AlterNet.org: Election 2012

Obama Shows He's Serious About Fixing Our Screwed-Up Election System

Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet — Tue, 21 May 2013 15:07:00 -0700

The President's election reform panel is filled with good people; let's hope Congress listens to them.

President Obama’s newly appointed election reform commission is filled with election officials who have a record of supporting progressive election reforms—even though some of them are known for working in red states under conservative Republicans.

Whether Congress listens to this panel’s suggestions is another matter. Half of the 10-member panel are election state and local officials who have participated in numerous retreats sponsored by the Pew Center on the States where they have endorsed voter registration modernization that would be a vast improvement over what’s widely in practice in election administration today. Regardless of political party, they generally agreed that voter registration—which is the gateway to the process—could be made more accurate, cost-effective and efficient. As important, they all don’t think very highly of politicizing the voting process. Their fundamental commitment is making sure eligible voters can cast ballots.

The backbone of their recommendations at Pew in 2010 was creating a system where states use a mix of government databases to draw up lists of eligible voters. Then states are left to decide how they will contact those voters and what people must do to activate their registrations before casting a ballot. This centrist compromise doesn’t entirely please progressives, who want states to universally register everyone. And it doesn’t please conservatives either, who want to make voter registration and the process of voting more difficult, in order to maintain GOP political power in states with increasingly diverse populations.

But, if Obama’s blue ribbon committee draws on the thinking that’s been done by these same people, what’s likely to emerge is a system where the government draws up eligible voter lists, attempts to contact new voters and people who move, and has better voter information databases and tracking ability on Election Day to ensure that anyone who wants to vote has an easier time crossing the finish line and casting a ballot. One impact of this more modernized approach—which would appeal to Republicans—is that a larger state role in enrolling voters would lessen the need for registration drives that have been attacked as unprofessional, such as by ACORN in 2008. However, the fact that states might rely on government data to identify people as eligible voters also would put GOP "voter integrity groups" out of business, because the government would be using data gathered under penalty of perjury.

Obama’s panel is headed by two of the country’s top election lawyers—Democrat Bob Bauer and Republican Benjamin Ginsberg—who are known for using any tactic to win and then saying there’s nothing wrong with the process because their side won. The panel also has people whose professional lives are in corporate America and not in running elections. Both these lawyers and executives are likely to defer to the real experts—people who have run elections for years.

In that latter category is former Tennessee Republican Secretary of State Trey Grayson; Clark County, Nevada (Las Vegas), Registrar Larry Lomax; former Texas Director of Elections Ann McGeehan; Maricopa County, Arizona, (Phoenix) longtime election official Tammy Patrick, and Michigan Director of Elections Christopher Thomas. These officials know exactly what does and doesn't work in elections. They may get mixed reveiws from some progressive groups, but many of them have improved voting in their state, though that hasn't gotten press attention.

For example, in Michigan, under a Republican Secretary of State, Christopher Thomas instituted an Election Day affidavit that a person who said she had registered—but wasn’t on the polling place list—could sign, under penalty of perjury, to get a ballot and vote. A handful of states have this option, which gives the benefit of the doubt to voters.

Whatever this panel may suggest could easily be disregarded by Congress, especially because they are likely to take a less confrontational tone than many Republicans who have talked up so-called voter fraud might prefer. However, it seems inexorable that advances in data management will be applied to the voting process, as they are everywhere else in society. And with that comes the promise of making voting more accurate, cost-effective and efficient—and easier and more inclusive. That is, if Congress wants to make voting that way.

(Full disclosure: In 2009-2010 the author worked with Pew and many of these state and local election directors to write a report on voter registration modernization in which half these officials took part.)

How Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum Almost Joined Forces to Knock Mitt Romney Out of the GOP Primaries

Steve M., No More Mister Nice Blog — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 14:17:00 -0700

That might have been the death of the GOP.

Regular readers know that I think the Republican Party is doing just fine these days, thank you very much, given its current stranglehold on Congress, the Supreme Court, and the states. But when I read that Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum seriously considered forming a unity ticket in order to defeat Mitt Romney in last year's GOP primaries, my first reaction was: wow, the results in that general election contest really would have justified a GOP "autopsy."

At least I hope so. The linked story, from Businessweek, says that Newt and Rick couldn't finalize the plan because they couldn't agree which one of them would top the ticket. I would have loved to see Gingrich on top, because of his endless self-regard and the sheer creativity of his carefully thought-out gaffes, which are remarkable for their ability to offend a broad range of Americans. (Poor schoolchildren should work as janitors?Women shouldn't be in combat "because they get infections"?) Before pollsters stopped polling this particular head-to-head, President Obama was leading Gingrich by 13.2 points, according to the Real Clear Politics poll aggregation.

But Obama's lead over Santorum, according to RCP, was only 7.8 points, and he was within shouting distance in a few surveys. My fear is that the mainstream press -- desperate as always to enable the GOP and perpetually in denial about the depths of its craziness -- would decide that, well, Santorum wasn't one of the crazies, like Cain or Trump, he was a serious, thoughtful guy who'd spent years in the Senate and had won his election victories in a swing state ... oh, and, yes, he does oppose not only gay marriage and abortion but alsocontraception, but really, isn't it Obama who's the radical here, with his embrace of Sandra Fluke and his insistence on forcing a contraceptive mandate down the throats of those nice Catholics?

I know, I know -- the latter didn't work for the GOP in the race we actually had (even though the mainstream media pushed the line that Obama was going too far on reproductive rights). But Santorum had that developmentally disabled daughter, whose condition he milked for all it was worth, to the delight of right-wingers, especially right-wing women (as The New York Times noted during the campaign). If he'd won the nomination under those conditions, even with Gingrich in tow as his running mate, wouldn't the members of the MSM have thoughtfully scratched their chins and said that he was clearly touching a cultural nerve, unlike that elitist Obama?

Oh, and neither Gingrich nor Santorum was an Ivy Leaguer, unlike that hoity-toity snob Obama. Who's the real American now?

I write all this and then I think: what am I talking about? It's Santorum. It's Gingrich. They're really, really unlikable. (Especially Gingrich.)

So, yeah, even though I think the press would have given Rick 'n' Newt much more credibility as candidates than they deserved, it would have been a blowout. And I hope everyone would have recognized that a party that would endorse this ticket had really serious problems.

Or perhaps it just would have been a cue for the Village to say, "None of this would have happened if Jeb Bush/Mitch Daniels/Chris Christie had run...."

GOP Rebranding? Fox News Chief Roger Ailes Isn't Buying It

Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 12:06:00 -0700

The Republican Party, riding a White House losing streak, has a massive messaging problem, thanks in large part to Roger Ailes.

A question for Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, who this week unveiled a nearly 100-page "autopsy" report on the GOP's recent electoral failings that urged the party to soften its image and become more inclusive: Do you think Roger Ailes is more concerned with his new biography hitting the top ten on the best-seller list, or with the Republican Party successfully appealing to more minority voters?

The answer to that question might go a long way in determining whether the GOP has any luck rebranding itself in the coming years. Early indications are Ailes and Fox News have no interest in moderating their form of attack programming, the bare-knuckle brand celebrated in Zev Chafets' new bio of the Fox News president, Roger Ailes: Off Camera.

Dubbed the "Growth & Opportunity Project," the RNC's laundry list of campaign failures urges the party to become more inclusive, tolerant and able to engage and persuade non-believers. Or to at least be able to not turn them off entirely with angry, absolutist rhetoric. "On messaging, we must change our tone," the report concluded.

Right now though, the Republican Party, riding a White House losing streak (2-4 since 1992), has a massive messaging problem, thanks to Roger Ailes.

As Variety confirmed last year, "the voice of Republican opposition throughout the Obama administration has been Fox News Channel, and the de facto leader of the GOP its chairman-CEO Roger Ailes."

It's fitting that the RNC report, which represents a concerted effort by the GOP to turn the page on its losing ways, arrived the same week Ailes was busy taking his book-release star turn and presenting himself as a clarion voice of the conservative movement. Via the book we learned Ailes, when not making weird media references to Hitler and Stalin and comparing Islamic charities to terrorist organizations, dismissed America's first black president is "lazy" liar who's "never worked a day in his life." (Ailes was clumsily misrepresenting comments Obama had made about himself in a 2011 interview with Barbara Walters.) Then in an interview with the Daily Beast, Ailes lashed out at another prominent African American, Van Jones, calling him a "communist infiltrator" who " has one job, to stir up racism whether he can find it or not."

So yes, thanks to a curious bit of timing, this week nicely captures the two paths, or the two options, that lay before Republicans. There's the "Growth & Opportunity" path of tolerance vs. the Roger Ailes path of divisiveness.

But Republicans aren't supposed to mention the Ailes conundrum. Instead, the Fox chief is like the crazy rich uncle who owns the fancy beach house where the dysfunctional family reunion is taking place; nobody wants to disparage the patriarch. Or, to mix metaphors, Ailes is the elephant in the elephant's room. So all week long there's been a running conversation among Republicans about their messaging, yet there's been virtually no public discussion about Ailes and Fox News, which own the GOP's messaging.

There's been little public acknowledgement that there can be no effective rebranding of the Republican Party if Ailes doesn't sign off. Meaning, the GOP can turn itself inside out if it wants, but if Fox News, the self-appointed face and voice the GOP, doesn't change, none of it matters because Fox will still be pounding home every negative stereotype that party leaders now want to erase. (i.e. Antagonistic, paranoid, narrow minded.)

That's the only approach Ailes knows: the phony Outrage Machine approach. (Obama did what?!) But it's growing stale. In January, Fox logged its worst ratings since August 2001. (Ratings reboundedsomewhat in February.) Even some conservative pundits have grownbored of the Fox News model. It's the decade-old model that features the same tired voices making the same tired claims.

As I asked two months ago, has the Fox phony Outrage Machine damaged the conservative movement? Is it standing in the way of Republican progress and electoral success?

I think the answer from the "Growth & Opportunity Report" is that yes, it clearly has. Fox's slash-and-burn, name-calling style is part of the GOP's larger messaging trouble and is a key reason the party is perceived as angry, intolerant, and out of touch. As conservative Erick Erickson wrote this year, "Who the hell wants to listen to conservatives whining and moaning all the time about the outrage du jour?" (Ironically, Erickson joined Fox as a contributor less than two weeks after leveling that criticism.)

The permanent state of victimhood that Fox markets on behalf of the GOP might keep a loyal audience of Obama haters happy on cable television. But all it's produced for the party is two landslide Obama victories.

