said: "There is a major economic restructuring going on where the middle class in this country are feeling an angst they haven't felt."

ARRIVING BY THE BUSLOAD

On the streets, despite mostly orderly marching and chants, anger was the common element among the crowds of protesters.

"I've got loads of loans," said Wedad Yassin, a student at Benedictine University in Lisle, Illinois, who was among the protesters. She said she wanted a fairer tax system that "stops putting our taxes towards war" and invests in education.

"Obama talks about there's going to be some answers to the education problem, but I don't see it," Yassin said.

Protesters arrived by the busload, including many Chicago Teachers Union members who climbed off yellow school buses that parked near police barricades.

Andromachi Koumbis, an elementary school teacher, said she showed up because she was unhappy with what she termed "tampering" with the Chicago teachers labor contract that will add hours to the school day. "I don't mind longer hours if it's done right," she said. "It's funny that they say kids first, and then they bail out big corporations."

Cary Bunnett, a 52-year-old Chicago electrician, was at the Mortgage Bankers protest and she claimed Bank of America had mishandled her mortgage modification on her $2,500-a-month home loan. She said she was laid off due to a lack of building activity, which cut her income in half.

"You don't see any cranes around downtown Chicago anymore," she said. "There's no work for me. What am I supposed to do?"

"I've stopped making my house payment because I just can't do it anymore, but they won't give me the modification they say I qualify for," Bunnett said.

The protests included lighter moments. At the corner of Monroe Street and Michigan Ave, horseback-mounted police smiled when demonstrators chanted "Police need a raise!"

More demonstrations were planned for the next three days.

Roderick Drew, spokesman for the city's law department, said protesters had worked with police, who aimed to allow free speech without impairing people's ability to get around.

Chicago has already several weeks of daily protests outside the Federal Reserve Bank by "Occupy Chicago," an echo of the larger Wall Street protests. Occupy Chicago demonstrators participated with the Stand Up Chicago marchers on Monday.

(Writing by Mary Wisniewski and Matthew Lewis; Reporting by Ann Saphir, Margaret Chadbourn, Joseph Rauch, Karin Matz, Jonathan Spicer and Eric Johnson; Editing by Greg McCune and Peter Bohan)

Class Justice: One Cartoon, 1000 Words

2011-10-11T04:34:00.001-07:00

OWS: Demanding Another World

2011-10-09T04:26:00.001-07:00

Occupy Wall Street is A Seed,

an Expression of What We Need

By Carole Travis
Progressive America Rising

I have been to Liberty Plaza (Zucotti Park, NYC) every day for almost a week now. Immediately I loved it. An early favorite sign read: For the first time in my life, I feel at home.

I have never seen anything like this. I am almost 70; I have organized all kinds of things and been to all kinds of places. I was on the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in VietNam (MOBE) staff in NY for about a year, the Demonstration staff for the 1968 Democratic Convention, the Conspiracy Trial staff, President of a United Auto Worker General Motors local (UAW Local 719, we built locomotives) and then was picked up by SEIU and worked for them 13 years in various capacities. I wasn't at Woodstock, but I was in Haight Ashbury for a few moments here and there. Occupy Wall Street is unique.

Many love it and others are perplexed. What are the demands? It's like a be-in, no politics no direction. I got bored there, there was nothing to do. How long can it last? …and so forth. Again, as I said, me, I loved it, instantly. But it took time to digest the meaning of this vibrant community Occupy Wall Street.

Wednesday, the day of the 'big march', I marched from Liberty Plaza to Foley Square and back. At Foley Square was not possible to tell how many people were there. It is a spread out segmented space. I couldn't see where the speakers were and could not hear them in any of the places I was able to get to. I walked around quite a bit. Packed crowds were in every corner stretching back and winding around. The front of the place I am sure had no idea how many thousands of us were in the various back places. I don't like over estimates of crowds, because then you never know what you represent or when things are getting bigger. But there was no less than 15,000 people. Two guys from NY who I ran into over and over in the course of the day thought there were 50,000 people there, probably not, maybe 30,000?

That day was a 'labor day' and each day some labor people visit the plaza; hundreds of people every day visit, some days, thousands. But, obviously, the people who live there have no jobs. In coming there and living there, they have created a community. There are rules, food (donated, much by unions), music, a library, a comfort station with donated clothes and blankets. Somebody donates laundry services. Some are college educated, some aren't. It is racially diverse and people are mostly at least 20, some quite a bit older. A few who I noticed regularly were physically disabled. Mostly white people go to the morning organization meetings.

Friday night there was a passionate speech by 2 visiting Greeks with many political insights. Greece is, after all, on the verge of General Strike, France too. They spoke to a small crowd at the southeast corner of the park, through, of course, the peoples mike. While I was listening, suddenly I understood my sense of this place, I too then spoke, my words sprang from my bones, I don't remember what I actually said. People picked up my last words as a chant for a few rounds. Later 2 people, at different times, found me, came up to me and said they loved what I said. I don't remember what I said, but I do, finally, know what I think about as a result of Occupy Wall Street. It is not what they are saying, but what they are doing that strikes chords of hope in me.

They are doing what we all must do, live a different way, a way that is not part of the system and situations we find ourselves, those ways are killing us and the planet. In having no demands, in some way they embody all demands, a different world.

The people who are there did not stop participating because they chose to, they were excluded from participation, there are not enough jobs, even while there is plenty of work. Yet, whatever their individual intentions might have been, they have made a place for themselves, taking care of each other, listening, learning, being human beings. In some fundamental way, they are free; that is the attraction I feel.

It is a scary time, without dramatic drastic changes in how we live, we will not survive. The scientists tell us that. Our planet is, at best, on the verge of dying. The way we have organized society is unsustainable not only for those who are suffering now, but for everyone. Currently, the military/industrial/prison/anti-privacy complex, the banks and financial speculators, the oil cartels, the pharmaceutical companies, the insurance companies are running our country, our world leaving death, misery, starvation, hopeless in their wake. And their natural…and ruthless practices have endangered even their own system.

To me, Occupy Wall Street represents is a seed, a lesson, an expression of what is needed. Non- complicity, a community outside the normal. However small, it is a grain of hope, a spark of a different fire.

With General Strike looming in Greece, in France, having occurred in Egypt, the notion of General Strike is spreading. Those situations are much different than Occupy Wall Street, yet the appearance of the concept in the world along with the encampment in NY, the speakers from Greece raising the concept, is part of a dramatically changing conversation.

What struck me as I listened to the Greek speakers was the dream of an International General Strike. Not for a day or a week or until our demands our met, but rather until we figure out how we should run things. How can a 'they' make the world we need? We need to create, not demand.

Will we get there? I don't know, but for the first time it seems to me, at least, conceivable.

[Carole Travis, Liberty Plaza, 10/8/11 I live in California after a lifetime in Chicago, but am loving New York]

Youth Culture: From One Generation to the Next

2011-10-03T11:36:00.001-07:00

The Wall Street Occupations and the

Making of a Global Counter Culture

Mark Naison
Fordham University

Yesterday, October 3, I spent about an hour in Liberty Plaza sitting, walking around and talking to people before the event I had come for- a Grade In organized by teacher activists- finally began, and was stunned by how different the occupation was from any demonstration I had attended recently.

First of all, in contrast to the last two protests I had participated in – a Wisconsin Solidarity rally at City Hall, and the Save Our Schools March on Washington-I saw few people my own age and no one I recognized- at least until the “Grade In” started.

When I arrived, at 11 AM, most of the people in Liberty Plaza were the ones who had slept their overnight, and the vast majority were in their 20’s and 30’s- a half to a third my age. They were drumming, sweeping the sidewalk, talking to curious visitors- whom were still few in number- eating or chilling with one another and their relaxed demeanor blew me away given the tumultuous events of the day before when more than 700 protesters had been arrested by the NYPD after marching onto the Brooklyn Bridge.

They were also, to my surprise, thoroughly international. Many of the people I met at the information desk, or who spontaneously started conversations with me, had accents which indicated they had been born in, or had recently come from, countries outside the United States.

I felt like I was in Berlin or Barcelona, where you could always count on meeting young people from all over the world at any music performance or cultural event, only this was a political action in the heart of New York’s financial district. I felt like I was in the midst of a
global youth community I had certainly seen emerging during my travels and teaching- after all, I had helped organize a “Bronx Berlin Youth Exchange”- but I had not expected to see at this particular protest.

But it was there, no doubt. And definitely made the discipline, determination and camaraderie of the protesters that more impressive But as much as the age cohort and global character of the occupation seemed strange, it also seemed oddly familiar, though it took a while for that familiarity to sink in. The longer I stayed at Liberty Plaza, the more it felt like the countercultural communities I had spent time in during the late 60’s, from Maine to Madison to Portland Oregon, where discontent with war and a corrupt social system had bred a communal
spirit marked by incredible generosity and openness to strangers.

During the years when I traveled the country regularly as a political organizer and revolutionary- 1968 to 1971- I never had to stay in a hotel or pay for a meal in the more than 20 cities I visited. Every one of these cities had a countercultural community and I was always
able to “crash” with people I knew or with people whose names I had been given by friends. And I did the same for people in NYC. My apartment on West 99th Street was a crash pad for people around the country who had come to NY for demonstrations, or for revolutionaries
from other countries who had somehow gotten my name. I still remember making huge pots of chili for anyone who showed up with Goya chili beans, canned tomatoes, chop mean, bay leaves and chili powder. And it was not unusual for 20 or 30 to show up.

I had feared those days would never return- erased by decades of consumerism, materialism and cheap electronic devices— but when I visited Liberty Plaza, I realized that the global economic crisis had recreated something which I often thought of as an artifact of my own
nostalgia. Because right here in New York were hundreds of representatives of a whole generation of educated young people around the world, numbering tens if not hundreds millions of young people, who might never land in the secure professional jobs they had been promised or experience the cornucopia of material goods that came with them.

Described as a “lost generation” by economists, a critical mass of these young people, in cities throughout Europe and Latin America- and now right here in the United States-- had decided to build community in the midst of scarcity, challenge consumerism and the profit motive, and call out the powerful financial interests whose speculation and greed had helped put them in the economic predicament they were in.

Serious questions remain about the long term significance of this global movement. Would these middle class( or ex middle class)protesters connect with the even larger group of people in their own countries- workers, immigrants, minorities- who had been living in
poverty well before the current crash? Would their community survive even a modest revival of the world economy, sending them back into a lifestyle of acquisitive individualism which the global consumer market depends on to yield profits? Could they connect with people in poor or
working class neighborhoods who were already practicing communalism and mutual aid to create a truly multiracial, multiclass movement?

The jury is still out on all of those issues. But there are some promising signs. The chants of “We are all Troy Davis” during several of the movement’s marches. The increasing participation of labor unions in the protest. The involvement of more and more activists from the city’s Black and Latino neighborhoods in support for the Occupation.

And those who lived through the 60’s should remember this. Oppositional cultures of all kinds-ranging from hippie communities to the Black arts movement-represented the soil in which political protest
flourished during those heady years.

And the same is true in this era. The emergence of a global youth counterculture should be be seen as a powerful complement to, if not an actual component of, a global movement for freedom, democracy, and economic justice

October 3, 2011

Solidarity Time vs. Finance Capital

2011-10-01T04:37:00.001-07:00

Wall Street Protests:

Which Side Are You On?

By Van Jones
Progressive America Rising via RebuildtheDream.com

Wall Street has long been the home of the biggest threat to American Democracy. Now it has become home to what may be our best hope for rescuing it.

For everyone who loves this country, for everyone whose heart is breaking for the growing ranks of the poor, for everyone who is seething at the unopposed demolition of America's working and middle class: the time has come to get off the fence.

A new generation has gone to the scene of the crimes committed against our future. The time has come for all people of good will to give our full-throated backing to the young people of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The young heroes on Wall Street today baffle the world because they have issued no demands. The villains of Wall Street had their demands -- insisting upon a massive bailout for themselves in 2008, while they pocketed million dollar bonuses. The Wall Street protesters are not seeking a bailout for themselves; they are working to bail out democracy.

The American experiment in self-governance is at a moment of crisis. The political system thus far has proven itself incapable of responding to a once in a lifetime economic calamity. With income inequality and unemployment at the highest rates since the Great Depression, it's no wonder that almost 80 percent of the country thinks we're on the wrong track.

But the crisis of American Democracy did not start with the financial collapse. For at least 30 years, the system has been rigged by the wealthy and privileged to acquire more wealth and privilege. At this point, 400 families control more wealth than 180 million Americans.

This great wealth divergence has resulted in an unjust and dangerous concentration of economic and political power in the hands of the few. It has pushed millions -- especially the rising generation and communities of color -- into the shadows of our society. The middle class continues to shrink, and the ranks of the poor have swelled. The political elite has failed to take the necessary steps to provide opportunity to the majority of Americans.

A movement was born after Madison, Wisconsin, to oppose these injustices. It has now spread to every Congressional District. We call ourselves the American Dream Movement. We engaged 130,000 people to crowd-source our own jobs agenda -- the Contract for the American Dream. In August, tens of thousands demonstrated for jobs in rallies across the nation. Next week in DC, we host our first national gathering: the Take Back The American Dream conference.

The Occupation of Wall Street -- and the occupations throughout the country -- are expressions of the same spirit and dynamic. And these particular demonstrations, perhaps uniquely, contain the spark to grow into a movement that can be transformative. They are the first, small step in the creation of a movement that can restore American Democracy, and renew the American Dream.

The hundreds of young people from all five boroughs that camp out every night, in the heart of the financial district, in the rain and the cold, at risk of arrest, are providing the inspiration to draw more and more out of the shadows and into the bright light of the public square. The occupation grows larger and more diverse every day. Young people, the majority of whom are under 25 and have never before engaged in activism, are managing the arduous task of a consensus rules meeting with no sound system. The nightly general assemblies are attracting crowds in the thousands to stand amongst a group of their peers and debate our path forward as a people.

The occupation is a revival of a proud tradition of authentic, people-powered movements that have been dormant -- and that we need now more than ever. It is building into the kind of massive public demonstrations -- like those in Egypt, Madison, and Santiago -- that can shake the foundation of a system of power that has lost sight of the public good.

Now is our time to choose. Will we keep rewarding those whose financial manipulations have brought us to ruin? Or will we stand with those whose democratic innovations are breathing life into our finest ideals? Both groups are within blocks of each other in downtown Manhattan.

For the past 30 years, the country has stood behind the titans on Wall Street and their values. We listened when they said that their banks were too big too fail. Today, there is only one thing that's too big to fail: the dreams of this new generation, finding its voice in Liberty Park. All of America should now stand with them.

Authored by Van Jones, President of Rebuild The Dream, and Max Berger, a youth organizer with the American Dream Movement.

Follow Van Jones on Twitter: www.twitter.com/VanJones68

The Jobless: Robbed with a Fountain Pen

2011-09-29T09:03:00.001-07:00

The Men We Trusted to Lead Us

By Robert Scheer
Progressive America Rising via Ttuthout

Sept. 29, 2011 - Now he tells us. On Wednesday Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke referred to the nation's unemployment rate as a "national crisis," an obvious if depressing fact of life to the 25 million Americans who have been unsuccessfully attempting to find full-time employment.

But to finally hear those words from the man George W. Bush and Barack Obama both appointed to lead us out of the great recession is a bracing reminder of how markedly the policies of both those presidents have failed: "We've had close to 10 percent unemployment now for a number of years, and of the people who are unemployed, about 45 percent have been unemployed for six months or more," Bernanke said. "This is unheard of."

But why is Bernanke just now discovering this after having overseen the Fed's purchase of trillions in toxic mortgage-backed securities from the too-big-to-fail banks that sacrificed people's homes in a giant Ponzi scheme? Why did he throw all of that money at the banks without getting anything back in the way of relief for the people the bankers swindled?

The housing meltdown, which has robbed Americans of a considerable portion of their net worth, has led to the continued depressed consumer confidence that is the prime cause of crisis-level unemployment. In another of his too-late-to-matter moments, Bernanke acknowledged that "strong housing policies to help the market recover" would "clearly be very useful," but he failed to suggest any.

Bernanke, along with then-New York Fed President Timothy Geithner, helped implement the Bush strategy of saving the banks in the hope that their rising tide would lift our little boats. That remained the strategy when President Obama rewarded Geithner for having saved AIG and Citigroup by naming him treasury secretary in the incoming government.

With the Geithner appointment, and the even more disturbing selection of Lawrence Summers to be his top economic adviser, Obama sealed his own fate as president. By turning to those disciples of Clinton-era Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, a prime enabler of Wall Street greed, the new president fatally betrayed his promise of hope.

If you still need confirmation of just how decisive a betrayal those appointments were, check out Ron Suskind's new book, Confidence Men, a devastating insider account of the Obama White House that clearly identifies as the source of this president's failure "Rubin's B-Team," Summers and Geithner, "two men whose actions had contributed to the very financial disaster they were hired to solve." Suskind quotes then-Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., one of the few who dared stand up to the Wall Street lobbyists, as telling Obama, "I don't understand how you could do this; you've picked the wrong people!"

Of course the Democrats from the Clinton era don't bear all of the responsibility for the radical deregulation of the financial industry that ended the sensible restraints on greed installed by Franklin Roosevelt in response to the Great Depression. Indeed, the inspiration came from Republicans led by Phil Gramm, the then-senator from Texas who as head of the Banking Committee authored the legislation that Wall Street lobbyists had long pushed unsuccessfully.

The mayhem they wrought and the subsequent big-money rewards to Rubin and Gramm do not seem to have shocked this president or the leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination. Rubin became chairman of Citigroup and was rewarded with $120 million while he guided the bank to the edge of bankruptcy. Gramm went to a leading position at the Swiss-based UBS, the continually troubled institution now in the midst of its latest scandal, involving fraudulent trading. In addition to a $45 billion direct TARP bailout, Citigroup got $99.5 billion, and Gramm's UBS $77.2 billion from a $1.2 trillion secret Fed loan fund.

Gramm and Rubin were partners in what should be considered the crime of the century, speaking in moral and not legal terms since, as regards the financial world, the bad guys get to write the laws. Thanks to their efforts, which allowed the creation of the "too-big-to-fail banks" and a totally unregulated derivatives market in toxic home mortgage securities, we entered the Great Recession, but neither of its authors has ever been held seriously accountable for the enormous suffering he caused.

On the contrary, Gramm and Rubin's "just free Wall Street to do its thing" ideology still dominates the economic policies of both major political parties. Rubin's acolytes have controlled the Obama administration's economic strategy of saving Wall Street by betraying Main Street, and Gramm, who recently endorsed his former student at Texas A&M, Rick Perry, for president, remains the free-market-mayhem guru for Republicans. On Election Day, whoever wins, we lose.

Week Two of ‘Street Heat’ in NYC

2011-09-24T16:30:00.001-07:00

Protesters March in Manhattan,

Criticizing Wall Street,

Demanding ‘Tax the Rich!’

NEW YORK (Reuters, Sept 24 2011) - Several hundred marchers wound their way through the streets of lower Manhattan on Saturday in the latest of a string of protests over the past week against what demonstrators saw as corporate greed on Wall Street.

The demonstrations, participants said, were meant to criticize a financial system that they believed unfairly benefits corporations and the rich. They said the protests were inspired by demonstrations in Egypt and Spain.

The marchers carried signs spelling out their goals. "Tax the rich," one sign said. "We Want Money for Healthcare not Corporate Welfare," read another.

At least a dozen protesters were arrested during the largely peaceful march that lasted more than three hours and wound its way north from the financial district into the bustling Union Square area.

The demonstrators were mostly college-aged marchers carrying American flags and signs with anti-corporate slogans. Some beat drums, blew horns and chanted slogans as uniformed officers surrounded and videotaped them.

"Occupy Wall Street," they chanted, "all day, all week."

Organizers said their intent was to occupy Wall Street but, with metal barricades and swarms of police officers in front of the New York Stock Exchange, the closest they could get was Liberty Street, about three blocks away.

The first arrest came shortly after noon near the stock exchange. Several blocks away, another protester, who identified himself as Robert Stephens, was arrested after kneeling in the middle of the street outside the Chase Bank building.

"That's the bank that took my mother's home," said Stephens, a law student, before being handcuffed.

An online activist group called Adbusters organized the weeklong event and word spread via social media, yet the throngs of protesters it had hoped for failed to show up.

"I was kind of disappointed with the turnout," said Itamar Lilienthal, 19, a New York University student and marcher.

The protest appeared smaller than a "Day of Rage" a week ago that turned out to be largely peaceful.

Tourists along the march stopped to snap photos, and some acknowledged the demonstrators with waves and peace signs but few joined the protest.

Laurie Hull, who was visiting New York with her husband from Oregon, stopped to watch and said the couple empathized with the marchers after filing for bankruptcy and living without health insurance.

Near Union Square Park, more than two hours into the march, police attempted to corral the demonstrators behind police lines. But surging protesters weaved around the officers and moved onward, prompting shoving matches that ended with more arrests.

(Editing by Lauren Keiper and Cynthia Johnston)

‘The Slate’ Tactic as Primary Challenge to Obama

2011-09-20T04:41:00.001-07:00

Progressives Vow to Challenge

Obama in Democratic Primaries

By SinglePayerAction
Progressive America Rising via Common Dreams

Sept 19, 2011 - Progressive leaders led by Ralph Nader and Cornel West unveiled a proposal today to challenge President Obama in the Democratic Party’s presidential primaries in 2012.

The proposal, which has been endorsed by over 45 distinguished leaders, seeks to have a slate of six candidates run against President Obama, each representing a field in which Obama has never clearly staked a progressive claim or where he has drifted toward the corporatist right.

“Without debates by challengers inside the Democratic Party’s presidential primaries, the liberal/majoritarian agenda will be muted and ignored,” said Ralph Nader.

“The one-man Democratic primaries will be dull, repetitive, and draining of both voter enthusiasm and real bright lines between the two parties that excite voters,” Nader said.

