The Tea Party “Catch 22”

The Tea Party movement has started to come unglued over a series of internal contradictions that amount to an identity crisis. The Tea Party is caught in a “Catch 22” position that has largely been ignored by the corporate mainstream media.

Just this morning I watched a local PBS show where a Republican operative claimed that the Tea Party movement was not “Republican, Right Wing or racist.” The comment appears to be the Republican Right Wing official spin on all things “Tea Party” in nature. Unfortunately, the claim really lacks credibility because it conflicts with the facts on the ground all over the nation.

Anyone who really watched the development of the Tea Party movement, as part of the anti-healthcare reform effort, understands that it was a creation of Fox News and corporate funded Right Wing Republican operatives. Despite many claims to the contrary, it brought very few new faces into the political process.

What the Tea Party public relations campaign did was simply “re-brand” the various largely discredited, Right Wing fringe elements in the Republican Party under a new name. It did con the mainstream corporate media very effectively into calling blatant corporatist, economic elitist policies “populist.” It was a bad joke that the media completely missed or just ignored.

Like the fake ACORN pimp and voter registration scandals, the storyline falls apart completely when the details are examined in any detail. The spin relies on manufactured “facts” that are really outrageous lies being told over and over again. In time, the storyline falls apart but often the damage has been done. It appears the mainstream corporate media has learned absolutely nothing from their Iraq War-Weapons of Mass Deception experience.

The reality is that there is probably not much of a Tea Party movement outside of Republican Right Wing corporate control. When it comes to economic populism, the Tea Party has either been completely missing in action or in outright opposition to every proposal that is populist in nature.

Our middle class has been under constant attack by corporate forces for decades. The Reagan-Bush Republicans have been pushing changes in government policy that benefit only the most elite of economic elitists for 30 years. American workers are being driven out of the middle class by government policy and market power. The Republican Right has successfully placed many of the levers of power in government in the hands of the corporatist economic elite. Some Democrats assisted parts of this corporate take-over of government but it was overwhelmingly Republican effort.

The government is not the enemy if it is controlled by the majority of middle class Americans. It is a check on excessive corporate power under those circumstances.

The genius behind the Tea Party campaign is that it is a corporate created public relations/political campaign designed to promote pro-corporate economic policies via government while calling the movement “anti-corporate and anti-government.” The racism angle is a just a way to hook “poor and middle class whites” into an effort designed to economically benefit the wealthiest of the wealthy at the expense of “the poor and middle class of all colors.”

Racism has long been used to divide working Americans up along color lines so they do not demand a better deal from the economic and political elite. Racism serves an economic purpose and always has served an economic purpose. Racism is a sucker bet for working Americans. It has been a key element in building the Tea Party movement and the Republican Party since Richard Nixon. Republican Right wing economic policies are a disaster for 90% of Americans and social wedge issues including race have been the key to Republican victories for more than a generation.

If the Tea Party was really a new creature, it would be fielding third party candidates everywhere under the Tea Party name. Republican and Right Wing operatives claim it is independent of the Republican Party but at the same time strongly oppose real independence. The Republican Party is the Tea Party. The Tea Party is just the most extreme elements of the Republican Party devoted to driving any remaining moderates out of the Republican Party.

You cannot support Pat Toomey-Club for Growth economic policies and still claim to be a populist movement. You have to support economic policies that increase the wages of American workers, support government measures to help the unemployed, curtail the ability of corporations to move jobs outside the United States and sell untaxed imports in our country, shift the tax burden back in the direction of corporations and the Super Wealthy instead of putting it on the middle classes and seek to regulate corporate market power to be an economic populist.

Economic populists do not make excuses for BP like Rand Paul or Sharon Angle. Economic populists do not oppose government deficits during a severe economic downturn nor support government deficits in good economic times, like the Republicans are doing. Opposing better access to affordable healthcare is not a populist position. Giving massive tax cuts to wealthy people while our government is running massive deficits and local governments are firing teachers, firefighters and police is simply stupid economics and has nothing to do with economic populism.

If the Tea Party is” populist” in nature, as they claim, then the policies they support should demonstrate that populism. If the Tea Party is independent of the Republican Party, then they should field independent candidates in the November general elections to prove their independence. If the Tea Party is not racist, then they should condemn the expression of racism from within their movement every time they occur. If the Tea Party is not an expression of extreme Right Wing sentiments, then they should stop supporting the political agenda of the Far Right.

American voters will learn in coming months just how fake and flakey the Tea Party con job is by watching the Tea Party Republicans seeking office in November. You will learn nothing about this from Fox News but the mainstream media should not drop the ball on this story in 2010. The voters deserve a real discussion about the unreality of the Tea Party reality.

Written by Stephen Crockett (Host of Democratic Talk Radio http://www.DemocraticTalkRadio.com ). Mail: 698 Old Baltimore Pike, Newark, Delaware 19702. Phone: 443-907-2367. Email: demlabor@aol.com.

Feel free to publish without prior approval.

July 12, 2010
REPUBLICANS JUST DON’T LIKE THE UNEMPLOYED, CONT’D….

I’ve been marveling in recent months at the ways in which Republican lawmakers and candidates seem to actively dislike — on a personal level — those who’ve lost their jobs in the recession. It’s kind of odd, given that the unemployed don’t seem to have done anything to offend the GOP and earn the party’s disdain.

In the latest example, we see Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett (R), the frontrunner in this year’s gubernatorial race, arguing publicly that jobless workers in his state are choosing not to work, preferring to live on meager unemployment aid.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Corbett on Friday accused some jobless Pennsylvanians of choosing to collect unemployment checks rather than going back to work, prompting swift criticism from his Democratic opponent and one of the state’s top labor leaders.

“The jobs are there. But if we keep extending unemployment, people are just going to sit there,” Corbett told Harrisburg radio station WITF at a campaign stop in Elizabethtown. “I’ve literally had construction companies tell me, ‘I can’t get people to come back to work until . . . they say, “I’ll come back to work when unemployment runs out.” ‘ ”

I obviously can’t speak with confidence about what some guy told some other guy who in turn told Corbett. But the general argument is getting quite tiresome.

“The jobs are there”? No, they’re really not. Nationwide, there are five applicants for every one opening, which is a terribly painful ratio. Pennsylvania’s unemployment rate is currently at a 26-year high.

Corbett not only seems confused about economic conditions, but his animosity about the jobless’ attitudes is awful. Yes, I can appreciate the fact that an unemployed worker who’s exhausted his/her benefits will be more desperate to take any job than an unemployed worker who’s still receiving public aid. But this dynamic matters a whole lot more when there are plenty of job opportunities for those who want them. That’s just not the current reality.

To hear Corbett tell it, the unemployed prefer to be unemployed — turning down job opportunities that pay more, choosing to rely on aid that offers far less. Worse, Corbett doesn’t seem to realize that his approach makes the larger problem worse — cutting people off from unemployment benefits undercuts consumer spending, which in turn leads to less demand and fewer job opportunities……

Read the rest of this article at

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2010_07/024674.php

Dems Could Win Tea Party Voters Over With America-First Trade Message

By Mike Elk

In These Times article link/

A new poll contradicts the widely held belief that the the tea party movement is opposed to government action to help the economy. It shows that self-described Tea Party supporters are very much in favor of government action to revitalize America’s manufacturing base.

Seventy-four percent of self-described Tea Party Supporters would support a “national manufacturing strategy to make sure that government that economic, tax, labor, and trade policies in this country work together to help support manufacturing in the United States,” according to the poll, put out by the Mellman Group and the Alliance for American Manufacturing. Likewise, 56 percent of self-described Tea Party Supporters “favor a tariff on products imported from other countries that are cheaper because they came from a country that does not have to comply with any climate change regulations in the country where the products were made.”

The poll also shows that President Obama’s approval rating are 11 points lower among households were a family member is employed in manufacturing than a household where no one is employed in manufacturing. That underscores a trend already noted: those most affected by the Democrats’ failure to deliver on their promises of trade reform are turning against the Democratic Party.

Why? The reason is that many feel betrayed by Democrats. Government inaction during the last thirty years has destroyed the core of the American economy: manufacturing.

Such is the case in my own hometown of Westmoreland County, Pa., where the loss of manufacturing jobs turned the county from a heavily white, heavily union, heavily Democratic county into a heavily white, heavily Fox New watching, heavily Republican County.

In 1988, card-carrying ACLU member Michael Dukakis carried my home county by an 11-point margin in a year in which he won only nine states nationally. Yet in 2008 my home county voted for Republican Sen. John McCain by a 17-point margin. It turned Republicans because Democrats sold out on NAFTA, the North American Free-Trade Agreement, and thousands of manufacturing jobs disappeared.