Esquire's Ton Junod, who wrote a lengthy profile of Ailes two years ago, recently noted Ailes' political failings. "For all his instinctive showmanship, and for all his purported populist genius," wrote Junod, "Ailes saw Obama cobble together his new majority right under his nose, and knew neither what to call it or how to stop it."

Priebus and his colleagues at the RNC now think they know how to stop the Democratic majority, but Roger Ailes isn't interested.

Can the GOP Rebrand Itself as a Responsible Center-Right Party?

Dan Berger, AlterNet — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 12:16:00 -0700

A party associated with economic and social inequality is in an electoral bind.

In the aftermath of the shellacking that the Republicans took in 2012 – which makes it 5 of the last 6 national elections in which they have lost the popular vote – there has been increasing discussion among the political and media elites of whether the GOP should or can reinvent itself as a responsible center-right political party.

The issue is urgent. Very little can get done in this country politically without a rough consensus in the political system. Yet no reasonable consensus can be reached where one of the 2 major parties has taken on the nature of a political third party, an extremist faction on the political spectrum whose views are obviously out of date, flagrantly false and at odds with the historic values of mainstream American society. The United States is currently in a long-term decline, which will become irreversible if causes are not addressed. Thus, the answer to the question of whether a GOP evolution can take place is among the most important facing the nation. Let’s look at the chances.

Demographic changes have certainly shown that the principal political strategy of the Republican Party for the last 35 years, namely, appeal to the White Vote, is increasingly ineffective in delivering an electoral majority. Obama and the Democrats have assembled a multi-racial, multi-generational and multi-cultural coalition of women, minorities, educated, young people and political progressives that is increasing both in absolute numbers and relative to the white vote. This coalition is immune to defection to the Republican Party as presently constituted as the racist, misogynist, nativist, hate mongering and socio-economic elitist political affinity group that it is. As a result traditional issues raised by the Republicans – the so-called “culture war” issues based on race, religion, gender and national origin -- have now become wedge issues AGAINST the Republicans. Go figure! Unless the Republicans change not only their rhetoric, but their policies, too, they’re finished in national elections.

But what happens if they try it? The White Vote strategy actually holds back the Republicans from changing, because without the racism, sexism, nativism, religious bigotry, and homophobia, they have nothing to deliver to the white electorate masses. Their message of economic elitism and exclusivity has no mass appeal whatsoever. At a fundamental level, the conservative movement, the Right and the Republican Party are so hostile to the notion of social and economic equality that they can’t effectively change political strategies without abandoning their so-called “principles” (better known as prejudices) – particularly, those relating to economic inequality.

This leaves the GOP in an electoral bind. If it changes policy or even rhetoric on social equality issues, it may have to abandon the White Vote strategy (as Paul Ryan and others have hinted or implied). But doing so might just undermine its allegiance to the economic inequality that is the very raison d’êtreof the Republican Party. Remember, the Right believes ( and virtually the only “principle” that the Right believes in is) that “property rights” are absolute and sacrosanct; that the free market system is based on the unfettered transfer of property; and that market forces must not be interfered with - - regardless of their accompanying deleterious economic, social and political effects.

Thus, although discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation or national origin is not a condition of property ownership and not required by conservative policy or philosophical considerations (unlike economic inequality and the social class differences thereby created), as a practical matter, the Republican Party would be unlikely to abandon its appeal to social inequality as an electoral strategy.

Becoming a responsible political party would require the GOP to acknowledge full social and political equality as a social and political starting point. That is possible, but don’t bet on it for the reasons just stated.

Yet there is still a way for the country to move forward, even if the GOP does not. Progressives and moderates will have to continue grass roots political mobilization to build public support for social and economic equality and to mobilize a more culturally diverse electorate. They can do this by bringing in those who are not registered and also those who are turned off by the Republicans’ extremism and getting them to vote. The GOP, in this case, will have sealed its own irrelevance – and, hopefully, demise.

Daniel Berger is a Philadelphia lawyer who is also a writer, journalist and book critic. His areas of expertise include the US economy and financial markets and political economy.

The Real Reason Scout Prouty Leaked the Famous Romney "47%" Video -- It Was Over Romney Profiting from Slave Labor

Marty Kaplan, AlterNet — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 16:50:00 -0700

Scott Prouty was appalled at how Romney was callous to slave labor ... too bad we didn't have an national conversation about that.

Scott Prouty buried his lede.

That's journalism jargon for not recognizing the most newsworthy part of a story -- for delaying the real attention-grabber for later. (Calling a story's first words the "lede" instead of the "lead" is a beloved fossil from the days when typesetters used lead -- the metal -- to put space between lines. No wonder newspapers' bottom lines are hurting.)

Prouty, we learned last week, is the 38-year old bartender who videotaped the $50,000-a-plate Boca Raton fundraiser where Mitt Romney wrote off 47 percent of the country as victims.

It's plausible that footage cost Romney the presidency. It validated his biggest perceived weakness -- his image as a cartoon plutocrat, Mr. Moneybags, the Bain guy who fired workers and saddled companies with debt, the country club Republican who called sports "sport" and didn't have a clue about how ordinary Americans were hurting. Romney tried to counter that image: he wore jeans, reminisced about shooting varmints and had country western stars in his corner. He wanted swing voters to believe that his sucking up to his party's resentful right was just an obligatory primary-season performance, and that as president he'd govern from the middle.

Scott Prouty's tape revealed that the regular-guy stuff was the real performance -- play-acting for the rubes. There he was in a roomful of millionaires, caught in the act, dissing half the country as dependents on the public teat. The contempt for working stiffs wasn't caricature; it was character.

Prouty didn't shoot the video because he wanted the goods on Romney. He was just making a souvenir, like his pictures of Bill Clinton shaking hands with the staff at another event. It was only when Romney talked about going to China to buy a factory "back in my private equity days" that he knew he had something explosive on his hands.

Romney told the room that the factory employed 20,000 young women in their teens and twenties, living 12 to a room in triple bunk beds, 10 rooms sharing one little bathroom, working long hours for a "pittance." The factory was surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers. "And we said gosh, I can't believe that you, you know, keep these girls in. And they said, no, no, no. This is to keep other people from coming in. Because people want so badly to work in this factory that we have to keep them out."

What galled Prouty was that Romney bought the lie. He told the story not to condemn slave labor, but to say how lucky American are to be born in a land of so much opportunity that we don't have to stop people from scaling walls to get work.

Looking around the room, Prouty saw that none of the guests were appalled. He thought it wrong that only people with $50k to shell out could see the real Romney. Afterward, searching online, he learned that the factory was Global-Tech in Donguan, and that Charles Kernaghan, an international labor rights activist, had exposed Bain's interest in ventures built on outsourced American jobs and exploited workers. Two weeks later, when Prouty decided he'd be a coward if he kept what he'd seen to himself, it was this story alone that motivated him to go public. China, not the 47 percent, was his lede.

He posted the China clip on YouTube, under a pseudonym, and began using social media sites to link to it. His goal, as he later explained, was to have the China clip pop up whenever someone typed "Mitt Romney" into Google. He also contacted Mother Jones reporter David Corn, who'd written about Bain's forays into China. Enterprising reporters from BuzzFeed and Huffington Post managed to track Prouty down. But it was only at the end of August, when Prouty posted the clip of Romney saying that 47 percent of Americans were freeloaders, that the video began to catch fire. Corn was the first to get the full 68-minute tape from Prouty, and when he ran with excerpts on September 17, "47 percent," like the Occupy movement's "1 percent," became an indelible part of the American political lexicon, and arguably changed the course of the race.

By remaining anonymous until he went on MSNBC's Ed Show last week, Prouty ensured that the story would be about Romney, not about the motives of the man who made the tape. What was striking about his media appearances was how important it was for him to keep talking about China and Kernaghan's work for the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights. Prouty now faces right-wing derision, and he's worried about the legal defense costs he may incur. But his courage caught the attention of United Steelworkers president Leo Gerard, who offered Prouty a job. His goal is to go to law school and fight on behalf of ordinary Americans like himself.

But it turns out that the Scott Prouty tending bar at that Boca fundraiser was not an ordinary American. Yes, he was struggling to make ends meet, and he had no health insurance and no car. But going public with the video was not, he said on the Ed Show, the only "incredibly brave or incredibly stupid thing I did"; there was also the time in 2005 -- "one of the proudest moments of my life" -- when he saved a woman's life. She had driven off Florida's I-75 into an alligator-invested canal. Prouty, who was working in a nearby Honda dealership, ran to help. He dove into the water, and with a co-worker he called to bring a knife, he cut her seat belt and carried her to shore.

That moment, he recalled last week, was something that said, 'You know what? If you can jump in, jump in.' And I had a chance to jump in with this again, with the video, and so I said, 'You know what? I'm going to jump in one more time.'"

It's one -- amazing -- thing to try to rescue a woman drowning right in front your eyes. But to have empathy for enslaved workers on the other side of the world, and to try to rescue a country from a candidate who had no such empathy, is even more amazing. Even if he buried the lede.

This is my column from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. You can read more of my columns here, and email me there if you'd like.

10 Funniest Things About the GOP Autopsy Report

Bill Scher, Campaign for America\'s Future — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 13:14:00 -0700

It’s a serious attempt to assess how the Republican Party has become uncompetitive nationally, but it's also hilarious.

Today the Republican National Committee released its “autopsy” of its 2012 electoral defeat, officially titled the “Growth and Opportunity Project.”

On one hand, it’s a serious attempt to assess how the Republican Party has become uncompetitive nationally, and suggests significant breaks with conservative orthodoxy in order to correct its course.

On the other hand, it’s hilarious.

Here are the top 10 unintended hilarious lines from the report:

10. “our candidates and office holders need to do a better job talking in normal, people-oriented terms”

Here’s a tip: Never say “people-oriented terms” ever again.

9. “Establish an RNC Celebrity Task Force of personalities in the entertainment industry … as a way to attract younger voters.”

Maybe avoid anyone who was in An American Carol:

Or any former Saturday Night Live cast member.

8. In the last two Republican presidential primary races, “there have been too many debates”

As the report mentioned, the Republican presidential candidates participated in 21 debates during the 2008 campaign, and 20 in the 2012 campaign.

But the report does not mention that the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries featured 26 debates.

So it’s not the number of the debates. It’s what gets said at the debates.