A letter (full text below) is being sent to a list of distinguished elected officials, civic leaders, prominent members of academia and the NGO community who represent the fields of labor, poverty, military and foreign policy, health insurance and care, the environment, financial regulation, consumer protection, and civil, political and human rights/empowerment.

The list of potential candidates also includes progressive democrats who have held national and state office and have fought for progressive reforms.

“We need to put strong democratic pressure on President Obama in the name of poor and working people” said Cornel West, author and Professor at Princeton University. “His administration has tilted too much toward Wall Street, we need policies that empower Main Street.”

The letter pronounces that without primary challengers, President Obama will never have to seriously articulate and defend his beliefs to his own party. Given the dangers our nation faces, that option is unacceptable.

“It’s time for the White House to get into the trench with organized labor and lend a hand. We know what we need, and we don’t need another campaign speech,” said Chris Townsend Political Action Director, United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. “The absence of discussion or debate about the failed strategies of this administration only emboldens the corporate onslaught.”

The letter points to numerous decisions that have drawn criticism from Obama’s own Democratic Party including his decision to bail out Wall Street’s most profitable firms while failing to push for effective prosecution of the criminal behavior that triggered the recession, escalating the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan while simultaneously engaging in a unilateral war in Libya, his decision to extend the Bush era tax cuts, and his acquiescence to Republican extortion during the recent debt ceiling negotiations.

“Robust debate on the crucial issues facing our nation, including global environmental devastation, should characterize all races for national public office and the Democratic presidential primaries are no exception,” said Brent Blackwelder, President Emeritus of Friends of the Earth. “The public needs to hear whether a second term Obama will be like the first term Obama, or perhaps more like the 2008 presidential candidate Obama or something else altogether.”

The list of prominent leaders receiving the letter is being kept private as a courtesy.

Here’s the full letter and a partial list of endorsees:

Dear Colleague,

We write to you in light of recent deteriorating events in Washington, D.C. Misguided negotiations by the Obama Administration over increasing the debt ceiling willingly put our nation’s vital social services on the chopping block while Bush-era tax cuts remain untouched. Clearly the situation has reached crisis proportions. In response, an innovative plan has been developed to reintroduce a progressive agenda back into the political discussion during the 2012 election season.

Consider for a moment two very different scenarios for the 2012 Democratic presidential primaries.

The First scenario, President Obama advances without contest to a unanimous nomination. There is no recognizable Democratic challenger, no meaningful debate on key progressive issues or past broken promises, just a seamless, self-contained operation on its way to raising one billion dollars in campaign funds.

This scenario is what most observers expect. Mr. Obama will face neither opposition nor debate. He will have no need to clarify or defend his own polices or address the promises, kept and unkept, of his 2008 campaign. The president will not have to explain to his supporters why he directly escalated the war in Afghanistan and broadened America’s covert war in Pakistan, why he chose to engage in a military intervention in Libya, or why he has maintained the Bush Administration’s national security apparatus that allows for the suspension and abuse of constitutionally protected civil liberties--dismissing Congress all the way.

In an uncontested Democratic primary, President Obama will never have to justify his decision to bail out Wall Street’s most profitable firms while failing to push for effective prosecution of the criminal behavior that triggered the recession, or his failure to push for real financial reform. He will not have to defend his decision to extend the Bush era tax cuts nor justify his acquiescence to Republican extortion during the debt ceiling negotiations. He will not have to answer questions on how his Administration completely failed to protect homeowner’s losing their homes to predatory banks, or even mention the word “poverty,” as he failed to do in his most recent State of the Union Address, even as more and more Americas sink into financial despair.

He will never be challenged to fulfill his pledge to actively pursue a Labor-supported card check, or his promise to increase the federal minimum wage or why he took single payer off the table after he said he believes in it. The American labor movement, facing an unprecedented onslaught by the Right will not have the opportunity to voice its concerns and rally around a supportive candidate.

The president will not be pressed to answer how he spent four years in office without addressing the ongoing destabilization of our climate or advocating a coherent and ecologically sound energy policy including defending his position on nuclear power and so called clean coal. Nor will he discuss regulatory agency deficiencies in enforcing corporate law and order in an era marked by a corporate crime wave having devastating economic consequences on workers and taxpayers and their savings and pensions. There will be no opportunity for the Hispanic and other relevant communities to speak out on immigration reform even as the Republicans continue to use it as a weapon of political demagoguery.

Add your own concerns, disappointments, and frustrated hopes to this list of what will surely be left off the table during an express-lane primary. The valid disagreements within the Democratic Party, let alone the goals of progressives, will be completely overlooked. The media will gleefully cover the media circus that is sure to be the Republican primaries, magnifying every minor gaffe and carefully cataloging every iteration and argument of the radical right. The cameras will cover the Democratic side only for orchestrated events, the whiff of scandal, and to offer commentary on how the campaign is positioning itself for the general election.

The summation of this process will be a tediously scripted National Convention, deprived of robust exchange and well-wrought policy. And here the danger is clear: not only will progressive principles past and present be betrayed but large sections of voters will feel bored with and alienated from the democratic candidate. This would not serve the president’s campaign, our goals, or the nation’s needs.

Thankfully, there is another option. This second scenario would allow for robust and exciting discussion and debate during the primary season while posing little risk to the president other than to encourage him take more progressive stands. It would also accomplish the critical task of energizing the Progressive base to turn out on Election Day.

Imagine: A slate of six candidates announces its decision to run in the Democratic primaries. Each of the candidates is recognizable, articulate, and a person of acknowledged achievement. These contenders would each represent a field in which Obama has never clearly staked a progressive claim or where he has drifted toward the corporatist right. These fields would include: labor, poverty, military and foreign policy, health insurance and care, the environment, financial regulation, civil and political rights/empowerment, and consumer protection.

Without primary challengers, President Obama will never have to seriously articulate and defend his beliefs to his own party. Given the dangers our nation faces, that option is unacceptable. The slate is the best method for challenging the president for a number of reasons:

The slate can indicate that its intention is not to defeat the president (a credible assertion given their number of voting columns) but to rigorously debate his policy stands.

The slate will collectively give voice to the fundamental principles and agendas that represent the soul of the Democratic Party, which has increasingly been deeply tarnished by corporate influence.

The slate will force Mr. Obama to pay attention to many more issues affecting many more Americans. He will be compelled to develop powerful, organic, and fresh language as opposed to stale poll-driven “themes.”

The slate will exercise a pull on Obama toward his liberal/progressive base (in the face of the countervailing pressure from “centrists” and corporatists) and leave that base with a feeling of positive empowerment.

The slate will excite the Democratic Party faithful and essential small-scale donors, who (despite the assertions of cable punditry) are essentially liberal and progressive.

A slate that is serious, experienced, and well-versed in policy will display a sobering contrast with the alarmingly weak, hysterical, and untested field taking shape on the right.

The slate will command more media attention for the Democratic primaries and the positive progressive discussions within the party as opposed to what will certainly be an increasingly extremist display on the right.

The slate makes it more difficult for party professionals to induce challengers to drop out of the race and more difficult for Mr. Obama to refuse or sidestep debates in early primaries.

The slate, if announced, will receive free legal advice and adequate contributions for all prudent expenses in moving about the country. The paperwork is far simpler than what confronts ballot-access-blocked third party and independent candidates. For the slate will be composed of registered Democrats campaigning inside the Party Primaries.

This opportunity to revive and restore the progressive infrastructure of the Democratic Party must not be missed. A slate of Democratic candidates challenging the president’s substance and record is an historic opportunity. Certainly, President Obama will not be pleased to face a list of primary challengers, but the comfort of the incumbent is far less important than the vitality and strength of his party’s Progressive ideas and ideals. President Obama should emerge from the primary a stronger candidate as a result.

This letter is sent to several dozen accomplished persons known to identify with the Democratic Party voting line for a variety of reasons. We ask that you join us in becoming an official endorsee of the slate proposal. All endorsements are made as individuals and organizational or institutional affiliations are for identification purposes only. Your endorsement will be a vital signal of support and will help in compiling the strongest slate of candidates possible when we send out the letter to the candidate list, yet to be finalized.

Second, can you suggest accomplished people to contact who may be interested in joining the slate as a candidate in one of the following fields: labor, poverty, military and foreign policy,health insurance and care, the environment, financial regulation, civil and political rights/empowerment, and consumer protection. This can be yourself if you feel it would be appropriate.

Endorsements will be accepted on a rolling basis. All submissions of endorsement or additional questions and comments for the can be directed to Colin O’Neil at colinoneil@gmail.com or 703-599-3474. We appreciate your speedy reply.

Thank you.

James Abourezk Former U.S. Senator, South Dakota

Gar Alperovitz, Professor University of Maryland, Co-Founder Democracy Collaborative

Norman Birnbaum Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University Law Center

Dr. Brent Blackwelder President Emeritus of Friends of the Earth

Ellen H. Brown Lawyer and Author of Web of Debt

Edgar Stuart Cahn Professor of Law, University of the District of Columbia Co-founder Legal Services for the Poor

Pat Choate 1996 Reform Party Vice President Candidate

Charles Cray Director of the Center for Corporate Policy

Peter Coyote Actor, Author and Director

Ronnie Cummins, Executive Director, Organic Consumers Association

Charles Derber, Professor, Boston College

Ronnie Dugger Founder, Alliance for Democracy

John Fullerton President, Capital Institute

Rebecca and James Goodman, Northwood Farm

Randy Hayes Director, Foundation Earth Rainforest Action Network Founder

Chris Hedges Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist of the New York Times and Author

Hazel Henderson, Author of Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy President, Ethical Markets Media, LLC.

Jean Houston Psychologist, Anthropologist and Author of The Possible Human and The Possible Society

Nicholas Johnson Former Commissioner, Federal Communications Commission Former Administrator, Federal Maritime Commission

Alan F. Kay Author of Spot the Spin and Locating Consensus for Democracy

Harry Kelber The Labor Educator

Andrew Kimbrell Executive Director, Center for Food Safety & International Center for Technology Assessment (ICTA)

Jonathan Kozol Educator, Author of Savage Inequalities

Lewis Lapham Former Editor, Harper’s Magazine

Leland Lehrman, Partner, Fund Balance

Rabbi Michael Lerner Editor, Tikkun Magazine Chair, Network of Spiritual Progressives

Dr. Richard Lippin, MD Physician Forecaster, Board Certified in Preventive Medicine and Advocate for both Individual and Institutional Prevention

Robert D. Manning Founder and CEO, Responsible Debt Relief Institute Author of Credit Card Nation

Dr. Samuel Metz, MD Mad As Hell Doctors, founding member Physicians for a National Health Plan, member of Portland chapter

Carol Miller, Community Activist, New Mexico

E. Ethelbert Miller, Board Chair Institute for Policy Studies

Ralph Nader Citizen Advocate

Michael Parenti Author

John Passacantando Former Executive Director, Greenpeace USA

Erich Pica President of Friends of the Earth

Vijay Prashad Author and Professor, Trinity College

Nomi Prins Author and former Managing Director at Goldman Sachs

Marcus Raskin Author of The Common Good and former White House Advisor

Andy Shallal “Democracy’s Restauranteur” and Owner of Bus Boys& Poets

Michelle Shocked Musician

Chris Townsend Political Action Director, United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE)

Gore Vidal Author and Political Activist

Rabbi Arthur Waskow Chair, The Shalom Center

Harvey Wasserman Author of Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth

Cornel West Professor and Author of Race Matters

Quentin D. Young MD National Coordinator, Physicians for a National Health Program Join the discussion:

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Far Right Exposing Its Own Class Hatreds

2011-09-15T08:50:00.001-07:00

Shameless Opposition to the Jobs Bill Reveals

The GOP's Deep Hatred of the Working Class

By Carl Davidson
Keep On Keepin' On

If you want to have your class consciousness raised a few notches, all you have to do over the next few weeks is listen to the Republicans in Congress offer up their shameless commentary rejecting President's Obama's jobs bill.

This week's doozy came from Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert, who was outraged that capitalists were being restricted from discriminating in hiring the unemployed, in favor of only hiring people who already had jobs elsewhere. I kid you not. Here's the quote:

"We're adding in this bill a new protected class called 'unemployed,'" Gohmert declared in the House Sept. 13, 2011. "I think this will help trial lawyers who are not having enough work. We heard from our friends across the aisle, 14 million people out of work -- that's 14 million new clients."

One hardly knows were to begin.

First, the Jobs Bill does no such thing as creating a 'new protected class.' It only curbs a wrongly discriminatory practice.

Second, so what if it did? Americans who uphold the Constitution, the 14th Amendment' equal protection clause, and the expansion of democracy and the franchise generally, will see the creation of 'protected classes' as hard-won progressive steps forward from the times of the Divine Right of Kings.

Third, if Gohmert had any first-hand knowledge of the unemployed, he'd know they usually can't afford lawyers, especially when the courts are stacked against them.

Fourth, to create even more confusion, Gohmert raced to the House clerk to submit his own 'Jobs Bill' before Obama's, but with a similar name. Its content was a hastily scribbled two-page screed consisting of nothing but cuts in corporate taxes.

What's really going on here is becoming clearer every day. The GOP cares about one thing: destroying Obama's presidency regardless of the cost. They don't even care if its hurts capitalism's own interests briefly, not to mention damaging the well being of everyone else. Luckily, Obama is finally calling them out in public-although far too politely for my taste.

The irony will likely emerge if and when they ever do take Obama down. I'd bet good money that a good number of the GOP bigwigs would then turn on a dime and support many of the same measures they're now opposing.

But most of them, especially the far right, would still likely press on with their real aim, a full-throated neoliberal reactionary thrust that repeals the Great Society's Medicaid and Medicare, the New Deal's Social Security and Wagner Act, and every progressive measure in between. Their idea of making the U.S labor market 'competitive' and U.S. business 'confident' is to make the whole country more like Texas, with its record volume of minimum wage work and poverty, and then Texas more like Mexico-the race to the bottom. They're not happy with 12% unionization; they want zero percent, where all of us are defenseless and completely under the thumbs of our 'betters'.

In brief, prepare for more wars and greater austerity.

If you think I'm exaggerating, over the next months observe how the national GOP is trying to rig the 2012 elections in Pennsylvania, Michigan and a few other big states. Our Electoral College system is bad enough, but they are going to 'reform' it to make it worse by attaching electoral votes to congressional districts, rather than statewide popular majorities. This would mean Obama could win the popular vote statewide, but the majority of electoral votes would still go to the GOP. Add that to their new 'depress the vote' requirements involving picture IDs, which are aimed at the poor and the elderly, and you'll see their fear and hatred of the working class.

We've always had government with undue advantages for the rich. But just watch them in this round as they go all out to make it even more so. We have to call it out for what it really is, and put their schemes where the sun doesn't shine.

Jobs Programs: The Right and Wrong Turns

2011-09-13T04:16:00.001-07:00

The Hot Potato Too Many Beltway Wonks Avoid:

The Need to Tie Job Creation to Industrial Policy

By Carl Davidson
Keep On Keepin' On

If you want to be a good policy advocate for jobs these days, two starting points will help you a lot. One is to take off your national blinders and see the economy globally. The second is to grasp how the need for revenues to finance the creation of new jobs can best be filled by increasing taxes on unproductive wealth.

A good example of the problem is Robert's Samuelson's 'Job Creation 101' op-ed column in the Sept 12 Washington Post. If we simply follow his lesson plan, we would end up creating new jobs in the third world--and doing so mainly at the expense of the wrong people at home.

Samuelson begins his argument wisely enough by stressing how increasing demand for goods and services creates jobs, and government has to have a hand in it. But then he goes astray:

"If government taxed, borrowed or regulated less, that money would stay with households and businesses, which would spend it on something else and, thereby, create other jobs. Politics determines how much private income we devote to public services.

"To this observation, there's one glaring exception. In a slump, government can create jobs by borrowing when the private economy isn't spending."

On the first point, tweaking taxes so both people and businesses have more cash to spend glosses over the matter of where and how the money is spent. Using extra income to pay down your Visa Card doesn't help job creation much. And if you spend it at Wal-Mart or other big box stores, you'll create some demand to hire more workers in China or Malaysia, but not much here.

On the second point, it's not always wise to create jobs simply by borrowing. It certainly adds to the revenues of the banks and bondholders. But it's much smarter to go after unproductive pools of capital with progressive taxation. The proposal for a financial transaction tax on Wall Street speculators is an excellent example.

The rule-of-thumb is to tax activities you want to discourage, such as unproductive gambling in derivatives, while subsidizing efforts you want to encourage, such as new green manufacturing startups. It's called 'industrial policy,' and it's why some countries that have one, like China and Germany, are weathering the economic storms better than others.

If Obama's new jobs program is going to be thwarted by a hostile Congress anyway, those politicians who are serious about creating jobs would do well to fight for the best options-direct government programs that fund increasing local demand for local labor and raw materials. If we had every county in the country funded to build a wind farm or solar array as a public power utility, it would be a good start. So would the building of the new and massive 'Smart Grid' power lines for clean and green energy.

When finance capital's opposition in Congress rears its head to crush something that makes perfect sense to everyone else, then we'll learn exactly who is part of the problem and who is part of the solution. If we get political clarity here in a massive way, we'll be in a much better position to assemble the popular power required to get what we really need.

AFL-CIO to Obama: This Is What a Real Jobs Plan Looks Like

2011-09-01T10:17:00.001-07:00

By Mike Hall

AFL-CIO Blog via Progressive America Rising

The nation’s ailing economy needs a prescription powerful enough to heal the jobs crisis and America’s working families need an independent political voice that’s not beholden to parties or politicians, says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

At a Labor Day press conference this afternoon, Trumka unveiled a six-point “America Wants to Work” jobs and economy initiative “that is serious and reflects the scale of the crisis we face.” The plan includes:

    Rebuilding the nation’s transportation and energy infrastructure;
     Reviving U.S. manufacturing and ending the exportation of U.S. jobs;
     -- Putting people to work in local communities;
    Helping states and local governments to prevent layoffs and cuts to public services;
    Extending unemployment insurance (UI) benefits and helping homeowners keep their homes; and
    Reforming Wall Street so it helps Main Street create jobs.

Here’s detailed look:

AFL-CIO’s ‘America Wants To Work Action Plan’

Three decades of Wall Street and corporate-dominated economic policies drove our economy into the ground, and we are still paying a high price for these policy failures. Unemployment and underemployment are projected to remain at crisis levels for years; our trade deficit is growing; the housing market continues its downward slide; millions of Americans are facing foreclosure; and real wages are stagnant. The AFL-CIO calls on Congress and the administration for big, bold, timely action to put America back to work, retain good jobs, and rebuild the U.S. economy.

1. Rebuild America’s schools and transportation and energy systems. If we have the will to tackle the jobs crisis, there is no mystery about how to go about doing it. We need to invest at least $2.2 trillion in repairing our crumbling 20^th century infrastructure and another $2 trillion building a modern clean energy infrastructure for the 21^st century. These investments would put millions of people to work while laying the foundation for long-term economic growth and competitiveness.

Congress should fund the Surface Transportation Act at $556 billion over six years, as proposed by President Obama; identify revenues to fund enhanced investment in highways, transit, rail, and ports; allow transit agencies to flexibly use federal funds to save and create jobs; fully fund Amtrak and make it the centerpiece of our high-speed rail program; pass a robust reauthorization bill for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that would sustain or create 300,000 jobs; adopt a national policy to get truly high-speed broadband to every individual, family, business, and community in America; create a government-backed bond program to help state and local governments finance the maintenance and repair of infrastructure, as well as new construction projects; reauthorize and expand the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA), the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Water State Revolving Fund; fund port dredging and maritime investment projects; renew the Building Star program to create jobs through the installation of energy-saving technology; create an adequately financed infrastructure bank to fund good jobs; and ensure that U.S. tax dollars are used to create U.S. jobs by insisting on Buy America safeguards.

Sen. Boxer's shorter-term reauthorization of the Surface Transportation Act, which would sustain or create 1.9 million jobs, awaits immediate action by Congress when it returns from the August recess, and Congress must not put thousands of FAA employees and construction workers out of work by allowing the FAA reauthorization to expire yet again.

2. Revive U.S. manufacturing and stop exporting good jobs overseas. We cannot hope to restore our economy to health unless we revive American manufacturing. This will require action on many fronts, including ending currency manipulation, reforming tax policy, enforcing and reforming our trade policies, strengthening government procurement policies, and increasing investment in job training. Congress should take concrete action to stem currency manipulation by passing the Currency Exchange Rate Oversight Reform Act. It should also renew tax incentives for investments in advanced energy (Section 48C); expand Title 17 loan guarantees to include investments in energy efficiency; end tax incentives that encourage the offshoring of good manufacturing jobs; enhance Buy America safeguards; reform our trade agreements to raise global labor and environmental standards and support good jobs at home; enforce our trade laws; reauthorize a robust Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program for workers who lose their jobs due to trade; and oppose free trade deals with Korea, Colombia, and Panama.

3. Put people to work doing work that needs to be done. There are 25 million people in America who need full-time work, and there is plenty of work to be done. Congress should pass legislation to provide for the direct creation of millions of jobs in local communities, such as Rep. Miller’s “Local Jobs for America Act” or Rep. Schakowsky’s “Emergency Jobs to Restore the American Dream Act.” These jobs must pay competitive wages and target distressed communities and must not replace existing jobs.

4. Help federal, state, and local governments avoid more layoffs and cutbacks of public services. Layoffs by federal, state and local government are dragging down the economy and making a double dip recession more likely. Congress should make a commitment not to lay off any more federal employees and prevent additional state and local layoffs by providing for increased federal funding of Medicaid when unemployment is high and by providing additional federal investment directly to local communities to save and create jobs and protect and restore public services.

5. Help fill the massive shortfall of consumer demand by extending unemployment benefits and keeping homeowners in their homes. Over $12 trillion of wealth was destroyed in 2008 when the housing bubble and stock market collapsed, and our economy continues to suffer from a massive shortfall of consumer demand. This is the primary reason why businesses are not hiring. Extending unemployment benefits for jobless workers and providing relief for homeowners facing foreclosure can help reduce this drag on the economy. If banks lowered the principal balance on all underwater mortgages to their current market value, over $70 billion per year would be pumped back into the economy, millions of families would be able to stay in their homes, and over one million jobs would be created. Congress and the administration should provide for mandatory reduction of principal for homeowners facing foreclosure—through bankruptcy reform, mandatory mediation, or other means. Congress should also extend the federal unemployment benefits program for another year.