The Republican Party has been able to keep these voters in their ranks despite the fact that Republican party is doing nothing on the trade front either. Infact, there is absolutely no mention of trade reform in the Tea Party’s official “Contract From America.” (See Roger Bybee’s great Working ITT piece on this problem for the Tea Party Movement). The Tea Party get its momentum not from an overall hatred of government, but from a hatred of government doing things that so often hurt people like unfair trade deals.

This new poll shows that the top concerns of all Americans, including Tea Party supporters, is not the federal budget deficit but that we are too deep of debt to China in terms of our trade imbalance. No major political party is championing this issue. The surprise victory of Democrat Mark Critz in John Murtha’s old district which was expected to go Republican showed that Democrats can win over Republican voters when they campaign tough on trade issues.

If President Obama really wanted to heal the words of divided nation and away from demagogues like Glenn Beck, he could do it be taking real action on trade. He could do it by fufilling his campaign pledge to renegotiate NAFTA (a pledge now considered “laughable” within the administration). Then Obama could fulfill another campaign promise by slapping tariffs on illegal Chinese currency manipulation which make Chinese goods 25-40% cheaper than American goods.

The great thing about renegotiating NAFTA and slapping tariffs on China is that by law Obama doesn’t need congressional approval to do it. He could do it unilaterally and send a huge signal to voters that he, along with those who support this policy, on the side of American workers. The president could use these steps to lay out a bold vision for an industrial policy to rebuild America.

The choice is President Obama’s - reform trade and heal the countries’ wounds or see a divided, unemployed white working class turn to voices of hate.

Unionists, Environmentalists, Progressives Need to Take Over Democratic Party

It is time to purge the corporatists from the Democratic power structure. The real work of the Democratic Party is done by grassroots activists. These activists are the Democratic Party. They should run it at every level.

This conclusion has become clear in the aftermath of tainted Blanche Lincoln primary victory in Arkansas. It took massive voter disenfranchisement and the intervention of both former President Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama for Lincoln to squeak out a victory.

Obama still has not learned that the Obama Movement that put him in the White House was not really about Obama. It was about a set of progressive policies that constituted “change we can believe in.”

Former President Clinton started the process of going Republican-lite and selling out parts of the Democratic base around specific policy issues. Union members and American workers were shafted by the false promises surrounding “so-called free trade deals.” Poor Americans really suffered from some aspects of his welfare reform ideas. Deregulation helped create media consolidation that gave the corporations excessive control of public policy discussions and American politics.

Hilary Clinton was the driving force behind the most progressive policy goal of the Clinton Presidency which was the failed attempt at healthcare reform. America would have been a much better place if she had been President instead of Bill Clinton. One note of caution in her background was her position at one point on the Wal-Mart Board but her overall political history is solidly progressive.

President Clinton was not a bad on corporate issues as Reagan or both of the Bushes but he was pretty bad for a Democrat. He was not as bad as Senator Blanche Lincoln. Lincoln received more campaign money from Big Oil than any other Senator regardless of political party. She was the leading force in blocking the public option in healthcare reform.

Blanche Lincoln stopped the Employee Free Choice Act from even getting debated on the floor of the US Senate. She has a terrible record on trade policy, environmental protections, tax policy and deregulation. Blanche Lincoln has proven herself the most “corporatist” Senator in the relatively small “corporatist” wing of the Democratic Party.

Union activists, progressives and environmentalists are the majority of foot soldiers that go to battle for Democratic candidates at every level in every community of the nation. Along with civil rights leaders, civil libertarians, peace activists and the progressive Internet community, these activists give more money to elect Democrats than every corporation combined.

The corporations make the big donations and control the mainstream media but their values are really more Republican than Democratic. They value money over people. They value money over traditional American values. They value money over American patriotism. They value money over ethics, honesty and decency. Their values are directly at odds with the core values of the Democratic base.

We need to return to the values of FDR and the New Deal. We need to capture every Democratic Party office and drive out the corporatists. The Democratic Party is a much better institution because we drove out the Southern racist faction (and the northern one) and we need to do the same with the corporatists.

Obama needs to decide if he is going to the leader of this effort or an obstacle. If he elects to be an obstacle, he will not get a second term. If he joins in this populist effort, he might go down in history as an equal to our greatest American President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

With or without Obama, we need to take over every local Democratic Committee, every Democratic club and elect our “real Democrats” to public office. Government is not our enemy as long as it has not been captured by corporations. The US Constitution says we “the people” are the government. Corporations are not people despite the radical Right Wing Supreme Court rulings.

The Tea Party crowd has been captured and in some cases created by corporate forces. They cannot be the populist engine for “change you can believe in” but you and your friends can be that populist engine. Get angry, get active and fight corporatism regardless of political party.

Written by Stephen Crockett (host of Democratic Talk Radio http://www.DemocraticTalkRadio.com and Editor of Mid-Atlantic Labor.com http://www.midatlanticlabor.com) . Mail: 698 Old Baltimore Pike, Newark, Delaware 19702. Email: demlabor@aol.com. Phone: 443-907-2367.

Feel free to publish without prior approval.

This Sestak job offer thing is a fake scandal. Pure BS designed to take the focus off Toomey. The corporate candidate Toomey would be really hurt considering everything corporations have been doing recently to destroy the American Dream. The Wall Street financial meltdown, oil destroying the Gulf of Mexico, bad trade deals destroying American jobs, crushing national debt created by tax breaks for corporations and corporate executives, etc., etc. Toomey supported all these policies and continues pushing more of the same.

We need to write letters to the Editor, blog and call talk shows to expose this ploy. Please do your part and share this message everywhere. The Pennsylvania Senate race is important!

Stephen Crockett

Host, Democratic Talk Radio
Editor, Mid-Atlantic Labor.com

Lessons for Obama from the Arkansas and Pennsylvania Democratic Primaries

The Obama White House hopefully will learn something about Obama 2008 winning coalition from the 2010 Democratic Primary Elections in Arkansas and Pennsylvania. The media needs to learn this same basic lesson. The Obama Movement was never just about Obama. It was about change… real change. While Obama gives a great speech and the Obama loves to hear him talk, they want real actions that they can believe in and they want it now!

Of course, the Obama movement is not really radical. However, it does want to see fundamental reforms in our political and economic system. The Obama White House has been unwilling to get out in front of the Obama Movement on almost every issue. Conservative and corporate forces within the Obama White House have effectively held back the pace of reforms and often have completely defeated them. The Obama Movement wants more! If they do not get more and soon then Obama will no longer be the leader of the Obama Movement.

Sestak won in the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate race because labor activists and the local Democratic Party leaders did not follow Obama’s endorsement of Specter although their top leadership did. The grassroots refused. They were joined by some unions and essentially all progressive organizations at every level. Minority voters simply did not vote in large numbers. The Obama Movement effectively backed Sestak or stayed home for the most part. Obama cannot take the Obama Movement down paths outside their core values.

Specter was not the kind of leader the Obama Movement wanted. Sestak was and is a different story.

Sestak loves labor. Specter needed labor. The grassroots of the labor movement understood the difference.

Sestak wants to end needless wars and wants to curb excessive corporate power. He is certainly not anti-business but he does seem more focused on Main Street than serving Wall Street. The Republican in the race, Pat Toomey, is widely considered a complete tool of Wall Street and with good reason. Toomey effectively ran the Right Wing billionaires political entity known as the Club for Growth. He will not look good running against a tough military man with a devotion to mainstream middle class values.

I believe that Specter would have lost to Toomey. I believe Sestak will soundly defeat Toomey! Sestak is both a realist and an economic populist. He is honest and hardworking almost to a fault. The contrast with Toomey will be very clear in November.

Blanche Lincoln has voted with the Republicans often. She has blocked important legislation like the Employee Free Choice Act. Only since getting an effective Democratic challenger did she start voting more often for the kind of change desired by the Obama Movement.

Lincoln did not deserve the support of Obama based on her voting record. She still does not deserve his support in the run-off. Obama’s core supporters will hold this misplaced support against Obama for a long time to come.

Obama should have stayed out of the race in both Pennsylvania and Arkansas. The American people like and respect Obama but want Obama to act more aggressively to check excessive corporate power. Opposing progressive or reform Democratic challengers only makes Obama weaker.

The Obama Movement activists want Obama to aggressively push legislation to limit the damage from the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. Obama should push legislation requiring that all shareholders should have to approve in a vote before any money from the corporate treasury gets spent on elections or politics. Corporate executives should not be able spend corporate funds on politics if even one shareholder disagrees. The executives are spending other people’s money.