7. “RNC must rebuild a nationwide database of Hispanic leaders” and “The RNC should develop a nationwide database of African American leaders” and “APA [Asian and Pacific Islander] leaders.”

In other words, the RNC doesn’t have a database of African-American and Asian-American/Pacific Islander leaders, and its Hispanic database has been collecting dust for years.

6. “We should speak out when CEOs receive tens of millions of dollars in retirement packages but middle-class workers have not had a meaningful raise in years.”

Don’t worry, we can keep staying quiet when anyone brings up raising the minimum wage (as this report does).

5. “Eight of the 10 states with the lowest unemployment in America have Republican governors.”

This is part of the report’s attempt to hold up Republican governors as the party’s hope the future.

But what’s funny here is that the report didn’t mention:

* 7 of the 10 states with the highest unemployment in America also have Republican governors (GA, SC, MI, MS, NJ, NC and NV).

* Two of those governors, Georgia’s Nathan Deal and New Jersey’s Chris Christie, are singled out for praise right after that comment. Both of these states were not in the bottom 10 four years ago.

* 7 of the 10 states with the lowest unemployment were already in that position four years ago. Two of the three states that have broken into the top 10 (VT and HI) have Democratic governors.

4. ” Instead of connecting with voters’ concerns, we too often sound like bookkeepers. We need to do a better job connecting people to our policies.”

What’s funny here is that four pages later, the report praises OH Gov. John Kasich for “clos[ing] an $8 billion shortfall without raising taxes.” Yet the report didn’t bother connecting people to the fact that the shortfall ended up being $6 billion because ofhigher than projected tax revenue and that about 25% of the spending cuts came out of education.

3. Republicans should “encourage governors to embrace diversity in hiring and appointments to the judiciary, boards and commissions.”

It’s called affirmative action. Welcome aboard! Now please tell your conservative lawyer friends to stop suing institutions that use it.

2. “Women need to hear what our motive is — why it is that we want to create a better future for our families and how our policies will affect the lives of their loved ones.”

Yes, I think women would like to hear Republican motives for opposing reproductive freedom, insurance coverage for contraception, the Lily Ledbetter Act and the Violence Against Women.

1. “we can’t expect to address these demographic groups if we know nothing about them”

It’s funny, because it’s true.

New Study Finds the Wealthy Are Different

Joshua Holland, AlterNet — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 16:42:00 -0700

On average, high earners have a very different idea of what makes a just society.

“The very rich,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “are different from you and me.”

It turns out he was right. According to a new study by the think-tank Demos (PDF), the affluent tend to hold a different vision of a just society than the public at large, and it is that vision which tops the political agenda in Washington and in state houses across the country.

The report, authored by David Callahan and J. Mijin Cha, found that “wealthy interests are keenly focused on concerns not shared by the rest of the American public, like keeping taxes low on capital gains, and often oppose policies that would foster upward mobility among low-income citizens, such as raising the minimum wage.”

The policy preferences of the wealthy (average income over $1 million annually) vary widely from those of the general public... [A recent] survey found that the general public is more open than the wealthy to a variety of policies designed to reduce inequality and strengthen economic opportunity, including: raising the minimum wage, increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit, providing generous unemployment benefits, and directly creating jobs. For example, only 40 percent of the wealthy think the minimum wage should be high enough to prevent full-time workers from being in poverty while 78 percent of the general public holds this view. Affluent voters are also less supportive of labor unions and less likely to support laws that make it easier for workers to join unions—even as research shows that unions are crucial to enabling people to work their way into the middle class.

One especially significant difference between the opinions of the wealthy and the population as a whole centers on deficit reduction. According to a study cited by Demos, “87 percent of affluent households believed budget deficits were a 'very important' problem, the highest percentage of all listed perceived problems.” Jobs and education, which rank at or near the top of most Americans' list of priorities, were “a distant second to budget deficits among the concerns of wealthy Americans.”

According to an exit poll conducted after the 2012 election, 59 percent of the public rated the economy as the country's number one problem, while only 15 percent cited the federal budget deficit. But as the Demos report notes, “the affluent [not only] participate more in civic life; they also have greater influence over public policy.”

Peter G. Peterson epitomizes that finding. The Wall Street mogul and Nixon administration cabinet member has reportedly dedicated a billion dollars of his fortune to promoting the idea that “entitlements” are going to impoverish our grandchildren.

Meanwhile, Callahan and Cha note that the affluent, “are significantly less inclined than other groups of Americans to support an active role for government in addressing mass unemployment.”

These are good examples of what the authors describe as “the interplay between declining upward mobility and growing political inequality.” Perhaps the most troubling finding in the Demos report is that the wealthy are, on average, less likely to support policies that allow people to pull themselves up the economic ladder. “Even when the affluent do support policies for upward mobility,” write Callahan and Cha, “they often do not prioritize these policies over other goals, such as lower taxes.”

A case in point is higher education. While affluent Americans and business leaders broadly support access to higher education, along with the general public, spending in this area has been cut in some states where governors have prioritized cutting taxes—with strong support from wealthy voters and corporate interests.

While most Americans believe that they live in a highly meritocratic society where one's fortunes are limited only by one's innate talents and work ethic, several studiesreleased in recent years suggest that Americans enjoy significantly less upward mobility than do the citizens of a number of other industrialized nations. German workers have 1.5 times the upward movement of Americans, Canada’s economy is nearly 2.5 times as mobile, and Denmark is three times as mobile. Norway, Finland, Sweden, and France are all more upwardly mobile societies than the United States. Of the countries included in the studies, the United States ranked near the bottom; only in the United Kingdom was it tougher to shake off a low social status one had been born with.

The United States is not the first country to experience what the authors call a “self-reinforcing phenomenon” of increasing inequality and declining mobility.

Historically, prosperous societies tend to fall apart under the burden of widening inequality. But gaping disparities in wealth and income are rarely the cause of their unraveling, at least not directly. It's the nexus between economic and political inequality that ultimately tears at the social fabric of a nation.

According to MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and Harvard scholar James Robinson, co-authors of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, gross economic and political disparities create a classic vicious cycle. Wealth becomes concentrated at the top, where it is leveraged into political power to advance the narrow interests of rarified elite. “When politics gets thus hijacked,” write Acemoglu and Robinson, “inequality of opportunity follows, for the hijackers will use their power to gain special treatment for their businesses and tilt the playing field in their favor and against their competitors.”

With the field so tilted, those at the top continue to grab a greater share of income, and more political clout, which leads to the vast majority of us losing not only an opportunity to climb the economic ladder, but also our collective voice. The “best bulwark” against this vicious cycle, according to the authors, is to make sure “that those whose rights and interests will be trampled on have a say and can prevent it.”

Today, we are surrounded by evidence that this fraying of the social contract is well underway in the United States, which is leading the developed world in economic inequality. Larry Bartels, a political scientist at Princeton, examined lawmakers' responsiveness to the interests of various constituents by income, and concluded:

In almost every instance, senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent statistical effect on their senators' roll call votes (PDF).

And in the wake of Citizens United, a Sunlight Foundation analysis of spending during the 2010 midterms found that the most rarified elites – the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent of households, or about one out of every 10,000 Americans – accounted for almost a quarter of all political spending in the United States, including direct donations to candidates and financing outside PAC spending.

According to the report:

The One Percent of the One Percent are not average Americans. Overwhelmingly, they are corporate executives, investors, lobbyists, and lawyers. A good number appear to be highly ideological. They give to multiple candidates and to parties and independent issue groups. They tend to cluster in a limited number of metropolitan zip codes, especially in New York, Washington, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
In the 2010 election cycle, the average One Percent of One Percenter spent $28,913, more than the median individual income of $26,364.

That kind of lopsided influence means the cycle of rising inequality feeding into undemocratic political outcomes will continue until the national will is there to do something real to address the widening gap.

The Demos report offers a series of recommendations toward that end, including:

Limiting the influence of money in politics. That includes a call for a constitutional amendment to undo the damage wrought by Citizens United and related decision deregulating campaign finance.
Protecting voting rights, and making it easier for people to register.
Making corporate America responsive to a larger group of shareholders, including a firm's workers.
Reducing economic inequality through a more progressive tax system, investments in education and human capital, and several wealth-building policies.

Most of these proposals have long had a prominent place in progressive policy wishlists. Getting them enacted with a political class that embraces the interests of those at the top is the challenge. It's one that only a mass movement crying out for a more equitable and humane economy can overcome.

Can We Trust Treasury Secretary Jack Lew?

Michael Winship, BillMoyers.com — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 16:36:00 -0800

Lew is,like so many of our recent treasury secretaries, deeply immersed in the old boy nexus of Wall Street and government.

This piece originally appeared on BillMoyers.com.

Along with its sandy beaches and quality snorkeling, the Cayman Islands’ reputation as an offshore tax haven for corporations, banks and hedge funds has become so well-known its financial institutions now are featured in travel brochures as yet another tourist attraction.

So as we traveled across the Caribbean this week – including a stretch paralleling the south coast of Cuba past Guantanamo Bay and the Sierra Maestra mountains, where Castro and his revolutionaries once hid out — we made a stop in George Town on Grand Cayman Island. A short walk along the shore took us to 335 South Church Street, a location made famous by Barack Obama a few years ago and more recently, Jack Lew, during his confirmation hearings to become Secretary of the Treasury.

There you’ll find Ugland House, a five-story office building that, according to a 2008 report from the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), houses 18,857 corporations, about half of which have billing addresses back in the States. It’s the business world equivalent of one of those circus cars that’s packed with more clowns than you thought possible. In 2009, Obama said of Ugland House, “either this is the largest building in the world or the largest tax scam in the world.”

In Foreign Policy magazine in January 2012, Joshua Keating wrote that in reality Ugland is neither but, “… the building makes a mockery of the U.S. tax system.”

Keating noted that the Caymans have no direct taxes, it only costs some $600 to set up a company address there – while the company does business around the world — and that “the Caymans also allow U.S. non-profit entities like pension funds and university endowments to invest in hedge funds without paying the ‘unrelated business income tax,’ which could be as high as 35 percent if those funds were based in the United States.” He also cited “concerns that the complexity and lack of transparency in Cayman Islands transactions can make tax evasion and money laundering easier, though,” he adds, “… the vast majority of Cayman Islands transactions are entirely legal.” This is what the Internal Revenue Service euphemistically described to the GAO as “the Cayman Islands’ reputation for regulatory sophistication.”

