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Turn on a Light, and Watch the GOP Rightwing Roaches Run

April 25th, 2012 by admin | No Comments | Filed in 2012 Election, GOP, rightwing, Tea Party

Robert Draper Book: GOP’s Anti-Obama

Campaign Started Night Of Inauguration

 

By Sam Stein
Progressive America Rising via HuffPost

WASHINGTON D.C. — As President Barack Obama was celebrating his inauguration at various balls, top Republican lawmakers and strategists were conjuring up ways to submarine his presidency at a private dinner in Washington, D.C.

The event — which provides a telling revelation for how quickly the post-election climate soured — serves as the prologue of Robert Draper’s much-discussed and heavily-reported new book, "Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives."

According to Draper, the guest list that night (which was just over 15 people in total) included Republican Reps. Eric Cantor (Va.), Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), Paul Ryan (Wis.), Pete Sessions (Texas), Jeb Hensarling (Texas), Pete Hoekstra (Mich.) and Dan Lungren (Calif.), along with Republican Sens. Jim DeMint (S.C.), Jon Kyl (Ariz.), Tom Coburn (Okla.), John Ensign (Nev.) and Bob Corker (Tenn.). The non-lawmakers present included Newt Gingrich, several years removed from his presidential campaign, and Frank Luntz, the long-time Republican wordsmith. Notably absent were Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) — who, Draper writes, had an acrimonious relationship with Luntz.

For several hours in the Caucus Room (a high-end D.C. establishment), the book says they plotted out ways to not just win back political power, but to also put the brakes on Obama’s legislative platform.

"If you act like you’re the minority, you’re going to stay in the minority," Draper quotes McCarthy as saying. "We’ve gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign."

The conversation got only more specific from there, Draper reports. Kyl suggested going after incoming Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner for failing to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes while at the International Monetary Fund. Gingrich noted that House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) had a similar tax problem. McCarthy chimed in to declare "there’s a web" before arguing that Republicans could put pressure on any Democrat who accepted campaign money from Rangel to give it back.

    The dinner lasted nearly four hours. They parted company almost giddily. The Republicans had agreed on a way forward:

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Why Republicans Must Be Defeated

April 21st, 2012 by admin | 1 Comment | Filed in 2012 Election, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, elections, rightwing, youth and students

New Curbs on Voter Registration Could Hurt Obama and Undermine Democracy

By Deborah Charles
Progressive America Rising via Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – New state laws designed to fight voter fraud could reduce the number of Americans signing up to vote in this year’s presidential election by hundreds of thousands, a potential problem for President Barack Obama’s re-election bid.

Voting laws passed by Republican-led legislatures in a dozen states during the past year have sharply restricted voter-registration drives that typically target young, low-income, African-American and Hispanic voters – groups that have backed the Democratic president by wide margins.

A further 16 states are considering bills that would end voter registration on election days, impose a range of limits on groups that register voters and make it more difficult for people to sign up, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School.

The new laws – many of which include measures requiring voters to show a photo ID at the polls – could carve into Obama’s potential support in Florida, Ohio and a few other politically divided states likely to be crucial in the November 6 election, analysts say.

The analysts note that massive registration drives in 2008 helped put millions of people aged 18 to 29 on voting rolls, and that age group – which makes up roughly one-quarter of the U.S. electorate – helped propel Obama to victory, voting 2-to-1 for him.

Rock the Vote, a nationwide organization that mobilizes young voters, said the new laws would make it more difficult for the group to educate people on how to sign up to vote.

"The types of laws have varied, but state by state they’ve added up to the fact that it’s going to be harder for young people to get registered and vote in this election cycle," said Heather Smith, president of Rock the Vote.

"We have a very busy year ahead of us, and a very important one," she added. "What a shame if we can’t continue to engage this generation in the political process because these laws have made it harder."

PROBLEMS WITH REGISTRATIONS

Rock the Vote, which registered a record 2.25 million young voters in 2008, has set a considerably lower target this year: 1.5 million. The group says the drop is because of the new laws as well as the fact that unlike 2008, this election year has had a competitive primary contest only among Republicans.

The League of Women Voters also could sign up fewer voters this year, partly because it has joined Rock the Vote in suspending voter registration drives in Florida as the groups challenge that state’s new restrictions in court.

Another factor expected to drive down voter registration totals this year: the absence of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, which registered more than 1 million mostly low-income voters in 2008.

Thousands of those registrations were for people who did not exist, submitted by ACORN-hired workers who were paid based on how many names they registered to vote.

The scandal helped lead to the demise of ACORN and inspire some of the anti-fraud laws affecting registration drives this year.