All publicly traded corporations should be required to give at least 20% of the Board of Director seats to elected representatives of their employees. Obama should push that legislation.

Obama should get out and start a nationwide voter education effort to pass the Employee Free Choice Act. It is time to make unionization elections truly democratic instead of jokes rigged in favor of corporations. Workers need a much bigger say in the economy and a bigger slice of the economic pie. Obama should support legislative limits on corporate executive salaries. Corporate executives should be removed completely from the election process for members of the Board of Directors.

Obama should push legislation to break up the largest banks, modify or repeal unfair “so-called free trade deals”, hold oil companies fully responsible for economic damages from oil spills without financial limits, appoint more aggressive regulators and judges, tax imports and start repealing decades of tax breaks for international corporations.

Every hint of going “corporate Republican-lite” upsets the Obama Movement. Obama needs to remember his base. Obama should look hard at making some staff changes and policy shifts in a more Democratic reform direction. He should compromise less with his enemies and remember his real friends.

The media should stop drinking the Republican Right “tea” kool-aid! The Tea Party Republicans are not economic populists nor anti-corporate. If Obama learns the lesson of these two elections, he can lead the Democratic Party in a real economic populist reform direction. This is what the Obama Movement wants and is the key to victory in 2010.

Written by Stephen Crockett (host of Democratic Talk Radio http://www.DemocraticTalkRadio.com and Editor of Mid-Atlantic Labor.com http://www.midatlanticlabor.com) . Mail: 698 Old Baltimore Pike, Newark, Delaware 19702. Phone: 443-907-2367. Email: demlabor@aol.com.

Feel free to publish or reprint at no charge without prior approval.

Published by AlterNet / Written By Mike Elk

Labor Unions May Have To Abandon Obama to Beat Corporate America

Labor unions need to start fighting their battles in the workplace, not on Capitol Hill.
May 13, 2010 |

As president of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka is emerging as the voice of an increasingly irrelevant labor movement. As unionized work sinks to only 7 percent of the private sector, the labor movement is losing its influence within the Democratic Party. To revitalize labor, Trumka must not only challenge Democratic leaders, but wage political battles outside the bounds of party politics by bringing labor back to its working-class activist roots.

The failure of President Barack Obama to make a major push on the Employee Free Choice Act — let alone give even a single speech dedicated to the topic — is a telling sign of organized labor’s declining momentum inside the Beltway. As Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson noted in February, “For American labor, year one of Barack Obama’s presidency has been close to an unmitigated disaster.” Labor ranks so low on the president’s list of priorities that a new generation of Obama activists is now planning for a political environment altogether devoid of the labor movement….

Read more at:

AlterNet article link
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Mike Elk is a third-generation union organizer who writes for Campaign for America’s Future. He previously worked for the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers (UE).

The Great Divide

by LORENZO A. CANIZARES FOR BUZZFLASH

http://blog.buzzflash.com/contributors/3194

Several weeks ago, Paul Krugman, in an article entitled “Senator Bunning’s Universe,” said that “Democrats and Republicans live in different universes, both intellectually and morally.” I wholeheartedly agree with him. This statement, on the face of it, should shape how we view our future as a nation.

In this article, Krugman states that Republicans are unable to feel the pain of those that are suffering economically. It has been my opinion, from the time of the Bush/Cheney campaign in 2000, that the combinations of greed and racism have been intertwined by the Republicans into a political view that have received the veneer of mainstream acceptance. This magic combo has provided Republicans the ideological cover for all the pain that they have inflicted on the middle/working class. That the majority of the recipients of this economic pain are white people is of no consequence for these Republicans. They have been able to create a mantra of themselves as protectors of white peoples’ interests in defense against the inordinate attacks to their livelihood by systemic demands coming from entitlement programs directed to keep lazy minorities happy. They also call their posture fighting encroaching socialism in their attempt to eliminate any possible empathy. They rationalize their anti-worker stand, which, again, affects mostly white people, by posing to be concerned with negative behavior from those they claim are amongst the unemployed and lack incentive to find jobs — the welfare queen syndrome. Republican Party leaders no longer seem to be inclined to take racism seriously, unless they can twist it around as “reverse racism.”

The legend says, “A wounded beast is the fiercest.” Now, those ideologically guided by Greed and Racism have received a big blow with the victory of Obama and Pelosi in the Healthcare Reform Bill. In spite of the fact that the Bill has glaring weaknesses, the national perception is that the forces of fairness and inclusion has won a major battle; that the social movement that is behind Obama and Pelosi is very much alive and well and empowered to tackle other major reforms that are needed to sustain our democratic system. Republican plans for a cake-walk electoral victory in November are turning sour. Consequently, gun shops are selling weapons and ammunition briskly. A recent Harris poll shows that as many as one in four Republicans believe that Barack Obama is the anti-Christ!

Charles M. Blow in a NYT op-ed article “A Mighty Pale Tea” (4/17/10) does a survey of Tea Party members, and as the title of the article reveals, what he saw at a Tea Party rally in Dallas conforms to a NYT/CBS News poll released on 4/14/10, that Tea-Party affiliation is 1% Afro-American and 1% Hispanic. Unless your level of gullibility has risen to become a risk to your daily living, you will agree that the Tea Party is the militant street component of the Republican Party (I recognize that there are many Republicans still left in the Party that do not share these views, but in the main, the party has been taken by those of the Cheney/Rove ilk). Also, it is important to point out that the extreme views of the Tea Party members are not shared by the majority of whites, including many white Republicans. The Tea Party has been crafted to give it semblances of populism to fool regular, common folks about where their allegiances lie. Let’s not forget the Nazis real name was National Socialist Party.

When the Tea Party movement talks about the threat of socialism, and call for “a new revolution,” and vow to “take our country back” or cheer loudly when Sarah Palin says “reload,” it is time for regular, common folks to be concerned. After all, what we have seen of the Tea Party Movement membership is that they are capable of taking all those slogans literally. The good thing in all this is that we have seen the Democrats have been able to muster the courage to fight back. Kudos to Obama and Pelosi for steering the Party away from the perfect storm! Obama’s strategy of relying in Congressional leadership has been vindicated. Progressive Democrats that had supported Obama enjoyed a victory that could give strength to other necessary changes in the nation as we are beginning to see with the Financial Reform Bill. Of course, it remains to be seen how long this entente will last. Let’s not forget House Minority leader John Boehner’s rhetoric after the passage of the healthcare bill referring to its passage as “Armageddon.” And the picture of Nancy Pelosi in a fundraising appeal by the Republican National Committee surrounded by flames with the Committee’s chairman comment that it was time to put Pelosi on the firing line. They hide behind the first amendment to mouth all their poison, but we can never allow again their thugs to walk away from criminal behavior without severe penalty for their actions. Liberals tend to be nice people, but the biggest mistake that can be made with thugs is being perceived as weak.

Nonetheless, the healthcare victory and student financial-aid victory has provided Obama the opportunity to start seriously working on creating jobs. This past week it was announced that 290,000 jobs were created. But we need millions more! The Obama Administration needs to force those banks that have received public monies to behave responsibly and start lending their government-backed loan monies, especially to small businesses. President Obama, put on the call, and the American people will make sure that they comply!

Gene Lyons reports in an article in the 4/7/10 edition of Liberal Opinion that Bruce Bartlett, a conservative thinker, cites a survey of Tea Partiers at a recent Washington demonstration that shows most know nothing about the policies they so noisily abhor. Bartlett cites as an example that almost none of the Tea Partiers realize that Obama job stimulus plan gave “90 percent of all taxpayers…a tax cut last year and almost 100 percent to those in the $50,000 income range.” Our great divide is being defined as a war against the racism-fueled ignorance masterminded by Unbridled Greed’s Greed Machine. We can win, but we can’t let our guard down, and least of all believe for a second that these people are of the same ilk as we are.

LORENZO A. CANIZARES FOR BUZZFLASH

Why Republicans should support health care reform

by Ray LaHood

http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/ct-perspec-0314-lahood-20100314,0,3364029.story

I’ve been a Republican all my life, when I served in the Illinois legislature, when I worked for members of Congress and when I served in Congress. During the 2008 presidential election, I supported Republican Sen. John McCain. I have always been — and still am — a fiscal conservative, an advocate for a smart, but restrained, government.

For those reasons and others, most people wouldn’t expect me to be an advocate for comprehensive health care reform. But the truth is, I believe there is no bigger issue to solve and no better chance to solve it than now.

If I were still a member of Congress, I would proudly vote for the bill that President Barack Obama is championing and I would urge my colleagues to do the same, not because I don’t believe in fiscal discipline, but because I do.