Ugland House offers one-stop shopping — it’s also headquarters for the international law firm Maples and Calder, experts at greasing the wheels for corporations wishing to do business via the Caymans. Recently, for example, it was announced that Maples and Calder is serving as Cayman Islands legal advisor to Seven Days Inn, a budget hotel chain in China. In a deal worth an estimated $688 million, Seven Days is being taken private by a consortium, the members of which include the Carlyle Group, the asset management company – third largest private equity firm in the world — whose past advisors and board members have included George H.W. Bush, former Secretary of State James Baker, former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci and former British Prime Minister John Major. The consortium has lawyers in the Cayman Islands, too.

Wheels within wheels. One of the thousands of entities registered at Ugland House is Citigroup Venture Capital International, a private equity fund in which our new Treasury Secretary Jack Lew invested $56,000 while he was an executive at Citigroup. He sold the investment, at a loss, for $54,118 in 2009 when he joined the Obama administration. Asked at his Senate confirmation hearing whether he knew that Citigroup had a presence in the Caymans – 121 subsidiaries, in fact, including the fund in which he had invested — Lew professed, “I do not recall being aware of any particular Citigroup subsidiaries located in the Cayman Islands.”

That may seem odd, given that, as Bloomberg News and others noted, Lew was managing director and chief operating officer of Citi Global Wealth Management, then moved in 2008 to Citi Alternative Investments, “which managed billions of dollars in private-equity and hedge-fund investments” — the kinds of deals that are as common in the Cayman Islands as pina coladas.

Granted, Lew has said on several occasions that he wasn’t responsible for Citigroup’s investment decisions. And true, $56,000 to many is minuscule compared to the aforementioned $688 million Chinese hotel deal, and may seem even less when stacked up against an estimated up to $11.5 trillion in offshore assets held worldwide. But as Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley pointed out to Lew at the Senate confirmation hearings, with his toe dipping into Cayman Islands-based funds, “You invested more money there than the average American makes in a year.”

And that’s the problem. Jack Lew is, by all accounts, a decent guy and dedicated public servant, but like so many of our recent treasury secretaries – Robert Rubin, Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner – so deeply immersed in the old boy nexus of Wall Street and government as to have little comprehension of how, in the midst of a soaring Dow Jones, so many millions struggle to make ends meet. Nor, we fear, much willingness to resist when the next fiscal meltdown hits and the banks once more demand taxpayer billions to be taken off the hook they baited themselves.

In the weeks leading up to his swearing-in at Treasury, we learned how New York University, a non-profit, gave Jack Lew more than a million dollars in mortgage loans when he became executive vice president of operations there and a $685,000 severance when he left the university to join Citigroup – all at a time when student tuition fees were going through the roof (and NYU was receiving a kickback: .25 percent of net student loans from the bank it was pushing to students as a “preferred lender” – Citigroup). And we learned that Lew’s multimillion-dollar Citigroup contract included a $944,518 bonus if he moved on to a “full time high level position with the U.S. government or regulatory body.” (Remember, too, that in the years while Lew happened to be there, Citigroup’s stock lost 85 percent of shareholder value as it received $45 billion in taxpayer bailout cash.)

Jack Lew and his employers have provided seemingly logical explanations for all of these – Kevin Drum at Mother Jones magazine was told that Lew’s Citigroup bonus for moving to a government job, negotiated up front before said job happened “avoids the problem of voluntarily either paying or nor paying a big bonus to someone who will exercise power over it in the future.” But each of the perks in Lew’s past contracts is typical of the friendly deals made amongst the endowed elite, the same who leap at the chance to shelter cash on idyllic tropical hideaways, far away from the clutches of the IRS.

So keep your eye on Jack Lew’s stewardship of the nation’s bankbooks. You may know him by the company he keeps. As the poet wrote, no man is an island — Cayman or otherwise.

Is Constant Obstruction in Congress Putting Our Republic at Risk?

Catherine Burke, AlterNet — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 13:25:00 -0800

When legislatures stop functioning, executive branches tend to grab power in order to "save the Republic."

When a government lacks the authority or the ability to govern effectively, to meet the urgent needs of its citizens, history has shown it will not long survive. There will be resistance, civil unrest, and if the government cannot respond, revolution.

Most Americans would say it can’t happen here. Our government has been relatively effective and stable for over 200 years. We are, however, the exception when compared to the 30 developing countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa that have established constitutions based on separation of powers

All of these countries have had frequent breakdowns by coup d’etat or revolution ending in despotism. Typically, these breakdowns begin with a legislative branch that fails to act or actively obstructs badly needed legislation. When this happens, the president may act to accomplish what he deems are much-needed policy objectives using his executive power. This may start as a genuine effort to preserve a functioning government, but it can easily evolve into an abuse of power, which descends into a usurpation of power and then the dissolution of the legislature and dictatorship.

We may be seeing the beginnings of such a pattern in the United States. The series of manufactured crises, from the debt ceiling debacle to the sequester are indicators of a failing system. Congress is certainly in trouble when root canals, head lice and cockroaches are viewed more favorably, according to a recent PPP poll. (To be fair, Congress did beat out gonorrhea, meth labs and North Korea, and the cockroaches had just a slim two-point advantage.) Overall, Congress had only a 9 percent favorable rating with 85 percent unfavorable.

While the poll provided great fodder for comedians, the disgust with Congress has much larger implications for all of us. In our government, the principle of separation of powers makes Congress a co-equal partner with the President in governing our nation. If Congress fails to function in its constitutional role to set policy, approve spending, raise taxes, advise and consent to presidential appointments, oversee the results of its actions and hold the executive accountable, our system of government is impaired. If the dysfunction lasts long enough, the republic itself could eventually fail, as has happened in all other systems with similar constitutions.

When the President and at least one house of the Congress are of different parties, it may be hard to accept that both have a responsibility for governing, not just for obstruction. The recently ended 112th Congress operated more like those third-world legislatures that led to the demise of their elected governments. They passed the fewest bills of any Congress since World War II. The House wasted time on futile gestures such as voting 33 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Their self-created “crisis” over the debt ceiling damaged the economic recovery, which was just gaining steam, and caused a drop in our credit rating. The 113th Congress appears to be following a similar path as the current refusal to deal with the sequester threatens to throw the economy back into recession.

The Senate minority has filibustered virtually every significant bill or presidential appointment. The House simply refuses to legislate at all. The federal bench was damaged due to the number of judicial appointments being delayed by holds or filibusters. The holds by individual senators and the filibusters were intended only to obstruct as no alternatives were put forward – when they ended, often large bipartisan majorities have approved appointees.

It is truly urgent that members of Congress take action to protect and preserve the institution. Changing the filibuster rule in the Senate, so that not everything requires 60 votes would have been a positive step, but key senators did not want to give up their individual power despite the damage being done to the institution by endless obstruction. This rule, which is not part of the original constitution, allows minority control of the Senate. When abused, the institution's governing responsibilities cannot be exercised.

The Senate has so many arcane procedural rules, it has long required “unanimous consent” to move even the most routine business forward. This requires trust, reciprocity and collegiality – something that is missing from the Senate today. Every procedural step, every appointment, every bill is now subject to a filibuster. The business of the country is held hostage or sacrificed entirely to the whims of a single Senator or a disciplined minority.

The House has also given great power to a minority of its members. Since the 1990s, House Republicans have used a rule, created by former Speaker Dennis Hastert, that nothing would be brought to the floor for a vote unless a majority of the majority party supports it. This has allowed a small but vigorous minority within the majority to block needed action.

Thus in both houses, small, often uncompromising minorities can block the will of the majority preventing our government from dealing with the serious issues we confront. Meanwhile, the slow recovery and continuing high unemployment is caused by Congress’s refusal to take action on numerous jobs and infrastructure bills. The Congressional Budget Office makes this point in its report, “The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2013 to 2023.”

The legislative gridlock has led to calls for the President to take more executive action to get things done. It was even suggested by a prominent journalist that the President ignore the sequester law and act on the basis of his role as Commander-in-Chief of the military -- in other words, like a dictator. Here is Bob Woodward, speaking during the February 27 “Morning Joe” program:

"Can you imagine Ronald Reagan sitting there saying, 'Oh, by the way, I can't do this because of some budget document?'" Woodward said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "Or George W. Bush saying, 'You know, I'm not gonna invade Iraq, because I can't get the aircraft carriers I need?' Or even Bill Clinton saying, 'You know, I'm not going to attack Saddam Hussein's intelligence headquarters' -- as he did when Clinton was President -- because of some budget document? Under the Constitution, the President is Commander-in-Chief and employs the force. And so we now have the President going out, because of this piece of paper and this agreement, I can't do what I need to do to protect the country. That's a kind of madness that I haven't seen in a long time."

Let’s be clear. This is a member of the elite media establishment telling the President that a law passed by Congress and signed by him can and should be ignored. This is how it begins.

The temptation of power is real, and so far we have been lucky to have had presidents who resisted that temptation. Now we have a President being excoriated for obeying the law, even though he has made clear he believes the actions required under the law are wrong and damaging to our country.

This President gives every indication that he will follow the Constitution and the laws as enacted by Congress, even though the actions (or inactions) of Congress are putting the country at risk. As the dysfunction continues, the damages mount, and the press and public call for action, can this President or some future President resist the temptation to ignore Congress and act on his own to “save the Republic?”

We should not count on executive restraint. It’s time for members of Congress to recognize their responsibility to govern. By refusing to talk to the President, to negotiate with the President – or with each other – or to allow votes on legislation, they are contributing to the disgust people feel toward their government, especially the Congress. It is strange how some members of Congress claim to revere the Constitution but hate the government it created.

The separation of powers was designed to prevent the abuse of power by safeguarding the interests of minorities. It has worked well to accomplish that goal, but the Founders did not anticipate the growing need of modern governments to provide effective policy leadership and implementation over a wide range of extremely complex issues. Minority rule rather than majority tyranny has too often prevented large majorities from acting. The result is gridlock and self-generated “crises” while important issues go unresolved. The separation of powers has thus far protected our liberties, but these will be small comfort if our democracy collapses in the face of problems it cannot or will not solve due to implacable minorities who block any attempt at solution.

The Sequester as a Tea Party Plot

Robert Reich, RobertReich.org — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:44:00 -0800

Sequestration grew out of a strategy hatched soon after they took over the House in 2011.

Imagine a plot to undermine the government of the United States, to destroy much of its capacity to do the public’s business, and to sow distrust among the population.

