Dirty Hippies » Progressives

Republicans Again Use Race, And It’s OUR Fault That It Still Works

Dave Johnson — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:42:13 +0000

Since forever, the Republican message is STILL “Dems take your money and give it to black people.” Doesn’t change. Doesn’t have to. It’s OUR fault.

Since Forever

I am not young. I remember when Nixon campaigned with his racially divisive “Southern Strategy.” Nixon campaigned on “crime” – fear of black people – and on the claim that Dmeocrats take “your” money and give it to black people. It worked.

It worked for Reagan, too, when he talked about “welfare queens” and “welfare Cadillacs.” Here is part of a Reagan campaign stump speech,

“She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000.”

(Please read what Terrance Heath has to say about welfare queens in, Romney And Ryan: The Right Kind Of “Welfare Queens”.)

HW Bush used the infamous Willie Horton ad. Watch it with the sound off.

Bush II beat back John McCain in the primaries by circulating stories that he had “fathered a black child” and “terrorists.” (But correct me if I’m wrong, Bush II didn’t appear to use race against Gore, instead preempting potential attacks on his own character and honesty by hammering Gore’s “character” and making him out to be a liar – both with the help of the media. His later use of “terrorists” (brown people) is another story entirely…)

Prediction

So I’m going to go way out on a limb here. I predict that Republicans will use race and other terribly divisive tactics to distract us from the real situation — the draining of the wealth of 99% of us and the country for the benefit of an already-wealthy few — in the 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020 and every campaign after that. They will say that “Democrats take your money and give it to black people.” They will campaign against “union thugs” and “union bosses” and say paying fair wages “hurts business” and we need to be more “business friendly.” They will say “government takes money out of the economy” and helping each other “makes people dependent.” They will say “cutting taxes increases government revenue.” They will say a lot of nonsense, and their policies when enacted will always, always benefit an already-wealthy few at the expense of the rest of us, our economy, our country and our planet.

They will say all kinds of stuff to keep We, the People from seeing what is in front of our faces.

That is who they are and that is what they do.

Unless we do something about it.

Look Where We Are & At What Romney Is Doing

Look where we are: Deregulation pretty much destroyed the economy. Tax cuts have partially defunded the government’s ability to empower and protect We, the People. The 1% and their giant corporations get so much of the benefits of our economy now. The climate is obviously getting worse and worse, already risking crop failures, incredible heat waves and terribly destructive storms. And with all of this going on one party blocks efforts to improve things, so they can campaign saying nothing is getting done. Yet with all that going on, the election so far is all coming down to billionaires spending hundreds of millions to run ads that say Obama is taking your money and giving it to black people.

Look what Romney is doing! He is running ads that come pretty close to the “welfare queen” messaging, pretty much saying that Democrats take your money and give it to black people. He is running ads about Medicare that pretty much say the same thing. And now he is even going “birther.” Thomas Edsall explains today in the NY Times, in Making The Election About Race,

The Republican ticket is flooding the airwaves with commercials that develop two themes designed to turn the presidential contest into a racially freighted resource competition pitting middle class white voters against the minority poor.

… The racial overtones of Romney’s welfare ads are relatively explicit. Romney’s Medicare ads are a bit more subtle. … Obamacare, described in the Romney ad as a “massive new government program that is not for you,” would provide health coverage to a population of over 30 million that is not currently insured: 16.3 percent of this population is black; 30.7 percent is Hispanic; 5.2 percent is Asian-American; and 46.3 percent (less than half) is made up of non-Hispanic whites.

… The Romney campaign is willing to disregard criticism concerning accuracy and veracity in favor of “blowing the dog whistle of racism” – resorting to a campaign appealing to racial symbols, images and issues in its bid to break the frustratingly persistent Obama lead in the polls, which has lasted for the past 10 months.

Once again, Republicans are saying, “Democrats take your money and give it to black people.”

And just like they do every time it works they take our money and give it to rich people instead.

It’s Our Fault

Here’s the thing. This is our fault. Fool me once, shame on you. We were fooled once, when Nixon did it. Shame on Nixon. But … We were fooled twice, when Reagan did it. We were fooled again and again, and apparently never caught on that this is what they do.

And if this is what they do, we should have taken steps after, maybe, the fifth or sixth or seventh or eighth time? This is our fault.

WHY are Republicans still able to use race in their campaigns to deflect attention from their ongoing campaign to turn the wealth and management of our country over to the 1%? Because we have not organized ourselves to reach out to regular people around the country and help them to understand what is happening to them. Instead we (progressives) have flargely focused our on changing things through elections. But we have not done the hard work between elections to set the stage for elections. We have not been very good at reaching out to tens and tens of millions of regular people and helping them to understand and appreciate the benefits to them of a progressive approach to solving our problems.

I mean, a lot of us do get this and try. This is a big part of what Campaign for America’s Future does – or tries to do with the very limited resources it has. But a real national, between-elections, ongoing — decades-long — campaign takes real resources, facilities, coordination, supplies, management, researchers, writers, talkers, technologists, and the rest. And that takes real money. The kind of money conservatives have been willing to put into such and effort, and progressives have not.

Let’s Finally Do Something About It

When are we going to recognize that this is what they do, and do something about it? They use race. They divide us. They make shit up, and spend millions and millions on blasting their made-up shit into people’s brains. Then they enrich the 1% at the expense of the rest of us, and use part of that to do it more. This is what they do. And very little is done to counter it. (Some say the problem is, “democracy does not have an advertising budget.”)

What if we had started 4 years ago to get ready for this campaign of lies and division, knowing full well that they are going to use race and lies and the rest against We, the People? What if we had started then to reach and educate millions and millions of working people, bring them together, help them see the bigger picture? What if we had reached out to millions of disaffected white voters and explained directly to them, in language that reaches them, with stories that resonate with them, so they would be ready for it when they are told “Democrats take your money and give it to black people,” and why believing it hurts them.

What if we did this between elections, and kept doing it after elections, and explained and reinforced the concepts of democracy so that people’s understanding and appreciation of democracy and what it really means increased year after year after year?

What if we had started doing this 8 years ago? 12 years ago? After Nixon’s election? What if we had started to dedicate a percentage of progressive-aligned funding and organizing toward a centrally organized, well-funded campaign of reaching regular people and explaining the harm conservatives are doing, and the benefits to them of democracy and a We, the People approach to our mutual problems?

How well would their campaign of racism and lies and division work, if we had done that? How well will it work if we do it.

What would it have done for the goals of environmentalists if we had put serious money into a coordinated, values-based approach that helped people understand and appreciate the meaning and benefits to them of truly honoring We, the People “we are in this together” democracy over the prevailing corporate/conservative, Randian, “you should be on your own”?

What would it have done for the goals of labor unions if we had used this approach?

What would it have done for the goals of consumer attorneys if we had used this approach?

What would it have done for the goals of Medicare-For-All advocates if we had used this approach?

And what could it do for all of these if we started today?

A Fight Back Strategy

Research & Development, and Action: What we need is a major, coordinated, funded, national project dedicated to researching the ways the 1% manipulates us, and developing strategics for overcoming them. This project also needs a national action arm that takes the research and strategies out to the country and continues this work for as long as it takes.

Just think about this, think about changing your orientation from election cycle to outside of the election cycle, ongoing, as-long-as-it-takes strategies. And mostly, please help and continue to help fund organizations that work outside of elections to help make these changes, so that progressive candidates and policy initiatives have fertile ground in which to do well!

Of course, this kind of work is a big part of what Campaign for America’s Future does – or tries to do with the very limited resources it has. You can and should help us with this, and you can do that right now by visiting this page. If you can give $3 right now, that helps. Seriously, if everyone reading this just gave $3 (or more) it would help.

And this is not a selfish appeal so I can get a raise (although it can’t hurt). There are a number of other organizations that are seriously working on this kind of approach. You can also give a donation to Center for American Progress here, or to the National Council of La Raza here, or to the Economic Policy Institute here, Media Matters here, to the Center for Community Change here, to Progressive Congress here, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights here, to People For the American Way here, and there are so many other organizations that are working in their own way to help. (I’ll add them as they read this and write to yell at me for leaving them out.)

There is a (somewhat out of date) page on funding progressive infrastructure here and a (somewhat out of date) list of progressive infrastructure organizations here.

We really need for progressives to understand this need, and the difference between this and election campaign contributions. Think about it, and help spread the word. Help fund it, and help others understand this need. We can beat back the conservative machine by building a machine of our own that is strong enough to do the job. This takes money.