The episode involving ACORN, which folded in 2010 after it lost federal funding, showed a need for the new anti-fraud laws, said Brian Darling, a senior fellow for government studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Like other conservatives, Darling rejected the notion that Republican-led legislatures had passed the laws to try to prevent certain groups from voting.

"There have been problems of voters being registered who weren’t real voters," Darling said. "Just look at the ACORN scandal."

The new laws have led to a flurry of lawsuits across the country.

FLORIDA’S LAW DRAWS FIRE

The new anti-fraud election laws vary from state to state, but Florida’s has received much attention largely because the state will be crucial in determining the winner of the November 6 presidential election.

Last May, Florida Governor Rick Scott, a Republican, signed a law that imposes tough new restrictions on third-party groups if they do not turn in voter registration forms quickly.

State legislators in Florida – the state at the center of the disputed 2000 presidential election won by Republican George W. Bush – said the law was aimed at preventing fraud and adding credibility to elections.

But the groups that try to register voters say the law – which requires the groups to register with the state and turn in voter forms within 48 hours of obtaining them or face at least $5,000 in fines – are onerous and discriminatory.

The law also cuts the number of days for early voting and no longer allows voting on the Sunday before Election Day. Some activists said that unfairly targeted blacks and Hispanics, who went to the polls in large numbers the Sunday before Election Day in 2008 through programs called "Pews to the Polls" and "Souls to the Polls.

In Ohio, another crucial state in the election, the Obama campaign has asked supporters to rally against a proposal to curtail early voting, arguing weekend polling hours allow many workers more of a chance to vote.

COMPLICATIONS IN WISCONSIN

Other states’ voting laws complicate things for groups seeking to register voters.

In Wisconsin, new laws require licensing for anyone who registers someone else to vote, and the rules for licensing vary in the state’s 1,800 municipalities.

That could mean a volunteer for a voting drive in a school district would have to take a course and get licensed in a dozen different municipalities in that one school district, said Jeannette Senecal, director of elections for the League of Women Voters.

Senecal called Florida’s law the most "extreme" of the new regulations. She said the impact was already being felt across the state, with about 81,000 fewer voters registered this year than at the same time in 2008.

"Since they’re making it more difficult for organizations like ourselves to participate in the process," Senecal said, "it does cut back on the amount of opportunity that we have to register these unregistered voters."

Senior Obama campaign officials would not comment. But in some states, the campaign began its own voter registration efforts earlier than it did in 2008, to try to make up for the impact of the new laws.

The Heritage Foundation’s Darling said Democrats and voter registration groups were overplaying the impact of the new laws.

"Voter registration drives are great and all that, but it’s not the end-all and be-all of voting," he said. "If (people are)going to vote, they should take the initiative to go register themselves."

(Additional reporting by Eric Johnson in Chicago; Editing by David Lindsey and Peter Cooney)

Bringing Democracy to Mississippi

April 20th, 2012 by admin | No Comments | Filed in Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Organizing, rightwing, Tea Party, trade unions

How Mississippi’s Black/Brown Strategy Beat the South’s Anti-Immigrant Wave

Photo: Frank Curiel (R), an organizer for the Laborers Union and the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, talks with Samuel Holguin, owner of the La Veracruzana market in Laurel, MS. Photo credit: David Bacon.

By David Bacon
Progressive America Rising via The Nation

Jackson, Mississippi, April 20, 2012 – In early April, an anti-immigrant bill like those that swept through legislatures in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina was stopped cold in Mississippi. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Tea Party Republicans were confident they’d roll over any opposition. They’d brought Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State who co-authored Arizona’s SB 1070, into Jackson, to push for the Mississippi bill. The American Legislative Exchange Council, which designs and introduces similar bills into legislatures across the country, had its agents on the scene.

Their timing seemed unbeatable. Last November Republicans took control of the state House of Representatives for the first time since Reconstruction. Mississippi was one of the last Southern states in which Democrats controlled the legislature, and the turnover is a final triumph of Reagan and Nixon’s Southern Strategy. And the Republicans who took power weren’t just any Republicans. Haley Barbour, now ironically considered a “moderate Republican,” had stepped down as governor. Voters replaced him with an anti-immigrant successor, Phil Bryant, whose venom toward the foreign-born rivals Lou Dobbs.

Yet the seemingly inevitable didn’t happen.

Instead, from the opening of the legislative session just after New Years, the state’s Legislative Black Caucus fought a dogged rearguard war in the House. Over the last decade the caucus acquired a hard-won expertise on immigration, defeating over two hundred anti-immigrant measures. After New Year’s, though, they lost the crucial committee chairmanships that made it possible for them to kill those earlier bills. But they did not lose their voice.