Imagine further that the plotters infiltrate Congress and state governments, reshape their districts to give them disproportionate influence in Washington, and use the media to spread big lies about the government.

Finally, imagine they not only paralyze the government but are on the verge of dismantling pieces of it.

Far-fetched? Perhaps. But take a look at what’s been happening in Washington and many state capitals since Tea Party fanatics gained effective control of the Republican Party, and you’d be forgiven if you see parallels.

Tea Party Republicans are crowing about the “sequestration” cuts beginning today (Friday). “This will be the first significant tea party victory in that we got what we set out to do in changing Washington,” says Rep. Tim Huelskamp (Kan.), a Tea Partier who was first elected in 2010.

Sequestration is only the start. What they set out to do was not simply change Washington but eviscerate the U.S. government — “drown it in the bathtub,” in the words of their guru Grover Norquist – slashing Social Security and Medicare, ending worker protections we’ve had since the 1930s, eroding civil rights and voting rights, terminating programs that have helped the poor for generations, and making it impossible for the government to invest in our future.

Sequestration grew out of a strategy hatched soon after they took over the House in 2011, to achieve their goals by holding hostage the full faith and credit of the United States – notwithstanding the Constitution’s instruction that the public debt of the United States “not be questioned.”

To avoid default on the public debt, the White House and House Republicans agreed to harsh and arbitrary “sequestered” spending cuts if they couldn’t come up with a more reasonable deal in the interim. But the Tea Partiers had no intention of agreeing to anything more reasonable. They knew the only way to dismember the federal government was through large spending cuts without tax increases.

Nor do they seem to mind the higher unemployment their strategy will almost certainly bring about. Sequestration combined with January’s fiscal cliff deal is expected to slow economic growth by 1.5 percentage points this year – dangerous for an economy now crawling at about 2 percent. It will be even worse if the Tea Partiers refuse to extend the government’s spending authority, which expires March 27.

A conspiracy theorist might think they welcome more joblessness because they want Americans to be even more fearful and angry. Tea Partiers use fear and anger in their war against the government – blaming the anemic recovery on government deficits and the government’s size, and selling a poisonous snake-oil of austerity economics and trickle-down economics as the remedy.

They likewise use the disruption and paralysis they’ve sown in Washington to persuade Americans government is necessarily dysfunctional, and politics inherently bad. Their continuing showdowns and standoffs are, in this sense, part of the plot.

What is the President’s response? He still wants a so-called “grand bargain” of “balanced” spending cuts (including cuts in the projected growth of Social Security and Medicare) combined with tax increases on the wealthy. So far, though, he has agreed to a gross imbalance — $1.5 trillion in cuts to Republicans’ $600 billion in tax increases on the rich.

The President apparently believes Republicans are serious about deficit reduction, when in fact the Tea Partiers now running the GOP are serious only about dismembering the government.

And he seems to accept that the budget deficit is the largest economic problem facing the nation, when in reality the largest problem is continuing high unemployment (some 20 million Americans unemployed or under-employed), declining real wages, and widening inequality. Deficit reduction now or in the near-term will only make these worse.

Besides, the deficit is now down to about 5 percent of GDP – where it was when Bill Clinton took office. It is projected to mushroom in later years mainly because healthcare costs are expected to rise faster than the economy is expected to grow, and the American population is aging. These trends have little or nothing to do with government programs. In fact, Medicare is far more efficient than private health insurance.

I suggest the President forget about a “grand bargain.” In fact, he should stop talking about the budget deficit and start talking about jobs and wages, and widening inequality – as he did in the campaign. And he should give up all hope of making a deal with the Tea Partiers who now run the Republican Party.

Instead, the President should let the public see the Tea Partiers for who they are — a small, radical minority intent on dismantling the government of the United States. As long as they are allowed to dictate the terms of public debate they will continue to hold the rest of us hostage to their extremism.

Innovative California Progressives Help Return State to Sanity With Effective Organizing

Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0800

New tactics and hands-on organizing help California Calls redraw the Golden State's political map.

Progressives who want a path to a political future where an emerging electorate is bypassing the budget battles now afflicting Congress and where decades of damage wrought by right-wingers is slowly being repaired, should look to California. There, a historic coalition of local organizers and labor unions have been remaking the landscape since 2010 by engaging “overlooked” voters.

For much of the past decade, California had terrible state budget deficits, a legislature held hostage by rules allowing a minority of anti-tax Republicans to cut $25 billion from education and human services, even as it became the first state where its communities of color, which were politically marginalized, gradually outnumbered white residents.

But in 2009, as yearly spending cuts began mounting, a coalition of progressives with deep roots in local organizing and labor unions in working-class communities set out to change the political status quo. In 2010, they helped to repeal the super-majority rule giving the GOP its power in the legislature’s budget fights. Last November, they were the linchpin in a statewide vote raising $6 billion a year in taxes for schools for seven years. The 2012 election also defeated an anti-union ballot measure and closed a corporate loophole capturing another billion in tax revenues.

At the heart of this rising progressive tide is a new kind of California voter, one perpetually overlooked by the state's political mainstream, including Democrats, according to Anthony Thigpenn. The longtime Los Angeles-based organizer heads California Calls, a statewide coalition of local groups that found, inspired and turned out half-a-million "infrequent" and "unlikely" voters in 2012, providing the margin of victory for Prop. 30, which raises taxes on incomes over $250,000 and sales tax by .25 percent.

“We wanted to produce a different kind of swing voter,” Thigpenn said. “This was young voters, working poor voters, people of color, immigrants, even disillusioned progressives, who typically would not vote—they may turn out to vote for a presidential election, but they won’t go down ballot and vote for propositions, etc., because they don’t think it makes a difference.”

The Los Angeles native, now pushing 60, has been an organizer for four decades. In the mid-1970s, he worked as a machinist by day and organized against police abuses by night. In the 1990s, he helped run city council races and then tried to create multiracial coalitions, especially when the state's GOP pushed anti-immigrant measures. Lydia Chavez’s 1998 book about that fight says even then Thigpenn was telling “occasional” voters that they had to vote, just as he was telling groups they had to create coalitions, because power only responds to power. But unlike the 1990s, Thigpenn realized that today there is a new majority of California voters—non-wealthy individuals from communities of color—who hold the state’s political future in their hands.

“Our goal was to educate and mobilize that force of people,” Thigpenn said, referring to California Calls’ strategy and mission. “We thought they could be the decisive difference in winning, and that we would not have to moderate our message, but the same message of income inequality, of the need for the top tier to pay their fair share, would resonate and motivate these folks. And that’s the campaign we launched.”

Progressives aren’t used to winning, or to winning big. But that’s the only way to describe the passage of Prop. 25 in 2010, which ended the GOP’s lock on passing state budgets, and Prop. 30 in 2012, which will provide $40-plus billion in new revenues for schools. This winter, for the first time since 2008, California is not facing billions in budget cuts, although $23 billion in debt remains and $8 billion in human service cuts have not been restored. Looking ahead, the coalition wants to reverse those cuts by reforming other holdovers from California's GOP-dominated days: raising commercial property taxes and closing oil and gas tax loopholes.

“We need more revenue and we need to get it from the most progressive possible sources,” said Fred Glass, communications director for the California Federation of Teachers, which was part of California Calls’ coalition. “Progressive forces in California see it as their job to try and hold Gov. Jerry Brown and the legislature accountable for adequate revenues for public education and services.”

The Fine Print: How They Did It

California Calls and its partners are breaking new ground in ways that progressives in and outside of California should heed. They will work with Democrats, as they did with Gov. Brown on Prop. 30, but they are not afraid to disagree or drive hard bargains—as they are not dependent on mainstream institutions for their electoral base and crediblity.

Instead, Thigpenn’s team and his partners—some of whom have been organizing among California’s growing immigrant communities and unions for decades—have a fine-tuned strategy. They start with a strong unapologetic economic justice message. They invest in building community organizations with technology and training. They work at cultivating and keeping relationships, by meeting yearround to listen, hear suggestions, explain new agendas and get feedback. And they have learned how to go beyond advocacy on local issues to engaging and shaping the electorate.

Last year, after Thigpenn and partners such as the California Federation of Teachers—the state’s second largest teachers union—forced Brown to make the proposal that became Prop. 30 more progressive by relying less on a sales tax and more on taxing upper income brackets, they sent 5,000 organizers into dozens of communities with the goal that each volunteer would find, engage and motivate 100 or more occasional or new voters.

In a state of 17 million registered voters, an army of 5,000 volunteers is nothing to sneeze at. But it’s also not unprecedented, especially when compared with labor’s biggest efforts or a presidential campaign. The usual center-left field organizing strategy in California is to buy lists of registered voters and then innundate those voters with messages at the last minute. In contrast, California Calls’ strategy was to tap into the multitudes who weren’t voting and engage them in a longer conversation that included voting in 2012.

“We did an analysis of the Obama surge in California in 2008,” Thigpenn said, saying he and his partners found 7 million new voters that year. “We played with the numbers and said, what if we could take just 15 percent of that total number, in 12 key counties where there are high concentrations of targeted voters… This was three years ago. And we thought that if we could do that, that could be the decisive difference.”

Going into last November’s election, pollsters predicted that Prop. 30 would fail, leading to $6 billion in immediate cuts for schools and services. That’s because pollsters do not consider new voters as reliable—even though voter registrations were surging in October (in part because the state offered online registration). On election night, early returns showed Prop. 30 losing. But Thigpenn and his coalition knew those results didn’t include the communities in a dozen counties where they had been talking to people for two to three years. When the final tally came, not only had Prop. 30 passed but the voters California Calls had cultivated—African Americans, Latinos, Asians, immigrants, young people, union members, and other working-class people—voted at remarkably high rates. (Lower-than-expected turnout has always frustrated voting rights groups.)

“The average voter turnout in November in California was 71 percent. The average voter turnout of our folks, who said, ‘Yes, they’re with us,” was 80 percent. Now these are new and occasional voters, so typically they vote below average. In this case, they voted 9 percent higher, and the number of African Americans, Latinos, young voters, immigrants was just astounding,” Thigpenn said. “Young people voted 7 percent higher in 2012 than ’08. People of color voted 8 percent higher in 2012. So for the first time the electorate wasn’t overwhelmingly white. It’s typically 65 percent white and that was reduced by 8 percent. And probably most interesting, people making less than $50,000 a year voted 12 percent higher in 2012 than they did in ‘08.”