And to keep that machine answerable to US, we have to fund it democratically, with each of us stepping up and contributing what we can. It has to be lots of people giving small and medium amounts, not depending on a few large donors. ANY organization or candidate is going to dance with the ones that brung ‘em, so WE have to bring them to the dance together. Go give $3 or $10 or $100 to any of those organizations now, and keep doing it, and get others to do it.

Cost-Effective

A dollar donated to an effort like this now is like a dollar donated again and again to each and every progressive issue campaign and candidate from now on, except that the dollar is amplified. This is because doing the work now makes elections and policy battles so much easier and less expensive.

Conservatives have developed a “brand” and their candidates and policy initiatives ride that brand like a surfer surfs a wave. They just hop on the wave and attach themselves or their issue. So much of the things we have to spend so much money on are already covered by their infrastructure of like-minded organizations, so for each candidate and policy initiative they have to spend so much less! ALL of their candidates are helped by the central branding effort.

Progressive-oriented candidates and policy initiatives start almost from scratch, and so it is tremendously expensive to get them elected or passed. We have to raise tremendous sums to do the things that conservatives have ready-to-go. And each of our candidates have to each raise that money, on their own, just to overcome the things conservatives already have in place – for all of them. One dollar spent on a core branding effort could have the same effect for all of our candidates and policy initiatives as the more-than-one-dollar spent for EACH candidate or policy initiative at election time to overcome it.

So help out, OK?

P.S. Here is a talk I gave on this subject in 2004, titled “On Our Own?“ that talked about how the corporate right works between elections to market their ideology, and suggesting that we should try a similar outside-the-election-cycle approach.

Here is a talk I gave to an education organization in 2007 titled, “We’re All In This Together” that described how the right uses the Overton Window to move public attitudes,

What can we, as supporters of public education, do about this?

The supporters of public education must join with their natural allies — the trial lawyers and the environmentalists and reproductive rights organizations and others and begin to talk to the public with a COMMON message that says WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER because we are a COMMUNITY. Only after people come to understand and appreciate this philosophy of community again, will they begin to understand and appreciate the value of public schools.

… The Right pushes an ugly message that we are each on our own, out for ourselves to get what we can, in a dog-eat-dog world. But in truth, we are really ARE all in this together, not only as being on the receiving end of similar attacks, but also because we can work together to help each other. We can work to counter the Right’s message by restoring the public’s understanding and appreciation of COMMUNITY and the value of responsible government.

How can we do this?

As I’m sure you know, frame and message development and testing are complex and require skilled professionals. Messaging efforts on behalf of public education will have the greatest effect if linked to broad frames that are developed across sectors, frames that support the value of community and government. And the messaging that supports these values will be most effective if it is delivered by multiple voices, third-party voices that are not strongly identified with public education and other interest groups. It must be coordinated with a long-term strategy.

This post originally appeared at Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. I am a Fellow with CAF.

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Colbert Super PAC: Exposing How It’s Done

Tom Sullivan — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 03:13:16 +0000

When comedian Stephen Colbert petitioned the Federal Election Commission for permission to form Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow (a.k.a., the Colbert Super PAC), people laughed to see Colbert use the campaign finance system to lampoon that very system. “This is 100 percent legal and at least 10 percent ethical,” he said upon receiving FEC approval.

The Citizens United decision by the U.S. Supreme Court now allows “independent-expenditure only committees” like Colbert’s to spend unlimited amounts of money to support or attack candidates. But with the debut of Colbert’s first television ads ahead of Iowa’s Ames straw poll, it is clear that Colbert’s target list is broader than candidates and campaign finance.

Another YouTube video points to one aspect of the Colbert super PAC’s targets that deserves more attention from progressives. In it, Teller, of the magic duo Penn & Teller, describes how magicians use human pattern seeking to trick both the eye and mind.

Teller begins, “One thing that magicians do is take advantage of our natural inclination to study something that we see done over and over again and think that we’re learning something … If you do that with a magician, it’s sometimes a big mistake.” With Fox News as well. Especially if you think you’re learning something.

To make their illusions work, magicians use that pattern reflex to manage audience attention and lead them to false assumptions about reality. Penn & Teller do more. Their magic/comedy shows bring audiences into the act by exposing how the tricks are done.

What the Iowa ads from Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow do is something similar. By calling out grifter super PACs by name, by revealing to the audience in satirical fashion how political ads attempt to manipulate them, Colbert lets the audience “in on the trick.” He’s telling them what to watch for when “out of state groups” like Grow PAC and Jobs for Iowa PAC “flood the airwaves” with their ads.

Faced with the massive amounts of money that flowed into conservative political ads in the wake of Citizens United, progressives face the daunting prospect of finding ways to fight back. Lacking comparable funding, there seem to be few ways for grassroots groups to mount an effective messaging counteroffensive. But few doesn’t mean none.

The Agenda Project’s “America the Beautiful” ad targeted Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform plan and – buying no air time – garnered tons of earned media after it went viral on YouTube. But that “earned media” strategy probably is not workable for mounting a sustained campaign against millions of dollars in corporate-funded ad buys.

Yet in spite of that, and unlike most progressive organizations, Colbert has positioned himself to fight back in the mainstream media against the Citizens United money flood – just what the progressive community wants, if not in the high-minded way it might imagine for itself. But even Colbert’s modest effort in Iowa is better than the mainstream messaging vehicle progressives don’t have. As much as they might value Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” progressives have not yet embraced Colbert’s super PAC as much more than Onion-like satire.

That could be a missed opportunity. Because Colbert has the national presence and media platform progressive groups lack for raising money and mainstreaming the kind of smackdown most political advertising deserves. Besides, attempting “serious” in this political environment might be a riskier maneuver than the progressive movement can successfully pull off. “Maybe the whole system has become such a joke,” writes the New York Times‘ David Carr, “that only jokes will serve as a corrective.”

Joining Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow’s efforts to spotlight other super PACs’ manipulation just might be progressives’ best bet for gaining ground in an otherwise asymmetrical fight. (As a bonus, Colbert adds donors’ names to the HEROE$ crawl that runs during his show.) Expect Karl Rove’s American Crossroads PAC to get extra special attention from Colbert’s super PAC. That alone should merit progressive financial support.

As the Fox News Channel’s short-lived “1/2 Hour News Hour” graphically demonstrated, humor is one of the few areas of political warfare where liberals wield superior firepower. In a battle in which they are otherwise outgunned, it would be a mistake for progressives to dismiss Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow’s effort as a mere comedic stunt rather than help Colbert deploy it to maximum effect. Of all people, progressive “dirty hippies” should be able to appreciate what it is like to be treated as unserious.

Conservatives, Communication and Coalitions

Robert Cruickshank — Sun, 22 May 2011 16:45:33 +0000

The latest round of argument within the progressive coalition over the Obama Administration – touched off by Cornel West’s scathing criticism – has generated a lot of heated discussion. Most of it seems to simply repeat the same arguments that have been played out over the last two years: Obama is a sellout, Obama is doing the best he can, you’re not being fair to him, he’s not being fair to us. Leaving aside for this article the personality issues at play here, what’s really going on is a deeper fracture over the progressive coalition. Namely, whether one exists at all.

Whenever these contentious arguments erupt, a common response from progressives is to bemoan the “circular firing squad” and point to the right, where this sort of self-destructive behavior is rarely ever seen. Instead, the right exhibits a fanatic message discipline that would have made the Politburo envious. Grover Norquist holds his famous “Wednesday meetings” where right-wing strategy and message are coordinated. Frank Luntz provides the talking points, backed by his research. And from there, and from numerous other nodes in the right-wing network, the message gets blasted out. Conservatives dutifully repeat the refrain, which becomes a cacophony that generates its own political force. Republicans ruthlessly use that message, that agenda, to shift the nation’s politics to the right, even as Americans themselves remain on the center-left of most issues.

“Can’t we be more like them?” ask these progressives who understandably grow tired of the Obama wars. The conservatives’ disciplined communications strategy typically gets ascribed to one of these factors. Some see it as an inherent feature of their ideology – the right is hierarchical, the left is anarchic. (Of course, the 20th century Communist movement disproved that.) Others see it as an inherent feature of their brains – conservatives are said to have an “authoritarian” brain where everything is black and white and where values and ideas are simply accepted from a higher-up, whereas liberals have brains that see nuance and prize critical thinking, making them predisposed to squabble instead of unite. And still others just see the conservatives as being smarter, knowing not to tear each other down, with the implication that progressives who engage in these bruising internal battles simply don’t know any better, or are so reckless as not to care.