We do not need to look that far down the road to see the pain that failure to pass health care reform will cause. Americans of every background, class, race and political persuasion are suffering. We have the best health care system in the world, yet more than 40 million Americans lack access to it, a reality that is morally reprehensible. Health care is an essential, as important as food, water and shelter. Those who don’t have it are left without the tools to survive.

In the coming days, Congress has a chance to change that. The bill that will be voted on will reduce the deficit by about $1 trillion over the next two decades, and will reduce waste, fraud and abuse in the health care system. It will slow the rate of growth in health care costs and put America back on the path toward fiscal sustainability.

The bill will give families and small business owners greater control over their own health care. It will expand coverage to more than 31 million Americans and will include tax credits to individuals, families and small businesses, giving them the same choices that members of Congress have to purchase private coverage. It will create state-based exchanges that will bring competition and transparency to insurance markets. And it will put in place common-sense rules of the road to hold insurance companies accountable and end some of the most outrageous practices of the insurance industry.

Never again will people be denied coverage because they have a pre-existing condition. Never again will insurance companies be able to raise rates unfairly — like the 60 percent hikes expected in Illinois.

While the ultimate vote on health care may not be bipartisan, the ultimate bill certainly is.

There are several Republican ideas in the bill. It allows Americans to buy health insurance across state lines. It increases the bargaining power of small businesses by allowing them to pool together — much like large corporations or labor unions — to bargain for a better insurance rate. It gives states the flexibility to come up with an alternate health care plan, and it gives them resources to reform our tort system by developing new ways to deal with medical malpractice.

I also feel compelled to remind my former colleagues that contrary to what many people have been saying, the bill explicitly prevents federal dollars from being used to fund abortion. It ensures not only that those seeking abortion coverage will be required to pay for it with their own money, but also that their personal money will never be commingled with federal funds. As a former congressman with a 100 percent pro-life voting record, I’m comfortable supporting this bill.

There isn’t one member of Congress who represents a district that is without a health care crisis. There are good, hardworking men and women in every part of this country who work for a living, but not at a business that offers the opportunity to purchase health insurance. On their own, the cost of insurance is just plain out of reach.

During my time in Congress, I was known for reaching across the aisle. I did it not for the sake of bipartisanship alone, but in order to get important things done.

Now, my former colleagues have the opportunity to change the lives of their friends and neighbors for the better by voting for health care reform.

Ray LaHood, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, is secretary of transportation in the Obama administration.

Currency Imbalances: China’s Problem or Ours?

By Susan Ozawa

Leading economists gathered at an EPI event today to discuss our trade deficit and labor problems caused by our imbalance with China. The conversation centered around how this imbalance can be solved by compelling China to appreciate its currency. Leo Gerard, the President of the United Steelworkers, did address domestic strategies to approach these problems, however, the central perspective of the panel appeared to view structural imbalances as a bilateral problem to be addressed through foreign policy.

I would broaden the conversation to consider this problem a historically multilateral problem of currency coordination, exacerbated by the neoliberal model of development and highlight our role in addressing these long-standing issues in both foreign and domestic policy. The dollar has fallen significantly since the recession began however, there are different domestic strategies we should pursue to address our structural trade deficit and lack of competitiveness. Looking forward, a new Bretton Woods, particularly the establishment of an International Clearing Union should be reconsidered alongside the neoliberal model of growth and development to address the international issues underlying these imbalances.

Post continues here: http://www.ourfuture.org/stories/2010031012/currency-imbalances-china-s-problem-or-ours

Boycott FedEx

By Chris Hedges

Dean Henderson’s career with FedEx ended abruptly when a reckless driver plowed into his company truck and mangled his leg. His doctor will decide this week if it needs to be amputated. No longer able to drive, stripped of value in our commodity culture, he was tossed aside by the company. He became human refuse. He spends most of his days, because of the swelling and the pain, with his leg raised on a recliner in the tiny apartment in Fairfax, Va., he shares with his stepsister. He struggles without an income and medical insurance, and he fears his future.

Henderson is not alone. Workers in our corporate state earn little when they work—Henderson made $18 an hour—and they are abandoned when they can no longer contribute to corporate profits. It is the ethic of the free market. It is the cost of unfettered capitalism. And it is plunging tens of millions of discarded workers into a collective misery and rage that is beginning to manifest itself in a dangerous right-wing backlash.

“This happened while I was wearing their uniform and driving one of their company vehicles,” Henderson, a 40-year-old military veteran, told me. “My foot is destroyed. I have a fused ankle. I have had over a dozen surgeries. It hurts to wear a sock. I was limping pretty badly, but in the spring of 2008 FedEx said I had to come back to work and sit in a chair. It saved them money on workers’ compensation payments. I worked a call center job and answered telephones. I did that for three months. I had my ankle fused in January 2009, and then FedEx fired me. I was discarded. They washed their hands of me and none of this was my fault.”

Our destitute working class is beginning to grasp that Barack Obama and other elected officials in Washington, who speak in a cloying feel-your-pain language, are liars. They are not attempting to prevent wages from sinking, unemployment from mounting, foreclosures from ripping apart communities, banks from looting the U.S. Treasury or jobs from being exported. The gap between our stark reality and the happy illusions peddled by smarmy television news personalities and fatuous academic and financial experts, as well as oily bureaucrats and politicians, is becoming too wide to ignore. Those cast aside are reaching out to anyone, no matter how buffoonish or ignorant, who promises that the parasites and courtiers who serve the corporate state will disappear. Right-wing rage is being fused with right-wing populism. And once this takes hold, a protofascism will sweep across our blighted landscape fueled by a mounting personal and economic despair. Take a look at Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here.” It is a good window into what awaits us……

(read the rest of this article at http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/boycott_fedex_20100222 )

The Economic Elite Vs. The People of the United States of America - Part I

By David DeGraw, AmpedStatus Report

This is the first part of a six-part report. Part two will be posted on Wednesday. To be notified via email, subscribe to our newsletter here. http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/339/t/4630/signUp.jsp?key=4028

——-I: Causalities of Economic Terrorism, Surveying the Damage
——-II: The Rise of the Economic Elite
——-III: Exposing Our Enemy: Meet the Economic Elite
——-IV: The Financial Coup d’Etat
——-V: Overcoming the Divide and Conquer Strategy
——-VI: How to Fight Back and Win: Common Ground Issues That Must Be Won

“The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight.” — Michael Lind, To Have and to Have Not

It’s time for 99% of Americans to mobilize and aggressively move on common sense political reforms.

Yes, of course, we all have very strong differences of opinion on many issues. However, like our Founding Fathers before us, we must put aside our differences and unite to fight a common enemy.

It has now become evident to a critical mass that the Republican and Democratic parties, along with all three branches of our government, have been bought off by a well-organized Economic Elite who are tactically destroying our way of life. The harsh truth is that 99% of the US population no longer has political representation. The US economy, government and tax system is now blatantly rigged against us.

Current statistical societal indicators clearly demonstrate that a strategic attack has been launched and an analysis of current governmental policies prove that conditions for 99% of Americans will continue to deteriorate. The Economic Elite have engineered a financial coup and have brought war to our doorstep. . . and make no mistake, they have launched a war to eliminate the US middle class.

To those who feel I am using extreme rhetoric, I ask you to please take a few minutes of your time to hear me out and research the evidence put forth. The facts are there for the unprejudiced, rational and reasoned mind to absorb. It is the unfortunate reality of our current crisis.

Unless we all unite and organize on common ground, our very way of life and the ideals that our country was founded upon will continue to unravel…….

Before exposing exactly who the Economic Elite are, and discussing common sense ways in which we can defeat them, let’s take a look at how much damage they have already caused.

I: Causalities of Economic Terrorism, Surveying the Damage

The devastating numbers across-the-board on the economic front are staggering. I’ll go through some of them here, many we have already become all too familiar with. We hear some of these numbers all the time, so much so that it appears as if we have already begun “to normalize the unthinkable.” You may be sick of hearing them, but behind each number is an enormous amount of individual suffering, American lives and families who are struggling worse then they ever have.

America is the richest nation in history, yet we now have the highest poverty rate in the industrialized world with an unprecedented amount of Americans living in dire straights and over 50 million citizens already living in poverty.

The government has come up with clever ways to down play all of these numbers, but we have over 50 million people who need to use food stamps to eat, and a stunning 50% of US children will use a food stamp to eat at some point in their childhood. Approximately 20,000 people are added to this total every day. In 2009, one out of five US households didn’t have enough money to buy food. In households with children, this number rose to 24%, as the hunger rate among US citizens has now reached an all time high.