“We forced a great debate in the House, until 1:30 in the morning,” says state Representative Jim Evans, caucus leader and still AFL-CIO staff member in Mississippi. “When you have a prolonged debate like that, it shows the widespread concern and disagreement. People began to see the ugliness in this measure.”

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One Graphic, One Thousand Words: Key Task for 2012

April 16th, 2012 by admin | No Comments | Filed in 2012 Election, Organizing, youth and students

 

Think your work registering new voters doesn’t matter?

Note to Team Obama: We Need a Bill of Rights Candidate

April 10th, 2012 by admin | No Comments | Filed in 2012 Election, Civil Liberties, pushing obama, youth and students

Protecting Face-to-Face Protest

By RONALD J. KROTOSZYNSKI JR.
Progressive America Rising via NYT Op-Ed

Tuscaloosa, Ala, April 8, 2012 – EVERY four years, we witness the spectacle of the presidential nominating conventions. And every four years, host cities, party leaders and police officials devise ever more creative ways of distancing protesters from the politicians, delegates and journalists attending these stage-managed affairs.

The goal is to trivialize and isolate dissenting speech without actually banning protest outright. One result is something of a Potemkin village: government proclaims its full commitment to respecting the First Amendment without actually permitting any observable dissent to take place near the convention.

Tampa, Fla., which will host the Republicans from Aug. 27 to 30, and Charlotte, N.C., which will host the Democrats from Sept. 3 to 7, are already following the trend. Charlotte has adopted an ordinance that expands the power of the local police to detain, search and arrest persons in its downtown core. (The Charlotte ordinance also bans camping on city-owned property, a clear response to the Occupy movement.) Tampa is also considering new municipal laws to limit, and in some instances flatly prohibit, downtown protest activity.

Citizens generally have a right to use public streets, sidewalks and parks for expressive activity — unless the government has a substantial reason for requiring expressive activity to take place somewhere else or at another time. Because the rights of speech, assembly and association do not include a right to communicate a particular message to a particular audience, the government’s willingness to let would-be protesters speak somewhere else, some other time, has usually been seen by courts as satisfying the First Amendment.

No reasonable person could argue that local officials or federal courts should ignore the genuine imperatives of security. In the post-9/11 world, and only a year after a gunman killed six people and critically wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona during an outdoor public meeting in Tucson, it might seem naïve to suggest that ordinary members of the public should have a right to communicate directly with elected government officials. Yet if democracy is to function properly, the ability of ordinary citizens to petition their government — directly and in person, if they choose — is essential.

Although virtually ignored today, a right to petition is part of the First Amendment, and the Constitution does not leave it to the government to decide who should have access to it.

The historical model of petitioning, going back to medieval England, literally involved laying a petition at the foot of the throne — while the king was sitting on it. The presentation of petitions has deep roots in American political culture. Quaker abolitionists used mass petitioning campaigns to advocate an end to the slave trade in the 1790s and the American Anti-Slavery Society renewed such efforts with similar campaigns in the 1830s and ’40s. Female suffragists embraced petitioning — as did Native Americans and veterans in later decades.

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Can Occupy Walk Through the Doors It Opened? Or Will It Paint Itself into a Corner?

April 8th, 2012 by admin | 1 Comment | Filed in economic democracy, financial crisis, Organizing, trade unions, Wall Street, youth and students

 

Occupy Wall Street Activists

Respond to the 99 Percent Spring

By Allison Kilkenny
Progressive America Rising via The Nation

April 6, 2012 – Seizing on the popularity of Occupy Wall Street, a broad coalition of liberal-left groups and organizations created the 99 Percent Spring, a movement aiming to recruit and train 100,000 Americans to learn the ways of non-violent direct action. The initiative includes support from MoveOn.org, AFL-CIO, Greenpeace, the Working Families Party, 350.org, Campaign for America’s Future, United Students Against Sweatshops, CodePink, Global Exchange and Color of Change, among other groups.

The plan has been heavily promoted by celebrities such as Edward Norton, Elijah Wood, Marisa Tomei and Jason Alexander and political heavyweights like Van Jones, founder of Rebuild the Dream.

However, Occupy Wall Street protesters have expressed mixed feelings about the 99 Percent Spring, a response that should have been expected given a statement like, "Occupiers have varying opinions," is a beige platitude akin to, "humans have varying opinions on life." OWS is a big tent movement, and as such, it attracts the entire gamut of the (generally) lefty political spectrum.

"I can’t blame the Occupy movement for being at best suspicious," says Joe Macare of Truthout and the Occupied Chicago Tribune, and observer of the Occupy movement, pointing out the 99 Percent Spring has adopted the language and imagery of Occupy Wall Street.