Perhaps some of those factors are all at work. But I want to argue that the truth is far simpler. Conservatives simply understand how coalitions work, and progressives don’t. Conservative communication discipline is enabled only by the fact that everyone in the coalition knows they will get something for their participation. A right-winger will repeat the same talking points even on an issue he or she doesn’t care about or even agree with because he or she knows that their turn will come soon, when the rest of the movement will do the same thing for them.

Progressives do not operate this way. We spend way too much time selling each other out, and way too little time having each other’s back. This is especially true within the Democratic Party, where progressives share a political party with another group of people – the corporate neoliberals – who we disagree with on almost every single issue of substance. But within our own movement, there is nothing stopping us from exhibiting the same kind of effective messaging – if we understood the value of coalitions.

A coalition is an essential piece of political organizing. It stems from the basic fact of human life that we are not all the same. We do not have the same political motivations, or care about the same issues with equal weight. Some people are more motivated by social issues, others by economic issues. There is plenty of overlap, thanks to share core values of equality, justice, and empathy. But in a political system such as ours, we can’t do everything at once. Priorities have to be picked, and certain issues will come before others.

How that gets handled is essential to an effective political movement. If one part of the coalition gets everything and the other parts get nothing, then the coalition will break down as those who got nothing will get unhappy, restive, and will eventually leave. Good coalitions understand that everyone has to get their issue taken care of, their goals met – in one way or another – for the thing to hold together.

Conservatives understand this implicitly. The Wednesday meeting is essentially a coalition maintenance session, keeping together what could be a fractious and restive movement. Everyone knows they will get their turn. Why would someone who is primarily motivated by a desire to outlaw abortion support an oil company that wants to drill offshore? Because the anti-choicers know that in a few weeks, the rest of the coalition will unite to defund Planned Parenthood. And a few weeks after that, everyone will come together to appease Wall Street and the billionaires by fighting Elizabeth Warren. And then they’ll all appease the US Chamber by fighting to break a union.

There are underlying values that knit all those things together, common threads that make the communications coherent. But those policies get advanced because their advocates work together to sell the narrative.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is primarily a fiscal conservative. So why would he attack domestic partner benefits? New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is not an anti-science zealot. So why would he refuse to say if he believes in evolution or creationism? Former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger supported marriage equality and refused to defend Prop 8 in court. So why did he twice veto a bill passed by the state legislature to veto marriage equality?

The answer to the above is simple: because they knew the importance of keeping the coalition together. They know that each part has to be looked after, or else the thing will fall apart as different constituencies turn on the person who failed to advance their agenda.

Members of the conservative coalition do not expect to get everything all at once. An anti-choice advocate would love to overturn Roe v. Wade tomorrow. But they don’t get angry when that doesn’t happen in a given year. Not because they are self-disciplined and patient, but because they get important victories year after year that move toward that goal. One year it could be a partial-birth abortion ban. The next year it could be defunding of Planned Parenthood. The year after that it could be a ban on any kind of federal funding of abortions, even indirect. (And in 2011, they’re getting some of these at the same time.)

More importantly, they know that even if their issue doesn’t get advanced in a given year, they also know that the other members of the coalition will not allow them to lose ground. If there’s no way to further restrain abortion rights (Dems control Congress, the voters repeal an insane law like South Dakota’s attempt to ban abortion), fine, the conservative coalition will at least fight to ensure that ground isn’t lost. They’ll unite to fight efforts to rescind a partial-birth abortion ban, or add new funding to Planned Parenthood. Those efforts to prevent losses are just as important to holding the coalition together as are the efforts to achieve policy gains.

Being in the conservative coalition means never having to lose a policy fight – or if you do lose, it won’t be because your allies abandoned you.

This is where the real contrast with the progressive and Democratic coalitions lies. Within the Democratic Party, for example, members of the coalition are constantly told it would be politically reckless to advance their goals, or that they have to give up ground previously won. The implicit message to that member of the coalition is that they don’t matter as much, that their goals or values are less important. That’s a recipe for a weak and ineffectual coalition.

There are lots of examples to illustrate the point. If someone is primarily motivated to become politically active because they oppose war, then telling them to support bombing of Libya in order to be part of the coalition is never, ever going to work. If someone was outraged by torture policies under President Bush, you’ll never get them to believe that torture is OK when President Obama orders it. If someone is motivated by taking action on climate change, then Democrats should probably pass a climate bill instead of abandoning it and instead promoting coal and oil drilling. If someone supports universal health care and wants insurance companies out of the picture, you need to at least give them something (like a public option) if you’re going to otherwise mandate Americans buy private insurance.

The LGBT rights movement offered an excellent example of this. For his first two years in office, not only did President Obama drag his feet on advancing LGBT rights goals, he actively began handing them losses, such as discharging LGBT soldiers under the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy or having his Justice Department file briefs in support of the Defense of Marriage Act. Obama argued that he could not advance the policy goals of DADT or DOMA repeal, but even if that were true, he was breaking up his coalition by also handing the LGBT rights movement losses on things like discharges and defending DOMA. It was only when LGBT organizations, activists, and donors threatened to leave the Obama coalition that the White House finally took action to end DADT.

A good coalition recognizes that not everyone is there for the same reason. The “Obama wars” online tend to happen because its participants do not recognize this fact. For a lot of progressives and even a lot of Democrats, re-electing President Obama is not the reason they are in politics. And if Obama has been handing them losses, then appealing to them on the basis of “Obama’s doing the best he can” or “the GOP won’t let him go further” is an argument that they’ll find insulting. This works in reverse. If someone believes that Obama is a good leader, or that even if he isn’t perfect he’s better than any alternative (especially a Republican alternative) then they won’t react well to a criticism of Obama for not attending to this or that progressive policy matter.

Cornel West has basically argued that he is leaving the Obama coalition because Obama turned his back on West’s agenda. That’s a legitimate reaction, whether you agree or not with the words West used to describe what happened. Cornel West won’t sway someone whose primarily political motivation is to defend Obama if he calls Obama a “black mascot” and an Obama defender won’t sway Cornel West if they’re telling West that he’s wrong to expect Obama to deliver on his agenda.

The bigger problem is that it is very difficult to successfully maintain a coalition in today’s Democratic Party. Michael Gerson has identified something I have been arguing for some time – that the Democratic Party is actually two parties artificially melded together. I wrote about this in the California context last fall – today’s Democratic Party has two wings to it. One wing is progressive, anti-corporate, and distrusts the free market. The other wing is neoliberal, pro-corporate, and trusts the free market.

These two wings have antithetical views on many, many things. Neoliberals believe that privatization of public schools is a good idea. Progressives vow to fight that with every bone in their body. Neoliberals believe that less regulation means a healthier economy. Progressives believe that we are in a severe recession right now precisely because of less regulation. Neoliberals believe that corporate power is just fine, progressives see it as a threat to democracy.

The only reason these two antithetical groups share a political party is because the Republicans won’t have either one. The neoliberals tend to be socially liberal – they support civil unions or outright marriage equality, don’t hate immigrants, and know that we share a common ancestor with the chimps. 35 years ago they might have still had a place in the Republican Party, but in the post-Reagan era, they don’t. So they came over to the Democrats, who after 1980 were happy to have as many votes as possible – and whose leaders were uneasy at the growing ranks of dirty hippies among the party base.

As to those progressives, destroying their values and institutions is the reason today’s GOP exists, so they clearly can’t go to that party. They don’t have the money to completely dominate the Democratic Party. Neither do they have the money to start their own political party, and right now they don’t want to, given the widespread belief that Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the 2000 election and led to the Bush disaster.

To our north, the neoliberals and progressives do have their own parties. The Canadian election earlier this month gave Conservatives a majority, but it also gave a historic boost to the New Democratic Party, home of Canada’s progressives, while the Liberal Party, home of Canada’s neoliberals, lost half their seats. Those parties have an easier time holding together their coalitions, and that enabled the NDP to break through and become the party that is poised to take power at the next election once Canadians react against Stephen Harper’s extremist agenda.

Still, for a variety of structural, financial, and practical reasons most American progressives are not yet ready to go down the path of starting their own party. And that makes mastery of coalition politics even more important.

Cornel West needlessly personalized things. He would have been on stronger ground had he pointed out, correctly, that Obama has not done a good job of coalition politics. Progressives have not only failed to advance much of their agenda, but are increasingly being told to accept rollbacks, which as we’ve seen doesn’t happen on the other side and is key to holding conservatism together as an effective political force. Obama told unions to accept a tax increase on their health benefits, and promptly lost his filibuster-proof majority in the US Senate in the Massachusetts special election. While Republicans are facing a big political backlash for actually turning on members of their coalition – for the first time in a long time – by proposing to end Medicare, Obama risks alienating more of his coalition by promoting further austerity. Civil libertarians have seen loss after loss under Obama (which explains clearly why Glenn Greenwald does not feel any need to defend Obama). Obama has consistently sided with the banks and has done nothing to help homeowners facing foreclosure. Hardly anybody has been prosecuted for the crimes and fraud at the heart of Wall Street during the 2000s boom.