6. Reform Wall Street so that it helps Main Street create jobs. The financial sector should channel capital to productive sectors of the economy, but the financial sector now diverts far too many resources from the productive economy, fails to finance productive investment, and endangers the global economy with its reckless gambling. Congress and the administration should pass legislation to encourage more lending to small businesses; enact a Financial Speculation Tax to discourage harmful speculation and make Wall Street pay to rebuild the economy it helped destroy; and enforce tough safeguards to stop the kind of cheating and massive fraud on Wall Street that precipitated the crisis of 2008.

The solutions we propose must be on the same scale as the problems we face. Half measures will not put America back to work. Nor will the same old Wall Street economic policies that drove our economy into the ground in the first place.

Four workers joined Trumka, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler and AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker at today’s press conference. They told reporters their personal stories about struggling to find work and fighting back against the attacks on workers and workers’ rights being waged by extremist politicians in states across the nation.

Leann Bosquez, a member of the AFL-CIO community affiliate Working America, has been out of work since early this year. A former retail sales manager with a reputation for boosting sales and cutting costs says:

I’ve never had difficulty getting a job before. But now I send out resumes or talk to people and they say I’m either overqualified or undereducated. There are hundreds of people applying for the same job. It’s clear more must be done to create jobs.

New Hampshire Electrical Workers (IBEW) member Steve Soule describes himself as a “conservative Republican,” but he fiercely opposes Republican attacks on workers such as the fight in New Hampshire over so-called right to work legislation. The Navy combat veteran says:

I don’t support Republican efforts to diminish unions. My family benefits from what labor unions do. Being in a union has allowed me to have a family and a job with security and benefits. It’s a good thing for me and a good thing for my community.

Many young workers are not as fortunate as Soule to have steady work in a good job with a union contact. Shuler says the jobs crisis has hit young workers particularly hard, with 22.5 percent of high school graduates under 25 years old jobless in 2010, compared with 12 percent in 2007. Too many politicians, she says, are focusing on “deficit reduction” and cutting vital programs instead of investing in jobs.

Without investment in job creation, young people will suffer in the future as the result of stunted opportunities in the present.

Mobilizing for job creation and economic justice will be the focus of the AFL-CIO’s Next Up Young Workers Summit to be held Sept. 29 to Oct. 2 in Minneapolis.

While the faltering economy has taken its toll on jobs and working families, there have been deliberate attacks on public service workers by politicians like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R), Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) and others. These extremist lawmakers blame workers for their states’ economic crises—not their failed corporate-backed policies—and claim eliminating workers’ rights to collectively bargain will somehow solve their economic problems.

“B.J.” Simmons Talley, an AFSCME member and Ohio bus driver for 32 years, says she is offended by Kasich’s targeting of public employees.

I’ve been watching Gov. Kasich. What he’s done hasn’t created any jobs, he’s just attacked workers, teachers, firefighters….He’s taken money from public schools. We’re not trying to be rich. We just want to feed our families, buy clothes for our kids and send them to school and hope there are jobs for them when they get out.

Holt Baker says that along with attacks on workers’ rights, these same extremist lawmakers are pushing voter suppression efforts that could disenfranchise as many as 21 million people, especially young people, people of color and poor people. She says the voter suppression drive is “shocking” and “reminiscent of the 1950’s…and a new poll tax.”

This year, state legislators in 34 states—nearly all Republicans—introduced voter ID laws under the guise of preventing voter fraud. But these laws disenfranchise voters rather than stopping actual fraud. Even the Bush administration’s Department of Justice’s comprehensive five-year investigation uncovered only 86 instances of improper voting across the entire country.

Like many union and other workers this year, Dawn Jennewein isn’t passively sitting around, instead she is fighting back against these assaults on workers. The vice president of her Missouri Communications Workers of America (CWA) local union says she has been holding politicians accountable and speaking out rallies because:

if we don’t fight for our future, our kids and our grandkids, they won’t have anything. We have to fight for them like the retirees before us fought for what we have today.

Trumka also announced the creation of an independent advocacy PAC that will “build the political power for America’s silent majority, the middle class and poor who are struggling to get by.”

It will be an effort by and for working people, communicating beyond our membership and striving to ensure all who work a strong and clear voice in the political process.

Why Neoliberals Have Trouble Telling the Truth

2011-08-29T09:31:00.001-07:00

Media Wars and Manufacturing Consent:

Getting People to Vote Against Themselves

By Carl Davidson
Keep On Keepin' On

"Newt Gingrich: Obama's 'Bureaucratic Socialism' Kills Jobs" is one of many similar headlines appearing on dozens of web-based news portals in this 2012 election season. This one keeps popping up, and I'm getting sick of seeing it.

The reason? It manages to pack several major lies, each of which you could write a book about, into just five words-and hardly an editor anywhere takes a blue pencil to it.

Don't get me wrong. I've got no problem with 'socialism.' My shoot-from-the hip response when someone spits the 'S' word out in a political argument is, "Socialism? I've been a socialist all my life, and proud of it. We should be so lucky as to have some socialism around here. Unfortunately, we're not even close."

First of all, Barack Obama is not a socialist. Even back in his more youthful years in Illinois, at best on a good day, he was simply a neo-Keynesian liberal with a few high tech green ideas. Keynesians believe, among other things, that when markets fail, government has the task of being the consumer of last resort, even hiring people directly to build infrastructure and put people to work,

But these days, surrounded by a 'Team of Rivals' largely from Wall Street, Obama has set aside any earlier Keynesian policies he held and has been, wittingly or not, sucked into the black hole of the prevailing neoliberal hegemony.

What's 'Neoliberal hegemony?' That's a shorthand phrase for the current domination of our government by Wall Street finance capital. It simply wants to diminish any government initiatives or programs, except for those that line their own pockets.

Keynesians and others, in and out of government, have opposed the neoliberals. They've advocated a range of reasonable proposals for getting us out of the current crisis-ending the wars, Employee Free Choice Act, Medicare for All, the People's Budget submitted by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Rep. John Conyer's HR 870 Full Employment Bill-but they all keep getting declared "off the table" by the neoliberals.

On Gingrich's second charge, far from being 'bureaucratic,' Obama, wisely or not, has actually reduced the number of federal employees, and made other cuts that will cause the states to do likewise.

On the third charge, far from 'killing jobs,' Obama's initial proposals regarding employment have actually created a few jobs, but not nearly enough. Why? Because of the real job-killing votes of Gingrich's Republican allies in the House.

It doesn't take a chess champion to figure any of this out. Any decent checker player could make an honest call of the false moves in the 'socialist job killer' gambit of Gingrich and other GOP presidential pretenders running the same rap.

But why distort the truth this way? Newt Gingrich is a smart man. He knows that Keynesianism is designed to keep capitalism going, and that socialism is something quite different and has very little to do with this debate. So why does he keep this 'Big Lie' business up?

It's a smokescreen. At bottom, Gingrich, the GOP and the far right are promoting a grand neoliberal project to repeal the New Deal and the Great Society, the primary past examples of liberal government dealing with market failure.

The right's problem is too many things that came out of those periods had some success and are still popular with a majority of voters-the elderly like Medicare and Social Security, labor likes the Wagner Act and the right to bargain collectively, Blacks and other minorities like the Voting Rights Act, and women like Title Seven. To take them all down, which is what the neoliberal-far right alliance wants, means you have to attack them indirectly, rather than directly.

So how does it work? You have to start with what most people fear most-losing their jobs-and then combine it with the darker demons of our past, such as anti-communism, racism and sexism. Next you mush all your potential adversaries--the socialist left, the liberals and progressives, and the FDR-loving moderates--into one huge combined bogey man. You make it into a hideous package that's going to scare voters into casting ballots against themselves. To put a fancier term on it, it's called manufacturing consent to combine with outright coercive force in getting you to submit to a renewed hegemonic bloc.

That's what Newt is doing here. In short, it's when they get you to think all your neighbors and co-workers are your enemies, while all the guys on Wall Street are your friends. You're going to hear a lot of it over the next year. Don't fall for it.

Time to Get Serious About Full Employment

2011-08-23T05:20:00.001-07:00

Yes, We Need a Jobs Program, But One

That Doesn't Tinker Around the Edges

By Carl Davidson
Keep On Keepin' On

Our regional daily newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, to its credit, came out with an editorial today, Aug. 22, 2011, urging President Obama to push for a substantial jobs program over Republican opposition.

"Action on jobs: Obama must push hard to get people back to work" is the headline, and a key point stresses "Mr. Obama now needs to offer proposals equal to the size of the problem. That means bold strokes, not half-measures. If his Republican antagonists in Congress are determined to stand in the way of getting Americans back to work, the president must say so publicly -- and then go over their heads to enlist the nation in his effort."

Terrific, a good framing of the question. Unfortunately, however, once you get into the substance of the piece, it turns into a muddle. The Post-Gazette offers up a hodgepodge of proposals that tinker around the edges of the problem-more tax cuts and credits for jobs created, more unemployment benefits, and oddly, more trade deals, even though these deals mostly result in net job losses.

Here's the heart of the matter. In a down economy, jobs are created by increasing demand, by more customers with bigger orders coming to a firm's doors. The problem is that consumer demand has taken a nose dive when the credit bubble burst. People don't have money to spend. They're cutting back on everything, and trying to unload their debt. This means business-to-business orders shrink as well. Companies may be cash-rich and have high profits, but with no increase in orders or customers at their door, they aren't likely to hire people to do nothing just to get a tax credit.

This is where government has to become the key customer. It has to make huge productive purchases for local work and local materials to build productive infrastructure-county-owned green energy plants, new and improved schools, modernized locks and dams, Medicare for all, investment in young students and veterans like we did with the GI Bill, investment in research in new industries, and so on.

Most important, to work well, it can't be nickel-and-dimed to death. It has to be on the scale of the expenditures for World War 2. That's when the 'multiplier effect' can kick in, and related growth in manufacturing can take off in turn. And it has to be paid for by going to where the most appropriate money is, imposing a financial transaction tax on unproductive and destabilizing speculation by Wall Street.

The best the P-G does on this matter is to support Obama's proposal for an 'Infrastructure Bank,' but urges him to find a way to bypass a GOP roadblock in Congress.

But even that is too passive. It says, in effect, here's a small pot of money. If you want to repair some roads, come and get some.

What we really need is something like the New Deal's Tennessee Valley Authority and Works Progress Administration, but on steroids, a TVA-WPA-CCC 2.0. We need to pass John Conyer's HR 870 Full employment Bill. We need the Dept. of Energy and the Dept. of Labor to go to every county in the country with a fully funded proposal to build new green energy wind farms and solar power arrays as public energy utilities, hiring local workers at union scale, with no obstacles to a union election. And that's just for starters.

Yes, we need a serious jobs program. But it's time for everyone who utters that phrase to get serious themselves. Why? Because it's going to take a massive upsurge in class struggle to get it by removing those standing in the way.

[Carl Davidson is a Steelworker Associate and a retired computer technician living in Beaver County. His 'Keep On Keepin' On' column appears in Beaver County Blue, website of the 4th CD Progressive Democrats of America.]

Progressive Cynicism and Misplaced White Anger

2011-08-21T04:44:00.001-07:00

The Far Right's Two Magic Weapons for 2012

By Carl Davidson
Keep On Keepin' On

If you want a Republican sweep in the 2012 election, follow this simple formula: Keep blaming the White House alone as the main cause of every problem the country faces, and ignore the Tea Party as overblown has-beens.

That's not advice from me. That's from Richard Viguerie, who some might remember as the think-tanker and skilled pollster of the 1970's New Right that helped usher in Reagan and the era of neoliberal hegemony we've suffered under ever since. That's what he hopes the center and left will do over the next year.

An Aug, 10, 2011 syndicated column by Viguerie reminds us that presidential elections don't require a majority of popular votes, but only a majority of votes in the Electoral College.

"The Aug. 8 Gallup tracking poll shows that Obama is at 50 percent or better approval rating in only 16 states, the majority of which are normally considered Democratic bastions. Those 16 states represent 203 electoral votes of the 270 needed to win the presidency." Then he adds: "Key states, such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida that contributed to Obama's 365-to-173 blowout of the McCain-Palin ticket in 2008, are in play at this time. It gets better. The states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida, which are now in play, were three of the top states where the tea party wave swept new constitutional conservative members into Congress."

Viguerie goes on to discuss the role of the Tea Party insurgency in Michigan and California among angry white voters. He adds an astute point: if the GOP puts up a 'moderate' like Romney, Obama wins narrowly. But if it plays its 'wild cards' like Bachmann and Perry, the far right's activist base is energized-and at a time when Obama's strategy is dissing his own left-progressive base for the wimpy and ever-narrowing 'center.'

In short, keep the left inactive, the progressives and the center divided, and the Tea Party energizer bunnies get their 270 electoral votes.

It's not a bad projection for the prospects of a neoliberal alliance with proto-fascists, with the latter in the driver's seat. The alternative view is that the majority of serious Wall St finance capital is circling the wagons around Obama. They're not interested in the wilder instabilities that would be fueled by Bachmann or Perry White House.

Maybe so. Serious money matters in American politics. But the far right has some serious money too, and they can combine it with an army of insurgents.

Therein lays our problem. At the moment, we have no candidate for peace and prosperity at the top of the ticket. But we need candidates of that sort at any level if we are to unite and mobilize a left-progressive base in 2012. We have the negative motivator of a possible Tea Party win, but only if we take them seriously. But we need more than that. We need candidates that will fight positively for what working-class people need, not what Wall Street needs. The People's Budget of the Congressional Progressive Caucus is a good starting point. We'll have some candidates who will back it, but we'll need them placed in the states with clout in electoral votes. We don't have enough at the moment.

Don't expect much help from the Blue Dog and upper crust Democrats. No matter how you slice it, it's going to be a tough fight. So organize your co-workers and neighbors independently, and prepare for some fierce battles.

Money for War vs. Money for Jobs

2011-08-17T04:34:00.001-07:00

True Cost of US Wars Unknown

By Nancy A. Youssef
Beaver County Peace Links via McClatchy Newspapers

The Pentagon says it spends about $9.7 billion per month, but its cryptic accounting system hides the true price tag of the two wars.

Aug 16, 2011 - When congressional cost-cutters meet later this year to decide on trimming the federal budget, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could represent juicy targets. But how much do the wars actually cost the US taxpayer?

Nobody really knows.

Yes, Congress has allotted $1.3 trillion for war spending through fiscal year 2011 just to the Defense Department. There are long Pentagon spreadsheets that outline how much of that was spent on personnel, transportation, fuel and other costs. In a recent speech, President Barack Obama assigned the wars a $1 trillion price tag.

But all those numbers are incomplete. Besides what Congress appropriated, the Pentagon spent an additional unknown amount from its $5.2 trillion base budget over that same period. According to a recent Brown University study, the wars and their ripple effects have cost the United States $3.7 trillion, or more than $12,000 per American.

Lawmakers remain sharply divided over the wisdom of slashing the military budget, even with the United States winding down two long conflicts, but there's also a more fundamental problem: It's almost impossible to pin down just what the US military spends on war.

To be sure, the costs are staggering.

According to Defense Department figures, by the end of April the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - including everything from personnel and equipment to training Iraqi and Afghan security forces and deploying intelligence-gathering drones - had cost an average of $9.7 billion a month, with roughly two-thirds going to Afghanistan. That total is roughly the entire annual budget for the Environmental Protection Agency.

To compare, it would take the State Department - with its annual budget of $27.4 billion - more than four months to spend that amount. NASA could have launched its final shuttle mission in July, which cost $1.5 billion, six times for what the Pentagon is allotted to spend each month in those two wars.

What about Medicare Part D, President George W. Bush's 2003 expansion of prescription drug benefits for seniors, which cost a Congressional Budget Office-estimated $385 billion over 10 years? The Pentagon spends that in Iraq and Afghanistan in about 40 months.

Because of the complex and often ambiguous Pentagon budgeting process, it's nearly impossible to get an accurate breakdown of every operating cost. Some funding comes out of the base budget; other money comes from supplemental appropriations.

But the estimates can be eye-popping, especially considering the logistical challenges to getting even the most basic equipment and comforts to troops in extremely forbidding terrain.

In Afghanistan, for example, the US military spent $1.5 billion to purchase 329.8 million gallons of fuel for vehicles, aircraft and generators from October 2010 to May 2011. That's a not-unheard-of $4.55 per gallon, but it doesn't include the cost of getting the fuel to combat zones and the human cost of transporting it through hostile areas, which can hike the cost to hundreds of dollars a gallon.

Just getting air-conditioning to troops in Afghanistan, including transport and maintenance, costs $20 billion per year, retired Brig. Gen. Steve Anderson told National Public Radio recently. That's half the amount that the federal government has spent on Amtrak over 40 years.

War spending falls behind tax cuts and prescription drug benefits for seniors as contributors to the $14.3 trillion federal debt. The Pentagon's base budget has grown every year for the past 14 years, marking the longest sustained growth period in US history, but it seems clear that that era is ending.

Since the US government issued war bonds to help finance World War II, Washington has asked taxpayers to shoulder less and less of a burden in times of conflict. In the early 1950s Congress raised taxes by 4 percent of the gross domestic product to pay for the Korean War; in 1968, during the Vietnam War, a tax was imposed to raise revenue by about 1 percent of GDP.

No such mechanism was imposed for Iraq or Afghanistan, and in the early years of the wars Congress didn't even demand a true accounting of war spending, giving the military whatever it needed. Now, at a time of fiscal woes and with the American public weary of the wars, the question has become how much the nation's largest bureaucracy should cut.

"The debt crisis has been a game changer in terms of defense spending," said Laura Peterson, a national security analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog.

"It used to be that asking how much the wars cost was unpatriotic. The attitude going into the war is you spend whatever you cost. Now maybe asking is more patriotic."

Still, deep cuts to the Pentagon remain unpalatable to many lawmakers. The debt limit deal that Congress passed earlier this month calls for $350 billion in "defense and security" spending cuts through 2024, but that's expected to be spread across several government agencies, sparing the Pentagon much of the blow.

However, if the 12-member bipartisan "super-committee" of lawmakers can't agree on further federal budget cuts later this year, the law mandates across-the-board cuts of $1.2 trillion over 10 years, with half of that coming from the Pentagon. The prospect of such deep defense cuts is thought to provide a strong incentive for deficit hawks to compromise and spread the pain more broadly.

Politics aside, finding defense savings is complex, even with the Obama administration trying to wind down two wars. For one thing, reducing troop levels doesn't necessarily yield commensurate cost reductions, given the huge amount of infrastructure the military still maintains in each country.

In Afghanistan, the cost per service member climbed from $507,000 in fiscal year 2009 to $667,000 the following year, according to the Congressional Research Service. Fiscal year 2011 costs are expected to reach $694,000 per service member, even as the US military begins drawing down 33,000 of the 99,000 troops there.

In Iraq, even with the overall costs of the war declining and the US military scheduled to withdraw its remaining 46,000 troops by the end of this year, the cost per service member spiked from $510,000 in 2007 to $802,000 this year.

In fiscal year 2011, Congress authorized $113 billion for the war in Afghanistan and $46 billion for Iraq. The Pentagon's 2012 budget request is lower: $107 billion for Afghanistan and $11 billion for Iraq.

In the more austere fiscal climate, the Pentagon has tried to be proactive, proposing cuts to some major military programs such as the controversial and hugely expensive F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has called the national debt the biggest threat to US national security. Before leaving office last month as defense secretary, Robert Gates ordered his department to find ways to cut $400 billion from the defense budget over 12 years, under Obama's orders.

Among the challenges of determining the costs of war is defining what to include. Rising health care costs for veterans? The damage done to Iraqi and Afghan families, cities and institutions? Holding tens of thousands of detainees at US military prisons in those two countries and others around the world? The massive interest on war-related debt, which some experts say could reach $1 trillion by 2020?

"The ripple effects on the US economy have also been significant, including job loss and interest rate increases, and those effects have been underappreciated," wrote a team of Brown University experts who authored a June report called "Costs of War."

Critics of the defense budget process note that the US already has paid a heavy cost for the wars, spending billions to wind up with older equipment and troops receiving less training.

Winslow Wheeler, who worked on national security issues on Capitol Hill for 30 years, said the Navy and Air Force fleets were smaller after a decade of war. The Army has been left with run-down, overworked vehicles and equipment.

"The danger of that is that as we blithely go on not paying attention, things happen that we don't notice, like the older, less trained forces," Wheeler said. Because the cost of replacing equipment has risen dramatically over the past decade, "what we are paying is a higher cost for a smaller force." He likened it to replacing a Lamborghini with a Volkswagen.

‘My City of Ruins’ from Bruce Springsteen, Telling It Like It Is…Pass it on!

2011-08-11T12:37:00.001-07:00

It's time for a Main Street Contract for the American People. National Nurses United has embarked on a campaign to reverse national priorities and policies that have placed the interests of Wall Street over the crisis facing American families today. The goal is to chart a new contract for the American people — for a better life today and a more secure future for our children and future generations. www.mainstreetcontract.org

‘Deal’ Vote Reveals Lay of the Land

2011-08-02T07:38:00.001-07:00

House Backs Debt Deal, But Dems Split

With 95 'Conscience' Democrats Voting 'No'

By John Nichols
Progressive America Rising via The Nation

August 1, 2011 - House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi reportedly told members of the House Democratic Caucus to vote their "individual consciences" when they were asked to approve the debt-celing deal cobbled together by the Obama White House and congressional Republicans.

Consciences divided evenly, with 95 Democrats opposed the compromise agreement while 95 supported it in a Monday evening vote that saw the measure pass primarily on the basis of Republican backing —despite the fact that this was a deal promoted aggressively by a Democratic White House.