"I think Van Jones means well and is a smart, formidable guy, but I disagree with a lot of what I’ve read in his analysis about the extent to which President Obama, as opposed to just the Tea Party, the GOP-controlled Congress, etc., needs to be held responsible for the mess the United States is in. If Rebuild the Dream and MoveOn.org are serious about challenging corporate power, that’s going to mean calling out a lot of Democratic policies and a lot of Democratic politicians who are bought and paid for by the private sector."

In a recent blog post for The Nation, Jones argues that all of this class war chatter is detrimental to Occupy, a movement founded on the very notion that wealth disparity exists and must be confronted for the sake of the survival of the "99 percent."

"The vast majority of Americans do not oppose their fellow Americans, simply because they are rich," Jones wrote.

In making this statement, Jones constructed a straw man. Generally speaking, Occupy Wall Street opposes corruption and corporate power, which they perceive as illegitimate wealth hoarded by the "one percent" who have rigged the US political system in their favor. The issue is not that there are rich people living in America. The issue is that some absurdly rich people, the "one percent", are only the "one percent" because they cheated, with an assist from the government, and are currently crushing the underclass in order to collect even more wealth than ever before.

Indeed, the majority of Americans do see a problem with wealth disparity. In a recent Pew poll entitled, "Rising Share of Americans See Conflict Between Rich and Poor," 66 percent said they believe there are "very strong" or "strong" conflicts between the rich and the poor—an increase of 19 percentage points since 2009.

Jones departs from Occupy’s philosophy in a number of ways, including his romanticizing of a non-existent bygone era in America that needs to be "reclaimed," which was packed with "justice and equality," and so his involvement in the 99 Percent Spring complicates things, as does MoveOn’s participation in the project.

Many Occupiers view MoveOn as an extension of the Democratic Party, since the group first rose to prominence supporting Democratic and progressive candidates and attacking right-wing figures. Conversely, Occupy is a movement that tends to view both the Democrats and Republicans as being culpable for growing class inequality and the corporate takeover of America.

I tweeted to Occupiers, asking them how they felt about MoveOn’s involvement in the 99 Percent Spring, and it seems the initial responders, meaning those who perhaps don’t understand the degree of the group’s involvement, tend to take issue with MoveOn’s presence:

"Training people in nonviolence is great! But for what means, Under what name? We want real change, not mobilizing DEM base," wrote @PHX99percent. "Like an 80-year old dude throwing on a toupee and trying to be a pick-up artist. MoveOn just be yourself!" @TempeBacon wrote. @Xanibrutal concurs: "If I wanted to be involved with MoveOn, I would have joined their generic grassroots organization instead of #Occupy."

Others in the movement see MoveOn’s involvement in the 99 Percent Spring as a potentially valuable asset, as long as MoveOn doesn’t start evangelizing on behalf of the donkey.

"These organizations are encouraging thousands of people to undergo direct action training, without any electioneering diluting that goal, despite the fact that we are six months out from a presidential election," says Occupy the SEC’s Alexis Goldstein. "This is unprecedented, amazing, and shows that there is an important focus on trainings and educations among groups that may have different strategies."

Goldstein adds that Occupy is fighting an information battle, and any effort to educate people on direct action is a positive act.

"If anything, this is Occupy ‘co-opting’ [MoveOn]," she says.

OWS has been talking about the value in maintaining a diversity of tactics since its creation, and many see the 99% Spring training as a natural extension of that. In a report on the training, Occupier Charles Lenchner addressed what he calls the "Halp! We’re being coopted!" concern:

Speaking as an occupier most active in the Tech Ops Working Group of the NYC General Assembly, my first response to the 99%Spring was envy. Why aren’t we initiating, leading or participating in this kind of serious coalition work? But that’s unfair. We are working on May First actions, which in New York include a march carried out together with labor and the immigrants’ rights movements. What we aren’t doing is training 100,000 activists and organizers in nonviolent direct action. So why not welcome an effort that is doing that?

Lenchner goes on to call the training "fantastic," "inter-generational" and "racially diverse," and explains that it draws on the legacy of Cesar Chavez, the post-Seattle anti-globalization movement, and the OWS narrative of the 1 percent vs. the 99 percent.

He does address the concerns that MoveOn.org may be trying to co-opt OWS, but writes, "the 99% Spring is an example of a large powerful organization placing resources in the service of a fairly radical agenda and allowing others to take the lead."

"Drop your defenses," Lenchner encourages his fellow Occupiers, "rest assured no one is talking about elections."