Political scientists who track voting in underrepresented communities, such as Melissa Michelson of Menlo College, called the 80 percent turnout rate “astounding,” if, in fact, those were mostly new voters. She said that California Calls did what political parties have always done. “California Calls’ model of identifying supporters and then focusing on getting them to vote is, in a way, pretty traditional,” she said. “It’s also been the case for quite a long time now that low-propensity voters, ethno-racial voters, people of color, have not, in general, been the target of mobilization campaigns by major parties and major candidates.”

Michelson’s comments are flattering because Thigpenn’s coalition is not a political party. It’s an assembly of groups, unions and coalitions that have worked for years on economic and social justice issues, such as on inner-city issues in Los Angeles or Oakland, raising minimum wages in San Jose, or supporting day laborers in San Francisco or the Central Valley, and includes church-based groups.

“There aren’t shortcuts to building progressive power,” said Roxana Tynan, executive director of Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, which worked on the Prop. 30 campaign, but was more focused on a successful 2012 campaign in Long Beach that raised the local minimum wage. Her group, LAANE, was typical of those comprising California Calls; it has worked for years at the local level and grew as Southern California’s immigrant community and union workforce became organized.

“I think this shift in the state has been about 20 years in the making,” she said, citing a dozen labor leaders, immigrant activists, activists-turned-politicians and others who, like Thigpenn, started in community organizing and unions, such as fighting for janitors and hotel workers. “You have to start at the city level and be able to build community organizations with real depth, and build relationships with key progressive unions that have real depth in their membership… and really think about building political power in a smart way.”

Tynan said that LAANE, working with UNITE, the hotel worker’s union, fielded 800 volunteers last summer who contacted 45,000 voters, as part of the campaign to raise the minimum wage in Long Beach and support the state ballot measures pushed by California Calls. “The best long-term organizing is face-to-face. I know it’s very old-school -- but it works,” she said. “And while you bolster that with communication and social media and all the rest of it, there is no substitute for building a deeper base of people who will stay engaged over a long period of time.”

In other words, it wasn’t an accident that Prop. 30 passed, with a push by progressives working independently but alongside the state’s Democratic Party apparatus. Looking backward, Thigpenn and his allies can lay out the steps they have taken since 2009. Indeed, it’s easy after a series of political victories to forget just how entrenched and discouraging California politics were for progressives just a few years ago.

“The main thing is progressives have begun to think more boldly,” said Fred Glass, the California Federation of Teachers communications director. “The way we were doing politics wasn’t working very well.”

From 2008 To Now

As progressives across the country look at the political stalemates surrounding the federal budget, it’s worth remembering that California underwent a version of that dysfunctional dynamic starting in 2008. As Glass said, established political players, like his union, had been relying on the same strategy and tactics for years: giving political action committee funds to like-minded elected officials and candidates, and sponsoring and pushing ballot measures to try to do what what the legislature would not.

But in 2008, the Republican Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a handful of Republican legislators who could block a two-thirds majority needed to pass a state budget, kept winning. Their victories took $25 billion out of public education and human services. Those cuts were made worse by inequities in the state’s arcane property tax system, where rates stayed at 1978 levels for longtime property owners (following the passage of Prop. 13), meaning the largest revenue source for schools was frozen.

The GOP-led cuts were really felt at the local level. Teachers were fired. Class sizes increased. School supplies went missing. After-school activities and arts were canceled. University tuition went up. Programs for the elderly, mentally ill and others were reeled in.

Progressive leaders knew something had to change. Different groups started studying different options. The CFT “decided that we had three long-term goals and we would be working toward these goals no matter what else happened,” Glass recalled. “That was to overturn the two-thirds rule in the California Legislature for passing a budget, to overturn the two-thirds rule for passing or increasing any tax, and conduct an education campaign among our members and the public about fair tax policy, progressive tax ideas, so that when we would achieve the proper balance of forces in the legislature, we would be able to turn to a constituency that would be able to pressure them properly.”

At the same time, Thigpenn was thinking about how to engage the new voters who had first elected Obama. While the CFT was planning and then executing what became a 48-day, 350-mile march from Southern California to Sacramento to promote its reforms—a tactic akin to what Cesar Chavez did decades ago—Thigpenn was meeting with 31 local groups from 11 counties, mostly in cities along the coast, with the idea of building up these groups institutionally with technology and training, and launching a series of ongoing discussions about economic justice challenges and solutions.

“We did capacity-building—getting people technology and computers and databases and training on that,” he said. “Then we did a number of what we called civic engagement programs. This was a time when all of the organizations for four to six weeks would go out and do phoning and door-knocking around a common issue or theme.” Thigpenn said the grassroots groups would do this every few months.

“We first started by asking people about the budget crisis, what the causes were, particularly what they thought about Prop. 13,” he said. “So we started there. Then we started asking, what about this solution or that? What about taxing the rich? What about reforming commercial property taxes? What about taxing corporations or closing corporate loopholes? And so with time we built a base of new and occasional target voters who agreed with us on a progressive agenda: taking the top, reforming corporate loopholes, reforming Prop 13, etc.”

As the Arab Spring unfolded in the media, different groups started looking past their traditional areas and asking what they collectively could do to break the budget deadlock. They started to focus on overturning the two-thirds legislative rule to pass a budget, using the state’s ballot initiative process. And they started looking for a Democrat they could back in 2010, who turned out to be former Gov. Jerry Brown.

“One of the lessons in California is we are far from perfect, but we do coalition politics really well,” said LAANE’s Tynan. “I think part of it is there is a generation of leaders who include Anthony Thigpenn at California Calls... who knew each other, who went to People’s College of Law together… and who have a real commitment to multiracial organizing and multi-issue organizing.”

In 2010, this coalition focused on two ballot measures and won: Prop. 25, reversing the two-thirds requirement to pass a budget, and beating Prop. 23, an oil industry effort to suspend environmental laws. “So this gave us the sense that we were onto something, in terms of being able to make a difference in these kinds of elections,” Thigpenn said.

As important, Jerry Brown was elected based on the promise that he’d be a political adult and bring the legislature’s misbehaving partisans together. While Brown tried and failed to do that in 2011—including finding a solution to the red ink -- Thigpenn’s coalition kept meeting with local constituents. “It was important for us to engage them, not just during an election time but in between election times,” he said. “Because one of the things we hear about during the phoning is voters complaining that, ‘We only hear from you in an election; we never hear from you again.’ We took that to heart.”

“We did nine of these statewide engagement programs in the last three years,” he said. “Seven of the nine were not election times. We kept engaging these folks, building these relationships, asking their opinion, testing ideas, and taking that feedback to fine-tune both the framing of the issues and the kinds of public policies that we want to put forth. So that was critical: anchoring in community-based organizations in an ongoing way."

By December 2011, the state budget crisis was still unresolved. California Calls and its partners were determined to put a millionaire’s tax on the ballot to stop more school cuts. A wealthy Silicon Valley heiress was funding a ballot measure with across-the-board tax increases to fund schools. And Brown was preparing his proposal, to raise both sales and income taxes. By then, the research that groups like the California Federation of Teachers and California Calls had done was ahead of Brown. They told Brown his plan wasn’t progressive enough and wouldn’t pass, both Glass and Thigpenn said. Brown replied that he did not have much faith in California Calls’ work among new and occasional voters.

“I remember the first meeting we had with him in December of 2011, first talking about what we were doing and his propositions,” Thigpenn said. “And he kind of told me, ‘Look, I don’t believe in community organizing. It’s too unreliable.’”

But Thigpenn and his coalition partners didn’t back down. They showed Brown polling data that only a tax on the upper-most earners would pass. And they forced Brown to make the proposal that made Prop. 30 more progressive—by raising tax rates on the wealthy and lowering his proposed sales tax increase from one-half to one-quarter percent.

“Once we forced the governor to compromise, that was in a sense, unheard of,” Thigpenn said. “Typically, the way these things happen is a group of power players in Sacramento decide what is to be done, and they come out to us and say, ‘Sign on the dotted line and become the troops to help us win it.’ So this really changed the dynamic. That we didn’t back down. We had ideas of our own. And they were forced to negotiate. When people saw that, they began to get a sense of their power, both individually and collectively.”

Then, during the early summer and fall, the California Calls coalition and its partners launched a new kind of field campaign that was outside of what the Democratic Party was doing. They set up training camps for organizers. PICO California, a coalition of church groups that was part of the coalition, fielded clergy who said that there was a moral dimension to making wealthy people pay more in taxes.

“If we vote yes on this proposition, we will be asking the rich to share the money they have gained from the suffering of the poor,” said Father Margarito Martinez, pastor of Los Angeles’ Our Lady of the Rosary of Talpa Church. “Fighting for money does not make us rich, sharing money makes us more human, more like brothers and sisters, and more like children of God.”

“For California to be a land of opportunity, we must provide enough funding for health, education and public safety to protect the state's poorest and most vulnerable residents, while opening the pathways of opportunity to all: a decent education, access to healthcare, and equal justice before the law,” Reverend Amelia Adams, pastor of the Open Door House of Prayer, said at the same press conference.

The messaging was built on anger and hope, which had come from the discussions that had been held during the past three years, Thigpenn said. Also, having younger people reaching out to new and occasional voters by calling them, knocking on their doors, and talking to them throughout the process, was a key to their electoral success.

“We discovered a few things,” Thigpenn said. “In addition to the classic kind of community organizing mantra that you have to tap into people’s anger and outrage, we actually found that an aspirational message about the California dream, about what’s possible, about what people’s hopes are for their families actually resonates a lot, in terms of motivating people to vote. So people are angry and we want to remind people of the consequences of the $20 billion being cut, but anger alone won’t sustain people: they just become cynical or afraid of us.”

This message, strategy and tactics led the coalition to turn out 6.18 percent of the yes vote on Prop. 30, which passed by 5.37 percent. Looking ahead, the coalition plans to keep talking to its grassroots groups with an eye to restoring some of the billions that have been cut from schools and social services. They know Jerry Brown wants to retire $23 billion in still-unpaid state debt in the next four years, but they also know where the billions in needed new revenue can be found: by reforming commercial property taxes, where longtime owners are assessed at 1978 values, which shifts the tax burden to newly bought homes; and by taxing oil and gas drilling, which unlike every other energy-producing state isn’t taxed in California.

The California Calls coalition thinks it can achieve these needed structural reforms. But just because the state’s new demographics favor progressive policies and government services, Thigpenn is quick to point out that “demographics is not destiny.”