The final tally was 269 in favor, 161 opposed [1].

Republicans generally backed the deal, with 174 voting "yes" while 66 voted "yes."

Democrats were far more closely divided, with widespread opposition to what Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Keith Ellison, D-Minnesota, described as a violation of "core Democratic ideals."

While Pelosi cast her own viote in favor of the agreement, she did not "whip" her fellow Democrats to back the deal during a marathon caucus meeting Monday. The former speaker outlined the consequences of a default by the federal government if an agreement to raise the debt ceiling is not reached. But North Carolina Congressman G.K. Butterfield, who attended the caucus session said Pelosi avoided pressuring House Democrats to fall in line with the Democrats in the White House. "She toldus to leave it to our individual consciences," Butterfield told reporters.

With the House vote done, the Senate will be vote Tuesday on the deal, which proposes radical cuts in federal programs—cuts that some fear will ultimately threaten Medicare and other Democratic “legacy” programs—in return for raising the nation’s debt ceiling.

The Senate is likely to back the deal that was cut between the Obama White House and Republican leaders; Senate majority leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, is already on board, as are key Republicans.

The general sense from the start was that the real test would come in the House, where Republican leaders had to scramble to keep Tea Party conservatives on board, and White House faced a revolt by progressives.

Even as Pelosi and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer indicated personal support for the measure, a striking number of Democratic spoke out in opposition to Obama's position before the hastily-scheduled Monday evening vote.

Congressman Pete DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat who frequently breaks with the White House when he feels the president is not doing enough to address unemployment, went to the House floor Monday to declare that this is a “no jobs” deal. Ohio Congressman Marcy Kaptur was opposed. Veteran New York Congressmen Jerry Nadler and Eliot Engle indicated early on that they are firmly opposed, as did former House Ways and Means Committee chair Charles Rangel, D-New York. Illinois Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. was another “no.” California Congresswoman Maxine Waters announced her "no" vote with a declaration that the deal was "one of the worst pieces of public policy" she had ever seen.

The progressive opposition to the deal grew, as grassroots groups stepped up their lobbying against the package. Progressive Change Campaign Committee [2] co-founder Adam Green said: “This deal will kill our economy and is an attack on middle-class families. It asks nothing of the rich, will reduce middle-class jobs, and lines up Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for cuts. Today, we’re putting in thousands of calls to Congress urging Democrats to keep their promise and oppose this awful bill. The 14th Amendment is unambiguous, and President Obama should invoke it to pay our nation’s debt. Then Democrats should focus on jobs—not cuts—in order to grow our economy.”

Progressive Democrats of America launched a national “No Deal!” push. “The corporatists in Congress recognize that the United States cannot go into default for the first time in its 235-year history,” said PDA director Tim Carpenter. “Yet, they are claiming that we can only increase the debt ceiling by cutting vital social programs designed to protect working class and poor people across this country. Don’t drink the Kool-Aid! [3] We can block this “deal” and demand a clean debt ceiling increase.”

At least 20 members of National People's Action, a group that seeks to hold banks and financial institutions to account for the damage their speculation has done to the U.S. economy, were arrested when they disrupted debate in the Capitol. Decrying the debt-ceiling agreement as "a raw deal," the NPA members chanted: "Hey, Boehner, get a clue, it's about revenue!"

Congressional Progressive Caucus and Congressional Black Caucus members expressed the most serious skepticism regarding the measure.

That skepticism was rooted in a sense that this was a bad deal for both the economy and a Democratic Party that has historically positioned itself as the defender of working families.

Harry Truman used to say: “Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time.”

If the thirty-third president was right, then Barack Obama did himself and his party a world of hurt by cutting the deal with the GOP leadership.

Faced with the threat that Tea Party–pressured Republicans in the House really would steer the United States toward default, and in so doing steer the US economy over the cliff, Obama had to do something. But instead of bold action—borrowing a page from Ronald Reagan to demand a straight up-or-down vote on raising the debt ceiling; borrowing a page from Franklin Roosevelt to pledge to use the authority afforded him by the Constitution to defend the full faith and credit of the United States—the president engaged in inside-the-Beltway bargaining of the most dysfunctional sort.

In cutting a deal with Congressional Republicans [4] that places Democratic legacy programs—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—at risk while cutting essential programs for working families and the poor, Obama has positioned himself and his administration to the right of where mainstream Republicans such as Howard Baker, Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush used to stand in fights with the fringe elements of their party.

Now, the fringe is in charge of the GOP. And Obama is aggreeing to policies that are designed to satisfy Republicans that Britain’s banking minister describes as “right-wing nutters [5].’”

Obama and Democratic Congressional leaders claimed they have done everything in their power to avert deep cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And it is true that they have given the Republicans (and their paymasters) less than House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan was demanding with a budget proposal that turned Medicare into a voucher program and began the process of privatizing Social Security.

But a compromise with total destruction can still do a lot of damage.

The president’s bow to the political extremism—and the economic irrationality [6]—of a tiny circle of “right-wing nutters” in Congress and their dwindling Tea Party “base” will, according to reports based on briefings by White House and GOP aides, “raise the debt limit by about $2.7 trillion and reduce the deficit by the same amount in two steps. It would cut about $1 trillion in spending up front and set up a select bicameral committee to put together a future deficit-reduction package worth $1.7 trillion to $1.8 trillion. Failure of Congress to pass the future deficit-reduction package would automatically trigger cuts to defense spending and Medicare.”

An aide familiar with the deal told the Hill newspaper that the Medicare cut would not affect beneficiaries. “Instead,” the aide indicated, “healthcare providers and insurance companies would see lower payments.”

But that’s still a squeezing of Medicare in order to meet the demands of Congressional Republicans who have spent the past six months trying to put the program on the chopping block.

Congressional Black Caucus chairman Emanuel Cleaver, D-Missouri, responded to initial reports regarding the deal by describing it as “a sugar-coated Satan sandwich [7].”

Congressional Progressive Caucus [8] co-chair Raul Grijalva said Obama and his negotiators bent too far to the extremists. Like many progressives, Grijalva favored the straight up-or-down vote on debt ceiling. “Had that vote failed,” he argued, “the president should have exercised his Fourteenth Amendment responsibilities and ended this manufactured crisis.”

Grijalva joined members of the Congerssional Progressive Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus at a Monday press conference, where they called on Obama to sidestep Congress and raise the debt limit by invoking the Fourteenth Amendment [9].

Obama has rejected this option.

Instead of taking a tough stance, the president blinked in the face of Republican recalcitrance. And in so doing Obama agreed to what the Progressive Caucus co-chair described as “a cure as bad as the disease.”

“This deal trades people’s livelihoods for the votes of a few unappeasable right-wing radicals, and I will not support it,” Grijalva declared Sunday afternoon. [10] “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.”

Grijalva expressed immediate opposition to the deal. And he was not alone.

Congresswoman Donna Edwards, D-Maryland, slammed the deal. [11]

“Nada from million/billionaires; corp tax loopholes aplenty; only sacrifice from the poor/middle class? Shared sacrifice, balance? Really?” she complained, via Twitter, on Sunday.

Congresswoman Barbara Lee, D-California, complained that she was “not sure how Social Security and Medicare” will be preserved by the bargain the president has cut with the Republicans. “We have to make sure that within this deal…Medicare and Medicare and Social Security and the most vulnerable are protected,” she said, while withholding an endorsement of the measure. “I worry about these triggers [for more cuts],” Lee concluded.

Grijalva objected, in particular, to the lack of shared sacrifice in the deal.

“This deal does not even attempt to strike a balance between more cuts for the working people of America and a fairer contribution from millionaires and corporations. The very wealthy will continue to receive taxpayer handouts, and corporations will keep their expensive federal giveaways. Meanwhile, millions of families unfairly lose more in this deal than they have already lost. I will not be a part of it,” the Arizona congressman explained. “Republicans have succeeded in imposing their vision of a country without real economic hope. Their message has no public appeal, and Democrats have had every opportunity to stand firm in the face of their irrational demands. Progressives have been rallying support for the successful government programs that have meant health and economic security to generations of our people. Today we, and everyone we have worked to speak for and fight for, were thrown under the bus. We have made our bottom line clear for months: a final deal must strike a balance between cuts and revenue, and must not put all the burden on the working people of this country. This deal fails those tests and many more.”

But Grijalva’s gripe was not merely a moral or economic one.

It was political, as well.

“The Democratic Party, no less than the Republican Party, is at a very serious crossroads at this moment. For decades Democrats have stood for a capable, meaningful government—a government that works for the people, not just the powerful, and that represents everyone fairly and equally. This deal weakens the Democratic Party as badly as it weakens the country,” explained Grijalva. “We have given much and received nothing in return. The lesson today is that Republicans can hold their breath long enough to get what they want. While I believe the country will not reward them for this in the long run, the damage has already been done.”

The question that remains is: How much damage? How much damage to vulnerable Americans? How much damage to the global reputation of the United States as a functional state? How much damage to a US economy that is threatened by rising unemployment? How much damage to the image of the Democratic Party as a defender of working families?

This deal cannot be defended as a sound or necessary response to a manufactured debt-ceiling debate and the mess that House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, has made of it.

That is why the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus said: “I will not support the emerging debt deal.”

“I will have no part of a deal that cuts Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to appease the farthest reaches of the right wing of the Republican Party,” argued Grijalva. “It is unconscionable to put these programs on the chopping block and ignore the voices and beliefs of the millions of Americans who trust us to lead while continuing to give handouts to the ultra wealthy and the largest corporations. There is no human decency in that.”

Like this blog post? Read it on The Nation’s free iPhone App, NationNow. [12]
Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/blog/162461/house-passes-obamas-debt-deal-even-most-dems-reject-it

Links:
[1] http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/60443.html
[2] http://www.boldprogressives.org
[3] http://www.pdamerica.org/
[4] http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/174595-reid-signs-off-on-bipartisan-debt-deal
[5] http://www.thenation.com/../../../../../../blog/162258/right-wing-nutters-threaten-global-economy-imf-warns-disastrous-consequences
[6] http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/174571-compromise-deal-could-include-broad-spending-cuts-as-a-trigger
[7] http://www.rollcall.com/issues/57_17/Debt-Deal-Emerging-With-Rightward-Tilt-207893-1.html
[8] http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/
[9] http://thehill.com/homenews/house/174601-house-liberals-urge-14th-amendment-fix-in-lieu-of-bipartisan-debt-deal
[10] http://grijalva.house.gov/index.cfm?sectionid=13&sectiontree=5,13&itemid=1063
[11] http://thehill.com/homenews/house/174599-pelosi-dem-leaders-withholding-judgment
[12] http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/nationnow/id399704758?mt=8

Obama Flunking Test on Education

2011-07-31T11:58:00.001-07:00

Teachers March on Washington,

Demanding 'Save Our Schools!'

By Michael Alison Chandler and Sarah Khan
Progressive America Rising via WashPost

July 30, 2011 - There are many reasons thousands of teachers traveled across the country to protest in front of the White House on Saturday — including to oppose charter schools, to fight for equal funding for poor schools, and to have more say in public education policies.

But at a noisy rally starting at noon under soaring temperatures, their message boiled down to one point, which was summed up by the sound check before the first speaker took the stage:

Tap. Tap. “No testing, no testing, 1-2-3.”

The assembled teachers, education advocates and parents vented a frustration they said has been building since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002, which made standardized testing the centerpiece of a school reform agenda championed by George W. Bush.

With the election of Barack Obama in 2008, many thought their long-standing complaints, about how the policy has imposed unfair penalties on the poorest schools and how it has narrowed curriculum to make time for test preparation, would finally be heard.

But three years later, the law is still intact, more schools are being labeled as failing, and standardized tests are starting to be used to make teacher tenure and termination decisions.

“We had reason to believe from his campaign promises that Obama was going to reverse the damage that this law has caused,” said Jonathan Kozol, a public education activist and author. “He has betrayed us. . . . That’s why we are here today.”

And so about 5,000 people, according to the organizers’ estimates, stood on the Ellipse between the White House and the Washington Monument and waved posters that read “Boycott NCLB” and “Teach Me, Don’t Just Test Me.”

A row of white tents on the edge of the crowd offered shade next to an art display of a graveyard meant to represent “the very real destruction that NCLB has brought to the important experiences and processes of learning.” Most teachers baked on the lawn, waving fans emblazoned with the Washington Teachers’ Union logo.

The “Save Our Schools March” was part of a four-day event including a two-day conference at American University with dozens of workshops, such as “Winning the Testing War” and “Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline.” There was also a half-day strategy session and a film festival, headlined by the documentary “The Inconvenient Truth About Waiting for Superman,” a response to the 2010 film “Waiting for Superman,” which featured then-D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and which promoted charter schools.

The event, which was endorsed by the two major teachers unions, took about a year and $150,000 to organize. At least a dozen other cities hosted sister rallies or events. The demonstration’s leaders are a core group of teachers, parent activists and education bloggers who maintain that federal policies are too influenced by business leaders and too little by educators who know how policies play out in classrooms.

The White House invited some of the organizers to speak with education policy advisers Friday, but the organizers turned down the offer, saying they would be willing to meet after Saturday’s march. “July 30 is your opportunity to listen to us,” they said in a news statement.

Bonnie Van Roekel, a 61-year-old music teacher from Commerce City, Colo., said she came to the march because “testing has become a ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit” in her district. Teachers are expected to follow scripts for each lesson, a new strategy intended to boost scores, she said. Like many in the crowd, she wore red (“for public ed”) .

Sonya Romero, 36, said she flew from Albuquerque because “No Child Left Behind is demoralizing New Mexico.” The state has a population that is poorer and more diverse than much of the country, she explained. By now, the vast majority of the schools statewide have been classified as “failing” under the federal law, which sets increasingly high pass rates for state tests each year.

Under that “failing” label, Romero’s school has cut back time for physical education and recess, and she has been required to use a new reading curriculum, she said. The regimen “stifles imagination,” she said.

The speakers included a long list of longtime education advocates and a few Hollywood celebrities whose mothers are teachers or public education advocates.

“The Daily Show’s” Jon Stewart sent his support by jumbo-size screen rather than driving to the march because, he said, “the dog ate his car.”

Actor Matt Damon elicited cheers when he commiserated with the crowd. “This has been a horrible decade for teachers,” he said. “The next time you feel down or exhausted . . . please know there are millions of people behind you.”

With that send-off, they marched off the lawn, up 17th Street and around the White House, many chanting, “Education under attack! What do we do? Stand up, fight back.”

Congress: Beware of Yellow Stripes and Pot Holes

2011-07-30T05:59:00.001-07:00

“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity” –William Butler Yeats

The Centrist Cop-Out

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Progressive America Rising via New York Times

July 28, 2011 - The facts of the crisis over the debt ceiling aren’t complicated. Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage, threatening to undermine the economy and disrupt the essential business of government unless they get policy concessions they would never have been able to enact through legislation. And Democrats — who would have been justified in rejecting this extortion altogether — have, in fact, gone a long way toward meeting those Republican demands.

As I said, it’s not complicated. Yet many people in the news media apparently can’t bring themselves to acknowledge this simple reality. News reports portray the parties as equally intransigent; pundits fantasize about some kind of “centrist” uprising, as if the problem was too much partisanship on both sides.

Some of us have long complained about the cult of “balance,” the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts. I joked long ago that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read “Views Differ on Shape of Planet.” But would that cult still rule in a situation as stark as the one we now face, in which one party is clearly engaged in blackmail and the other is dickering over the size of the ransom?

The answer, it turns out, is yes. And this is no laughing matter: The cult of balance has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster. For when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism. Voters won’t punish you for outrageous behavior if all they ever hear is that both sides are at fault.

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. As you may know, President Obama initially tried to strike a “Grand Bargain” with Republicans over taxes and spending. To do so, he not only chose not to make an issue of G.O.P. extortion, he offered extraordinary concessions on Democratic priorities: an increase in the age of Medicare eligibility, sharp spending cuts and only small revenue increases. As The Times’s Nate Silver pointed out, Mr. Obama effectively staked out a position that was not only far to the right of the average voter’s preferences, it was if anything a bit to the right of the average Republican voter’s preferences.

But Republicans rejected the deal. So what was the headline on an Associated Press analysis of that breakdown in negotiations? “Obama, Republicans Trapped by Inflexible Rhetoric.” A Democratic president who bends over backward to accommodate the other side — or, if you prefer, who leans so far to the right that he’s in danger of falling over — is treated as being just the same as his utterly intransigent opponents. Balance!

Which brings me to those “centrist” fantasies.

Many pundits view taking a position in the middle of the political spectrum as a virtue in itself. I don’t. Wisdom doesn’t necessarily reside in the middle of the road, and I want leaders who do the right thing, not the centrist thing.

But for those who insist that the center is always the place to be, I have an important piece of information: We already have a centrist president. Indeed, Bruce Bartlett, who served as a policy analyst in the Reagan administration, argues that Mr. Obama is in practice a moderate conservative.

Mr. Bartlett has a point. The president, as we’ve seen, was willing, even eager, to strike a budget deal that strongly favored conservative priorities. His health reform was very similar to the reform Mitt Romney installed in Massachusetts. Romneycare, in turn, closely followed the outlines of a plan originally proposed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. And returning tax rates on high-income Americans to their level during the Roaring Nineties is hardly a socialist proposal.

True, Republicans insist that Mr. Obama is a leftist seeking a government takeover of the economy, but they would, wouldn’t they? The facts, should anyone choose to report them, say otherwise.

So what’s with the buzz about a centrist uprising? As I see it, it’s coming from people who recognize the dysfunctional nature of modern American politics, but refuse, for whatever reason, to acknowledge the one-sided role of Republican extremists in making our system dysfunctional. And it’s not hard to guess at their motivation. After all, pointing out the obvious truth gets you labeled as a shrill partisan, not just from the right, but from the ranks of self-proclaimed centrists.

But making nebulous calls for centrism, like writing news reports that always place equal blame on both parties, is a big cop-out — a cop-out that only encourages more bad behavior. The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you’re not willing to say that, you’re helping make that problem worse.

David Brooks is off today.

More in Opinion (1 of 18 articles) Op-Ed Columnist: My Very Own Captain America

GOP Still Trying to Dump FDR’s New Deal

2011-07-27T15:00:00.001-07:00

Debt Madness Was Always

About Killing Social Security

By Robert Scheer
Progressive America Rising via Nation of Change Op-Ed

This phony debt crisis has now passed through the looking glass into the realm where madness reigns. What should have been an uneventful moment in which lawmakers make good on the nation’s contractual obligations has instead been seized upon by Republican hypocrites as a moment to settle ideological scores that have nothing to do with the debt.

Hypocrites, because their radical free market ideology, and the resulting total deregulation of the financial markets, is what caused the debt to spiral out of control this last decade. That and the wars George W. Bush launched but didn’t have the integrity to responsibly finance. The consequence was a banking bubble and crash leading to a 50 percent run-up of the debt that has nothing to do with the “entitlements” that those same Republicans have always wanted to destroy.

Even Barack Obama has put cuts in those programs into play, warning ominously that a failure to lift the debt ceiling could cause the government to stop sending out Social Security checks. Why, when the Social Security trust fund is fully funded for the next quarter-century and is owed money by the U.S. Treasury rather than the other way around? Why would we pay foreign creditors before American seniors? The answer, offered as conventional wisdom by leaders of both parties, is that we cannot endanger our credit by failing to back our bonds, even though the Republicans have aroused the alarm of the main U.S. credit rating agencies by their brinkmanship on the debt.

What a topsy-turvy world when the same credit rating agencies that gave the thumbs up to the bankers’ toxic mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps now threaten the AAA rating of U.S. Treasury bonds. According to them, it will not be enough to merely lift the debt ceiling—what had been assumed by both Republican and Democratic presidents to be a routine act. In addition to that, as the credit agency Standard & Poor’s has insisted, more than $4 trillion has to be cut from programs that mostly benefit the victims of the banking meltdown. Otherwise the agencies will downgrade the U.S. credit rating, leading to higher interest rates that will destroy what remains of the U.S. housing market, dim the prospect for any improvement in employment and further enrich the Chinese government and other holders of U.S. debt.

President Obama and the Senate Democratic leadership are clearly poised to cave in to those demands in the spirit of “compromise,” Obama’s favorite word, but the Republicans keep upping the ante. The GOP is shameless: Speaker John Boehner has sanctimoniously responded to Obama’s plea for a bargain that gives up almost everything to the right wing by rebuffing the president on the grounds that the Republican Party is the last line of defense against big government.

Boehner dared blame Obama for “the largest spending binge in American history,” which he attributed to the health care reform, most of which has yet to be enacted, and a stimulus program that was an underfunded effort to save American jobs. Not a word from Boehner or the other Republicans about the banking collapse that resulted from their deregulatory policies, the real cause of the inflated debt.

Boehner’s slogan, “I’ve always believed, the bigger government, the smaller the people,” is downright bizarre coming from someone who supported the Bush tax cuts for the rich, the banking bailout and the highest war spending since World War II, all of which is what caused government to get this big. Was it job stimulus spending that kept GM jobs in this country that made people smaller, or the loss of their homes and jobs as a result of the policies that are at the core of the Republican program?

What is at stake is a radical Republican agenda to totally reverse the progress in economic justice that began with the great reforms of Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal. Consider the direct consequence of the economic crisis that unfettered Wall Street greed has wrought, particularly in reversing the gains made by the most underprivileged sectors of the population. As The Wall Street Journal reported, based on a Pew Research Center study from 2005 to 2009, “The wealth gap between whites and each of the nation’s two largest minorities—Hispanics and blacks—has widened to unprecedented levels amid the housing crisis and the recession. … The disparities are the greatest since the government began tracking such data a quarter-century ago. …”

But there is plenty of suffering to go around as a result of the deep recession. The wealth of whites in that period declined by 16 percent, not to mention the ever-greater chasm between the top 2 percent and everyone else. That’s the same 2 percent whose tax cuts the Republicans are determined to preserve.

This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/debt-madness-was-always-about-killing-social-security-1311780544. All rights are reserved.