Jeff Rae, an OWS protester, who recently had the New York District Attorney’s subpoena his tweets related to the Brooklyn Bridge mass arrest, says it’s "easy to be skeptical of groups like MoveOn." However, Rae points to the other signatories as evidence the movement isn’t being watered down.

"You will see people from Ruckus Society and [the Rainforest Action Network], all who do pretty radical direct action stuff," Rae says.

"I’m not a big MoveOn fan," OWS protester Jesse Myerson says, "I’ve criticized them publicly when they’ve tried to co-opt OWS. But that doesn’t mean that it is a toxic organization that can contribute nothing to the movement. If providing you with 100,000 Americans trained in direct action isn’t the most useful thing MoveOn, and its many awesome partners on this, could be doing, what is?"

Myerson warns against Occupiers becoming purists, meaning picky over who can call themselves Occupiers to the point of total extinction.

"[MoveOn] isn’t a monolith. It’s a pretty big group with a really big-email list and an executive leadership accountable to it," says Myerson, adding that the e-mail list was used strictly for political stuff, specifically liberal/progressive stuff. As a result, MoveOn’s niche became the activist wing of the Democratic Party. Now, with many liberals disappointed with President Obama’s performance and drawn to the revolutionary spirit of Occupy, MoveOn finds itself in a difficult position.

"[The Democratic Party] base is showing tendencies toward abandoning the [party], and I bet a lot of MoveOn people feel the same pull. But then there’s MoveOn’s now longstanding institutional relationships and their knowledge that some critical things are going on legislatively that could really use some activist support in the streets. It’s a tough bind," he says.

Myerson says he expects a mixed bag now that MoveOn is involved, but it’s "not up to us to judge MoveOn; it’s up to us to grow our movement."

"A revolution is not an e-mail list. It isn’t 100 or even 100,000 people in the streets. It’s a widespread social consensus that overtakes the institutions of power," he says. "Right now, it needs to be about generating consensus. On the scale of hundred of millions of people. The neo-liberal monster is a big enemy."

Micah Uetricht, an Occupy Chicago protester who was arrested with 174 other people during a protest in October, expected to hear about a significant 99 Percent Spring backlash from OWS.

"The 99% Spring is a pretty unabashed attempt on the part of much of the ‘institutional left’ to capitalize on the grassroots momentum that Occupy put in motion," he says.

However, Uetricht says that he hasn’t noticed any kind of outright rejection of the effort among Occupiers in Chicago.

"What I’ve seen and heard from Occupiers in Chicago is a very mature, thoughtful kind of radicalism."

Protesters certainly understand the dangers of engaging with these groups i.e. the risks of co-option, but they also understand these established organizations may also become valuable partners down the road.

"Occupiers also seem to understand that even though these groups are far from perfect and don’t have the same kind of radical commitments that much of Occupy does, organizations like unions and community groups are the ones who are going to do the practical work of trying to implement the kinds of change OWS is demanding," says Uetricht.

It’s Occupy’s job, Uetricht says, to push the country’s policies and dialogue to the left, but that doesn’t mean it can’t engage with the mainstream left on these kinds of projects.

George Goehl, executive director of National People’s Action, a network of grassroots organizations using direct action to battle economic and racial injustice, who recently appeared on Bill Moyers’ Moyers & Company to discuss the 99 Percent Spring, believes now is a crucial time to education Americans about non-violent resistance.

"The plans for this Spring grew out of a belief that to truly reorganize our economy and address mass political and economic inequality we will have to challenge those that most benefit from the current structure: corporate executives that consistently violate values of fairness, decency, and conservation," says Goehl. "Non-violent direct action has long been a powerful means for doing just that."

"The political system is so messed up, and income inequality is such a huge problem, that we need a stronger response," says Justin Ruben, executive director of MoveOn. "Simply put, the goal of the 99% Spring is to empower activists to use non-violent direct action so they an challenge growing economic inequality and confront the increasing concentration of political power in the hands of the 1%."

Ruben stresses that the 99 Percent Spring work is separate from MoveOn’s legacy of promoting and supporting progressive candidates.

"The 99% Spring is not part of that work," he says, adding that the 99% Spring is happening through MoveOn.org Civic Action, a c(4), while the electoral work is housed in MoveOn’s PAC.

All parties seem mindful of the dreaded accusations of co-option, but rarely does such an annexation occur overnight. MoveOn being mindful of co-option accusations and compartmentalizing training in a separate wing of its franchise, Occupiers discussing the need to remain autonomous and perhaps co-opt MoveOn’s members, all of this is part of OWS’s ongoing struggle to maintain its identity without becoming a purist movement that alienates potential new converts and isolates the fledgling movement to the point of extinction.