There’s no doubt that any Democratic president faces a difficult task in holding together a political coalition made up of two groups – progressives and neoliberals – who distrust each other and are in many ways fighting each other over the basic economic issues facing this country. But Obama has not made much effort to keep progressives on his side. He halfheartedly advocated for their goals, did some things to roll back progressive gains and values, and expects progressives to remain in the coalition largely out of fear of a Republican presidency. That’s a legitimate reason to stay, don’t get me wrong. But it won’t work for everybody, and nobody should be surprised when some progressives walk. Everyone has their limit.

It has been clear that Obama is of the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party. He always was (and so too was Hillary Clinton). It’s far easier for a neoliberal Democrat to win over just enough progressives to gain the party presidential nomination than vice-versa. Progressives are debating amongst themselves whether it makes sense to stay in that coalition if the terms are, as they have been since the late 1970s, subservience to a neoliberal agenda. I do not expect that debate to end anytime soon.

What we can do – and what we must do – is ensure that within the progressive coalition, we DO practice good coalitional behavior. If we are going to stay inside the Democratic Party, then we have to overcome the neoliberal wing. To do that, we have to be a disciplined and effective coalition. And to do that, we have to have each other’s back. We have to attend to each other’s needs. We have to recognize that everyone who wants to be in the coalition has a legitimate reason to be here, and has legitimate policy goals. If we have different goals – if Person A cares most about ending the death penalty, if Person B cares most about reducing carbon emissions, and if Person C cares most about single-payer health care, we have to make sure everyone not only gets their turn, but also make sure that each does not have to suffer a loss at our hands. If we find that we have goals that are in conflict, then we have to resolve that somehow.

One thing is clear: no coalition has ever succeeded with one part telling the other that their values are flawed, that they are wrong to want what they want, that they are wrong to be upset when they don’t get something. We are not going to change people’s values, and we should not make doing so the price of admission to a coalition. Unless we want to. In which case we have to accept the political consequences. I’d be happy to say we will never, and must never, coalition with neoliberals. But that has political consequences that many other progressives find unacceptable.

If we are going to address the severe crisis that is engulfing our country, we need to become better at building and maintaining coalitions. That means we have to decide who we want in the coalition, how we will satisfy their needs, and what price to maintain the coalition is too high to pay. Those are necessary, even essential political practices. It’s time we did that, rather than beating each other over the head for not seeing things exactly the way we do ourselves.

Only then will be become the disciplined and effective operation that we want.

Building the Progressive Brand

Tom Sullivan — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 07:30:59 +0000

How do we build the progressive brand and create demand for our policies?

The New York Times ran a piece recently about a study of pop song lyrics and other studies suggesting increasing narcissism in America since the 1980s. (Big news, huh?) They found “the words ‘I’ and ‘me’ appear more frequently along with anger-related words, while there’s been a corresponding decline in ‘we’ and ‘us’ and the expression of positive emotions.” This must make the Randians proud. Their world is all about them, and it’s a view they have sold successfully for decades. Progressives will not change that outlook just by promoting programs people don’t want to pay for, sponsored by a government they distrust, with benefits they would rather do without than see help neighbors they see as parasites.

A progressive America is less about me and more about we.

I just revisited Dave Johnson’s Firedoglake piece about building progressive infrastructure. It’s the kind of piece that reminds me that, clearly, the Democratic Party’s mission statement doesn’t involve changing minds and building the brand. With the exception of Howard Dean, party leaders think in election cycles and are more concerned with recruiting electable candidates.

Building a progressive infrastructure is about survival. In the absence of support from the left that Republicans get from a billionaire-funded infrastructure, national Democrats have turned to the same corporate sponsors as the GOP, and become servants to the same commercial interests. To put it somewhat perversely, any progressive infrastructure we build has to create public demand for Democrats to act like Democrats again, and has to figure out how to tap the progressive market that’s already there.

I’m all for punching back against conservative lies, and for rapid response, and so forth. And we need infrastructure that supports progressive legislators. But we stay so busy fighting zombie lies that we never mount a sustained message offensive of our own. Hell, it’s gotten to where we think debunking is playing offense. And while we defend, conservative think tanks and media continue seeding a right-wing worldview into the public consciousness.

Give a voter some one-off, “white knight” Democratic candidate and you might have him for an election. Teach that same voter to think like a Democrat and you might have him for life. That’s how our opponents operate. One of the founders of Reason magazine mentioned how in the early 1970s an Ayn Rand devotee suggested “converting the world to libertarianism … by going door-to-door and distributing to every household a copy of Atlas Shrugged. That’s not a sophisticated strategy, but it’s a model evangelists have used for centuries. Train people to think like conservatives and support for conservative policies follows. The Kochs et, al. have spent billions doing just that. Lather, rinse, repeat.

If we were to plant a progressive worldview in the minds of swing voters, what would that look like? How would we do it? Accomplishing that – not just debunking and building policy shops – has to be a central component of any progressive infrastructure. Lakoff suggests that people have both a “strict father” and “nurturant parent” model within them. Conservatives worked for decades to awaken the first and put the latter into a coma. Our efforts should awaken swing voters’ progressive selves and get them to identify with us again. We’re talking about voters who are too busy with jobs and kids and bills to master policy. Our messages have to be simple. We have to reach them on an “I wouldn’t trust anybody my dog doesn’t like” level. Doing that won’t happen overnight or with a single, ripping TV commercial. But instead of starting from scratch, we can build on what voters already believe and — as a filmmaker friend suggests — use visual (or mental) imagery with emotional resonance to steer what people already believe in a progressive direction. Meet people where they are. Lead them to where we are. Win their hearts, and their heads (and votes) will follow.

Conservative think tanks and media have been waging well-funded, asymmetrical warfare for decades. But I’m convinced that big problems don’t necessarily require big solutions. With the limited resources at hand, how can we make that asymmetry work for us in seeding – or re-seeding – progressive ideas in the public mind the way distributing copies of Atlas was supposed to? How can we promote a progressive worldview in ways that don’t require Koch-level backing or building media distribution channels from scratch? (Demonstrating that that could be done on a grassroots level was the point of the eleven hundred 30-second AM radio spots Blue Century ran in 2008.) But whatever form progressive messaging takes, we first have to have the messages. (Here are three we tried in our pilot project.)

The conservative infrastructure sees messaging as an ongoing function — year in, year out — and progressives always seem to be playing defense. Yes, there’s good news out there. The conservatives’ message is starting to fall on deaf ears. But conservative failure isn’t the same thing as progressive success. If 2006, 2008 and the health care fight didn’t make that clear, then 2010 should have settled it.

Reframing the conservative message isn’t enough. We have to begin creating and planting our own seeds, and they might not bloom for some years. The messages don’t have to be detailed — less is more — but have to be more than “their math doesn’t add up” or “they want to kill off the New Deal.” We need to be seeding messages that define us on our own terms — who we are, what we want, how we believe the same, core things about America as most Americans.

Got any? That’s the hardest part.

It Takes a Village to Stand Up to JPMorgan Chase

Greg Basta — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 15:57:59 +0000

How do you get a major bank like JPMorgan Chase to listen? What do the thousands of New York homeowners, the majority of whom are African American and Latino, who have been pleading for mortgage modifications to avoid foreclosure, do to get them to pay attention?

Wednesday, The Mayor and Board of Trustees of the Village of Hempstead, NY along with New York Communities for Change, sent a new kind of message: if you ignore our citizens, we won’t do business with you. The village voted to pull all $12.5 million of its funds from JPMorgan Chase, and refuse to do business with the bank until it improves its modification procedures.

The Village of Hempstead (pop. 54,000) is the largest incorporated village in the United States, and the largest community of color on Long Island. Research from the Furman Center shows that African American and Latino homeowners in New York are far less likely to receive loan modifications than white homeowners. Moreover, it is well-documented that JPMorgan Chase has the worst track record in New York as far as modifying loans – only 6% of homeowners in the state that have sought modifications from Chase have received them.

Hempstead Mayor Wayne Hall has seen his village be ravaged by the foreclosure crisis, and could no longer watch the bank do nothing. “It’s important that Chase and all the big corporate banks start to heed the minority communities,” Hall said. “There’s a lot of power in the minority communities. If we all stick together and start withdrawing our money out of these big banks and start putting it into more favorable banks, Chase will review its procedures for modifications.”