We also currently have over 50 million US citizens without healthcare. 1.4 million Americans filed for bankruptcy in 2009, a 32% increase from 2008. As bankruptcies continue to skyrocket, medical bankruptcies are responsible for over 60% of them, and over 75% of the medical bankruptcies filed are from people who have healthcare insurance. We have the most expensive healthcare system in the world, we are forced to pay twice as much as other countries and the overall care we get in return ranks 37th in the world.

In total, Americans have lost $5 trillion from their pensions and savings since the economic crisis began and $13 trillion in the value of their homes. During the first full year of the crisis, workers between the age of 55 - 60, who have worked for 20 - 29 years, have lost an average of 25% off their 401k. “Personal debt has risen from 65% of income in 1980 to 125% today.” Over five million US families have already lost their homes, in total 13 million US families are expected to lose their home by 2014, with 25% of current mortgages underwater. Deutsche Bank has an even grimmer prediction: “The percentage of ‘underwater’ loans may rise to 48 percent, or 25 million homes.” Every day 10,000 US homes enter foreclosure. Statistics show that an increasing number of these people are not finding shelter elsewhere, there are now over 3 million homeless Americans, the fastest growing segment of the homeless population is single parents with children.

Read more at http://ampedstatus.com/the-economic-elite-vs-the-people-of-the-united-states-of-america-part-i

Toward A Progressive Tea Party Movement

Most progressives have little respect for the Fox News generated “Tea Party” movement. However, it has tapped into a very real populist anger with the direction the country is headed in at this point in our history.

Progressives should see a real opportunity in the emergence of the “Tea Party” movement to educate the public and re-direct the anger to the real villains whose actions and policies created the many problems faced by the citizens of the United States of America. Our government has failed the American public by serving corporate interests and private profit instead of the public good.

The Republican Right has been somewhat successful in twisting this legitimate anger and aiming it against those who have been fighting this corporate takeover and corruption instead of themselves. They do this by lying to the public and twisting reality.

Of course, Fox News has been the leading force in this evil propaganda campaign. However, a few corporatist Democrats like Senator Ben Nelson, independents like Joe Lieberman and almost every elected Republican in the nation have helped advance the corporatist agenda by deceiving the reformist elements in the Tea Party movement.

Tea Party activists should realize that Fox News was formed by corporatists to advance the corporatist agenda. The corporatists have captured the “conservative” movement. They are playing their followers for suckers. A few Tea Party leaders know they are being used as a tool of the Republican Right and corporatists but most do not.

The American government is not the enemy if it is actually controlled by the American public instead of by the rich and powerful elite who make up the corporatists power structure. The American government needs to provide a check and balance against corporate power. We must recapture our government from corporate interests. This will never be done by Republicans. It will never be done by the small corporatist faction of the Democratic Party. It can be done with an alliance of progressives, real Tea Party reformers, economic populists and grassroots Democrats.

The Scott Browns and Sarah Palins of the nation only play at being populists. They act in support of the corporatist agenda while talking like reformers. Scott Brown was financed by corporatist forces. He was heavily financed by the debt collection industry, banking interests, health insurance companies and the like just like Sarah Palin. Brown opposes Wall Street reforms and regulation. He wants corporate power to go unchecked. These ideas are clearly enemies of the American public and real functional democracy. Folksy talk is just more hot air. It is actions that count.

Fox News seems designed to act as a financial and political backer of Republican Right corporatist politicians. They spin everything to defeat real reforms and undermine real reformers.

Labor unions act as a check and balance on corporate power. Fox News and the Republican Right corporatists demonize them at every opportunity. Union leaders are always elected by the membership. They are the only truly democratically-elected populist element in our economic system. The Fox News crowd calls these elected leaders “union bosses.” You do not get to elect your “boss.” Try suggesting free elections for all the management positions at your place of employment and you will probably be joining the ranks of the unemployed. Corporations are basically organized in a top down dictatorial manner. It is their nature and mindset to be dictatorial with very, very few exceptions.

Suing corporations act as a check and balance to corporate power. Fox News and the Republican Right corporatists are trying to eliminate the effectiveness of this check and balance under the disguise of “tort reform.”

Campaign finance laws slightly reduced the ability of corporations to buy elections, smear reformers and defeat reforms. While in power, the Republican Right corporatists packed all our federal courts with corporatists. This is why the Republican Right corporatists on the Supreme Court have recently overturned over 60 years of established law to give corporations unlimited power to spend shareholders’ money to advance their corporatist political goals.

Most corporations are not loyal American citizens like the recent Supreme Court ruling implies. Almost all the large corporations operating in America are international in nature. International corporations should not be controlling the American economy, the American political system or the American government. American citizens should be. No matter what the Supreme Court says, international corporations are neither people nor American citizens.

The percentage of the American economy going toward debt is growing rapidly. Why? The answer is corporate power and corporatist government policy. So-called “free trade” has failed the American public while enriching the corporatists. Tax revenue has gone in the toilet because we do not tax imports and tens of millions of former taxpayers have lost their jobs. Without good-paying jobs, these workers/taxpayers are not paying nearly as much in taxes.

Tax cuts for over 30 years have been focused on enriching the corporatists and screwing the middle classes. The Fox News and the Republican Right corporatists want you to place the blame on the poor for government debt. This is pure nonsense. Unfair tax cuts are the real villains along with corporatist “free trade” policies. Additionally, the corporatists start unnecessary wars financed by public debt that enrich the international corporations while killing and maiming American soldiers.

So-called “free trade” is undermining our national security by crushing our industrial manufacturing base and crippling our national finances.

Government spending as a percentage of our economy is excessively large mostly because our economy has not really grown the way it should because of so-called “free trade.” Free trade has not been free for American citizens. Our public and personal debts have exploded. Our wages have not grown as quickly as our cost of living. Our jobs are disappearing or have already disappeared.

Government debt to enrich international corporations instead of improving the lives of American citizens is nearly criminal. Why does Medicare money get paid to drug companies without bargaining down the price of drugs? Corporate power is the only answer.

Why do Americans pay twice as much for medical care than any industrialized nation but have worse results? Why are medical costs exploding here at the same time as millions of citizens are being kicked out of their health insurance plans? Why are our companies paying the cost of health insurance while all our foreign competitors get subsidized by government payment of healthcare costs? The answers are corporate power.

The real reformers of the Tea Party movement need to look at corporate power instead of government as the villains threatening the future of America. The Republican Right, corporatists and Fox News are threatening your civil liberties and Constitutional Right not the ACLU, Obama or the Democratic Party. Republican Right, corporatists and Fox News are those who support the “national security state”, torture, jailing citizens without trial, wiretapping without court orders, etc.

International corporate interests have much more control over the lives of the average American citizen than our government does. When the government gets captured by these corporations, like it did under George W. Bush and his allies who are still in office, the American public gets hammered!

You are not ignorant or out of touch with reality just because you watch Fox News or listen to right wing talk radio but prolonged exposure will eventually get you there. Watching only Fox News will likely stop reform supporters of the Tea Party movement from realizing that they have much more in common with progressives than they ever realized. The real reformers in the Tea Party movement and progressives should unite in a Progressive Tea Party movement. Fox News and the Republican Right corporatists should not control or define the Tea Party. Both progressives and the real reform elements in Tea Party movement should reach out to each other and make common cause on many issues.

It is time for a Progressive Tea Party movement.

Written by Stephen Crockett (Host of Democratic Talk Radio http://www.DemocraticTalkRadio.com and Editor of Mid-Atlantic Labor.com http://www.midatlanticlabor.com).

Shareholders Forced Political Spending

When we make an investment by buying shares in a corporation are we endorsing the political goals of corporate CEO’s or other corporate executives? For most American citizens, the answer is clearly “NO!”

The recent Supreme Court ruling stating that corporations have the right to spend the shareholders’ money to influence federal elections seems designed to trample on the property rights of individual shareholders, empower the international corporate executive class and distort the electoral process in favor of the pro-corporate Republican Party. It completely fails to protect the property rights of shareholders against politically-motivated abuse by corporate executives.

While the ruling was both bad law and bad for American democracy, as most commentators have stated publicly, few editorialists or pundits have examined how badly the ruling tramples on the property rights of shareholders. I might want to buy shares to fund my retirement or meet unexpected future financial demands. I want my money used in the core missions and functions of the business. I did not invest my money to have it misused by corporate executives to fund their political goals or agenda instead of mine.

Why did this radically activist Supreme Court empower corporate executives to use my money for politics instead of for the legitimate business purposes that are the reasons shareholders bought shares in the first place?

Every member of Congress should support a new federal law that would require all shareholders agree before any corporate money can be spent to influence elections. This does not violate the premise of the Supreme Court ruling that states (incorrectly in my opinion) that corporations have the right to spend corporate funds on elections. Such a law would not require a Constitutional Amendment.