For Those Dubious about White-Skin Privilege

2011-07-26T13:40:00.001-07:00

Little Rock School District Won't Allow

Black Valedictorian, Lawsuit Alleges

The Huffington Post

By Laura Hibbard

After four years of nearly straight-As, Honors and Advanced Placement classes, 18-year-old Kymberly Wimberly achieved the highest GPA at McGehee Secondary School southeast of Little Rock, Ark., according to a court complaint.

However, instead of awarding the student for her hard work and dedication, the school denied her the valedictorian status because she was black, claims the document filed by Wimberly's lawyer, John W. Walker.

According to the court document, this is not the first time this has happened in the school's history:

"[The] defendant's actions were part of a pattern and practice of school administrators and personnel treating the African-American students less favorably than the Caucasian ones...Until Wimberly, the last African-American valedictorian in the McGeeHee school district was in 1989."

Although the high school is predominantly white, 46 percent of students are African-American.

Wimberly's mother, Molly Bratton, said in the federal discrimination complaint that after her daughter had been told she would be the class valedictorian, she heard whispers of discontent over her daughter's race.

According to an article in the Courthouse News Service and the court document itself, Bratton heard school personnel discussing that Wimberly's valedictorian status might cause a "big mess."

The next day, high school principal Darrell Thompson told the mother that he had decided to name a white student as "co-valedictorian," even though Wimberly had a higher GPA and a press release had already been sent out to the local paper naming her in the position.

Despite Bratton's protests, the school board would not hear her appeal on her daughter's behalf.

Wimberly seeks punitive damages for violation of equal protection rights secured by the 14th amendment of the U.S. constitution.

Read the official court document:

wimberlypdf

Can 1600 Meetings Grow into Progressive Clout?

2011-07-21T16:12:00.001-07:00

Bigger Than the Tea Party

By Van Jones
Progressive America Rising via OurFuture.org

Last month, I joined with MoveOn.org and launched the Rebuild the Dream [1] campaign to help give a voice to the millions of Americans who aren't being heard in Washington.

This past weekend, we organized nearly 1,600 house meetings across the country -- nearly double the number of protests the Tea Party held when they launched in April of 2009. The American Dream Meetings gave more than 27,000 people, from all across the country, an opportunity to come together and discuss what the American Dream means to them and their families.

They talked about how the jobless crisis and foreclosure mess is impacting their communities. They put forth creative ideas for the Contract for the American Dream [2] -- a bold progressive vision to help fix the broken economy and rebuild our communities. The Contract has already received nearly 26,000 ideas submitted online alone and over 6 million ratings.

While I'm beyond inspired by the enormous outpour of ideas we've received thus far, it doesn't surprise me that the American people are yearning to come up with practical solutions to our economic crisis. While so many Americans struggle with joblessness and rampant foreclosures, we keep hearing from Washington that we need to reduce the deficit, even if it means slashing Medicare or gutting vital programs families depend on. Washington appears to be operating on an entirely different planet than the rest of America.

There's an important story that's not being told in Washington. It's the story of the mother or father getting the dreaded call into the office where their boss informs them that they've been laid off. They were already underwater on their house, and now without a steady paycheck, they start to get behind on their mortgage payments. Then comes the big bad bank. They do everything they can to keep their house but it's no use. The bank posts that horrifying foreclosure notice on their door, and takes their home. They sell most of their belongings and move their entire family into a one-bedroom apartment. Or if they're lucky, they move in with grandma. It's a vicious cycle and it's happening every single day in America. It's the new American nightmare.

Our brave men and women in uniform are coming from a war battlefield only to return home to an economic battlefield with little hope of finding a job. Young Americans are graduating off a cliff, and sleeping on their parent's couches waiting for an opportunity to come along.

In Washington, it's almost as if these problems don't exist. It's fair to say that Washington has become obsessed with deficit politics, even though poll after poll shows that the number one concern of Americans is the economy and jobs. So, how did Washington get so off track with the rest of America? How did the debate change from being focused on job creation during the stimulus debate, to becoming focused mostly on cutting spending and tightening our belt? There was a movement with a message, and it has helped drive this deficit obsession in Washington -- the Tea Party.

In April of 2009, Americans who identified themselves as Tea Partiers took to the streets to protest against what they perceived to be a "big government takeover". With the help and funding of lobbyist-run think tanks such as Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works, 800 Tea Party protests were organized across the country to speak out against "big government", taxation, and more specifically, President Obama.

The media started to take notice. Who were these people? Why were they so angry? Should they be taken seriously? Like bees to honey, right-wing candidates began to flock to the Tea Party and adopt their platform as their own. The Tea Party organized protests at town halls around health care reform -- successfully heckling members of Congress and making sure the TV cameras were there to spread the story. From that point on, anything and everything the Tea Party did, the media paid attention to. And, anyone on the left who didn't take them seriously had pie in their faces when Tea Party-backed candidates propelled to power in Congress in the 2010 Election.

The Tea Party didn't just make waves in Washington, DC, they also helped elect extreme right-wingers to State Houses and began occupying Governor's mansions across the country. These newly elected Tea Party candidates weren't afraid to take risks, and they weren't shy about putting their right-wing ideology before the economic well being of their constituents. They immediately began an all out assault on public workers, women's rights, and began doling out tax breaks for millionaires and corporations. They threw everything at the wall in the hopes it would stick. And to the detriment of working families, some of it did. But it wasn't without consequence for their movement or the candidates they helped elect.

Fast forward to February of 2011, Madison, Wisconsin. Just after Governor Walker doled out $140 million in tax breaks to corporations, he proposed the Budget Repair Bill, which restricted the collective bargaining rights of workers. Tens of thousands of Wisconsinites filled the Capitol and surrounded the grounds, protesting the attack on workers' rights. The protests reached a magnitude of 150,000 people in Madison -- larger than the rally put on by Glenn Beck and the Tea Party in Washington, DC. The protests in Wisconsin helped ignite and inspire other protests around the country. In an effort to show solidarity with the workers in Wisconsin, "Rallies to Save the American Dream" were held in all 50 states. From Ohio to Montana to New York, protests against right-wing attacks and unfair budget cuts began breaking out across America.

A new movement to save the American Dream was born.

The Tea Party has their message and their movement, and it continues to impact the debate in Washington. But the movement to save the American Dream is bigger. There is a silent majority of Americans who are fighting back, and many of them have been fighting alone. They've been fighting to find a job and provide for their families. They've been fighting against the banks that are trying to take their homes. They're fighting against unfair budget cuts that will disproportionately hurt the middle class and poor. They're fighting for the American Dream. But, as we saw in Wisconsin, and we're now beginning to see around the country, millions of Americans are starting to fight back together. And, it's only a matter of time before the American Dream Movement comes to Washington.

Campaign For America's Future 1825 K Street, NW, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20006 202-955-5665 (tel) | 202-955-5606 (fax) | www.ourfuture.org

http://rebuildthedream.com/

GOP and Far Right Undermine The Vote

2011-07-16T05:04:00.001-07:00

A Whiff of Jim Crow: The Right's

Effort to Suppress the 2012 Vote

By Malik Miah
Progressive America Rising via Solidarity-US.org

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY and its rightwing base are on a concerted drive to suppress the vote in coming elections. The targets are African Americans, other ethnic minorities, the elderly and young.

Bogeyman reasons are given to justify these broadside attempts to suppress the voting rights of these groups. The number one tactic is to charge “ID fraud” aimed at poor Blacks and Latinos, and so-called illegal immigrants.

The Republican governors and state legislators (now aligned with the most extreme elements of the Tea Party movement) made this a priority after the 2008 presidential election. The right first targeted the community organization ACORN because of their work among the poor and organizing voter registration drives. Because of the capitulation of liberals and Democrats — many of whom joined the smear campaign — ACORN was destroyed.

Emboldened by that victory, the conservatives (backed by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allowed unlimited corporate money in elections) decided to step up their attacks. It seemed possible to further limit voting rights as well as go after public sector unions, women’s rights and immigrants.

Wisconsin took the lead to strip public sector workers of collective bargaining rights. Ohio, Michigan and other states with Republican governors are doing the same.

Arizona drew up the template for states to target undocumented workers. Some states like Alabama and Georgia have raised the bar to include provisions that make it illegal to rent or transport “illegal” immigrants. The Alabama law — which also demands that school districts check the immigration status of all entering students! — appeals to nativist fears and national security hysteria. The goal is to drive immigrants (not just illegals) from the states.

Progressive forces have done little to respond to this onslaught. The Obama administration at best is low keyed, if not actively complicit with some of the rightist attacks. The Obama White House, indeed, has deported more “illegal” immigrants in its first two years in office than Bush did in his final four.

Elected liberals are running as fast as they can to the center right, not fighting back. Many identify with the conservatives and adopt positions on deficits and spending cuts that hurt the poor. Medicare and Social Security are no longer “off the table” or safe, even as Democrats claim they will never allow these social guarantees to be fundamentally weakened. To Suppress the Vote

In this context the attacks on voting rights for African Americans are facing more setbacks. President Barack Obama won many state votes in 2008 by narrow margins, including such a longtime rightwing bastion as North Carolina. His white vote was higher than John Kerry’s in 2004.

Rightwing think tanks began drafting a model resolution (used almost to the word in each state) to go after traditional Democratic Party voters, particularly public sector workers who are white, claiming that Obama is “not one of us,” and from elsewhere. The fact that Obama’s policies are mainstream center right did not matter; the goal of these smears was to win more white working-class votes.

African Americans, who back Obama by more than 95% in most states, were also targeted. The aim in this case is to deny Blacks their vote. The template legislation took aim at early voting (in person and by mail), absentee balloting and alleged identity fraud (mainly by requiring voters to show photo ID at the polling place.

Considering that many poor, unemployed and elderly citizens don’t have government-issued IDs or that the homeless don’t have addresses, these restrictions can mean many fewer voters.

Some laws narrow the time frames for early voting, by excluding Sundays when many Black church goers go to vote. According to The New York Times (June 6, 2011 editorial), referring to North Carolina: “More than half of the state’s Black votes were cast before Election Day [2008], compared with 40 percent of the white votes. A similar trend was evident elsewhere in the South, according to studies by the Early Voting Information Center, a nonpartisan academic center at Reed College in Oregon. Blacks voting early in the South jumped from about 13 percent in 2004 to 33 percent in 2008, according to the studies, significantly outpacing the percentage of whites.”

In Georgia, the legislature voted to shorten the in-person early voting period from 45 days to 21 days. Florida went further, cutting the early voting period to eight days from 14.

In Wisconsin, where the state legislators voted to strip public sector workers of union rights, the legislature also enacted laws requiring government issued IDs. This came soon after petitions were signed to recall six Republican legislators who voted to strip union rights. The Obama Paradox

It is clear all these actions are aimed at suppression and discrimination. Some North Carolina Black lawmakers correctly call it a whiff of Jim Crow. The hallmark of the segregated South was to undermine Black participation rights by designing laws to prevent Black participation in the electoral process. What better way to maintain total white supremacy?

What’s striking about these moves to reverse the basic democratic voting rights of ethnic minorities is how it’s barely talked about by the Obama administration — another example of how liberal politics are shifting further rightward under the first Black president.

If the president were white, I suspect the civil rights groups would be marching on state houses and demanding action by the Justice Department. The problem today is that the Attorney General is also the first African American to hold that position.

This shows the fundamental paradox and contradiction of having the first Blacks as president and attorney general: African Americans have decided in the main to keep quiet rather than organize to press their rights and grievances, despite the disproportionate impact of the Great Recession on the Black communities.

When the acclaimed academic Cornel West stepped up to mildly criticize Obama and his policies, particularly regarding the plights of African-American communities, others in the Black elite like Al Sharpton came to Obama’s defense. In fact, Sharpton now works as a political shield for Obama. His activist past provides a nationalist and militant cover to speak out against those who want more from Obama.

The Congressional Black Caucus likewise is mild in putting pressure on Obama and the White House. Without Resistance, Blows Will Continue

The reactionaries know this is the case. It is why they are pushing so hard on issues that would have been unthinkable even under George W. Bush without expecting a fierce national backlash and resistance.

The racist forces, especially the “birthers” wing of the Republican Party that includes the Tea Party movement, see the opportunity to roll back many of the historic gains of the civil rights era.

This is the irony of ironies that while things are getting worse for Blacks on every front, there has been little mobilization and action demanding change. Black unemployment is in the high double digits; job discrimination is still a fact of life; and housing foreclosures and personal bankruptcies are at record levels.

It is also true for Latinos and immigrants. Everyone knows that the right and the Republican Party are far worse than the Obama administration even as it moves to the right.

Most progressive, liberal and left forces have one hand tied behind their backs because of this de facto strategy of not rocking the boat in fear of the worse evil of a far right president. It shows — if any proof were needed — that a strong independent left movement is needed. For now the far right has the upper hand and the traditional and left liberal organizations are reeling.

The voter suppression drive is winning because of that sentiment and paralysis. If the rights and gains of the working class and poor, especially African Americans, are left further behind, it means little to those who care if Obama wins a second term.

Without sustained resistance by labor, women’s rights and civil rights groups to the far right — glimmers of such are seen in Wisconsin and Ohio — more setbacks are inevitable.

July/August 2011, ATC 153

No Robbing the Poor to Pay the Rich!

2011-07-07T14:20:00.001-07:00

Progressive Caucus To Obama:

No Cuts To Social Security,

Medicare, Medicaid

By Isaiah J. Poole

Progressive America Rising via OurFuture.org

The Progressive Caucus, in a letter being sent to President Obama today, says any budget deal he agrees to that contains cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid won't get their votes. Given that any deal that President Obama agrees to is unlikely to win over enough Republicans to pass the House of Representatives unless it represents absolute capitulation to the most radical of Republican demands, push-back on Obama's left side from the Progressive Caucus at this stage of the game could prove significant.

Outrage from the left [1] could already be making a difference in the tone of statements coming out of the White House. After The Washington Post reported [2] that Obama was considering cuts to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for Republican agreement on revenue increases, a senior administration official e-mailed The Huffington Post to say that the report "overshoots the runway. [3]" The aide cited previous administration statements in opposition to benefit cuts but support for other actions that would "strengthen" the program.

At a news conference [4] today, Progressive Caucus leaders Reps. Raul Grijalva and Sheila Jackson Lee indicated they were willing within limits to give the administration wiggle room on what's being called measures to "strengthen" Social Security as well as Medicare and Medicaid. Still, the language in their letter is firm:

"First, any cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid should be taken off the table. The individuals depending on these three programs deserve well-conceived improvements, not deep, ideologically driven cuts with harmful consequences.... Second, revenue increases must be a meaningful part of any agreement. ... Republican insistence on protecting these tax breaks [for the very richest Americans] will force middle-class families to shoulder the burden of even deeper budget cuts, and this is unacceptable."

Lee said that conservatives should "stop scaring the American people, stop using tactics of intimidation" and stop comparing the United States' fiscal situation to that of Greece or Portugal. "America is not broke," she said.

She added that the message her progressive colleagues would be taking to the White House would be that there has to be an end to the Bush tax cuts and the tax loopholes, a rejection of budget cuts that would cause a loss of jobs, and a refusal to touch Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits.

The Progressive Caucus "is not trying to be the skunk at the party," Grijalva said (he could have added that Republicans are doing quite a good job by themselves of stinking up the joint), but someone has to represent what the American Majority [5] wants to see out of the deficit talks—an agreement that puts the top priority on putting people back to work and lowers the deficit by rebuilding the middle class. One of the more recent examples of American Majority thinking is reflected in a late June New York Times/CBS News poll [6], in which 53 percent said the economy and jobs were their top concern, with just 7 percent identifying the federal deficit as their top concern. That same poll found 45 percent of respondents concluding the federal government was paying either no or little attention to the economy.

Just as Republican leaders are claiming that the "Tea Party" absolutists won't let them cut a deal that raises taxes or cuts of tax expenditures on millionaires and billionaires, President Obama should take advantage of the fact that progressive House Democrats and a majority of the American public won't support him cutting a deal that is not based on the principle of shared sacrifice and which puts the axe to Social Security and to health care for seniors and the economically struggling.

Maryam al-Zoubi contributed to this post.

Trackback URL for this post:

http://www.ourfuture.org/trackback/68221

The Clean and Green Jobs Solution

2011-06-30T07:26:00.001-07:00

North Carolina Sees New Jobs,

Rapid Growth in Renewable Energy

By Stirling Little
Progressive America Rising via The Daily Tar Heel

Renewable energy has emerged as a growing industry in the state, according to a recent report by the N.C. Sustainable Energy Association.

The report identified more than 1,800 renewable energy projects in the state this year.

About 1,100 firms were involved with renewable energy activities in 2010, according to the association.

Erik Lensch, president of Argand Energy Solutions, a solar energy company based in Charlotte, said his company has been a part of the industry’s recent expansion.

“We have doubled (in size) every year since 2008,” he said. “We just kicked off a $3 million project this week, our largest ever.”

Paul Copleman, communications manager at Iberdrola Renewables, an energy company whose American subsidiary is based in Portland, Ore., said his company is in the process of receiving state approval for construction of a wind farm project called Desert Wind.

Copleman said the 300-megawatt Desert Wind project would represent an investment of at least $600 million, making it the largest utility-scale wind power project in the state’s history.

Legislators and industry leaders have attributed growth to a 2007 law that established renewable energy standards.

The law requires electric power suppliers in the state to generate a prescribed amount of electricity from renewable sources.

Rep. Mike Hager, R-Cleveland, said the state has played an active role in the growth of renewable energy.

“Federal funds were not the major driving force behind most of these projects,” he said. “The growth almost all happened after 2007, when we passed (the renewable energy law).

Though the state’s unemployment rate remains stubbornly high at 9.7 percent, industry leaders say they are boosting the state’s economy by promoting job creation.

The association estimated that the renewable energy industry employed about 12,500 workers in the state in 2010.

“I’ve got 20 guys on a roof north of Durham this morning,” Lensch said. “These kind of guys come straight out of Appalachian (State University). These jobs would have gone out of state without solar projects in North Carolina.”

But Hager said the higher cost of clean energy is a concern for the state’s consumers.

“Renewables are a great asset, but what we have to make sure of is to keep energy prices down and to keep our energy income reliable.”

Rep. Pat McElraft, R-Carteret, said in an email that the state must pursue all potential energy sources to keep costs low for state residents.

“I am definitely an advocate for becoming energy independent in the United States and I think North Carolina can play a big part in obtaining that goal,” she said.

Copleman said only economically viable projects receive approval from N.C.’s regulators.

“The wind has to blow long and hard if it’s going to happen,” he said.

Contact the State & National Editor at state@dailytarheel.com.

GOP Throws Granny Under the Bus

2011-06-29T05:32:00.001-07:00

National GOP Leaders Want to

Destroy the US Social Safety Net

They Have Had This Goal for Generations Because People Who Receive the Benefits of the US Social Safety Net Predominantly Are Democrats, or People so Dense ‘Tea Partiers,’ Who Receive These Benefits but Don't Realize They Do

By Brian Conners
Progressive America Rising via Takeaways

Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan wants to turn Medicare into a voucher system and reduce Medicaid by turning them into block grant which won't keep up with the pace of medical costs.

This means that the elderly and ill segments of our population will be encouraged to " die quickly" -- remember Grayson's summary of the GOP's health care plan? This isn't what they signed up for. The GOP is not being true to the bargain we gave our people.

The article "Medicare Saves Money" delineates how the GOP is hurting us all by its Medicare plan." states "Every once in a while a politician comes up with an idea that's so bad, so wrongheaded, that you're almost grateful. For really bad ideas can help illustrate the extent to which policy discourse has gone off the rails.

And so it was with Senator Joseph Lieberman's proposal, released last week, to raise the age for Medicare eligibility from 65 to 67.

Like Republicans who want to end Medicare as we know it and replace it with (grossly inadequate) insurance vouchers, Mr. Lieberman describes his proposal as a way to save Medicare. It wouldn't actually do that. But more to the point, our goal shouldn't be to "save Medicare," whatever that means. It should be to ensure that Americans get the health care they need, at a cost the nation can afford.

And here's what you need to know: Medicare actually saves money -- a lot of money -- compared with relying on private insurance companies. And this in turn means that pushing people out of Medicare, in addition to depriving many Americans of needed care, would almost surely end up increasing total health care costs."

It isn't only a liberal leaning columnist saying this, but a former Reagan adviser, as the article states "Indeed, as the economist (and former Reagan adviser) Bruce Bartlett points out, high U.S. private spending on health care, compared with spending in other advanced countries, just about wipes out any benefit we might receive from our relatively low tax burden. So where's the gain from pushing seniors out of an admittedly expensive system, Medicare, into even more expensive private health insurance?"

The GOP has generations ago decided that rational political conversation didn't work as well as appealing to the baser instincts of their constituents as the article states "Now, none of what I have said should be taken as a reason to be complacent about rising health care costs. Both Medicare and private insurance will be unsustainable unless there are major cost-control efforts -- the kinds of efforts that are actually in the Affordable Care Act, and which Republicans demagogued with cries of "death panels."

The point, however, is that privatizing health insurance for seniors, which is what Mr. Lieberman is in effect proposing -- and which is the essence of the G.O.P. plan -- hurts rather than helps the cause of cost control. If we really want to hold down costs, we should be seeking to offer Medicare-type programs to as many Americans as possible."

The states are near bankrupt and the GOP wants to make them use a decreasing pot of money to provide health care for the poor. How do we think this will end up?

That isn't enough. They want to destroy Medicaid also as the article "Critics Fear G.O.P.'s Proposed Medicaid Changes Could Cut Coverage for the Aged" states "The House plan would turn Medicaid, which provides health coverage for the poor through a combination of federal and state money, into a program for states. The federal government would give lump sums to states, which in turn would be block grant given more flexibility and independence over use of the money, though the plan does not spell out what the federal requirements would be.

Beginning in 2013, these grants would increase annually at the rate of inflation, with adjustments for population growth, a rate far below that of inflation for health care costs. As a result, states, which have said that they cannot afford to keep up with the program's costs, are likely to scale back coverage. Such a reduction, critics fear, could have a disproportionate effect on Medicaid spending for nursing home care for the elderly or disabled."