Mayor Hall will be working with New York Communities for Change to promote this action in villages, towns, and cities throughout the State. The Village of Freeport, Hempstead’s neighbor, is on the verge of shutting down their Chase accounts. Elected officials in the city of Albany, as well as Albany County, have expressed their desire to do the same. More announcements by several municipalities in upstate NY will be made in the coming weeks.

Next week, NYCC will be releasing an online tool that will allow New Yorkers to email their local elected officials to support similar resolutions. The federal government may have bailed out Chase, and has turned a blind eye to their abysmal track record with homeowners. All well and good. If DC and Wall Street wish to turn their backs on working families, we can force Chase to change its ways one town at a time, on Main Streets throughout the State (and beyond).

(Hey, NYC folks, want to send Chase a message on your own? Join us on Chase Shutdown Day April 16th. Can’t join us then? Click here.)

GOP’S RADICAL BREAKAGE CONTINUES

Gary Farber — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 17:28:27 +0000

Who is “Wisconsin’s most dangerous professor“? He’s William Cronon. Who he? He’s this incredibly threatening man:

[...] In 1991, Cronon completed a book entitled Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, which examines Chicago ‘s relationship to its rural hinterland during the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1991, it was awarded the Chicago Tribune‘s Heartland Prize for the best literary work of non-fiction published during the preceding year; in 1992, it won the Bancroft Prize for the best work of American history published during the previous year, and was also one of three nominees for the Pulitzer Prize in History; and in 1993, it received the George Perkins Marsh Prize from the American Society for Environmental History and the Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Award from the Forest History Society for the best book of environmental and conservation history published during the preceding two years.

[...]

In July 1992, Cronon became the Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison after having served for more than a decade as a member of the Yale History Department. In 2003, he was also named Vilas [pronounced "Vy-lus"] Research Professor at UW-Madison, the university’s most distinguished chaired professorship.

Cronon has been President of the American Society for Environmental History, and serves as general editor of the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Series for the University of Washington Press. [...] He has served on the Governing Council of The Wilderness Society since 1995, and on the National Board of the Trust for Public Land since 2003. He has been elected President of the American Historical Association for 2011-12.Born September 11, 1954, in New Haven , Connecticut, Cronon received his B.A. (1976) from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He holds an M.A. (1979), M.Phil. (1980), and Ph.D. (1990) from Yale, and a D.Phil. (1981) from Oxford University. Cronon has been a Rhodes Scholar, Danforth Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, and MacArthur Fellow; has won prizes for his teaching at both Yale and Wisconsin; in 1999 was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society’ and in 2006 was elected a Fellow of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He is obviously a Maoist of the worst Marxist-Leninist sort!

How do we know? Because the Republican Party of Wisconsin wants him investigated.

The Republican Party of Wisconsin has made an open records request for the e-mails of a University of Wisconsin professor of history, geography and environmental studies in an apparent response to a blog post the professor wrote about a group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Professor William J. Cronon, who is the president-elect of the American Historical Association, said in an interview Friday that the party asked for e-mails starting Jan. 1.

The request was made by Stephan Thompson of the Republican Party of Wisconsin. In his request, Thompson asked for e-mails of Cronon’s state e-mail account that “reference any of the following terms: Republican, Scott Walker, recall, collective bargaining, AFSCME, WEAC, rally, union, Alberta Darling, Randy Hopper, Dan Kapanke, Rob Cowles, Scott Fitzgerald, Sheila Harsdorf, Luther Olsen, Glenn Grothman, Mary Lazich, Jeff Fitzgerald, Marty Beil, or Mary Bell.”

Most of the names are Republican legislators. Marty Beil is the head of the Wisconsin State Employees Union and Mary Bell is the head of the Wisconsin Education Association Council.

Cronon said the university had not yet complied with the open records request. The e-mails would be subject to the state’s open records law because they were written on an university e-mail account.

The university has an e-mail policy that states, “University employees may not use these resources to support the nomination of any person for political office or to influence a vote in any election or referendum.”

Cronon said he did not violate the policy in any way. “I really object in principle to this inquiry,” Cronon said of the party’s open records request.

Thompson was not available for comment. But in an statement, Mark Jefferson, the party’s executive director, said, “Like anyone else who makes an open records request in Wisconsin, the Republican Party of Wisconsin does not have to give a reason for doing so. [...]“

What was Cronon’s offense? He wrote an Op-Ed piece for the terrorist-loving New York Times.

Entitled “Wisconsin’s Radical Break,” Cronan wrote:

NOW that a Wisconsin judge has temporarily blocked a state law that would strip public employee unions of most collective bargaining rights, it’s worth stepping back to place these events in larger historical context.

Republicans in Wisconsin are seeking to reverse civic traditions that for more than a century have been among the most celebrated achievements not just of their state, but of their own party as well.

You’ve heard of the states as laboratories of democracy. Cronon:

[...]

Wisconsin was at the forefront of the progressive reform movement in the early 20th century, when the policies of Gov. Robert M. La Follette prompted a fellow Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, to call the state a “laboratory of democracy.” The state pioneered many social reforms: It was the first to introduce workers’ compensation, in 1911; unemployment insurance, in 1932; and public employee bargaining, in 1959.

University of Wisconsin professors helped design Social Security and were responsible for founding the union that eventually became the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Wisconsin reformers were equally active in promoting workplace safety, and often led the nation in natural resource conservation and environmental protection.

But while Americans are aware of this progressive tradition, they probably don’t know that many of the innovations on behalf of working people were at least as much the work of Republicans as of Democrats.

Although Wisconsin has a Democratic reputation these days — it backed the party’s presidential candidates in 2000, 2004 and 2008 — the state was dominated by Republicans for a full century after the Civil War. The Democratic Party was so ineffective that Wisconsin politics were largely conducted as debates between the progressive and conservative wings of the Republican Party.

Let’s remember who led the “conservative wing” of the Wisconsin Republican Party in the Fifties: Senator Joseph Raymond “Joe” McCarthy was a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957.

You may have heard of him.

Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity.

Cronon:

When the Wisconsin Democratic Party finally revived itself in the 1950s, it did so in a context where members of both parties were unusually open to bipartisan policy approaches. Many of the new Democrats had in fact been progressive Republicans just a few years earlier, having left the party in revulsion against the reactionary politics of their own senator, Joseph R. McCarthy, and in sympathy with postwar liberalizing forces like the growing civil rights movement.

The demonizing of government at all levels that has become such a reflexive impulse for conservatives in the early 21st century would have mystified most elected officials in Wisconsin just a few decades ago.

When Gov. Gaylord A. Nelson, a Democrat, sought to extend collective bargaining rights to municipal workers in 1959, he did so in partnership with a Legislature in which one house was controlled by the Republicans. Both sides believed the normalization of labor-management relations would increase efficiency and avoid crippling strikes like those of the Milwaukee garbage collectors during the 1950s. Later, in 1967, when collective bargaining was extended to state workers for the same reasons, the reform was promoted by a Republican governor, Warren P. Knowles, with a Republican Legislature.

The policies that the current governor, Scott Walker, has sought to overturn, in other words, are legacies of his own party.

But Mr. Walker’s assault on collective bargaining rights breaks with Wisconsin history in two much deeper ways as well. Among the state’s proudest traditions is a passion for transparent government that often strikes outsiders as extreme. Its open meetings law, open records law and public comment procedures are among the strongest in the nation. Indeed, the basis for the restraining order blocking the collective bargaining law is that Republicans may have violated open meetings rules in passing it. The legislation they have enacted turns out to be radical not just in its content, but in its blunt ends-justify-the-means disregard for openness and transparency.

This in turn points to what is perhaps Mr. Walker’s greatest break from the political traditions of his state. Wisconsinites have long believed that common problems deserve common solutions, and that when something needs fixing, we should roll up our sleeves and work together — no matter what our politics — to achieve the common good.