Indeed, just as local organizers in California looked to their state capital several years ago and were mortified by reactionary policies and billion-dollar cuts by Republicans, so too are progressives in many states now looking at Congress and its poised cuts—whether the upcoming "sequester" or other entitlement "reforms." Thigpenn hopes what has been accomplished in California can be exported to other states, but he also knows that organizing takes time and every state political culture is different.

“We convened a meeting last May where there were 21 states represented, a mix of red and blue and purple states,” he said. “Everyone is trying to figure out what approaches actually work in building long-lasting and sustained power for social justice movements that in the end could have an impact on the national agenda.”

That work, and that struggle, will continue, in California and nationally. But in the Golden State, progressives have come out after a long dark night and appear poised to reshape state government. And that is no small achievement.

Why Even Republicans Loved Obama's State of the Union

George Lakoff, AlterNet — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:26:00 -0800

The president uses a moral framework to cut through partisan politics.

Political journalists have a job to do — to examine the SOTU’s long list of proposals. They are doing that job, many are doing it well, and I’ll leave it to them. Instead, I want to discuss what in the long run is a deeper question: How did the SOTU help to change public discourse? What is the change? And technically, how did it work?

The address was coherent. There was a single frame that fit together all the different ideas, from economics to the environment to education to gun safety to voting rights. The big change in public discourse was the establishment of that underlying frame, a frame that will, over the long haul, accommodate many more specific proposals.

Briefly, the speech worked via frame evocation. Not statement, evocation — the unconscious and automatic activation in the brains of listeners of a morally-based progressive frame that made sense of what the president said.

When a frame is repeatedly activated, it is strengthened. Obama’s progressive frame was strengthened not only in die-hard progressives, but also in partial progressives, those who are progressive on some issues and conservative on others — the so-called moderates, swing voters, independents, and centrists. As a result, 77 per cent of listeners approved of the speech, 53 percent strongly positive and 24 percent somewhat positive, with only 22 percent negative. When that deep progressive frame is understood and accepted by a 77 percent margin, the president has begun to move America toward a progressive moral vision.

If progressives are going to maintain and build on the president’s change in public discourse so far, we need to understand just what that change has been and how he accomplished it.

It hasn’t happened all at once.

In 2008, candidate Obama made overt statements. He spoke overtly about empathy and the responsibility to act on it as the basis of democracy. He spoke about the need for an “ethic of excellence.” He spoke about the role of government to protect and empower everyone equally.

After using the word “empathy” in the Sotomayor nomination, he dropped it when conservatives confused it with sympathy and unfairness. But the idea didn’t disappear.

By the 2013 Inaugural Address, he directly quoted the Declaration and Lincoln, overtly linking patriotism and the essence of democracy to empathy, to Americans caring for one another and taking responsibility for one another as well as themselves. He spoke overtly about how private success depends on public provisions. He carried out these themes with examples. And he had pretty much stopped making the mistake of using conservative language, even to negate it. The change in public discourse became palpable.

The 2013 SOTU followed this evolution a crucial step further. Instead of stating the frames overly, he took them for granted and the nation understood. Public discourse had shifted; brains had changed. So much so that John Boehner looked shamed as he slumped, sulking in his chair, as if trying to disappear. Changed so much that Marco Rubio’s response was stale and defensive: the old language wasn’t working and Rubio kept talking in rising tones indicating uncertainty.

Here is how Obama got to 77 percent approval as an unapologetic progressive.

The president set his theme powerfully in the first few sentences — in about 30 seconds.

“Fifty-one years ago, John F. Kennedy declared to this Chamber that ‘the Constitution makes us not rivals for power but partners for progress…It is my task,’ he said, ‘to report the State of the Union — to improve it is the task of us all.’ Tonight, thanks to the grit and determination of the American people, there is much progress to report. …”

First, Obama recalled Kennedy — a strong, unapologetic liberal. “Partners” evokes working together, an implicit attack on conservative stonewalling, while “for progress” makes clear his progressive direction. “To improve it is the task of us all” evokes the progressive theme that we’re all in this together with the goal of improving the common good. “The grit and determination of the American people” again says we work together, while incorporating the “grit and determination” stereotype of Americans pulling themselves up by their bootstraps — overcoming a “grinding war” and “grueling recession.” He specifically and wisely did not pin the war and recession on the Bush era republicans, as he reasonably could have. That would have divided Democrats from Republicans. Instead, he treated war and recession as if they were forces of nature that all Americans joined together to overcome. Then he moved on seamlessly to the “millions of Americans whose hard work and dedication have not yet been rewarded,” which makes rewarding that work and determination “the task of us all.”

This turn in discourse started working last year. Empathy and social responsibility as central American values reappeared in spades in the 2012 campaign right after Mitt Romney made his 47 percent gaff, that 47 percent of Americans were not succeeding because they were not talking personal responsibility for their lives. This allowed Obama to reframe people out of work, sick, injured, or retired as hard working and responsible and very much part of the American ideal, evoking empathy for them from most other Americans. It allowed him to meld the hard working and struggling Americans with the hard working and just getting by Americans into a progressive stereotype of hard working Americans in general who need help to overcome external forces holding them back. It is a patriotic stereotype that joins economic opportunity with equality, freedom and civil rights: “if you work hard and meet your responsibilities, you can get ahead, no matter where you come from, what you look like, or who you love.”

It is an all-American vision:

“It is our unfinished task to make sure that this government works on behalf of the many, and not just the few; that it encourages free enterprise, rewards individual initiative, and opens the doors of opportunity to every child across this great nation.”

“Our unfinished task” refers to citizens — us — as ruling the government, not the reverse. “We” are making the government do what is right. To work “on behalf of the many, and not just the few.” And he takes from the progressive vision the heart of the conservative message. “We” require the government to encourage free enterprise, reward individual initiative, and provide opportunity for all. It is the reverse of the conservative view of the government ruling us. In a progressive democracy, the government is the instrument of the people, not the reverse.

In barely a minute, he provided a patriotic American progressive vision that seamlessly adapts the heart of the conservative message. Within this framework comes the list of policies, each presented with empathy for ideal Americans. In each case, we, the citizens who care about our fellow citizens, must make our imperfect government do the best it can for fellow Americans who do meet, or can with help meet, the American ideal.

With this setting of the frame, each item on the list of policies fits right in. We, the citizens, use the government to protect us and maximally enable us all to make use of individual initiative and free enterprise.

The fact that the policy list was both understood and approved of by 77 percent of those watching means that one-third of those who did not vote for the president have assimilated his American progressive moral vision.

The president’s list of economic policies was criticized by some as a lull — a dull, low energy section of the speech. But the list had a vital communicative function beyond the policies themselves. Each item on the list evoked, and thereby strengthened in the brains of most listeners, the all-American progressive vision of the first section of the speech. Besides, if you’re going to build to a smash finish, you have to build from a lull.

And it was a smash finish! Highlighting his gun safety legislation by introducing one after another of the people whose lives were shattered by well-reported gun violence. With each introduction came the reframe “They deserve a vote” over and over and over. He was chiding the Republicans not just for being against the gun safety legislation, but for being unwilling to even state their opposition in public, which a vote would require. The president is all too aware that, even in republican districts, there is great support for gun safety reform, support that threatens conservative representatives. “They deserve a vote” is a call for moral accounting from conservative legislators. It is a call for empathy for the victims in a political form, a form that would reveal the heartlessness, the lack of republican empathy for the victims. “They deserve a vote” shamed the republicans in the House. As victim after victim stood up while the republicans sat slumped and close-mouthed in their seats, shame fell on the republicans.

And then it got worse for republicans. Saving the most important for last — voting reform — President Obama introduced Desiline Victor, a 102-year spunky African American Florida woman who was told she would have to wait six hours to vote. She hung in there, exhausted but not defeated, for many hours and eventually voted. The room burst into raucous applause, putting to shame the republicans who are adopting practices and passing laws to discourage voting by minority groups.

And with the applause still ringing, he introduced police officer Brian Murphy who held off armed attackers at the Sikh Temple in Minneapolis, taking twelve bullets and lying in a puddle of his blood while still protecting the Sikhs. When asked how he did it, he replied, “That’s just how we’re made.”

That gave the president a finale to end where he began.

“We may do different jobs, and wear different uniforms, and hold different views than the person beside us. But as Americans, we all share the same proud title: We are citizens. It’s a word that doesn’t just describe our nationality or legal status. It describes the way we’re made. It describes what we believe. It captures the enduring idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations; that our rights are wrapped up in the rights of others; and that well into our third century as a nation, it remains the task of us all, as citizens of these United States, to be the authors of the next great chapter in our American story.”

It was a finale that gave the lie to the conservative story of America, that democracy is an individual matter, that it gives each of us the liberty to seek his own interests and well-being without being responsible for anyone else or anyone else being responsible for him, from which it follows that the government should not be in the job of helping its citizens. Marco Rubio came right after and tried out this conservative anthem that has been so dominant since the Reagan years. It fell flat.

President Obama, in this speech, created what cognitive scientists call a “prototype” — an ideal American defined by a contemporary progressive vision that incorporates a progressive market with individual opportunity and initiative. It envisions an ideal citizenry that is in charge of the government, forcing the president and the Congress to do the right thing.

That is how the president has changed public discourse. He has changed it at the level that counts, the deepest level, the moral level. What can make that change persist? What will allow such an ideal citizenry to come into existence?

The president can’t do it. Congress can’t do it. Only we can as citizens, by adopting the president’s vision, thinking in his moral frames, and speaking out from that vision whenever possible. Speaking out is at the heart of being a citizen, speaking out is political action, and only if an overwhelming number of us speak out, and live out, this American vision, will the president and the Congress be forced to do what is best for all.

By all means, discuss the policies. Praise them when you like them, criticize them when they fall short. Don’t hold back. Talk in public. Write to others. But be sure to make clear the basic principles behind the policies.

And don’t use the language of the other side, even to negate it. Remember that if you say “Don’t Think of an Elephant,” people will think of an elephant.

Structure is important. Start with the general principles, move to policy details, finish with the general principles.

Fox Openly Makes Fun of the Long Wait Desiline Viktor endured in Florida to Vote

Emily Arrowood, Media Matters — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 06:21:00 -0800

Of course, Speaker John Boehner could not even be bothered to stand up and applaud the 102-year-old at the SOTU.