Shareholders should never be forced to make a political contribution to a candidate or campaign that the individual shareholder does not support. These forced contributions are unjust. In fact, corporate executives who spend corporate funds on influencing elections are frankly stealing from the shareholders.

Even before the new federal law is passed, shareholders should consider suing any corporate executives who misuse corporate funds to influence election outcomes directly or indirectly. The lawsuits should seek both to injunction the corporation from using shareholders money without universal approval from all shareholders and to fire the corporate executive involved “with cause” so that any “golden parachute” provisions (where more shareholder money gets stolen by executives) might get blocked.

Any officeholder who fails to support a new federal law restricting corporate executive power and empowering individual shareholders to veto spending corporate money on elections is helping in the politically-motivated theft of shareholder property! We need to identify these officeholders regardless of political party and vote them out of office. They are corrupt!

While corporations are not people, shareholders and corporate executives are people. The corporate executives should not overrule shareholders when it comes to political spending of corporate funds. The corporate executives work for the shareholders and never should be legally permitted to forget this basic fact.

Written by: Stephen Crockett (Host of Democratic Talk Radio http://www.DemocraticTalkRadio.com ). Mail: 698 Old Baltimore Pike, Newark, Delaware 19702. Phone: 443-907-2367. Email: midsouthcm@aol.com.

Feel free to publish at no charge without prior approval.

ACORN Scandal Offers Key Lessons to All Charities

by John Atlas and Peter Dreier

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-atlas/acorn-scandal-offers-key_b_386064.html

Acorn is getting a bum rap — in the news media, among politicians, and even by some foundations.

The attacks are worrisome not just because they have harmed an effective grass-roots organization but also because they show how the nation’s increasingly polarized political environment, exacerbated by the news media, can threaten any group that challenges big business and conservative politicians.

Until recently, Acorn, the nation’s largest community-organizing group, was well known primarily among progressive activists and the low-income people it has organized since it began in Little Rock in 1970. By mobilizing poor people and their middle-class allies, it has won major victories — at the local, state, and national levels — to improve the living and working conditions of everyday people.

With chapters in more than 70 cities, it has successfully fought banks that engaged in predatory lending, employers that paid poverty wages, and developers that gentrified low-income neighborhoods. It has also registered more than a million Americans to vote.

Acorn is now well known, but what most Americans know about it is wrong, based on controversies manufactured by the group’s long-time enemies.

A new national survey revealed shocking public misperceptions about Acorn: More than half of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of the organization, and 52 percent of Republicans, 18 percent of Independents, and 9 percent of Democrats think Acorn stole the election for Obama.

If foundations retreat in the face of the current war against Acorn, it will not only embolden right-wing extremists but will also raise questions about grant makers’ commitment to a robust democracy.

How is it that after working in relative obscurity for almost 40 years, Acorn was so falsely framed in news stories that many Americans believed the absurd and alarming notion that it stole a presidential election?

The answer is a tale not only of how the Republican Party and conservative news media framed Acorn but also of how most mainstream journalism organizations were negligent by repeating rather than fact-checking the allegations.

After the 2000 presidential election, Karl Rove (President Bush’s top political adviser) and conservative Republicans orchestrated an attack on Acorn for alleged “voter fraud,” as part of a campaign to suppress the voting of minorities and the poor. As part of this effort, a U.S. Attorney was asked to investigate Acorn.

The investigation came up empty-handed, but the GOP operatives persisted. The allegations of “voter fraud” hit a peak in October 2008, aided by Arizona Sen. John McCain’s charge in a presidential debate with Barack Obama that Acorn “is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”

He demanded that Mr. Obama disclose his ties to Acorn. Senator McCain frequently repeated those accusations on the campaign trail. Soon, according to a national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 82 percent of Americans reported they had heard about Acorn.

Although the voter fraud never materialized, the stories planted during the election season yielded a bountiful crop of misinformation.

In recent months, the organization’s notoriety was compounded after Fox News broadcast controversial clips from videotapes of Acorn staff members talking to two people posing as a prostitute and her pimp. The pair showed up at 10 Acorn offices, tried to entrap low-level staff mem bers into providing tax and housing advice for their illegal prostitution ring, and videotaped the encounters.

The tapes were edited before they were released, failing to reveal that some Acorn offices turned the pair away or refused to provide them any aid. In no Acorn office did employees file any paperwork on the duo’s behalf.

Nonetheless, Fox News broadcast those videos on a virtual round-the-clock basis, causing a controversy far out of proportion to its news value. Almost every major TV station and newspaper reported the controversy, allowing Fox News to set the agenda.

The attack on Acorn is not really about a few bogus names on voter forms or about a few staff members providing advice to a phony prostitute with a video camera. Rather, it is part of a broader conservative effort to attack progressive organizations (including labor unions, environmental groups, activist religious organizations, and community organizers).

The attacks on Acorn began years ago. Its corporate enemies paid a Washington public-relations firm to create the Web site RottenAcorn.com, where many of the attacks on Acorn were first rehearsed. Then the right-wing echo chamber orchestrated its war on Acorn, and the mainstream news media joined the chorus.

Although Acorn has received positive news coverage about its organizing work in many local news outlets, the national media (with some exceptions) have acted more like stenographers than journalists, repeating the lies and half-truths by Acorn’s critics without trying to verify them, put them in context, or provide Acorn with an opportunity to rebut them.

We expect this from the right-wing echo chamber — Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and their ilk. More troubling is the mainstream news media’s unwitting complicity in the conservative campaign to frame Acorn.

For example, 80.3 percent of the print and broadcast stories about Acorn’s alleged voter fraud failed to mention that Acorn itself was reporting voter-registration irregularities to authorities, as required by law.

Unfortunately, the Repu blican-manufactured contro versies have scared some of Acorn’s longtime supporters. Even many Democrats in Congress voted to condemn Acorn and demand that the federal government pull its financial support.

Some foundations also pulled the plug. The Catholic Campaign for Human Devel opment, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ antipoverty charity, praised Acorn for its work “preventing home foreclosures, creating job opportunities, raising wages, addressing crime, and improving education.” But under pressure from conservatives, it, too, cut off Acorn’s money. Other grant makers are sticking by Acorn but want to see the organization improve its day-to-day management.

Like all large organizations, Acorn is not without flaws. Acorn was embarrassed by its errant employees and fired them immediately. But the misjudgment of a few employees is hardly grounds for withdrawing federal or foundation funds.

Acorn admits that in the past it devoted too few resources to management. But since Bertha Lewis took over as chief executive a year ago, she has improved staff accountability, financial safeguards, and internal communications. With foundation support, she brought in management experts, account ants, and lawyers to help Acorn establish new management practices.

Ms. Lewis also set up an advisory council to recommend management changes. In October that group recruited Scott Harshbarger, the former Massachusetts attorney general, and former president of Common Cause to investigate the videotape incident and to recommend and carry out necessary man agement changes. On Monday, Harshbarger released his independent report http://www.proskauer.com/files/uploads/report2.pdf concluding that while ACORN needs to improve its management structure, it did not engage in illegal activities when two videographers, one posing as a prostitute, sought to entrap ACORN employees. The report confirms that the rush to judgment by Congress, as well as by some of ACORN’s political allies, was premature. Harshbarger noted that the videos, made by two conservative videographers under the guidance of right-wing activist Andrew Breitbart, were doctored and distorted, making it difficult to determine what actually occurred. The videographers refused to provide Harshbarger with the original videos or to talk with him for his report.

People concerned about poverty in the United States can ill afford to lose Acorn.

Its organizing — door-knock ing in poor neighborhoods to identify problems and mobilize residents — not only helps the poor but is also one of the best training grounds for new young organizers.

Most of its budget goes into (relatively low) salaries for organizers, researchers, administrators, and counselors. By any measure, Acorn has been remarkably successful. For example:

Assisting the poorest Am ericans. Acorn spearheaded campaigns to adopt living-wage laws in dozens of cities and increase state minimum wages, resulting in millions of Americans getting raises. Its free tax counseling has helped make the federal earned-income tax credit an effective antipoverty program.

Helping low-income people buy houses. Acorn has pressured banks to end racial discrimination in mort gage lending (”redlining”) and provided counseling on buy ing a home to 350,000 low-income people. It has also helped negotiate 110,000 mort gages worth more than $16-billion. Officials at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, even during George W. Bush’s ad ministration, viewed Acorn’s nonprofit programs — to develop low-cost housing and provide homeownership counseling — as among the best in the country.

Fighting for an overhaul of the financial system. Almost a decade ago, Acorn warned about the dangers of predatory lending by banks, private mortgage companies, and mortgage brokers.