[...] Perhaps that is why — as a centrist and a lifelong independent — I have found myself returning over the past few weeks to the question posed by the lawyer Joseph N. Welch during the hearings that finally helped bring down another Wisconsin Republican, Joe McCarthy, in 1954: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

The Republican Party leaders of Wisconsin have no such sense of decency:

[

Cronon concluded his Leninist diatribe:

Scott Walker is not Joe McCarthy. Their political convictions and the two moments in history are quite different. But there is something about the style of the two men — their aggressiveness, their self-certainty, their seeming indifference to contrary views — that may help explain the extreme partisan reactions they triggered. McCarthy helped create the modern Democratic Party in Wisconsin by infuriating progressive Republicans, imagining that he could build a national platform by cultivating an image as a sternly uncompromising leader willing to attack anyone who stood in his way. Mr. Walker appears to be provoking some of the same ire from adversaries and from advocates of good government by acting with a similar contempt for those who disagree with him.The turmoil in Wisconsin is not only about bargaining rights or the pension payments of public employees. It is about transparency and openness. It is about neighborliness, decency and mutual respect. Joe McCarthy forgot these lessons of good government, and so, I fear, has Mr. Walker. Wisconsin’s citizens have not.

Executive Director of Wisconsin's Republican Party Mark Jefferson responded as I've written above, with a press release decrying:

“I have never seen such a concerted effort to intimidate someone from lawfully seeking information about their government.

“Further, it is chilling to see that so many members of the media would take up the cause of a professor who seeks to quash a lawful open records request. Taxpayers have a right to accountable government and a right to know if public officials are conducting themselves in an ethical manner. The Left is far more aggressive in this state than the Right in its use of open records requests, yet these rights do extend beyond the liberal left and members of the media.

“Finally, I find it appalling that Professor Cronin seems to have plenty of time to round up reporters from around the nation to push the Republican Party of Wisconsin into explaining its motives behind a lawful open records request, but has apparently not found time to provide any of the requested information.

“We look forward to the University’s prompt response to our request and hope those who seek to intimidate us from making such requests will reconsider their actions.”

Republican Party of Wisconsin | 148 East Johnson St. | Madison, Wisconsin 53703 p: 608.257.4765 | f: 608.257.4141| e: info@wisgop.org

What's going on here? Andrew Leonard of Salon explains:

[...] The obvious goal is to find something damaging or embarrassing to Cronon — although judging by Cronon’s account, smoking guns seem unlikely to be lying around in plain sight. (Eight of the names referenced in the request belong to the eight Republican state senators targeted by Democrats for recall.)

I can’t do a better, more eloquent or more profound job of summarizing the issues at stake than Cronon himself does in a lengthy blog post that the professor posted Thursday night. Everyone should read it.

I agree. And read about ALEC.

Who’s Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere? (Hint: It Didn’t Start Here)

[...]

I don’t want this to become an endless professorial lecture on the general outlines of American conservatism today, so let me turn to the question at hand: who’s really behind recent Republican legislation in Wisconsin and elsewhere? I’m professionally interested in this question as a historian, and since I can’t bring myself to believe that the Koch brothers single-handedly masterminded all this, I’ve been trying to discover the deeper networks from which this legislation emerged.

Here’s my preliminary answer.

Telling Your State Legislators What to Do:
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)

The most important group, I’m pretty sure, is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which was founded in 1973 by Henry Hyde, Lou Barnett, and (surprise, surprise) Paul Weyrich. Its goal for the past forty years has been to draft “model bills” that conservative legislators can introduce in the 50 states. Its website claims that in each legislative cycle, its members introduce 1000 pieces of legislation based on its work, and claims that roughly 18% of these bills are enacted into law. (Among them was the controversial 2010 anti-immigrant law in Arizona.)

If you’re as impressed by these numbers as I am, I’m hoping you’ll agree with me that it may be time to start paying more attention to ALEC and the bills its seeks to promote.

You can start by studying ALEC’s own website. Begin with its home page at http://www.alec.org

First visit the “About” menu to get a sense of the organization’s history and its current members and funders. But the meat of the site is the “model legislation” page, which is the gateway to the hundreds of bills that ALEC has drafted for the benefit of its conservative members.
http://www.alec.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Model_Legislation1

You’ll of course be eager to look these over…but you won’t be able to, because you’re not a member.

Becoming a Member of ALEC: Not So Easy to Do

How do you become a member? Simple. Two ways. You can be an elected Republican legislator who, after being individually vetted, pays a token fee of roughly $100 per biennium to join. Here’s the membership brochure to use if you meet this criterion:

http://www.alec.org/AM/pdf/2011_legislative_brochure.pdf

What if you’re not a Republican elected official? Not to worry. You can apply to join ALEC as a “private sector” member by paying at least a few thousand dollars depending on which legislative domains most interest you. Here’s the membership brochure if you meet this criterion:
http://www.alec.org/am/pdf/Corporate_Brochure.pdf

Then again, even if most of us had this kind of money to contribute to ALEC, I have a feeling that membership might not necessarily be open to just anyone who is willing to pay the fee. But maybe I’m being cynical here.

Which Wisconsin Republican politicians are members of ALEC? Good question. How would we know? ALEC doesn’t provide this information on its website unless you’re able to log in as a member. Maybe we need to ask our representatives. One might think that Republican legislators gathered at a national ALEC meeting could be sufficiently numerous to trigger the “walking quorum rule” that makes it illegal for public officials in Wisconsin to meet unannounced without public notice of their meeting. But they’re able to avoid this rule (which applies to every other public body in Wisconsin) because they’re protected by a loophole in what is otherwise one of the strictest open meetings laws in the nation. The Wisconsin legislature carved out a unique exemption from that law for its own party caucuses, Democrats and Republicans alike. So Wisconsin Republicans are able to hold secret meetings with ALEC to plan their legislative strategies whenever they want, safe in the knowledge that no one will be able to watch while they do so.

(See http://www.doj.state.wi.us/dls/OMPR/2010OMCG-PRO/2010_OML_Compliance_Guide.pdf for a full discussion of Wisconsin’s otherwise very strict Open Meetings Law.)

If it has seemed to you while watching recent debates in the legislature that many Republican members of the Senate and Assembly have already made up their minds about the bills on which they’re voting, and don’t have much interest in listening to arguments being made by anyone else in the room, it’s probably because they did in fact make up their minds about these bills long before they entered the Capitol chambers. You can decide for yourself whether that’s a good expression of the “sifting and winnowing” for which this state long ago became famous.

Partners in Wisconsin and Other States: SPN, MacIver Institute, WPRI

An important partner of ALEC’s, by the way, is the State Policy Network (SPN), which helps coordinate the activities of a wide variety of conservative think tanks operating at the state level throughout the country. See its home page at http://www.spn.org/

Many of the publications of these think tanks are accessible and downloadable from links on the SPN website, which are well worth taking the time to peruse and read. A good starting place is:
http://www.spn.org/members/

Two important SPN members in Wisconsin are the MacIver Institute for Public Policy:

http://maciverinstitute.com/

and the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI):
http://www.wpri.org

If you want to be a well-informed Wisconsin citizen and don’t know about their work, you’ll probably want to start visiting these sites more regularly. You’ll gain a much better understanding of the underlying ideas that inform recent Republican legislation by doing so.

Understanding What These Groups Do

As I said earlier, it’s not easy to find exact details about the model legislation that ALEC has sought to introduce all over the country in Republican-dominated statehouses. But you’ll get suggestive glimpses of it from the occasional reporting that has been done about ALEC over the past decade. Almost all of this emanates from the left wing of the political spectrum, so needs to be read with that bias always in mind.

Interestingly, one of the most critical accounts of ALEC’s activities was issued by Defenders of Wildlife and the Natural Resources Defense Council in a 2002 report entitled Corporate America’s Trojan Horse in the States. Although NRDC and Defenders may seem like odd organizations to issue such a report, some of ALEC’s most concentrated efforts have been directed at rolling back environmental protections, so their authorship of the report isn’t so surprising. The report and its associated press release are here:
http://alecwatch.org/11223344.pdf
http://www.nrdc.org/media/pressreleases/020228.asp

There’s also an old, very stale website associated with this effort at
http://alecwatch.org/

A more recent analysis of ALEC’s activities was put together by the Progressive States Network in February 2006 under the title Governing the Nation from the Statehouses, available here:
http://www.progressivestates.org/content/57/governing-the-nation-from-the-statehouses

There’s an In These Times story summarizing the report at
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2509/

More recent stories can be found at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miles-mogulescu/alec-states-unions_b_832428.htmlview=print

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/6084/corporate_con_game (about the Arizona immigration law) and there’s very interesting coverage of ALEC’s efforts to disenfranchise student voters at http://campusprogress.org/articles/conservative_corporate_advocacy_group_alec_behind_voter_disenfranchise/
and
http://www.progressivestates.org/node/26400

For just one example of how below-the-radar the activities of ALEC typically are, look for where the name of the organization appears in this recent story from the New York Times about current efforts in state legislatures to roll back the bargaining rights of public employee unions:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/business/04labor.html

Hint: ALEC is way below the fold!