Popular Front vs. Finance Capital, Anyone?

April 7th, 2012 by admin | No Comments | Filed in 2012 Election, financial crisis, rightwing, Wall Street

The Banksters…

The Fable of the Century

By Robert Reich
Progressive America Rising via RobertReich.org

April 5, 2012 – Imagine a country in which the very richest people get all the economic gains. They eventually accumulate so much of the nation’s total income and wealth that the middle class no longer has the purchasing power to keep the economy going full speed. Most of the middle class’s wages keep falling and their major asset – their home – keeps shrinking in value.

Imagine that the richest people in this country use some of their vast wealth to routinely bribe politicians. They get the politicians to cut their taxes so low there’s no money to finance important public investments that the middle class depends on – such as schools and roads, or safety nets such as health care for the elderly and poor.

Imagine further that among the richest of these rich are financiers. These financiers have so much power over the rest of the economy they get average taxpayers to bail them out when their bets in the casino called the stock market go bad. They have so much power they even shred regulations intended to limit their power.

These financiers have so much power they force businesses to lay off millions of workers and to reduce the wages and benefits of millions of others, in order to maximize profits and raise share prices – all of which make the financiers even richer, because they own so many of shares of stock and run the casino.

Now, imagine that among the richest of these financiers are people called private-equity managers who buy up companies in order to squeeze even more money out of them by loading them up with debt and firing even more of their employees, and then selling the companies for a fat profit.

Although these private-equity managers don’t even risk their own money – they round up investors to buy the target companies – they nonetheless pocket 20 percent of those fat profits.

And because of a loophole in the tax laws, which they created with their political bribes, these private equity managers are allowed to treat their whopping earnings as capital gains, taxed at only 15 percent – even though they themselves made no investment and didn’t risk a dime.

Finally, imagine there is a presidential election. One party, called the Republican Party, nominates as its candidate a private-equity manager who has raked in more than $20 million a year and paid only 13.9 percent in taxes – a lower tax rate than many in the middle class.

Yes, I know it sounds far-fetched. But bear with me because the fable gets even wilder. Imagine this candidate and his party come up with a plan to cut the taxes of the rich even more – so millionaires save another $150,000 a year. And their plan cuts everything else the middle class and the poor depend on – Medicare, Medicaid, education, job-training, food stamps, Pell grants, child nutrition, even law enforcement.

What happens next?

There are two endings to this fable. You have to decide which it’s to be.

In one ending the private-equity manager candidate gets all his friends and everyone in the Wall Street casino and everyone in every executive suite of big corporations to contribute the largest wad of campaign money ever assembled – beyond your imagination.

The candidate uses the money to run continuous advertisements telling the same big lies over and over, such as “don’t tax the wealthy because they create the jobs” and “don’t tax corporations or they’ll go abroad” and “government is your enemy” and “the other party wants to turn America into a socialist state.”

And because big lies told repeatedly start sounding like the truth, the citizens of the country begin to believe them, and they elect the private equity manager president. Then he and his friends turn the country into a plutocracy (which it was starting to become anyway).

But there’s another ending. In this one, the candidacy of the private equity manager (and all the money he and his friends use to try to sell their lies) has the opposite effect. It awakens the citizens of the country to what is happening to their economy and their democracy. It ignites a movement among the citizens to take it all back.

The citizens repudiate the private equity manager and everything he stands for, and the party that nominated him. And they begin to recreate an economy that works for everyone and a democracy that’s responsive to everyone.

Just a fable, of course. But the ending is up to you.

Obama’s Best Shot: GOP Will Keep On Pissing Off Millions

April 2nd, 2012 by admin | No Comments | Filed in 2012 Election, Organizing, pushing obama, women, youth and students

Hope 2.0: Inside Obama’s Campaign

The president’s reelection machine is gearing up to mobilize millions of volunteers. But are they too fed up to turn out?

By Tim Dickinson
Progressive America Rising via Rolling Stone

Pass through security into the headquarters of Obama 2012, and the effect is like stepping into the world’s most high-tech dorm room. Spanning the entire floor of a Chicago skyscraper, the campaign’s nerve center boasts a ping-pong table, a staff of 300 and a life-size cardboard cutout of the president dressed in a University of Montana jersey. They don’t use phones up here; most of the digital team weren’t even issued any. Instead, campaign workers communicate mostly by e-mail, G-chat and Twitter. Rows of young staffers, some perched on yoga balls, are quietly coding new online tools to engage supporters, tweaking a video of Sarah Palin attacking Obama, and tracking metrics of volunteers recruited and new voters registered. An energetic hum fills the room, punctuated only by mouse clicks.