The GOP would have Alzheimer disabled granny sitting on the side of the road as the article states "According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, which analyzes health care issues, 7 of 10 nursing home residents are on Medicaid, in large part because even middle-class patients often run through their savings while in a nursing home and turn to the entitlement program."

Democrats have accused the GOP over having no decency as the article states "At a news conference last week, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia sharply criticized several of the ideas for reshaping Medicaid, calling broad-based cuts "almost beyond my moral understanding."

Before you get old enough to be in that awful plight the GOP wants to maintain your joblessness and raise your taxes so the fat cats get richer. To do that they will trot out the failed propaganda that tax cuts for the rich pay for themselves.

The article "EVIDENCE SHOWS THAT TAX CUTS LOSE REVENUE" depicts that the opposite of the GOP's promises occurs.

The article states "The claim that tax cuts "pay for themselves" -- i.e., cause so much economic growth that revenues rise faster than they would have without the tax cut -- has been made repeatedly in recent years and is one of the many tax policy issues that is likely to receive renewed attention in light of the upcoming election. As explained briefly below, this claim is false. The evidence shows clearly that tax cuts lose revenue."

The article painstakingly analyzed data and concluded "In sum, the idea that tax cuts pay for themselves sounds too good to be true because it is too good to be true. Tax cuts lose revenue, and when they are deficit financed, they can also contribute to poorer economic performance over the long term."

Where does the Tea Party darling Michele Bachmann stand in this matter?

Bachmann wants to cut taxes for the rich and make the poor pay more as evidenced in the article "Bachmann Calls for Huge Corporate Tax Cut Alongside Tax Increase for the Working Poor".

Maybe the GOP is simply evil. Maybe they only want their contributors to make huge profits. Maybe they don't realize the facts. Maybe they don't understand that unless people have employment they can't buy the fat cats products.

Looking at it as objectively as possible it appears that GOP leaders want to destroy the US Social safety net. They have had this goal for generations. They don't want Democrats to be able to boast to their voters that through their efforts the middle and lower classes can look forward to employment in their youth and middle age, and secure golden years. They don't care about proles who vote for them due to the GOP's campaigns that appeal to their baser instincts.

Ryan wants to turn Medicare into a voucher system and reduce Medicaid by turning them into block grant which won't keep up with the pace of medical costs.

Gambit or End Game? No Matter, Keep Pressing for ‘Out Now!’

2011-06-19T06:45:00.001-07:00

How the U.S. Intends to

End War with Taliban

By Ahmed Rashid

Progressive America Rising via Financial Times

After more than two years of internal disputes and rivalries, the Obama administration is for the first time united on stepping up its secret talks with the Taliban. It also wants to start wider talks with regional countries such as Pakistan, which hold the key to a peaceful settlement as the US and Nato prepare to pull out their troops by 2014.

As the situation in Afghanistan worsens with a ferocious Taliban summer offensive having just started with a spate of suicide bombings, the White House, the state department and the Pentagon are preparing for extensive diplomatic initiatives in the next few months to take the fledgling peace process forward and push to broker an end to the war.

After extensive interviews in Washington with many of the key players involved in Afghan policy, it is apparent that several major US initiatives boosted by Nato are under way. The clear aim is to end what all but some of the uniformed generals recognize as an impasse which cannot be resolved by force of arms alone.

Since last autumn US officials have held a couple of rounds of talks with Taliban representatives, but the logistics, in particular the checking of Taliban bona fides, have been difficult. So the US now accepts – and is working on – a Taliban request to open a Taliban political office, most probably in a Gulf state although Turkey is also a possibility. This would mark a decisive change of nearly a decade of US strategy since the overthrow of the Taliban. With such an office there could be direct, unimpeded talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government and outsiders such as the Americans.

If current talks progress well, such a Taliban office could be moved to Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai’s government in Kabul has been speaking to the Taliban off and on for nearly three years but without US support the talks have not moved forward. The Taliban had specifically asked to talk to the Americans.

On another front, despite months of acrimony between the intelligence agencies of the US and Pakistan, US officials say they are keen to engage with the Pakistan military to use it to help end the war and bring under control the safe havens that the Taliban have enjoyed in Pakistan. US frustration with Pakistan is only matched by the knowledge that there can be no peace in Afghanistan without it.

The Pakistani leadership is in turn deeply frustrated with the Americans for refusing to share their vision of a peace process, but US officials say there has been no united US vision to share until recently. Last week, in a clear snub to the US, military and civilian Pakistani leaders visited Kabul and pledged to promote Mr Karzai’s talks with the Taliban.

One expected US initiative, which Mr Obama had promised to do in 2008 and then stalled on, is a behind-the-scenes push to persuade India and Pakistan to hold talks on reducing their mutual mistrust on Afghanistan. Such talks may eventually be joined by the Afghan and US governments. Simultaneously the US wants to pursue a major diplomatic push with Afghanistan’s five other neighbours including Iran, even though Washington has no diplomatic relations with Tehran.

In recent months the US has quietly dropped its preconditions that the Taliban sever links with al-Qaeda and accept the Afghan constitution before holding face-to-face talks. Instead the US accepts that the Taliban would have to meet these conditions at the end of talks.

Much of the bedrock for the new strategy was established by Richard Holbrooke, the US diplomat who died last December, but the failure of the White House to embrace his ideas left him on the sidelines. Now the seasoned diplomat Marc Grossman is in charge and has received co-operation from all parts of the government, especially Mr Obama.

The first target date is a presidential speech in July to mark the first withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. Mr Obama may then sketch out the new strategy including a first public admission that the US is talking to the Taliban.

The next date is December when a conference in Germany marks the Bonn meeting 10 years ago that created the post-Taliban government in Kabul. Rashly that conference did not include the defeated Taliban. Instead, left out, they relaunched their insurgency in 2003. The new conference will try and make sure Taliban are present as full partners, although no peace agreement is expected at such an early stage.

There are major problems. Some Pentagon generals are opposed to a substantial withdrawal this July and want the offensive to continue for the rest of the year. Mr Obama wants the drawdown to be significant, especially given the anti-Americanism in Afghanistan that rose to the fore recently with the riots after the burning of the Koran in a Florida church.

The Pentagon has dominated discussion of Afghanistan since Mr Obama came to office, by talking about troop numbers. The administration now wants to change direction and talk less about troops and more about a political strategy to end the war. Many of the top generals, including General David Petraeus, who commands all US-Nato forces in Afghanistan, will be replaced over the next nine months – giving Mr Obama the opportunity to bring in officers who will concur with his strategy.

One hiccup ahead is Mr Karzai’s request for a “strategic partnership agreement” with the US after 2014. The Pentagon is keen on this so it can maintain between two and six bases in Afghanistan to keep the pressure on al-Qaeda. Most countries in the region – such as Pakistan, China and Russia – will object to an indefinite US military presence, while Iran will see it as a permanent threat.

For the US to want to maintain bases after 2014 directly contradicts with the US desire to win the co-operation of Afghanistan’s neighbours. A further concern is the escalating dispute between Saudi Arabia and Iran over the Arab revolt. The Saudis accuse the Iranians of fuelling Shia unrest in the Gulf and the Saudis now want to secure Pakistan and Afghanistan on their side. However, no peace process in Afghanistan can succeed without Iran’s full participation.

The end game has begun in Afghanistan. How the US and Nato play their cards will be vital. A rush for the exit by some Nato countries could prove catastrophic. As negotiating partners the Taliban are at best an unknown quantity.

But there is at last a determination in Washington to have a political strategy rather than depend on a military outcome – and in the context of the past decade that is a breakthrough.

What Happened to ‘Changing The Mindset’ for Getting into Wars?

2011-06-16T05:27:00.001-07:00

Obama's Libya Defense Makes

Bush's Lawyers Look Smart

By David Swanson
Beaver County Peace Links via WarIsACrime.org

June 16, 2011 - The arguments made to "legalize" war, torture, warrantless spying, and other crimes by John Yoo and Jay Bybee and their gang are looking rational, well-reasoned, and impeccably researched in comparison with Obama's latest "legalization" of the Libya War.

Here's the key section from Wednesday's report to Congress:

"Given the important U.S. interests served by U.S. military operations in Libya and the limited nature, scope and duration of the anticipated actions, the President had constitutional authority, as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive and pursuant to his foreign affairs powers, to direct such limited military operations abroad. The President is of the view that the current U.S. military operations in Libya are consistent with the War Powers Resolution and do not under that law require further congressional authorization, because U.S. military operations are distinct from the kind of 'hostilities' contemplated by the Resolution's 60 day termination provision. U.S. forces are playing a constrained and supporting role in a multinational coalition, whose operations are both legitimated by and limited to the terms of a United Nations Security Council Resolution that authorizes the use of force solely to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under attack or threat of attack and to enforce a no-fly zone and an arms embargo. U.S. operations do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve the presence of U.S. ground troops, U.S. casualties or a serious threat thereof, or any significant chance of escalation into a conflict characterized by those factors."

Whatever the president's "foreign affairs powers" may be, they do not, under the U.S. Constitution, include the power to launch "military operations" or "hostilities" or "wars." Nor has the distinction between "military operations" that involve what ordinary humans call warfare (blowing up buildings with missiles) and "hostilities" that qualify for regulation under the War Powers Resolution been previously established. This distinction is as crazy as any that have come out of U.S. government lawyers in the past.

The War Powers Resolution forbids unconstitutional wars unless the United States is attacked. But even ignoring that fact, as is the custom, the Resolution says right at the top:

"It is the purpose of this joint resolution to fulfill the intent of the framers of the Constitution of the United States and insure that the collective judgment of both the Congress and the President will apply to the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, and to the continued use of such forces in hostilities or in such situations."

Anything from imminent involvement in hostilities to hostilities is covered. There doesn't seem to be a gap left through which to exclude bombing people's homes in a non-hostile manner with non-combat troops as part of an overseas contingency operation.

Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey remarks: "To say that our aggressive bombing of Libya does not rise to the level of 'hostilities' flies in the face of common sense and is an insult to the intelligence of the American people."

Further down, the same resolution makes clear:

"For purposes of this joint resolution, the term 'introduction of United States Armed Forces' includes the assignment of members of such armed forces to command, coordinate, participate in the movement of, or accompany the regular or irregular military forces of any foreign country or government when such military forces are engaged, or there exists an imminent threat that such forces will become engaged, in hostilities."

So, the "constrained and supporting role in a multinational coalition" is completely irrelevant, and would be even if it were true that a UN resolution was being adhered to.

The Obama report to Congress spends half its time claiming that the United States is not part of the NATO operation in any major way, and the other half warning that the NATO operation would collapse without the United States:

"If the United States military were to cease its participation in the NATO operation, it would seriously degrade the coalition's ability to execute and sustain its operation designed to protect Libyan civilians and to enforce the no-fly zone and the arms embargo, as authorized under UNSCR 1973. Cessation of U.S. military activities in support of OUP would also significantly increase the level of risk for the remaining Allied and coalition forces conducting the operation, which in turn would likely lead to the withdrawal of participation in the operation."

The "limited nature, scope and duration of the anticipated actions" is irrelevant. The War Powers Act specifically sets a limit of 60 days, which has passed. Moreover, not that it matters legally, but the House resolution to which this report was a response asked for some information that the report does not provide, including:

"The anticipated scope and duration of continued United States military involvement in support of NATO activities regarding Libya."

The report says the duration is limited, but that merely suggests it's not infinite.

I have my doubts even about that claim. 0digg

Libya

MayFirst.org Source URL: http://warisacrime.org/content/obamas-libya-defense-makes-bushs-lawyers-look-smart

Links: [1] http://warisacrime.org/content/obamas-libya-defense-makes-bushs-lawyers-look-smart [2] http://warisacrime.org/category/categories/libya

Yet Another Reason to Like the WPA

2011-06-13T04:31:00.001-07:00

Mural Depicts Depression Era in Coalfields

By Bill Archer
Progressive America Rising via Bluefield Daily Telegraph

BLUEFIELD, Va, June 13, 2011. — A neon light fixture in the lobby of the Bluefield, Va., post office partially obscures a Tazewell County art treasure, but the tempera mural above the postmaster’s office door represents a New Deal initiative that was aimed at restoring morale among citizens who were suffering the lingering effects of surviving the Great Depression.

In the years after the end of World War I, the U.S. economy experienced some robust growth and left evidence of that growth in cities throughout the nation. Most of the imposing structures in the heart of downtown Bluefield including the 13-story tall West Virginian Manor and the Arts and Crafts Center appeared in the mid-1920s, and steel-making coal from southern West Virginia and southwestern Virginia was in great demand as builders used steel as the framework for skyscrapers including the Empire State Building completed in 1931.

While “Black Thursday,” Oct. 24, 1029, signaled the start of the decline, the Dust Bowl drought starting in 1930 and lasting almost a decade threw the U.S. into desperate straights and by March 9, 1933, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared a “Bank Holiday” and started the process of restoring confidence in the nation’s banks, every American family had been touched in some way by the depression.

When Roosevelt launched his New Deal legislation the federal government provided a boost for the nation’s art community through the Works Public Administration/Federal Art Project, but another federal art project — the Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts — didn’t stop at placing art in galleries, museums and private collections, but made art a celebration of the spirit of community.

From 1934-’43, the Treasury Department commissioned murals, oil paintings and sculptures to be permanent attractions at post office buildings and other federal buildings that were built as part of an effort to restore national confidence administered by the Procurement Division of the Treasury Department and headed by Edward Bruce.

Southwest Virginia has incredible examples of three decorative art treasures that stand as reminders of hard times. The first was installed in the Marion, Va., post office in 1937 — a painted plaster relief titled “The Letter,” by Daniel Olney, a native of New York City who was born in 1909 and later taught in the New York Public Schools. In addition to his plaster relief in Marion that was moved to the new post office in 2000, Olney also created three reliefs for the Berryville, Ark., post office for the Section of Fine Arts, and received $750 for that work.

In 1940, William H. Calfee created two oil on canvas murals for the new post office in Tazewell, Va., that was completed in 1936. Calfee, (1909-1995) was a native of Washington, D.C., who became chair of American University’s art department from 1946 to 1954 and worked on the AU faculty for several more years, was paid $900 for the two murals.

Calfee’s “Sheep — Mother and Child — Cow” painting is located above the door to the postmaster’s office and features a pastoral scene representing Tazewell County’s rural setting. Calfee’s other painting — “Mining” — located at the other end of the lobby, features a man and older boy standing in front of a mine shaft with a railroad track in the background.

The mural above the door to the postmaster’s office in Bluefield, Va., is titled “Coal Mining,” and was painted by Richard Hay Kenah, a native of New Brighton, Pa., (1907-1982), who worked for the Section of Fine Arts in the late 1930s and early ‘40s, was in the Army Quartermaster Corps during World War II, was chief illustrator for the U.S. Geological Survey and was a noted painter, illustrator and woodworker in his native Beaver County, Pa.

Kenah also painted a tobacco auction scene for a post office in Louisburg, N.C., and a mural in Bridgeport, Ohio, just across the Ohio river from Wheeling. He attended the dedication of the Bluefield, Va., post office on May 10, 1941, and, with the help of former postmaster William Litz, installed the “tempers over oil on canvas” mural at Bluefield on July 22, 1942.

“Every time I look at it, I see something different in it,” Jerry Sluss, an employee at the Bluefield, Va., post office said. “I’ve never seen it done before, but they clean it with bread,” he added.

Kenah received $700 for his work, according to information assembled by Christopher M. Akers of Bluefield, Va.

— Contact Bill Archer at barcher@bdtonline.com

Labor and ‘Medicare for All’

2011-06-12T04:32:00.001-07:00

Still Paying Through the Nose,

Labor Campaigns for Single Payer

By Andy Coates
Health Care NOW via Labor Notes

June 9, 2011 - A year after President Obama signed his health care reform with strong support from the labor movement, advocates of a single-payer system might be tempted to ask, “How’s that working out for you?”

At last weekend’s conference of the Labor Campaign for Single Payer, a Plumbers and Pipe Fitters delegate pointed out that his members are paying $12.31 per hour for their health benefits.

The activists marshaled their forces once again in D.C. last weekend, where campaign coordinator Mark Dudzic reported progress on the group’s mission: “to establish and expand within labor the idea that labor has got to lead this fight” for single payer, or improved and expanded Medicare-for-All.

Indeed, the conference began June 3 at AFL-CIO headquarters and heard from President Richard Trumka himself. Trumka spoke of the reluctance of the AFL-CIO Executive Council to embrace single payer but pointed to disappointment with the president’s Affordable Care Act at the council.

He recalled meetings 20 years ago when he fought for single payer on the council and Karen Ignagni, then assistant to the AFL-CIO president, was “doing her damnedest” to thwart the effort. (Today Ignagni is CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the lead lobby for health insurance corporations.)

Trumka referred to single payer as “the only way to cure the health care problem.” He proposed that labor should “continue to educate about Canada. It’s a big myth about Canada. I go there all the time. You sit down with someone over coffee and ask them: ‘Tell me about your health care.’ They say: ‘Oh, it’s a godsend.’ We need to get that message out.”

The AFL-CIO president also continued to gesture toward political independence for labor, saying, “We should strengthen our support for our friends and do less for our acquaintances.”

As signs of progress, Dudzic noted the federation’s financial support for the Labor Campaign, participation by Vice President Arlene Holt Baker in a press conference announcing single-payer legislation, and the fact that the AFL-CIO sent staffer Nick Unger to help the single-payer efforts in Vermont. (Unger was the same staffer who in 2009-2010 campaigned for single-payer activists to embrace the public option.)

Dudzic also reported progress within the Labor Caucus for Single Payer, a group of nine internationals chaired by Greg Junemann of the Professional and Technical Engineers. Dudzic suggested several unions in which single-payer activists should “insist that our leaders follow the direction of the members.”

Without the White House

The deafening silence coming from the White House was a recurring theme as participants discussed the state-by-state assault on labor, ongoing unemployment, and the relentless rise in the costs of care. Stuart Acuff of the Utility Workers counseled, “Our job is not to follow Obama. Our job is to hold Obama accountable.”

Although the chances of passing a single-payer bill this year are less than remote, delegates welcomed Representative Jim McDermott of Washington by conference call and Representatives John Conyers and Dennis Kucinich, co-sponsors of HR 676, in person. HR 676, which calls for a publicly financed, privately delivered health care system, has been introduced every year since 2003.

McDermott, a psychiatrist, recently introduced a single-payer House companion to one introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Delegates agreed to support both the McDermott and Conyer bills, yet took note that HR 676 covers the undocumented, forces for-profit hospitals to convert to non-profit status, and requires federal, instead of state-by-state, administration.

On more immediate efforts in the states, delegates heard a panel from Vermont, where the Act for a Universal and Unified Health System was signed into law May 26. Mari Cordes of the Vermont Nurses/AFT recalled that only two years ago single-payer advocates were called “bomb throwers” by Vermont legislators for sticking to a cause labeled “too hard” and “not possible.”

Jill Charbeonneau, president of the Vermont AFL-CIO, cautioned that the legislation was the first in a series of steps toward single payer—”a skeleton this year,” followed by a year-long process of defining the scope of health benefits under the plan, followed by a second to third year process “to decide how to finance the system,” and ultimately a need for waivers from the federal government.

A video excerpt from the Vermont Workers Center illustrated the grassroots campaign, predicting: “If Vermont Leads, the Rest of the Nation Will Follow.” On a panel about the effort in California, Cindy Young of the California Nurses Association laid out a multi-year strategy for achieving single payer in that state.

Don Tremontozzi, a local president who is running for the No. 2 job in the Communications Workers national union, described how his members phone-banked for single payer in Vermont this spring.

“Once it was, ‘I want what the unions have,’” Trementozzi said. “Now it’s, ‘Why should you have 100 percent coverage?’ We need to get to the public.”

He roused the room with a call to defend the existing benefits companies are trying to claw back.

Drawing parallels between his union’s upcoming contract negotiations with Verizon and talks now under way with General Electric, Trementozzi said, “Yesterday at the CWA headquarters Verizon made a presentation about how costly health care is. These companies make billions in profits! They pay their CEOs millions!”

Trementozzi said “these companies act like they make no money at all” when they come crying to jack up insurance rates and cut health benefits for retirees.

“I say, ‘Over my dead body!’” Trementozzi said. “When a company makes billions and pays no taxes—we won’t stand for it!”

2012 Warning: Voters Want an End to the Wars

2011-06-09T05:48:00.001-07:00

The Fight for Peace Heats Up

By Tom Hayden
Beaver County Peace Links via TomHayden.com

June 8, 2011 - Sixty-four percent of Americans think the number of troops in Afghanistan should be decreased. (CBS News)The New York Times finally acknowledged this week that a significant withdrawal from Afghanistan is a real possibility being considered by the White House.

In a lead story on June 6, the Times reported that the Obama administration is considering a “steeper” reduction of troops than previously discussed or acknowledged.

The fact is that Democratic constituencies and leaders, responding to overwhelming public sentiment against the war, have been uniting in recent weeks behind a call for “substantial and significant” troops reductions and a transfer of war funds to job creation at home.

The push began long before the killing of Osama bin Laden, though the al-Qaeda leader’s death has accelerated the momentum towards de-escalation.

In effect, the Democrats finally have chosen to unite and align themselves with public peace sentiment and prepare a climate in which the president can make a bold step this month.

But will Obama himself do so? The answer to that question may reveal the nature of his presidency and determine whether he can win back disillusioned Democrats in 2012.

An Obama refusal to decide on a significant troop reduction may jeopardize his re-election and will reveal much about power in Washington. Is there an institutional mindset firmly committed to the Long War in spite of huge public opposition, or does democratic sentiment matter enough overrule the elites and shorten the war?