A Cautionary Note

What you’ll quickly learn even from reading these few documents is that ALEC is an organization that has been doing very important political work in the United States for the past forty years with remarkably little public or journalistic scrutiny. I’m posting this long note in the conviction that it’s time to start paying more attention. History is being made here, and future historians need people today to assemble the documents they’ll eventually need to write this story. Much more important, citizens today may wish to access these same documents to be well informed about important political decisions being made in our own time during the frequent meetings that ALEC organizes between Republican legislators and representatives of many of the wealthiest corporations in the United States.

Go access. Knowledge is our weapon in the fight to defend ourselves from what radical Teddy Roosevelt knew:

I am well aware that every upholder of privilege, every hired agent or beneficiary of the special interests, including many well-meaning parlor reformers, will denounce all this as “Socialism” or “anarchy”–the same terms they used in the past in denouncing the movements to control the railways and to control public utilities. As a matter of fact, the propositions I make constitute neither anarchy nor Socialism, but, on the contrary, a corrective to Socialism and an antidote to anarchy.

That was the progressive Republican Teddy Roosevelt who inspired George W. Bush, who John McCain so admires:

[...] the Times has the entire transcript. It’s worth quoting at length:

Q: How do you think of your self as a conservative? Do you think of yourself more as a Goldwater conservative or Reagan conservative or George W. Bush conservative?

Senator John McCain: A Teddy Roosevelt conservative, I think. He’s probably my major role model…. I think Teddy Roosevelt he had a great vision of America’s role in the 20th Century. He was a great environmentalist. He loved the country. He is the person who brought the government into a more modern – into the 20th century as well. He was probably engaged more in national security slash international affairs that any president [had] ever been. I understand that TR had failings. I understand that every one of my role models had failings…..

[snip]

Q: Roosevelt wasn’t really a small government person. He saw an active role for government what thing in your record in your record would you say are in a similar vein of using government to do things that…

Mr. McCain: Campaign Finance reform – obviously he was a great reformer — is one of them. Climate change is another. He was a great environmentalist

Q: You don’t believe in small government, the sort of classic conservative view of minimal government is not one you would necessarily share.

Mr. McCain: …I also believe there is a role for government. If there is abuses, TR was the first guy to enforce the Sherman anti-trust act against the quote trusts that were controlling the economy of America. Because I believe his quote was unfettered capitalism leads to corruption. So there certainly is a role for government but I want to keep that role minimal. And I want to keep it in the areas where only governments can perform those functions.

Government should take care of those in America who can’t care for themselves. That’s a role of government. It’s not that I’m for no government. It’s that I’m for government carrying out those responsibilities that otherwise can’t be exercised by individuals and the states — that’s the founding principles of our country — and at the same time recognizing there’s a role for our government and society to care for those who can’t care for themselves, to make sure there are not abuses of individual rights as well as the rights of groups of people and to defend our nation. And National Security is obviously No. 1.

So I count myself as a conservative Republican, yet I view it to a large degree in the Theodore Roosevelt mold.

The GOP now wants to break doyen professor of history William Cronon. They’re attacking in full.

Read how and why. And study up on American conservatism:

[...]

An Introductory Bibliography on the Recent History of American Conservatism

John Micklethwait & Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, 2004 (lively, readable overview by sympathetic British journalists).

David Farber, The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism: A Brief History, 2010.

George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, 1976(one of the earliest academic studies of the movement, and still important to read).

Lee Edwards, The Conservative Revolution, 2002 (written from a conservative perspective by a longstanding fellow of the Heritage Foundation).

Bruce Frohnen, et al, American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, 2006 (a comprehensive and indispensable reference work).

Jerry Z. Muller, Conservatism, 1997 (extensive anthology of classic texts of the movement).

There are many other important studies, but these are reasonable starting points.

And, of course, Rick Perlstein. Knowledge is power. Knowledge is our weapon. Use it. Fight back. Defend William Cronon.

Cross-posted at Amygdala.

ADDENDUM, March 26th, 8:58 a.m., PST: Everyone and their dog has been blogging and tweeting about this, so a bazillion links, so I’ll give few or none, but here is the NY Times editorial: “A Shabby Crusade in Wisconsin.”

Fitzgerald, Barca disagree on whether law goes into effect Saturday:

Madison — In a stunning twist, Gov. Scott Walker’s legislation limiting collective bargaining for public workers was published Friday despite a judge’s hold on the measure, prompting a dispute over whether it takes effect Saturday.

The measure was published to the Legislature’s website with a footnote that acknowledges the restraining order by a Dane County judge. But the posting says state law “requires the Legislative Reference Bureau to publish every act within 10 working days after its date of enactment.”

The measure sparked protests at the Capitol and lawsuits by opponents because it would eliminate the ability of most public workers to bargain over anything but wages.

The restraining order was issued against Democratic Secretary of State Doug La Follette. But the bill was published by the reference bureau, which was not named in the restraining order.

Laws normally take effect a day after they are published, and a top GOP lawmaker said that meant it will become law Saturday. But nonpartisan legislative officials from two agencies, including the one who published the bill, disagreed. [....]

As well, I’ll stress:

In response, Cronon has posted a lengthy rebuttal on his own web site. In the post, Cronon states that he has committed no wrongdoing in terms of the use of his state e-mail account — and also saying that it would violate federal law to reveal e-mail conversations with students that have touched upon these subjects.

Cross-posted at Obsidian Wings.

Cross-posted at Amygdala.

Radio Interview – “Building a Strong Progressive Movement”

Joe Brewer — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 18:48:32 +0000

This radio interview with Joe Brewer, Founder of Cognitive Policy Works, explores the core challenges facing the progressive movement in the United States. Joe explains why progressives have been unable to set the political agenda in recent decades and offers insights into how to successfully frame the debate. He also describes how to create compelling narratives for driving social change, why social media tools can lead to game changers, and what a more effective approach to political and social change looks like.

Listen to the interview here!

Listen to internet radio with DemocracyInteractive on Blog Talk Radio

(If the link doesn’t work, you can get the podcast here.)

The bully boys of Wisconsin

Susan Madrak — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 19:31:46 +0000

Here’s the thing we all know: Right-wing Republicans don’t usually win if they’re honest about what they want to do. So in order to be successful, they have to lie, coerce, threaten, manipulate and cheat their way to victory. They can’t lead on the basis of their policies, because so few people support them once they know what they are.

So I’m not all that surprised that they’re trying to bully the Wisconsin Democrats out of their paychecks, their staff and their ability to serve. I’d be surprised if this new resolution is even legal:

MADISON – The 14 Wisconsin state Senate Democrats who left the state two weeks ago will now face fines of $100 for each day they miss, if they miss two or more days.

Republicans remaining in the Senate approved the daily fine on Wednesday morning with none of the Democrats present.

The Democrats left Wisconsin in order to delay indefinitely a Republican-backed bill taking away collective bargaining rights from public employees.

The resolution passed on Wednesday also requires the missing Democrats to reimburse the Senate for any costs incurred during attempts to force them to return. Their salary and other per diem payments can be withheld until they pay back the penalties and costs.

Republicans have already withheld the checks of missing Democrats from direct deposit and denied access to copying machines for their staff.

According to TODAY’S TMJ4′s Mick Trevey, there are punishments incorporated into the resolution which would allow for the removal of offices from senators, to downsize their offices, to take away spending capabilities for their offices for photocopies and office supplies, even to changing the way the staffs are run.

The two-day clock would not begin until Thursday, and if senators do not return two days later, the $100 fines and other measures could possibly begin.

I don’t think Democrats will have a problem raising the money, do you?

In the meantime, the Republicans might want to consider, you know, actually negotiating with the Democrats.

Union-Busting Is Market Manipulation and Wage Theft

Joshua Holland — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 00:25:23 +0000

Like all progressives, we obsess on the quest for good ‘framing’ quite a bit around here (when I lived in DC, even the cabbies and doormen were reading Lakoff).

So, here’s a frame. Over at AlterNet, I have a feature up arguing that labor markets only work when workers can bargain collectively. As it stands, with private-sector union density in the U.S. hovering at just 7 percent, the wages of many, many workers in this country represent a market failure of significant proportions.

By all means, read the whole thing for some lefty-bomb-throwing goodness, but for our purposes, here is the relevant passage (sorry for the long excerpt):

In economic terms, the wages of many Americans working in the private sector represent a “market failure” of massive proportions. Even the most devout of free-marketeers — economists like Alan Greenspan and the late Milton Friedman — agree that it’s appropriate and necessary for government to intervene in the case of those failures (they believe it’s the only time such “meddling” is appropriate). But the corporate Right, which claims to have an almost religious reverence for the power of “free” and functional markets, has gotten fat off of this particular market failure, and it’s dead-set on continuing to game the system for its own enrichment.