Given Barack Obama’s transformation from insurgent politician to establishment president, you might expect his re-election campaign to emphasize the benefits of incumbency, leaning on big-dollar donors and party insiders. But the campaign staff assembled in Chicago has a different plan to return Obama to the White House: They’re building the mother of all field campaigns – one that is even more dependent on face-to-face organizing than it was four years ago. Obama 2.0 has been quietly re-engineered from the bottom up, powered by new high-tech organizing tools designed to mobilize volunteers and target new voters more quickly and efficiently. By the start of early voting in October, the campaign expects to transform college dorms and coffeehouses across the country into 20,000 all-volunteer, fully functioning field offices.

"To be honest, I’m amazed at what they’re doing," says Temo Figueroa, who directed Obama’s field operation against Hillary Clinton in 2008 but is not a part of the campaign this year. "It makes what we were doing look like a startup."

Obama and his team know that come fall, they will face an epic ad war backed by the nearly limitless funds being poured into Republican Super PACs. So the campaign is returning to the potent combination of cutting-edge technology and timeworn field techniques it deployed in 2008 – the president’s one advantage that the GOP can’t match. "The other side has decided this is a race about Super PAC ads," says Jim Messina, the campaign manager of Obama 2012. "We have a different theory about the whole deal. Both sides are going to have beautiful TV ads, and everyone is going to spend millions of dollars. But we’re going to win this on the ground, person-to-person, volunteers talking to voters about the issues."

There’s only one problem with running a people-powered campaign this time around: the people. Ever since he charged to victory in 2008 on a movement of his own creation, President Obama’s relationship with his activist base has been an uneasy one. Instead of deploying his loyal army of 13 million citizen-activists to pressure Congress to enact his agenda, Obama essentially mothballed his massive campaign machine as soon as he took office. He also dispatched his top deputies – including Messina, a Beltway veteran of 17 years – to tell the "professional left" to sit down and be quiet. "The progressive community was better organized than I’d ever seen before, but they were all leaned on by the White House to not raise hell," says an insider from the ’08 campaign. "That first year and a half, it was like, ‘No, we’ll take care of it.’ You got a visit from Jim Messina or someone, saying, ‘Don’t rock the boat.’"

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The Age of Obama: What Went Wrong (And How To Fix It)

April 1st, 2012 by admin | No Comments | Filed in 2012 Election, Organizing, pushing obama

By Van Jones
Progressive America Rising via Yes! Magazine

This article is adapted from Rebuild the Dream, Van Jones’ new book.

The 2008 campaign was a campfire around which millions gathered. But after the election, it was nobody’s job or role to tend that campfire. The White House was focused on the minutiae of passing legislation, not on the magic of leading a movement. Obama For America did the best that it could, but the mass gatherings, the idealism, the expanded notions of American identity, the growing sense of a new national community, all of that disappeared.

It goes without saying that clear thinking and imaginative problem solving are easier in hindsight, away from the battlefield. I was in the White House for six months of 2009, and I was outside of it afterward. I had some of the above insights at the time, but many did not come to me in the middle of the drama and action. Most are the product of deeper reflection, which I was able to do only from a distance.

Nonetheless, the exercise of trying to sort out what might have been and trying to understand why nobody was able to make those things happen in real time has informed this book and shaped my arguments going forward.

I say Obama relied on the people too little, and we tried to rely on him too much.

Let me speak personally: looking back, I do not think those of us who believed in the agenda of change had to get beaten as badly as we were, after Obama was sworn in. We did not have to leave millions of once-inspired people feeling lost, deceived, and abandoned. We did not have to let our movement die down to the level that it did.

The simple truth is this: we overestimated our achievement in 2008, and we underestimated our opponents in 2009.

We did not lose because the backlashers got so loud. We lost because the rest of us got so quiet. Too many of us treated Obama’s inauguration as some kind of finish line, when we should have seen it as just the starting line. Too many of us sat down at the very moment when we should have stood up.

Among those who stayed active, too many of us (myself included) were in the suites when we should have been in the streets. Many “repositioned” our grassroots organizations to be “at the table” in order to “work with the administration.” Some of us (like me) took roles in the government. For a while at least, many were so enthralled with the idea of being a part of history that we forgot the courage, sacrifices, and risks that are sometimes required to make history.

That is hard, scary, and thankless work. It requires a willingness to walk with a White House when possible—and to walk boldly ahead of that same White House, when necessary. A few leaders were willing to play that role from the very beginning, but many more were not. Too many activists reverted to acting like either die-hard or disappointed fans of the president, not fighters for the people.