Most polls show Democrats and independents favoring a more rapid pullout than Obama’s current proposal of ending combat operations by 2014. Consider the favorable sequence of events since February:

A resolution by Rep. Barbara Lee calling for rapid, significant reductions and a transfer of funds to job creation passed the Democratic National Committee without dissent. Legislation by Rep. Jim McGovern calling for an accelerated timetable of withdrawal received 205 House votes, including an overwhelming majority of 178 Democrats. The House voted unanimously against sending any ground troops to Libya, criticized the president’s refusal to abide by the War Powers Act, and gave 148 votes to a Dennis Kucinich resolution which would have ended all support or the NATO military operation in Libya. In the Senate, one-time Afghanistan hawks like John Kerry and Richard Lugar called for a fundamental rethink, while conservative Democratic Sen. Max Baucus even proposed pulling all combat troops out by 2012. This week 15 Senators sent a letter to Obama asking for a substantial drawdawn, with more signing by the day. Obama himself told the Associated Press that his July announcement would order “significant” withdrawals. In addition, Obama reconfigured his national security team by appointing the dovish Tom Donilan as director, replacing Robert Gates with Leon Panetta at Defense, and sending Gen. David Petraeus to the CIA where he might find it more difficult to oppose the president.

Meanwhile, independent think tanks with close ties to the White House, like the Center for American Progress and the Afghanistan Study Group, have pushed for an initial withdrawal in the range of 50-60,000 American troops, ten times the figure pushed by the Pentagon.

This entire scenario was foretold in Bob Woodward’s book on White House decision making leading up to the 2009 surge, Obama’s Wars. In those pages, Obama repeatedly expressed concern that he couldn’t afford to “lose the entire Democratic Party,” that he needed an exit strategy, and that he expected (and needed) a timetable demand to come from the then-Democratic Congress.

The question now is whether he will bend to the Pentagon and the mainstream media whose voices are loudest in the Beltway, or heed the rank-and-file voters who have soured on the war and losing confidence in his presidency.

Prediction: In once scenario, Obama bookends the competing demands of 15,000 and 50,000 and decides on 30,000, ending the surge. But if he wants a bigger political impact, he pulls all 47,000 troops out of Iraq and cuts the U.S. force in Afghanistan in half by 2012.

Total reduction: 100,000 U.S. troops.

Total direct taxpayer savings: $200 billion through 2012.

The second course is better politics and policy. Committed peace advocates should ask no less.

Solar: Before It’s Too Late

2011-06-03T05:05:00.001-07:00

Michael Lind's Clueless and Fossilized

Thinking on Coal, Oil and Natural Gas

(A Critique of Michael Lind’s Salon Article, ‘Everything

you've heard about fossil fuels may be wrong’)

By David Schwartzman

Progressive America Rising

It’s the other way around. Nearly everything we hear from Lind in this Salon piece (May 31, 2011) is wrong, except for his argument that huge potential reserves of fossil fuel will likely prove peak oil boosters being big exaggerators. The latter news may not be wrong, but it is hardly comforting.

More importantly, Lind’s uninformed dismissal of solar power as a real alternative is typical misinformation that we can expect from the fossil fuel/nuclear lobbies. And his misplaced optimism regarding the unlikelihood of catastrophic climate change (C3) from rising levels of greenhouse gas is still another unsubstantiated claim. We’re used to hearing this from scientifically illiterate global warming deniers. Why Lind chooses to join them is a puzzle.

Whenever peak fossil fuel usage occurs--either from the exhaustion of reserves or replacement by alternatives--the Age of Fossil Fuels will soon be over. Human civilization and existing biodiversity will simply not sustain ever rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane. We have precious little time, if any at all, to radically reduce carbon emissions and replace fossil fuel energy with solar. This is fundamentally why Lind's born again fossil fuel enthusiasm is so misplaced. If he has the facts and science to claim otherwise, he should produce it. As a scientist involved in this field, I don’t think he can.

Lind’s enthusiasm for shale-derived natural gas via ‘fracking’ (the hydraulic fracturing of underground shale formations with toxic brine) is truly delusional. Ignoring the growing evidence for fracking leading to serious groundwater contamination, he attempts to rebut Howarth’s study recently published in a peer-reviewed journal Climatic Change. Howarth argued that fracking could well be worse than even burning coal, the fossil fuel with the highest carbon emission per energy generated, because this technology results in methane leakage directly to the atmosphere.

Since methane is a very potent greenhouse gas, direct leakage is always an issue in the extraction of natural gas, which is itself the lowest carbon emitter when completely burned. Lind cites the WorldWatch critique which at best demonstrates that methane leakage from coal mining was overlooked in Howarth’s study. So the greenhouse impact of coal use may be worse than anyone thought.

The choice, however, should not be between two fossil fuels with the greatest greenhouse and environmental footprint. Rather it should be to wisely use the minimum necessary fraction of the remaining reserves of conventional petroleum, including non-fracked natural gas, to make a rapid transition to a fully solar power infrastructure while we still have time to avoid C3. This transition is strongly supported by WorldWatch, aside from the controversy around fracking. (Lind’s other potential source of natural gas, extracted from methane hydrates, would likely have the same problem with direct leakage to the atmosphere. I suppose we should at least be grateful for his not mentioning tar sands or oil shale, both with huge negative environmental and greenhouse impacts).

Lind bubbles with delight at the prospect of abundant fossil fuel subverting organic agriculture (really agroecology informed by cutting edge science) and facilitating the spread of human populations outward from cities into forests and grasslands. Biodiversity destruction and poison dispersal gone wild! At least he has made clear that his “green” values refer to the Almighty Dollar, i.e., accumulation of capital by the fossil fuel industrial complex rather than to any semblance of environmental protection.

Lind says “The scenarios with the most catastrophic outcomes of global warming are low probability outcomes...And if the worst-case scenarios for climate change were plausible, then the most effective way to avert catastrophic global warming would be the rapid expansion of nuclear power, not over-complicated schemes worthy of Rube Goldberg or Wile E. Coyote to carpet the world’s deserts and prairies with solar panels and wind farms that would provide only intermittent energy from weak and diffuse sources.”

The worst-case scenarios may not be plausible for Lind, but they are for a growing number of climate scientists, notably Jim Hansen. IPCC predictions keep on being shown to be too conservative. For example, Hansen has recently highlighted the likelihood that disintegration/melting of the ice caps is non-linear, with future sea level increases being underestimated if carbon emission do not cease soon (Hansen and Sato, 2011). Empirical evidence mounts for ocean acidification and extreme weather fluctuations being driven by rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and global warming respectively. And Hansen’s “safe” upper limit of 350 ppm for atmospheric carbon dioxide (Hansen et al., 2008) may well be too high, while the level now is 395 ppm (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/31/carbon-levels-peak). Only thermal inertia of the ocean may give us a small window of time to act, perhaps a decade or two. Carbon sequestration using permaculture and solar energy will be required to avoid C3 even if carbon emissions decline rapidly.

Lind’s prescription for nuclear power is another case of delusion. Aside from the negative impacts of the nuclear fuel cycle, unmentioned by Lind, and catastrophic accidents, the quickest way to replace fossil fuel dependence is building wind turbines, installing photovoltaics and concentrated solar power in deserts--all proven technologies far less complicated and safer than the nuclear option. And these solar technologies generate more jobs and are far cheaper than the nuclear option (or even coal) if the huge subsidies to the nuclear/fossil fuel industries are taken into account.

My older son Peter and I recently published a peer-reviewed “A Solar Transition is Possible” study (http://iprd.org.uk and on our own website http://www.solarutopia.org). We modeled the conversion of our present global energy infrastructure to a fully renewable alternative, inputting properties of current state-of-the-art renewable technology, notably its EROI (energy return on energy invested) and lifetime. Energy investments come from the depletable (i.e., non-renewable) energy sources dominated by fossil fuels as well as the growing renewable infrastructure.

We find that we can replace the entire existing energy infrastructure with renewables in 25 years or less, so long as EROI of the mixed renewable power infrastructure is maintained at 20 or higher, by using merely 1% of the present fossil fuel capacity and a reinvestment of 10% of the renewable capacity per year. Furthermore, in this time frame, for an annual contribution equal to 2% of the present energy fossil fuel capacity, the global power capacity can grow relative to the present level so as to provide energy consumption per person levels sufficient for every one on the planet to live at high human development requirements, while radically reducing carbon emissions. Even faster replacement times result from higher dedicated commitments of depletable energy and energy invested from the growing renewable capacity.

Lind’s alleged intermittency problem with solar has been convincingly addressed by Stanford University Professor Mark Jacobson and others. Adequate baseload energy is achieved once the solar infrastructure grows using smart grids and becomes more diverse. Meanwhile energy storage technologies and petroleum can contribute to baseload.

While we did not include energy conservation in our model, making our projections conservative (not politically!), aggressive energy conservation is imperative, especially in the United States and other countries of the global North. We can all live better with a sharp reduction of wasteful consumption, breathe clean air, drink clean water and eat organic food. Nevertheless, we are arguing strongly for a global increase in power capacity, employing clean energy and not fossil fuels or nuclear power, to insure every child born on this planet has the material requirements for the highest quality of life.

The obstacles are obvious. First is the huge waste of resources and funds to the annual $1.5 trillion global military budget, followed by the disinformation spread by the Military Industrial Fossil Fuel Nuclear Complex with authors in its service such as Michael Lind.

References cited

Hansen, James E. and Makiko Sato, May 5, 2011, submitted. Paleoclimate Implications for Human-Made Climate Change. http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.0968

Hansen, J., Mki. Sato, P. Kharecha, D. Beerling, R. Berner, V. Masson-Delmotte, M. Pagani, M. Raymo, D.L. Royer, and J.C. Zachos, 2008, Target atmospheric CO₂: Where should humanity aim? Open Atmos. Sci. J., 2, 217-231, doi:10.2174/1874282300802010217.

Howarth, Robert W., Renee Santoro and Anthony Ingraffea, 2011, Methane and the greenhouse-gas footprint of natural gas from shale formations. Climatic Change 106:679–690.

Lind, Michael, 2011 (May 31), Everything you've heard about fossil fuels may be wrong,

http://www.salon.com/news/env/energy/?story=/politics/war_room/2011/05/31/linbd_fossil_fuels

http://blogs.worldwatch.org/natural-gas-versus-coal-clearing-the-air-on-methane-leakage/Natural Gas versus Coal: Clearing the Air on Methane Leakage

David Schwartzman is a Professor in the Department of Biology at Howard University in Washington, D.C. His research focus is on biogeochemistry, astrobiology, origin of life, and environmental policy. He is a member of the International Committee, Green Party U.S., DC Metro Science for the People, and Metro DC chapter of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, and an activist in the DC Statehood Green Party . He is the author of Life, Temperature, and the Earth: The Self-Organizing Biosphere. Websites: www.solarutopia.org and www.redandgreen.org

BC Series: What Will It Take to Bring Obama Home?

2011-05-26T05:27:00.001-07:00

His Home Is Not My Home

By Carl Bloice
BlackCommentator.com
Moving Left, Part 9

May 26, 2011 - Maybe it depends on where home is. It’s not where I am. I’m to the left of Obama. Quite a bit. When Obama refers to “my friends on the left” he’s telling us two things: he has some and that’s not where he’s at. I knew it all along and that still didn’t stop me from welling up when he made that first speech to his party’s convention. I was reminded of the source of that emotion the other night watching the PBS documentary on the Freedom Riders when Robert Kennedy said someday there would be a black president. None of us thought it would happen so soon. When it did most of us were pleased and proud of the brother, in a way that I think a lot of white people have trouble relating to.

Home? The place we should be talking about, I think, is the place he himself described in the campaign, the place he said he wanted to take the country when he asked for our votes and our money. He promised “change” and we crossed our fingers. He said he would end the foreign wars and we pulled the lever by his name. He said he would attack poverty and bring relief from some of the burdens working people increasingly have to bear and we thought: we’ll hold you to it.

Now I’m not saying he hasn’t accomplished anything. Some positive things have happened since he moved into the White House. And I do think he is trying to find a way out of Afghanistan. And, yes he’s been stymied at every turn by members of the opposition party that shape their policies around making him fail, and some members of his own party that lend them a helping hand. And they are egged on by the legions of the reactionary and racist right. And these people are a real danger.

Yet we are very disappointed.

As others have said, most of us aren’t about to add to the undermining of the Obama presidency and most likely we are going to pull that same lever again. But I think there is something at work here that is very fundamental and it relates to the Administration’s response to our everyday lives and the future of the country.

On June 3, 2004, over two years before the economic crisis erupted and two years before Obama was elected, Bill Moyers had this to say:

There's no question about it: The corporate conservatives and their allies in the political and religious right are achieving a vast transformation of American life that only they understand because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the greatest economic inequality in the advanced world, they have saddled our nation, our states, and our cities and counties with structural deficits that will last until our children's children are ready for retirement, and they are systematically stripping government of all its functions except rewarding the rich and waging war.

And, he went on:

Let's face the reality: If ripping off the public trust; if distributing tax breaks to the wealthy at the expense of the poor; if driving the country into deficits deliberately to starve social benefits; if requiring states to balance their budgets on the backs of the poor; if squeezing the wages of workers until the labor force resembles a nation of serfs - if this isn't class war, what is?

The attack on public worker unions, the drive to eviscerate or destroy Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, the attack on teachers and the defunding of public education, the slashing of social welfare programs, the home foreclosure crisis, are not merely interconnected, they are part of one project.

Right now the lives of millions of people are being rendered increasingly precarious. All working people are feeling it and African Americans are being hit extra hard. On top of historic racism - and largely because of it - we have to put up to with a catastrophic rate of joblessness, especially for our young people, and a disproportionate share of home foreclosures. The schools that are crumbling the fastest and facing unacceptable teacher layoffs are in our neighborhoods.

I never expected the President to choose liberal and progressive economists to try and rescue the economy when the crisis hit full force. He chose some of the movers and shakers of the finance industry and their academic fellow travelers (some of the same people that helped get us into this mess). It wasn’t just because the hedge fund people contributed so much to his campaign; they are competent and besides they know where the bodies are buried.

The problem is that the President is now ignoring the wise counsel of those who are saying clearly and forcefully that this “deficit reduction” business is a shuck. This is the “Shock Doctrine” that Naomi Klein spelled out in her book. The aim of the austerity drive in this country and in most of the advanced capitalist world - think of Greece, Ireland, Portugal - is to emerge from the present economic crisis with the system intact and the assets of the rich and powerful secure. Right now these shape the policies of both of the two major political parties, the bulk of the major mass media and business groups.

It’s reported that President Obama got no applause the other night when he told the audience at a Washington’s Capital Hilton Hotel fundraiser: “Let me tell you, we as Democrats, we as progressives, need to be just as concerned about the debt as anybody else. Because that’s how we will be able to move our vision forward - investing in education, investing in infrastructure, investing in clean energy, if we’ve got a government that lives within its means. So we’ve got to be concerned about that.”

Though the reports are still murky, it seems the President said pretty much the same thing when he met with members of the Congressional Black Caucus earlier this month and he scarcely got any amens there either.

These days when I hear anyone in official Washington say something about investing in education, infrastructure or clean energy, I reach for my computer. They aren’t talking about investing in anything. They’re too busy arguing about how much less to spend, how much to sock it to working people and poor while the banks are raking it in and paying out obscene bonuses big time. The tragedy here is that the Obama administration has effectively ruled out any more overt economic stimulus. What talk there is about spending on infrastructure offers no specific targets or budget allocations. The result is that there is no long-term employment program or meaningful steps to deal with the plight of the jobless today.

And whatever happened to green jobs?

“Successful job creation is the key to deficit reduction over the medium term,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said recently. “We must commit to the sizeable and sustained level of public investment needed to rebuild our crumbling roads, bridges and schools and prepare our country for the next generation. From technology to education, investments today will make responsible fiscal balance achievable and - most important - create good jobs for America’s workers and help us win the future.” Obama used to talk that way but no more; now the cart has been moved to front of the horse.

“Today's budget debate is being framed as if the President's proposal is the ‘left’ and the Republican proposal is the ‘right,’ Richard Eskow, a senior fellow with The Campaign for America's Future wrote the other day. “Actually, the President's offering a center-right plan and the GOP's offering a radical-right plan. The budget plan that most closely reflects public opinion is the one offered by the House Progressive Caucus, and that's being dismissed as coming from the 'loony left' - even though polls show it represents the real 'center' of public opinion.”

What should progressives do now? Seems to me we have little choice but to draw a line in the sand of our own. The budget proposals of the Black Congressional Caucus and the Progressive Congressional Caucus’s "People's Budget” should become our rallying point. We should resist with all the creative energy we can muster, and quite independently, any attempts to undermine Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, insist on an end the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, and for a turn away from the “deficit reduction” mania toward real action to create jobs and aid the unemployed.

And I agree with what Congressmember Barbara Lee said last November: “We're going to have to develop our own ways of communicating the truth to the America people that means grassroots organizing, town halls, and using social media networks. We're going to have to be 21st Century communicators to turn it around and to hit each and every front simultaneously. Because the fact is that money now rules in campaigns and those with money can distort the facts, tell lies, and it's hard to get a consistent platform to refute them.”

One of the lessons of the Freedom Rider story is that administrations can change (not in the “make me do it” sense. Obama’s no FDR.). The Kennedys were not happy about the activity of the young riders; they tried to get the project called off. But in the end the dedication and tenacity of the protestors won out. Segregation in interstate travel was banned. If, like them, we refuse to roll over or be quiet, if we insist that the needs and aspirations of Main Street, the ghetto and the barrio get through to the corridors of power, maybe, just maybe, the President will come back home. That is to the place he said he was when change was promised and the saga began.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Carl Bloice is a writer in San Francisco, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly worked for a healthcare union.

2012 Warning: Trumka & SEIU vs. Top Democrats

2011-05-25T04:43:00.001-07:00

Labor’s Hail Mary pass

By Harold Meyerson
Progressive America Rising via Washington Post

May 24, 2011 - This is a maddening time for anyone concerned about the lives of working-class Americans. The frustration and anger that suffused AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka’s declaration last week that labor would distance itself from the Democratic Party was both clear and widely noted. Not so widely noted has been a shift in the organizing strategy of two of labor’s leading institutions — Trumka’s AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union — that reflects a belief that the American labor movement may be on the verge of extinction and must radically change its game.

It took a multitude of Democratic sins and failures to push Trumka to denounce, if not exactly renounce,the political party that has been labor’s home at least since the New Deal. In a speech at the National Press Club last Friday, Trumka said that Republicans were wielding a “wrecking ball” against the rights and interests of working Americans. But Democrats, he added, were “simply standing aside” as the Republicans moved in for the kill.

The primary source of labor’s frustration has been the consistent inability of the Democrats to strengthen the legislation that once allowed workers to join unions without fear of employer reprisals. …

…American business has poked so many holes in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act that it now affords workers no protections at all. Beginning with Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, every time the Democrats have held the White House and strong majorities in both houses of Congress, bills that strengthened workers’ rights to unionize have commanded substantial Democratic support — but never quite enough to win a Senate supermajority. And during that time, the unionized share of the private-sector workforce has dwindled from roughly 30 percent to less than 7 percent.

Many union activists viewed the 2009-10 battle for the most recent iteration of labor law reform — the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) — as labor’s last stand. EFCA could never attain the magic 60-vote threshhold required to cut off a filibuster, despite the presence, at one point, of 60 Democratic senators. Given the rate at which private-sector unionization continues to fall (which in turn imperils support for public-sector unions), many of labor’s most thoughtful leaders now consider the Democrats’ inability to enact EFCA a death sentence for the American labor movement.

“It’s over,” one of labor’s leading strategists told me this month. Indeed, since last November’s elections, half a dozen high-ranking labor leaders from a range of unions have told me they believe that private-sector unions may all but disappear within the next 10 years.

While some unions still wage more conventional organizing campaigns, the campaign that best captures the desperation of American labor today is that of the SEIU. Perhaps the best-funded and most strategically savvy of American unions, SEIU has embarked on a door-to-door canvass in the minority neighborhoods of 17 major American cities. The goal isn’t to enroll the people behind those doors in a conventional union but, rather, into a mass organization of the unemployed and the underpaid that can turn out votes in 2012 and act as an ongoing pressure group for job creation and worker rights during (presumably) Barack Obama’s second term.

“We realized we could organize one million more people into the union and it wouldn’t in itself really change anything,” SEIU President Mary Kay Henry told me earlier this year. “We needed to do something else — something more.”

The SEIU’s program — like its semi-counterpart in the AFL-CIO’s Working America program, a door-to-door canvass in white working-class neighborhoods — will surely help Democatic candidates, despite the frustrations that nearly all labor leaders feel toward the party. But, like Working America, it signals a strategic shift by American labor, whose ranks have been so reduced that it now must recruit people to a non-union, essentially non-dues-paying organization to amass the political clout that its own diminished ranks can no longer deliver. Since labor law now effectively precludes workplace representation, unions are turning to representing workers anywhere and in any capacity they can. It’s time, they’ve concluded, for the Hail Mary pass.

The unions’ support for the Democrats’ party committees has already diminished considerably, though, as Trumka made clear last week, they will continue to support individual pro-union Democrats. But the greater change in union strategy is the one that’s been forced upon them. They are going outside the workplace. They have no place else to turn.

meyersonh@washpost.com

Task for 2012: Monkey-Wrenching the White United Front

2011-05-18T20:08:00.001-07:00

What Too Few Progressives

are Prepared to Discuss

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
Progressive America Rising via BlackCommentator.com

May 18, 2011 - In the context of the criticisms that many of us have of the Obama administration for what it has not accomplished, for its advance of a corporate agenda and for the unacceptable compromises it has made with the Republicans, there is something that I have seen few progressives address. To borrow from a comment offered by television commentator Tavis Smiley, the 2012 elections are likely to be the most racist that most of have seen in our life-times. Given this, what are the implications?

It has been striking that many progressives, particularly those who have not only written off President Obama but also written off all those who offered critical support to the Obama campaign in 2008, have said so little about race, racism, and the discourse of right-wing populism in the context of the upcoming elections.