The market does work pretty well for Americans with advanced degrees or specialized skills that allow them to command an income that’s as high as the market for their scarce talents will bear. There are also people with more common skills who have the scratch (and/or connections) and fortitude to establish their own businesses — think George W. Bush or a really great mechanic who owns his or her own shop.

But that leaves a lot of people; about 80 percent of working America are hourly workers, “wage slaves” in the traditional sense. There’s no doubt that their salaries are heavily influenced by the laws of supply and demand. We saw that clearly in the latter half of the 1990s, when, under Bill Clinton, the Fed allowed the economy to grow at a fast clip, unemployment dropped below 4 percent, and for a brief period, a three-decade spiral in inequality was reversed as wages grew for people in every income bracket.

But a common fallacy is that wages are determined by market forces. They’re not, for a variety of reasons that require more explanation than space permits. I’ll focus on two: what economists call “information asymmetries” and coercion. Both are anathema to a functional free market, and both exist today, in abundance, in the American workplace.

To understand these failures of the free market, one has to go back, briefly, to basic economic theory. In order for a free market transaction to work, both the buyer and the seller need to have a good grasp of what the product being sold — in this case, people’s sweat — is worth elsewhere, who else is buying and selling, etc. In other words, they have to have more or less equal access to information. There can be no misrepresentation by either the buyer or the seller in a free market transaction. And both parties have to enter into the transaction freely, without being coerced; neither side can exercise power or undue influence over the other, whether implicitly or explicitly, through threats or other means.

Now let’s look at how that theoretical construct plays out in the real world of the American workplace. When an individual worker negotiates a price for his time, effort and dedication with any business bigger than a mom-and-pop operation, there’s quite a bit of explicit coercion (much of it in violation of our labor laws), which I’ll get to shortly. But there’s always an element of inherent coercion when an individual negotiates with a company alone, because of the power differential: a company that’s shorthanded by one person will continue to function, while a person without a job is up a creek with no paddle, unable to put a roof over her head or food on the table.

The “information asymmetries” in such a negotiation are immense — they’re actually more like process asymmetries. Companies spend millions of dollars on human resource experts, consultants, labor lawyers, etc., and they know both the conditions of the market and the ins and outs of the labor laws in intimate detail. While working people with rarified skills are often members of trade associations or guilds, read trade journals and have a pretty good sense of what the market will bear, many low- and semi-skilled workers don’t know their rights under the labor laws, don’t know how to assert them and (rightfully) fear reprisals when they do. They often have little knowledge of the financial health — or illness, as the case may be — of the company to which they’re applying for a job, how profitable it is, how much similar workers in other regions or firms earn, etc.

For the majority of Americans who lack scarce talents or a high level of education, negotiating a price for one’s time with a firm on an individual basis is anything but a free market transaction. That’s where collective bargaining comes in — when workers bargain as a group, they do so on a level playing field with employers, and the resulting wages (and benefits) are as high as the market can bear, but no higher.

Unions, like corporations, have a great deal of information about the market. They know how a firm is doing, how profitable it is and where it is relative to the larger industry in which it operates. They know what deals workers at other plants have negotiated. They have attorneys who are just as familiar with the American labor laws as their counterparts in management.

And while an individual has very little leverage in negotiations — again, most companies can do with one less worker — collectively, an entire work force has the ability to shut down or at least slow down a company’s operations if management chooses not to negotiate in good faith (as is often the case).

It’s not difficult to quantify the difference between what most hourly employees take home and what the free market would dictate. Economists Lawrence Mishel and Matthew Walters estimate the “union wage premium” — the amount of additional pay a unionized worker receives compared with a similar worker who isn’t a member of a union — at around 20 percent (that’s in keeping with other studies, using different methodologies, which put the premium in a range between 15 and 25 percent). If one includes benefits — health care, paid vacations, etc. — union members make almost 30 percent more than their nonunion counterparts.

Another way of looking at it is this: Millions of American families are scraping by on below-market wages, and if that weren’t the case, there wouldn’t be such a large group of American families among the “working poor.” In economic theory, it’s a given that a producer can’t sell his or her wares below the cost of production. The equivalent to the cost of producing a gizmo, when we’re talking about the sale of someone’s working hours, is the cost of providing basic necessities — nutritious food, safe housing and decent medical care. These are out of reach for the almost three million American families who work full-time and live beneath the poverty level. According to the Working Poor Families Project, half of the working poor have no health insurance.

So, I’m turning the free market argument around and using it against the union-busters. What do you think?

Building a Strong Progressive Message Through Community Amplification

Beth Becker — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 06:57:13 +0000

This is part 2 of the Building a Progressive Echo Chamber series and I’m thrilled to report, efforts have begun to crystallize and a path forward is taking shape. That path will combine effective framing for message creation with a carefully planned system of message delivery.

In that first diary, I laid out a vision for creating message unity within the Progressive Community. Progressives in Washington are making an effort work together to craft messaging and build a community to work with to push forward a progressive agenda. Intrinsic to their vision is that this message must reach beyond the hill and beyond the Beltway; this is where you and I come in. So I often get emails from people I work with telling me I can share some of the messaging with others, which I do.

Today I’d like to focus on the blogosphere: What role do bloggers play in the Echo Chamber? And specifically, how can bloggers get involved?

Of all of the pieces of the Echo Chamber puzzle, bloggers have the most eyes that can then digest and further amplify the common messaging. Daily Kos alone gets millions of page views per month. A typical regional blog may get hundreds of thousands of page views per month and an individual local blog may get thousands. Those page views translate into people reading the message, hopefully from multiple bloggers, and then, in turn, writing and talking with that same message. That chain of message amplifcation is invaluable to our Progressive Community.

The second crucial role of bloggers is in message expansion. Let’s face it, there are some things that an elected official just can’t say. Bloggers, on the other hand, don’t have those same constraints. So while a US Representative may take the messaging of say “the no jobs agenda of the GOP” and carefully couch their delivery to be powerful yet tactful, we bloggers can call individual members of the opposition out with more force. We can take a hashtag like #nojobs on Twitter and dominate it… if we do such things together.

So how do bloggers become involved in this Echo Chamber? First: join our email list. Do this by sending a request to me at progressiveechochamber at gmail dot com asking to be put added to the Echo Chamber list. When you receive those emails you can then take the messaging offered and use it in your conversations about the issues at hand. Most importantly, you can use that messaging as you blog about those issues.

Second: right here on Daily Kos, you can become part of the new Progressive Messaging group. In that group we will be talking about how to best frame the messaging we are being told about and we will exchange ideas about how we can best expand and amplify Progressive messaging.

Third: when you have ideas about messaging, drop me a note that I can then forward to those involved in message creation.

Last: tell everyone you know what we’re doing and invite them to become involved. The more people echoing each other, the louder we get.

In the past, we as progressives have not been known for our messaging unity and strength. Now is the time to show that things have changed…that we as a Progressive Community have changed.

This diary is a part of my new series on Progressive Messaging. Please note that my company, Progressive PST, works for Rep. Grijalva’s legislative office as an independant consultant, assisting them with netroots outreach and social media strategy. I’m happy to say they understand the importance of this echo chamber building and are working to help unify our messaging but these diaries and my efforts are independent of anything they are doing.

Dirty Hippies » Progressives

Republicans Again Use Race, And It’s OUR Fault That It Still Works

Since Forever

Prediction

Look Where We Are & At What Romney Is Doing

It’s Our Fault

Let’s Finally Do Something About It

A Fight Back Strategy

Cost-Effective

Colbert Super PAC: Exposing How It’s Done

Conservatives, Communication and Coalitions

Building the Progressive Brand

It Takes a Village to Stand Up to JPMorgan Chase

GOP’S RADICAL BREAKAGE CONTINUES

Who’s Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere? (Hint: It Didn’t Start Here)

Telling Your State Legislators What to Do: The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)

Becoming a Member of ALEC: Not So Easy to Do

Partners in Wisconsin and Other States: SPN, MacIver Institute, WPRI

Understanding What These Groups Do

A Cautionary Note

An Introductory Bibliography on the Recent History of American Conservatism

Radio Interview – “Building a Strong Progressive Movement”

The bully boys of Wisconsin

Union-Busting Is Market Manipulation and Wage Theft

Building a Strong Progressive Message Through Community Amplification

Telling Your State Legislators What to Do:
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)