If foundations use the current controversy as an excuse to abandon Acorn now — particularly during a deep recession when poor Americans desperately need a voice in the corridors of power — it will do more than wound Acorn. It will also hurt the poor and weaken the fabric of American democracy.

John Atlas is president of the National Housing Institute and author of Seeds of Change, a history of Acorn that Vanderbilt University Press will publish in 2010. Peter Dreier is a professor of politics and director of the urban and environmental policy program at Occidental College; he is the co-author of the study “Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why Acorn Was the News, and What the News Got Wrong.”

A version of this was originally published in the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

They Still Don’t Get It

By BOB HERBERT

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/opinion/23herbert.html?ref=opinion

How loud do the alarms have to get? There is an economic emergency in the country with millions upon millions of Americans riddled with fear and anxiety as they struggle with long-term joblessness, home foreclosures, personal bankruptcies and dwindling opportunities for themselves and their children.

The door is being slammed on the American dream and the politicians, including the president and his Democratic allies on Capitol Hill, seem not just helpless to deal with the crisis, but completely out of touch with the hardships that have fallen on so many.

While the nation was suffering through the worst economy since the Depression, the Democrats wasted a year squabbling like unruly toddlers over health insurance legislation. No one in his or her right mind could have believed that a workable, efficient, cost-effective system could come out of the monstrously ugly plan that finally emerged from the Senate after long months of shady alliances, disgraceful back-room deals, outlandish payoffs and abject capitulation to the insurance companies and giant pharmaceutical outfits.

The public interest? Forget about it.

With the power elite consumed with its incessant, discordant fiddling over health care, the economic plight of ordinary Americans, from the middle class to the very poor, got pathetically short shrift. And there is no evidence, even now, that leaders of either party fully grasp the depth of the crisis, which began long before the official start of the Great Recession in December 2007.

A new study from the Brookings Institution tells us that the largest and fastest-growing population of poor people in the U.S. is in the suburbs. You don’t hear about this from the politicians who are always so anxious to tell you, in between fund-raisers and photo-ops, what a great job they’re doing. From 2000 to 2008, the number of poor people in the U.S. grew by 5.2 million, reaching nearly 40 million. That represented an increase of 15.4 percent in the poor population, which was more than twice the increase in the population as a whole during that period.

The study does not include data from 2009, when so many millions of families were just hammered by the recession. So the reality is worse than the Brookings figures would indicate.

Job losses, stagnant or reduced wages over the past decade, and the loss of home equity when the housing bubble burst have combined to take a horrendous toll on families who thought they had done all the right things and were living the dream. A great deal of that bleeding is in the suburbs. The study, compiled by the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, said, “Suburbs gained more than 2.5 million poor individuals, accounting for almost half of the total increase in the nation’s poor population since 2000.”

Democrats in search of clues as to why voters are unhappy may want to take a look at the report. In 2008, a startling 91.6 million people — more than 30 percent of the entire U.S. population — fell below 200 percent of the federal poverty line, which is a meager $21,834 for a family of four.

The question for Democrats is whether there is anything that will wake them up to their obligation to extend a powerful hand to ordinary Americans and help them take the government, including the Supreme Court, back from the big banks, the giant corporations and the myriad other predatory interests that put the value of a dollar high above the value of human beings.

The Democrats still hold the presidency and large majorities in both houses of Congress. The idea that they are not spending every waking hour trying to fix the broken economic system and put suffering Americans back to work is beyond pathetic. Deficit reduction is now the mantra in Washington, which means that new large-scale investments in infrastructure and other measures to ease the employment crisis and jump-start the most promising industries of the 21st century are highly unlikely.

What we’ll get instead is rhetoric. It’s cheap, so we can expect a lot of it.

Those at the bottom of the economic heap seem all but doomed in this environment. The Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston put the matter in stark perspective after analyzing the employment challenges facing young people in Chicago: “Labor market conditions for 16-19 and 20-24-year-olds in the city of Chicago in 2009 are the equivalent of a Great Depression-era, especially for young black men.”

The Republican Party has abandoned any serious approach to the nation’s biggest problems, economic or otherwise. It may be resurgent, but it’s not a serious party. That leaves only the Democrats, a party that once championed working people and the poor, but has long since lost its way.

Grayson: Court’s Campaign Finance Decision “Worst Since Dred Scott”

By Nick Baumann

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/01/grayson-courts-campaign-finance-decision-worst-dredd-scott

Alan Grayson, the first-term Democratic congressman from central Florida, really didn’t like Thursday’s Supreme Court decision legalizing unlimited corporate spending in election campaigns. “It’s the worst Supreme Court decision since the Dred Scott case,” he told me last night. In Dred Scott, Grayson explained, the Supreme Court decided that neither slaves nor the children of slaves could ever be US citizens. In Citizens United v. FEC, decided Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled “that only huge corporations have any constitutional rights,” Grayson said. “They have the right to bribe, the right to buy elections, the right to reward their elected toadies, and the right to punish the elected representatives who take a stab at doing what’s right.”

I wrote a profile of Grayson for the most recent issue of Mother Jones. You can read the whole thing here.

Like independent campaign finance reform groups, Grayson saw this decision coming. Last week, he filed five bills that he hopes will help counteract the effects of the Court’s decision. On Wednesday night, he launched a website, savedemocracy.net, to rally support for these measures. On Thursday morning, he delivered over 10,000 signatures from a web-based petition to the Supreme Court. After the court issued its decision, he introduced a sixth campaign finance reform bill.

The Court’s decision creates serious problems for the Fair Elections Now Act (FENA), a bill that Grayson co-sponsored that would institute publicly financed elections. “The funding from FENA is a drop in the bucket compared to what the oil companies might spend to defeat representatives who don’t want to drill everywhere,” Grayson warned. “It’s a drop in the bucket compared to what Wall Street’s prepared to spend to reward those who vote for bailouts and punish those who won’t.” The Supreme Court has “created a whole new problem…. that really isn’t addressed by that bill,” Grayson said, while emphasizing that he still supported FENA because it is “a step in the right direction, but not sufficient.”

Via Grayson’s website, here are the six bills “and what they aim to accomplish,”:

The Business Should Mind Its Own Business Act (H.R. 4431): Implements a 500% excise tax on corporate contributions to political committees, and on corporate expenditures on political advocacy campaigns.

The fifth measure has already gained the support of Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the chair of the House Judiciary committee, Grayson said. Grayson hopes the committee might hold a hearing on that bill sometime in the next 30 days. Grayson circulated his proposals among his colleagues on Thursday. He has a decent record with winning support for populist ideas— last year he signed up over 100 cosponsors for Texas Republican Ron Paul’s bill to audit the Federal Reserve.

Still, what Grayson could really use is the support of President Barack Obama, who has slammed the Supreme Court decision and promised a “forceful” legislative response. Grayson’s bills would certainly qualify. The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder has reported that the White House and other Hill Democrats are seriously considering three options for responding to the decision, including one that bears a resemblance to Grayson’s sixth bill—requiring shareholders to approve of independent political expenditures. When we spoke, Grayson also voiced support to another idea Ambinder says is under consideration—a “Stand by Your Ad” requirement. As Ambinder describes it, “The head of an insurance company would be forced to say, ‘I’m Honus Wagner, the CEO of Acme, and I stand by this ad.’” Grayson emphasized that such a move would be consistent with the Supreme Court’s decision today, which explicitly allowed Congress to pass tough disclosure requirements.

New York Times Editorial

The Court’s Blow to Democracy

Published: January 21, 2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/opinion/22fri1.html

With a single, disastrous 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has thrust politics back to the robber-baron era of the 19th century. Disingenuously waving the flag of the First Amendment, the court’s conservative majority has paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.

Congress must act immediately to limit the damage of this radical decision, which strikes at the heart of democracy.

As a result of Thursday’s ruling, corporations have been unleashed from the longstanding ban against their spending directly on political campaigns and will be free to spend as much money as they want to elect and defeat candidates. If a member of Congress tries to stand up to a wealthy special interest, its lobbyists can credibly threaten: We’ll spend whatever it takes to defeat you.

The ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission radically reverses well-established law and erodes a wall that has stood for a century between corporations and electoral politics. (The ruling also frees up labor unions to spend, though they have far less money at their disposal.)

The founders of this nation warned about the dangers of corporate influence. The Constitution they wrote mentions many things and assigns them rights and protections — the people, militias, the press, religions. But it does not mention corporations.

In 1907, as corporations reached new heights of wealth and power, Congress made its views of the relationship between corporations and campaigning clear: It banned them from contributing to candidates. At midcentury, it enacted the broader ban on spending that was repeatedly reaffirmed over the decades until it was struck down on Thursday.