We have witnessed the first Black president of the United States questioned about his citizenship and birthplace, yet I have seen precious little from many friends on the left side of the aisle (particularly those so critical of Obama) responding to this. If you put your ear to the ground, however, you hear the murmurings of Black Americans furious that Obama was put in a place where he had to file a petition in order to obtain his Hawaii birth certificate. The murmurings do not stop there. When Donald Trump and other opportunists started asking questions about how it was that Obama got into Columbia University and Harvard Law School (i.e., was he REALLY qualified to have gotten into those schools), for most of us enough was enough. Because this was no longer about Obama and it had very little to do with criticisms of Obama and his policies.

The white nationalist backlash is using Obama as the target but they are attempting to create a white united front to, in their minds, take back the United States. Part of this agenda means delegitimizing the democratically elected President, but it also goes towards tampering with election laws and voting processes in state after state.

In case you have not noticed, in many states where there is a Republican majority in control, efforts are underway to restrict voting, whether by further limiting ex-felons from voting, to eliminating same-day voter registration, to the demand for picture identifications at the time of voting, to the shortening of periods of early voting. The objective is to reduce the potential anti-Republican electorate. This is being done by demagogically and inaccurately crowing about alleged voter fraud. But this happens through the Right racializing alleged voter fraud. In other words, as opposed to a discussion about real voter theft, e.g., the Republican theft of the 2000 election, the right-wing uses black and brown characters as the way of convincing segments of the white populace that something needs to be done, otherwise these colored peoples will be taking over.

The racist attacks on Obama, then, fuse with the larger right-wing narrative: the United States of America is being lost to white people. This has been the core of the Birther message, but it has also been the core of the attacks that contributed to the collapse of ACORN, as well as the blitzkrieg effort of the Right to overturn voting rights. In its more extreme version it is the core of the message that comes out of the fascist and semi-fascist movements among white nationalists such as the Sovereign Citizens (the subject of a segment of the May 15th episode of 60 Minutes).

What we are witnessing is disturbingly similar to the period of the overthrow of Reconstruction and the building of the Jim Crow segregationist system in the South. Appealing to fears among whites, and in a frantic effort to destabilize any efforts at unity between the black and white poor in the South at the end of the 19th century, white Southern elites moved an agenda of voter disenfranchisement, hiding behind various coded concerns, such as the literacy of the electorate. African Americans were completely disenfranchised, and quite ironically, so were many poor whites.

Despite our knowledge of history and awareness of the antics of white right-wing populism, few progressives are discussing the implications of any of this for the 2012 elections. The implications, it would seem to me, are quite profound, and range from what does this mean about HOW to criticize the Obama administration, to how to ensure that the elections are not outright stolen by the white Right.

Just to be clear before some of my critics start yelling that ".Fletcher is covering for Obama.," this column is about racial politics in the USA. The particular flashpoint happens to be Obama but what is at stake, as I have attempted to elaborate, is far more than the political future of a corporate liberal president. Silence on the part of progressives in the face of this situation, despite our own legitimate criticisms of Obama, misses the larger picture. Yes, we must criticize Obama; yes, we must push this administration; yes, we must protest any retrograde domestic or foreign policies. But in the end, we need to be discussing how this is done in the context of fighting a white, right-wing populism that is arguing that Obama is an alien and that he [and the changing demographics of the USA] represents the end of the white `American Dream.' We should have no illusions that the Republican candidate for the Presidency, irrespective of who gets it, will center their campaign on anything but this one, critical message.

I think it is time to talk about strategy and tactics in the fight for power and against the Right, and not only about matters of policy. Politics is dirty, but it is also very complicated, that is, if one exists in the real world rather than in one's own playpen.

_____________

Book Review: ‘Mom. Sex and God’

2011-05-17T19:12:00.001-07:00

Insider: The Christian

Right Aims to Destroy

All Things Public’

By Frank Schaeffer
De Capo Press
Progressive America Rising Via Alternet - May 17, 2011

The following is an excerpt from Frank Schaeffer's new book, Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics -- and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway (Da Capo Press, 2011). Raised in Switzerland in l'Abri, a utopian community and spiritual school his evangelical parents founded, Schaeffer was restless and aware even at a young age that "my life was being defined by my parent's choices." Still, he took to "the family business" well, following his dad as he became one of the "best-known evangelical leaders in the U.S." on whirlwind speaking tours. While rubbing shoulders with Pat Robertson, James Dobson and Jerry Falwell, Schaeffer witnessed the birth of the Christian anti-abortion movement, and became an evangelical writer, speaker and star in his own right.

****

Ironically, at the very same time as Evangelicals like Dad and I were thrusting ourselves into bare-knuckle politics in the 1970s and 80s, we were also retreating to what amounted to virtual walled compounds. In other words we lashed out at “godless America” and demanded political change—say, the reintroduction of prayer into public schools—and yet also urged our followers to pull their own children out of the public schools and homeschool them. The rejection of public schools by Evangelical Protestants was a harbinger of virtual civil war carried on by other means. Protestants had once been the public schools’ most ardent defenders.

For instance, in the 1840s when Roman Catholics asked for tax relief for their private schools, Protestants said no and stood against anything they thought might undermine the public schools that they believed were the backbone of moral virtue, community spirit, and egalitarian good citizenship.

The Evangelical’s abandonment of the country they called home (while simultaneously demanding change in that society) went far beyond alternative schools or homeschooling. In the 1970s and 1980s thousands of Christian bookstores opened, countless new Evangelical radio programs flourished, and new TV stations went on the air. Even a “Christian Yellow Pages” (a guide to Evangelical tradesmen) was published advertising “Christcentered plumbers,” accountants, and the like who “honor Jesus.”

New Evangelical universities and even new law schools appeared, seemingly overnight, with a clearly defined mission to “take back” each and every profession—including law and politics—“for Christ.” For instance, Liberty University’s Law School was a dream come true for my old friend Jerry Falwell, who (when I was speaking at his school in 1983 to the entire student body for the second time) gleefully told me of his vision for Liberty’s programs: “Frank, we’re going to train a new generation of judges to change America!” This was the same Jerry Falwell who wrote in America Can Be Saved, “I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools.”

To the old-fashioned conservative mantra “Big government doesn’t work,” the newly radicalized Evangelicals (and their Roman Catholic and Mormon cobelligerents) added “The U.S. government is evil!” And the very same community—Protestant American Evangelicals—who had once been the bedrock supporters of public education, and voted for such moderate and reasonable men as President Dwight Eisenhower, became the enemies of not only the public schools but also of anything in the (nonmilitary) public sphere “run by the government.”

As they opened new institutions (proudly outside the mainstream), the Jesus Victims doing this “reclaiming” cast themselves in the role of persecuted exiles. What they never admitted was that they were self-banished from mainstream institutions, not only because the Evangelicals’ political views on social issues conflicted with most people’s views, but also because Evangelicals (and other conservative religionists) found themselves holding the short end of the intellectual stick. Science marched forth, demolishing fundamentalist “facts” with dispassionate argument. So science also became an enemy.

Rather than rethink their beliefs, conservative religionists decided to renounce secular higher education and denounce it as “elitist.” Thus, to be uninformed, even willfully and proudly stupid, came to be considered a Godly virtue. And since misery loves company, the Evangelicals’ quest, for instance when Evangelicals dominated the Texas textbook committees, was to strive to “balance” the teaching of evolution with creationism and damn the facts. In the minds of Evangelicals, they were recreating the Puritan’s self-exile from England by looking for a purer and better place, this time not a geographical “place” but a sanctuary within their minds (and in inward-looking schools and churches) undisturbed by facts.

Like the Puritans, the post-Roe Evangelicals (and many other conservative Christians) withdrew from the mainstream not because they were forced to but because the society around them was, in their view, fatally sinful and, worse, addicted to facts rather than to faith. And yet having “dropped out” (to use a 1960s phrase), the Evangelicals nevertheless kept on demanding that regarding “moral” and “family” matters the society they’d renounced nonetheless had to conform to their beliefs.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century the Evangelical and conservative Roman Catholic (and Mormon) outsider victim “approach” to public policy was perfected on a heretofore-undreamed of scale by Sarah Palin. She was the ultimate holier-than-thou Evangelical queen bee. What my mother had represented (in her unreconstructed fundamentalist heyday) to a chalet full of young gullible women and later to tens of thousands of readers, Palin became for tens of millions of alienated angry white lower-middleclass men and women convinced that an educated “elite” was out to get them.

Palin was first inflicted on the American public by Senator John McCain, who chose her as his running mate in the 2008 presidential election for only one reason: He needed to shore up flagging support from the Evangelical Republican antiabortion base. McCain wanted to prove that he was fully in line with the “social issues” agenda that Dad, Koop, and I had helped foist on our country over thirty years before. Palin lost the election for McCain but “won” her war for fame and fortune and self-appointed “prophetess” status.

She presented herself as called by God and thus cast in the Old Testament mold of Queen Esther, one chosen by God to save her people. Palin perfected the Jesus Victim “art” of Evangelical self banishment and then took victimhood to new levels of success by cashing in on white lower-middle-class resentment of America’s elites. She might as well have run under the slogan “I’m as dumb as you are!”

Palin made a fortune by simultaneously proclaiming her Evangelical faith, denouncing Liberals, and claiming that she would help the good God fearing folks out there “take back” their country. This “Esther” lacked seriousness. But born-again insiders knew that the “wisdom of men” wasn’t the point. Why should the new Queen Esther bother to actually finish her work governing Alaska? God had chosen her to confound the wise! So she became a media star and quit as governor of Alaska. Then she battled “Them”—the “lamestream media” (as she labeled any media outlets outside of the Far Right subculture)—in the name of standing up for “Real Americans.” Palin used the alternative communication network that had its roots deeply embedded in those pioneering 1970s and 1980s Evangelical TV shows and radio shows that I used to be on just about every other day. She did this to avoid being questioned by people who didn’t agree with her. By not actually governing or doing the job she’d been elected by Alaskans to do, and by using the alternative media networks as an “outsider”—all the while reacting to and demanding attention from the actual (theoretically hated) media—Palin also made buckets of money.

And the greatest irony was that many women in the Evangelical/ Roman Catholic/Quiverfull movements were cheering for Palin as a defender of “traditional family values.” Yet Palin was the least- “submissive” female imaginable. She misused her children as stage props and reduced her husband to the role of “helpmeet”; indeed, he became the perfect example of a good biblical wife.

Speaking of “good biblical wives,” in the Palin era the Evangelical Right still liked to pay lip-service to the Puritan community as an ideal to “get back to.” Yet the post-Roe Evangelicals ignored the Puritans’ actual ideas about government’s biblically mandated role.

The Puritans’ theology of government was formed in the context of an embrace of all Christians’ duty to enhance the public good. This was exemplified by such unquestioned well-established concepts as the “king’s highway,” a common road system protected by the crown (government) and a common law that applied to all.

One’s common duty to others was accepted as the essential message of Christian civilization. Public spaces were defended by government in the early New England settlements, just as they had been in England.

What’s so curious is that in this religion-inflicted country of ours, the same Evangelicals, conservative Roman Catholics, and others who had been running around post-Roe insisting that America had a “Christian foundation” and demanding a “return to our heritage” (and/or more recently trashing health care reform as “communist”) ignored the fact that one historic contribution of Christianity was a commitment to strong central government. For instance, this included church support for state-funded, or state-church-funded, charities, including hospitals, as early as the fourth century.

Government was seen as part of God’s Plan for creating social justice and defending the common good. Christians were once culture-forming and culture-embracing people. Even the humanism preached by the supposedly “anti-Christian” Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century was, in fact, a Deist/Christian “heresy,” with a value system espousing human dignity borrowed wholesale from the Sermon on the Mount.

In the scorched-earth post-Roe era of the “health care reform debates” of 2009 and beyond, Evangelicals seemed to believe that Jesus commanded that all hospitals (and everything else) should be run by corporations for profit, just because corporations weren’t the evil government. The Right even decided that it was “normal” for the state to hand over its age-old public and patriotic duties to private companies—even for military operations (“contractors”), prisons, health care, public transport, and all the rest.

The Religious Right/Far Right et al. favored private “facts,” too. They claimed that global warming wasn’t real. They asserted this because scientists (those same agents of Satan who insisted that evolution was real) were the ones who said human actions were changing the climate. Worse, the government said so, too!

“Global warming is a left-wing plot to take away our freedom!”

“Amtrak must make a profit!”

Even the word “infrastructure” lost its respectability when government had a hand in maintaining roads, bridges, and trains. In denial of the West’s civic-minded, government-supporting heritage, Evangelicals (and the rest of the Right) wound up defending private oil companies but not God’s creation, private cars instead of public transport, private insurance conglomerates rather than government care of individuals.

The price for the Religious Right’s wholesale idolatry of private everything was that Christ’s reputation was tied to a cynical union-busting political party owned by billionaires. It only remained for a Far Right Republican- appointed majority on the Supreme Court to rule in 2010 that unlimited corporate money could pour into political campaigns— anonymously—in a way that clearly favored corporate America and the superwealthy, who were now the only entities served by the Republican Party.

The Evangelical foot soldiers never realized that the logic of their “stand” against government had played into the hands of people who never cared about human lives beyond the fact that people could be sold products. By the twenty-first century, Ma and Pa No-name were still out in the rain holding an “Abortion is Murder!” sign in Peoria and/or standing in line all night in some godforsaken mall in Kansas City to buy a book by Sarah Palin and have it signed. But it was the denizens of the corner offices at Goldman Sachs, the News Corporation, Koch Industries, Exxon, and Halliburton who were laughing.

Excerpted with permission from the publisher and author -- all rights reserved -- Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics -- and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway by Frank Schaeffer (Da Capo Press, 2011).

Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of many books including Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back © 2011 De Capo Press All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/150936/ [w1]

Out Now! Bring the Troops Home

2011-05-11T09:55:00.000-07:00

With bin Laden dead, the U.S. should change its policy

By Bill Fletcher Jr.

The Progressive, May 11, 2011

The killing of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden provides an opportunity for the United States to make a much-needed change in its policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The United States invaded Afghanistan because al-Qaida used that country as a base. A direct connection between the Sept. 11 attacks and the Taliban government of Afghanistan was never proven. But what was clear was that al-Qaida, the group responsible for the deed, was a network rather than a government. Invading Afghanistan was a conventional solution to a problem that was anything but conventional. It was the equivalent of proposing the bombing of Sicily in order to get rid of the Mafia.

Despite 10 years of war and occupation, the Taliban insurgency has not been defeated. If anything, it has increased in influence. The United States and its NATO allies, through an invasion and support of corrupt warlords, have turned an unpopular, theocratic, semi-fascist organization into Robin Hood’s band.

One final irony: bin Laden was killed not in Afghanistan but in Pakistan, a longtime ally of Washington, and Pakistan was directly responsible for the rise of the Taliban.

The fact that bin Laden was able to exist within Pakistan, so close to a Pakistani military installation, means that Pakistan is, at the least, ambivalent about U.S. objectives in Afghanistan.

U.S. policy in the region needs to change immediately, and it should do so in three ways.

First, Washington needs a political solution with the Taliban. The United States can’t crush the Taliban. The people of Afghanistan will need to settle accounts with the Taliban on their own.

Second, al-Qaida needs to be confronted as any other criminal network is. Drone strikes and conventional invasions are both counterproductive and ineffective.

And third, for peace to come to the region, the question of Kashmir must be settled peacefully and democratically. Lying beneath virtually every dispute in the region has been the decades-long struggle between India and Pakistan over the disposition of Kashmir, a struggle that often ignores the will of the Kashmiri people. The Pakistani ruling elite views India as its enemy, and as long as that particular conflict simmers, there is always the threat of terrorism and nuclear catastrophe in South Asia.

The Obama administration must reassess its military involvement in Afghanistan now, which has proven to be a failure. And it must broker a regional peace. Nothing less will suffice.

Bill Fletcher Jr. is a longtime racial justice, labor and international writer and activist. He is the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum and the co-author of “Solidarity Divided.” He can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.

‘Affirmative Action’ at the Polls for Old White Guys? GOP Already Trying to Rig the Vote

2011-05-05T06:03:00.001-07:00

Florida GOP Squeezes

Obama-Friendly Voters

BY JOY-ANN REID
Progressive America Rising via The Miami Herald

May 1, 2011 - Last week, we learned that even achieving the highest level of academic and political success — up to and including being elected president of the United States — is not enough to exempt an African American from having it demanded of him, by even the Washington press corps, that he prove the circumstances of his birth to a white, B-list television personality.

The racial enmity — dare I say envy — of people like Donald Trump, and the parade of racists and rejectionists rallying behind the birther banner will soon lose media interest.

But there are forms of rejectionism that in a way are more pernicious, in that they target not President Obama, but rather the people who voted for him, and who Republicans fear will do so again.

In Florida, the GOP-dominated legislature will soon pass laws squeezing the voting methods favored by minorities, college students and the working class.

Between them, the House and Senate bills would cut early voting from two weeks to one; force people who need to update their name or address on Election Day (say, due to marriage or divorce or a move by a military family) to vote on provisional ballots; and impose onerous restrictions on groups registering people to vote.

In the most extreme case, Republicans hope to pack the Supreme Court to undermine the anti-gerrymandering Fair Districts Amendments voted through by a public who actually thought the authoritarians in Tallahassee would let a little thing like the Constitution come between them and their stranglehold on power.

And in an especially creative flourish, Rick Scott and his Cabinet have revived the spirit of Jim Crow by re-imposing restrictions on voting rights restoration that had been brought into the 21st Century by former Gov. Charlie Crist.

Florida’s two-week early voting period was among the reforms meant to prevent embarrassments like the 2000 election. It was a hard-won victory for working people who sometimes can’t get to the polls if they work odd hours, or run out of time to resolve a problem at the polls.

Arguably, it also contributed to Obama’s Florida win in 2008, as black churches and college students took full advantage of the extra time (and the history-making opportunity).

Karen Andre, who ran the Liberty City/Little Haiti office for the Obama campaign, called the impact of early voting in those neighborhoods “amazing.”

“It was raining constantly during early voting and people would not leave the polls,” she said.

Held harmless by the “reformers” will be absentee voting, which happens to be the method used most effectively by Republicans.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act prohibits the erection of race-based barriers to voting.

Yet, for all the showbiz of ushering a pair of black tea partiers, Tim Scott of South Carolina and Allen West of Florida, into Congress in 2010, Republicans have had no luck convincing African Americans to choose the party of birtherism, Andrew Breitbart, and the running innuendo that black and Hispanic Ivy Leaguers stole the rightful slots of “real Americans.”

In Florida, putting Jennifer Carroll on the gubernatorial ticket with Rick Scott was good for a whole 3 percent of the black vote in 2010.

Likewise, Hispanics, apparently failing to see the welcome in laws requiring police officers to demand the papers of anyone who “looks or sounds” illegal — with “illegal” being shorthand for “Spanish-speaking” — continue to vote more than two to one Democratic, even when conservative-leaning Cuban-Americans are factored in.

Ditto the idealistic young, single women, who stubbornly insist on controlling their own reproduction, or union members, who fail to appreciate the benevolence of corporations or the miracle of outsourcing.

As Monica Russo, who heads the SEIU Healthcare Union in Miami put it: “The right-wing powers-that-be understand that we outnumber them.”

Miami-Dade NAACP President Bishop Victor Curry, pastor of one of the largest predominantly African-American churches in South Florida, puts it more bluntly.

“The extreme right wing of the Republican Party has always fought voters’ rights,” Curry said. “They don’t want full participation because they fear that if there is full participation, the majority of people in this country will not vote for them. So they try to stifle. They try to block.”

Curry, Russo and Andre agree on the way to fight back.

“I hope people decide that although [Republicans] have the power to reduce early voting to a week that people take full advantage of that week,” Curry said.

Or as the guy who occupies the post that Donald Trump never will once said: “Yes we can.”

Bin Laden and the Folly of Being Driven by a ‘Search for Monsters’

2011-05-03T05:10:00.001-07:00

Bin Laden Is Dead, But Will

the 'Long War' on Terror Live On?

By Tom Hayden
Progressive America Rising via The Nation

May 2, 2011 - The killing of Osama bin Laden is a triumphant moment for President Obama and the CIA, allowing a symbolic claim to victory in the War on Terror, bringing an understandable feeling of closure for the victims of 9/11, and will almost certainly assure the president’s re-election in 2012.

But as I wrote in The Nation in October 2009, however, the death of bin Laden is not likely to end the Long War on Terror, now spreading from Iraq to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and a dozen other theaters of counterterrorism.

If bin Laden is gone, and his network heavily damaged, what is left of the terrorist threat to our national security that justifies so many trillions of dollars and costs in thousands of lives? Because of a fabricated fear of bin Laden, we invaded Iraq. The invasion of Afghanistan was to deny sanctuaries to bin Laden and Al Qaeda. In response, Al Qaeda moved into Pakistan, where bin Laden was killed tonight. So why are the Taliban in Afghanistan a threat to the security of the United States with bin Laden gone? Surely there are terrorist cells with lethal capacity scattered around the world, surely there might be revenge attacks, but there is hardly a centralized conspiratorial threat that justifies the deployment of hundreds of thousands of American troops.

Now we shall learn whether there is another agenda that keeps 150,000 American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

John Quincy Adams long ago urged that American foreign policy should be based on the principle that “she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

As history turned out, however, our governments have identified and defined many monsters, from Crazy Horse and Geronimo on to the present. The underlying theory has been that demonic conspirators provoke, lead and manipulate insurgent movements, and that silencing them will end the threat.

The example of Che Guevara is instructive. Detected, hunted, captured and killed by Bolivians accompanied by the CIA in October 1967, Che was transformed in death into a global symbol of rebellion. His spirit continues to be alive today all over Latin America, and indeed the world. It can be argued that Che’s impact became greater in martyrdom than during his guerrilla campaigns in Africa and Bolivia.

So it could be with the myth of Osama bin Laden. It may depend on whether the US moves away from the War on Terrorism model to more active support of the youthful social revolution sweeping the Arab world today, which has already surpassed Al Qaeda in its scope and momentum.

Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/160313/bin-laden-dead-will-long-war-terror-live