The conventional wisdom is that Obama went too far to the left to accommodate his liberal base. In my view, the liberal base went too far to the center to accommodate Obama. The conventional wisdom says that Obama relied on Congress too much. I say Obama relied on the people too little, and we tried to rely on him too much. Once it became obvious that he was committed to bipartisanship at all costs, even if it meant chasing an opposition party that was moving further to the right every day, progressives needed to reassess our strategies, defend our own interests, and go our own way. It took us way too long to internalize this lesson— and act upon it.

The independent movement for hope and change, which had been growing since 2003, was a goose that was laying golden eggs. But the bird could not be bossed. Caging it killed it. It died around conference tables in Washington, DC, long before the Tea Party got big enough to kick its carcass down the street.

The administration was naïve and hubristic enough to try to absorb and even direct the popular movement that had helped to elect the president. That was part of the problem. But the main problem was that the movement itself was naïve and enamored enough that it wanted to be absorbed and directed. Instead of marching on Washington, many of us longed to get marching orders from Washington. We so much wanted to be a part of something beautiful that we forgot how ugly and difficult political change can be.

Somewhere along the line, a bottom-up, largely decentralized phenomenon found itself trying to function as a subcomponent of a national party apparatus. Despite the best intentions of practically everyone involved, the whole process wound up sucking the soul out of the movement.

As a result, when the backlash came, the hope-and-changers had no independent ground on which to stand and fight back. Grassroots activists had little independent ability to challenge the White House when it was wrong and, therefore, a dwindling capacity to defend it when it was right.

We need a president who is willing to be pushed into doing the right thing, and we need independent leaders and movements that are willing to do the pushing.

The Obama administration had the wrong theory of the movement, and the movement had the wrong theory of the presidency. In America, change comes when we have two kinds of leaders, not just one. We need a president who is willing to be pushed into doing the right thing, and we need independent leaders and movements that are willing to do the pushing. For a few years, Obama’s supporters expected the president to act like a movement leader, rather than a head of state.

The confusion was understandable: As a candidate, Obama performed many of the functions of a movement leader. He gave inspiring speeches, held massive rallies, and stirred our hearts. But when he became president, he could no longer play that role.

The expectation that he would or could arose from a fundamental misreading of U.S. history. After all, as head of state, President Lyndon Johnson did not lead the civil rights movement. That was the job of independent movement leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Fannie Lou Hamer. There were moments of conflict and cooperation between Johnson and leaders in the freedom struggle, but the alchemy of political power and people power is what resulted in the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

As head of state, Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not lead the labor movement. That was the job of independent union leaders. Again, the alchemy of political power and people power resulted in the New Deal. As head of state, Woodrow Wilson did not lead the fight to enfranchise women. That was the role of independent movement leaders, such as suffragettes Susan B. Anthony and Ida B. Wells. The alchemy of political power and people power resulted in women’s right to vote. As head of state, Abraham Lincoln did not lead the abolitionists. That was the job of independent movement leaders Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and Harriet Tubman. The alchemy of political power and people power resulted in the emancipation of enslaved Africans. As head of state, Richard Nixon did not lead the environmental movement. That was the job of various environmental organizations, such as the Sierra Club, and other leaders, like those whom writer Rachel Carson inspired. Once again it was the alchemy of political power and people power that resulted in the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency

The biggest reason for our frustrations and failures is that we have not yet understood that both of these are necessary—and they are distinct. We already have our head of state who arguably is willing to be pushed. We do not yet have a strong enough independent movement to do the pushing. The bulk of this book makes the case for how and why we should build one.

Note to Obama: Don’t Go Here

March 14th, 2012 by admin | Comments Off | Filed in 2012 Election, antiwar, Iran, pushing obama

Circle Of Clowns Playing With Fire:

The GOP’s Warmongering on Iran

By Bill Fletcher, Jr
Progressive America Rising via Seattle Medium

March 14, 2012 – It is difficult to watch the spectacle of the Republican primaries and not agree with whoever it was that originated the description of those candidacies as nothing more or less than a ‘circle of clowns.’ At each moment one or the other candidate seems to go deeper into the swamp, whether through denigrating science, attacking women or attempting to ridicule President Obama for supporting college education.

With this evolution of the campaign it feels as if we are going deeper and deeper into a new dark age with mysticism, fear, militarism, racism and misogynism as the defining characteristics.

What never ceases to amaze me is the manner in which these politicians have, with the exception of the right-wing libertarian Ron Paul, jumped up and down on the band-wagon in favor of war with Iran. In concert with an element of the Israeli political establishment and their supporters in the USA, they have been beating the drum for military strikes against Iran as a means of stopping the alleged efforts of Iran to achieve a nuclear weapon.

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