This issue should never have been before the court. The justices overreached and seized on a case involving a narrower, technical question involving the broadcast of a movie that attacked Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2008 campaign. The court elevated that case to a forum for striking down the entire ban on corporate spending and then rushed the process of hearing the case at breakneck speed. It gave lawyers a month to prepare briefs on an issue of enormous complexity, and it scheduled arguments during its vacation.

Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., no doubt aware of how sharply these actions clash with his confirmation-time vow to be judicially modest and simply “call balls and strikes,” wrote a separate opinion trying to excuse the shameless judicial overreaching.

The majority is deeply wrong on the law. Most wrongheaded of all is its insistence that corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights. It is an odd claim since companies are creations of the state that exist to make money. They are given special privileges, including different tax rates, to do just that. It was a fundamental misreading of the Constitution to say that these artificial legal constructs have the same right to spend money on politics as ordinary Americans have to speak out in support of a candidate.

The majority also makes the nonsensical claim that, unlike campaign contributions, which are still prohibited, independent expenditures by corporations “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” If Wall Street bankers told members of Congress that they would spend millions of dollars to defeat anyone who opposed their bailout, and then did so, it would certainly look corrupt.

After the court heard the case, Senator John McCain told reporters that he was troubled by the “extreme naïveté” some of the justices showed about the role of special-interest money in Congressional lawmaking.

In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens warned that the ruling not only threatens democracy but “will, I fear, do damage to this institution.” History is, indeed, likely to look harshly not only on the decision but the court that delivered it. The Citizens United ruling is likely to be viewed as a shameful bookend to Bush v. Gore. With one 5-to-4 decision, the court’s conservative majority stopped valid votes from being counted to ensure the election of a conservative president. Now a similar conservative majority has distorted the political system to ensure that Republican candidates will be at an enormous advantage in future elections.

Congress and members of the public who care about fair elections and clean government need to mobilize right away, a cause President Obama has said he would join. Congress should repair the presidential public finance system and create another one for Congressional elections to help ordinary Americans contribute to campaigns. It should also enact a law requiring publicly traded corporations to get the approval of their shareholders before spending on political campaigns.

These would be important steps, but they would not be enough. The real solution lies in getting the court’s ruling overturned. The four dissenters made an eloquent case for why the decision was wrong on the law and dangerous. With one more vote, they could rescue democracy.

No More Senate Super Majority Illusion

There is very little upside to the election of a Republican Far Right Senator to replace the late Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) for Democrats, progressives and reformers. My list is very short: (1) everyone should now understand that we never had a real workable Senate Super Majority to begin with despite all the media hype, (2) watering-down progressive legislation has now been shown to produce electoral defeat for Democrats and (3) Democratic candidates at all levels can now clearly see that they will suffer if Democratic House and Senate members do not start acting more aggressively in opposition to Republican actions and spin.

The Senate Democrats should never let Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) caucus with them. Lieberman was rejected by Connecticut Democrats at the polls. He was not elected as a Democrat. He often opposes the Democratic legislative agenda in the Senate. Lieberman supports and campaigns for Republicans. Letting Lieberman join the Democratic caucus raised unrealistic expectations without adding his vote behind the legislation Democrats were trying to pass! For Democrats, the fictional 60th Senate Democratic member illusion was a “lose, lose” proposition.

Of course, some elected Democratic Senators remain unreliable votes. Neither Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE) nor Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) are guaranteed yes votes on most progressive legislative issues. It is obvious that relying on a 60 member Super Majority to pass legislation is and always will be a mistake. A simple majority vote of Senate members can reduce the number of Senators it takes to end a filibuster. I suggest moving to 55 instead of the current 60, as a reasonable compromise, unless Senate Republicans stop threatening to filibuster everything Democrats want to do in terms of passing laws and budgets. Ending filibusters entirely would be a better approach.

Watering-down healthcare reform left the Democratic base discouraged for basically nothing in return. Republicans remain devoted to defeating all real healthcare reforms. Corporate Democrats filled the Senate version full of compromises that left independents unhappy with the results. If we had no filibuster threat, the Senate could have given us a much better product to sell to the voting public.

Republicans can be counted on to do everything possible to disrupt debate and progress on legislation in the Senate. It pays for them. It helped defeat great Democratic candidates in state and local elections in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Virginia in 2009. With the election of Scott Brown to the Senate in January 2010, the Republicans smell blood. Their shark instincts are in full attack mode.

Republican tactics and spin make bipartisan compromise basically impossible! It is time to tell the public to forget it and why!

Democrats should never have let the idea that “Obama and the Democrats own the economy” to gain traction. Anyone with even a little bit of honest understanding of how an economy operates should have been responding to every statement along this line. Our message should have been that the Republican economic train-wreck started about 30 years ago and would take at least 2 full Presidential terms to fix. This answer is good politics and actually true. Obama should have been publicly attacking Republican efforts to undermine his agenda as attacks on the American middle class designed to benefit greedy corporations. It would have been good politics and is true! There is still time to correct our messaging.

Every local Democratic officeholder and/or candidate in America needs to put pressure on Senate Democrats to move aggressively to pass legislation with a real economic populist approach. Local Democrats should demand an end to the filibuster blackmail. It is time to move to regulate and tax imported manufactured goods. Bring our factory jobs back home. Pass the Employee Free Choice Act without watering it down. Raise taxes on the wealthy. Pass a second stimulus bill. Regulate abuses on Wall Street including executive pay at publicly traded corporations.

Make economic populism the core principle behind our Democratic Party. Show we are not the “Republican-lite” alternative. Be aggressive, forceful and brave. Be winners! Be real Democrats!

Written by Stephen Crockett (host of Democratic Talk Radio http://www.DemocraticTalkRadio.com and Editor of Mid-Atlantic Labor.com http://www.midatlanticlabor.com ). Phone: 443-907-2367. Email: demlabor@aol.com. Mail: 698 Old Baltimore Pike, Newark, Delaware 19702.

Feel free to publish or reprint in full without prior approval.

The Other Plot to Wreck America

by Frank Rick, New York Times

THERE may not be a person in America without a strong opinion about what coulda, shoulda been done to prevent the underwear bomber from boarding that Christmas flight to Detroit. In the years since 9/11, we’ve all become counterterrorists. But in the 16 months since that other calamity in downtown New York — the crash precipitated by the 9/15 failure of Lehman Brothers — most of us are still ignorant about what Warren Buffett called the “financial weapons of mass destruction” that wrecked our economy. Fluent as we are in Al Qaeda and body scanners, when it comes to synthetic C.D.O.’s and credit-default swaps, not so much.

What we don’t know will hurt us, and quite possibly on a more devastating scale than any Qaeda attack. Americans must be told the full story of how Wall Street gamed and inflated the housing bubble, made out like bandits, and then left millions of households in ruin. Without that reckoning, there will be no public clamor for serious reform of a financial system that was as cunningly breached as airline security at the Amsterdam airport. And without reform, another massive attack on our economic security is guaranteed. Now that it can count on government bailouts, Wall Street has more incentive than ever to pump up its risks — secure that it can keep the bonanzas while we get stuck with the losses.

The window for change is rapidly closing. Health care, Afghanistan and the terrorism panic may have exhausted Washington’s already limited capacity for heavy lifting, especially in an election year. The White House’s chief economic hand, Lawrence Summers, has repeatedly announced that “everybody agrees that the recession is over” — which is technically true from an economist’s perspective and certainly true on Wall Street, where bailed-out banks are reporting record profits and bonuses. The contrary voices of Americans who have lost pay, jobs, homes and savings are either patronized or drowned out entirely by a political system where the banking lobby rules in both parties and the revolving door between finance and government never stops spinning.

It’s against this backdrop that this week’s long-awaited initial public hearings of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission are so critical. This is the bipartisan panel that Congress mandated last spring to investigate the still murky story of what happened in the meltdown. Phil Angelides, the former California treasurer who is the inquiry’s chairman, told me in interviews late last year that he has been busy deploying a tough investigative staff and will not allow the proceedings to devolve into a typical blue-ribbon Beltway exercise in toothless bloviation.

He wants to examine the financial sector’s “greed, stupidity, hubris and outright corruption” — from traders on the ground to the board room. “It’s important that we deliver new information,” he said. “We can’t just rehash what we’ve known to date.” He understands that if he fails to make news or to tell the story in a way that is comprehensible and compelling enough to arouse Americans to demand action, Wall Street and Washington will both keep moving on, unchallenged and unchastened……

(Click on link below to read the rest of this article)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/opinion/10rich.html