After glossing over state Republicans' role in exacerbating long lines at the ballot box, three Fox hosts mocked the hours-long wait and multiple trips a 102-year-old woman endured in order to cast her vote in 2012.

On Fox News Radio's Kilmeade & Friends, host Brian Kilmeade and Fox's Martha MacCallum and Bill Hemmer laughed off the difficulties 102-year-old Desiline Victor endured in order to vote in the 2012 election. Victor, who was invited to the State of the Union address and whom President Obama applauded for enduring a long wait to vote, had to make two trips to the polls and wait in line for over three hours before she was able to cast her ballot. Discussing Victor, MacCallum wondered, "What's the big deal?" and said, "This is such a non-issue. Ridiculous." Hemmer added that at the State of the Union, "They held her up as a victim. What was she a victim of?"

But long lines at polling places are widely acknowledged as a major issue nationwide. In Victor's home state of Florida alone, at least 201,000 eligible voters reportedly did not cast ballots because they were discouraged by lengthy wait times.

Earlier, on MacCallum and Hemmer's show America's Newsroom, Fox correspondent Eric Shawn reported on proposals to extend early voting to ease the problem of long lines at the polls. Shawn noted that Florida had the longest polling place lines in 2012, and then played a clip of Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner addressing Florida's issues, stating that Detzner is "working on ways to fix the problems," including an extension of the state's early voting period in order to shorten voters' wait.

Shawn failed to reveal, however, that Detzner played a role in exacerbating this problem in Florida.

Prior to the 2012 election, as The Huffington Post explained, "Florida's GOP-led legislature cut the number of early voting days down from 14 to eight last year, eliminating the traditionally heavy Sunday before Election Day but keeping the number of maximum hours the same. The move was signed into law by Scott and approved by federal courts." Governor Rick Scott refused to extend early voting hours even when asked by county election supervisors -- and Detzner, his secretary of state, rationalized this refusal by arguing that he was only allowed to extend early voting hours during a state of emergency, and "[f]ortunately, no such situation currently exists in the State of Florida." However, past Republican governors found that prohibitively long voting lines met this standard and subsequently extended early voting hours.

Florida is not alone -- Republican state lawmakers passed waves of legislation before the 2012 election that made it more difficult to for voters to cast ballots and may have increased wait times by curtailing early voting. The Brennan Center for Justice estimates that these new laws may have impacted over five million Americans, particularly minorities. Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Charles Stewart, who has conducted extensive election analysis, noted that "the factors associated with waiting in longer lines are easy to identify: early voters wait longer than Election Day voters, city dwellers wait longer than all others, and African Americans and Hispanics wait longer than white voters." Indeed, as the Brennan Center wrote:

New restrictions on early voting will also have their biggest impact on people of color. Opponents of these restrictions have been particularly angered by the efforts to eliminate Sunday early voting, which they see as explicitly targeting African-American voters. Florida eliminated early voting on the last Sunday before Election Day, and Ohio has eliminated early voting on Sundays entirely. There is substantial statistical and anecdotal evidence that African Americans (and to a lesser extent Hispanics) vote on Sundays in proportionately far greater numbers than whites.

What Would It Look Like If Red States Actually Seceded?

Joshua Holland, AlterNet — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 14:46:00 -0800

Our interconnected world makes an amicable divorce a bit more complicated than just breaking up the states.

Thirty-five percent of Texas Republicans want to secede from the United States. After November's election, eight red states filed petitions on the White House's YouGov Web site calling for a split, and judging from the popularity of Chuck Thompson's Better Off Without 'Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession (which calls for an “amicable divorce” from the former states of the Confederacy) a fair number of progressives would be happy to let them go.

Talk of secession is, of course, pretty silly. But national boundaries have historically been impermanent, and it does lead to an interesting thought experiment: just how would one approach the task of dividing up the world's leading superpower? It's easy to write a screed about how out of touch with Real America those socialist coastal elites are, or how backward the South's cousin-marrying bumpkins can be, but I'm not sure either side of that squabble has paused to consider the details.

Making it a truly amicable divorce would have to be the primary goal. A scenario in which two powerful new states with a shared border and a degree of mutual animosity might end up at war would be the last thing anyone would want. This also isn't the 19th century – like it or not, we live in an interconnected world, and we'd still share 200-plus years of common history.

An amicable separation would require creating something like a North American Union, with each country maintaining sovereignty over domestic policy while establishing some cooperation through binding treaties. Let's consider some of the sticky points.

Where Do You Draw the Borders?

Texas could just secede, or the United States could disaggregate into regional blocs with similar political cultures. You might have the Pacific States of America, the Southwestern States of America, the Northeastern States, etc. But most Americans like living in a large, powerful state, and size – market size and military might – matters on the international stage.

If one were to divide the country in two, a quick glance at a map reveals that there's no clean way to sever the “red” and “blue” states into two contiguous territories. North Dakota went for Romney by 20 points, but it would have to be part of the “Northern States of America.” New Mexico, which Obama won by 10 points, would end up being one of the more liberal states in the “Southern States of America.”

It gets trickier when you consider the political and cultural differences within states. A farmer in Southern Illinois once told me, “We consider this area to be Northern Kentucky.” You could hold a county-by-county referendum to determine exactly where to draw the line, which would be great for the folks in Northern New Mexico, as this county-by-county electoral map suggests.

Something to think about.

The Military

This gets sticky. How do you split up the most powerful military on the planet? Ideally, you wouldn't; you'd create a NATO-style common defense force, with a central chain of command, and it would be dedicated to protecting the territory formerly known as the United States. This would avoid a situation in which the world's leading military powers shared a common border – a scenario that could lead to all sorts of ugliness.

But here's the problem: the two new countries would want the ability to set their own foreign policies and determine their own levels of military spending. Presumably, the “blue” states would want to spend a little less on guns and a little more on butter (or a lot less on guns and a lot more on butter).

One possible solution would be to separate true “defense” from military spending. We could agree to a treaty that sets common defense spending at, say, half of current levels (or a third -- whatever) for a dedicated North American Defense Force, and then allow the two new countries to maintain their own “expeditionary forces,” based overseas, that would be barred from operating in North America. If one of the new countries wants to play World Police, it can do so and bear those costs.

What to do with our 700-plus foreign bases? I guess you'd divide them up like common assets in any other divorce.

Trade and Borders

If the idea is to pursue different ideas about the role of government in society, why would we want to give up the advantages that come with being the world's second largest economy? The best scenario would be to retain one big economic zone along the lines of the EU – two countries establishing their own domestic affairs, in a union with some common policy that facilitates the free exchange of goods, services and people. This would give citizens the opportunity to vote with their feet if they don't like living with their new model of governance.

But there are two problems here. First, we'd have to avoid having the red states become a maquiladora zone, with cheap labor and lax environmental regulations that blue state firms could take advantage of to manufacture products for sale in their domestic market. The second problem would be contraband goods flowing back and forth – what's the point of stricter gun laws in the North if a constant stream of AR-15s flows up from the South? (The opposite would be true if the blue states legalized marijuana and the red states maintained its prohibition.)

The first problem might be answered with some sort of tariffs that equalize labor costs and regulatory burdens, creating an even playing field for firms to compete without engaging in a race to the bottom.

The second problem is stickier. Would we want a high-tech, heavily guarded border with limited crossing points like we now have with Mexico? In the EU, nationals move freely across borders. Perhaps checkpoints could be established on the most heavily trafficked routes. Random vehicle searches – with penalties for trafficking in contraband goods – might be enough to manage the problem, at least to a significant degree, without having formal border crossings.

Taxes and Benefits

Here's another sticky issue. It's safe to assume that the blue states would tax their citizens a bit more and offer better benefits in return. How would we deal with these differences if we maintain an open-border policy, and people spend time living and working in both of the new countries?

The European Union might again provide an answer: a bilateral tax treaty. In the EU, people who spend more than half of a year working outside their home country are considered tax residents of that country. Those who spend less than half a year working in another country only end up paying taxes on their income in that country.

As far as retirement and health benefits go, as in the EU, you'd accrue benefits in the country where you worked, or, if you've worked in both countries, then you would be eligible for retirement benefits in both countries according to what you've paid into the system during your career.

Currency/Monetary Policy

Ideally, we'd maintain a common currency and avoid a lot of the hassles the EU has had by having a single central bank overseeing monetary policy (most of the EU has a single currency but no common fiscal policy, which has caused a lot of problems).

But gold-buggery is now a mainstream proposition in the GOP. Just last week, Virginia legislators approved a plan to study the feasability of the state minting its own coins in order to survive the inevitable collapse of the federal government. And distrust of the Federal Reserve would probably make a common fiscal policy all but impossible.

Minority Rights

Liberals would no doubt worry about minority voting rights in Alabama and conservatives would be equally worried about the right of Montanans to own firearms. One way to adress these concerns would be to have both new countries adopt our existing Constitution. If they want to amend it, they can do so through a constitutional convention, or by passing an amendment with a super-majority in both chambers of Congress and then having it affirmed by three-quarters of their states.

This is a high bar, which means that only constitutional changes with very broad support would be possible. It may not be ideal, but it would go a long way toward protecting minority rights in both new countries.

They would also have independent Supreme Courts, and over the years those courts would no doubt come to very different interpretations of the Constitution. That's probably a good balance; significant change would eventually be apparent, but absent new amendments, its core principles would remain intact.

Alimony

The “blue” states currently subsidize the “red” – eight of the 10 states that took in the most net federal dollars are solidly Republican, and all 10 of the states that pay the most net dollars into the federal system are solidly Democratic. Also, in any rational division of the country, the Blue States of America would end up with the lion's share of economic capacity – we'd have California, New York and Chicago, just for starters.

If we want to make this a friendly divorce, we'd have to consider paying the national equivalent of alimony to the new Red States of America, at least for a certain period of adjustment. This would be in our own interests – when a marriage ends amicably, and one spouse is the primary breadwinner, he or she pays alimony to help the other spouse land on his or her feet.

What Else?

Those are a few things one should consider before calling for secession – or for other states to secede. I'm sure there's much more to consider, so feel free to hash it out.

Big Tobacco, Koch Brothers Planned Tea Parties a Decade Before They Hit American Politics

Brendan DeMelle, Huffington Post — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 11:27:00 -0800

Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was curated by wealthy industrialists years in advance.

A new academic study confirms that front groups with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry and the billionaire Koch brothers planned the formation of theTea Party movement more than a decade before it exploded onto the U.S. political scene.

Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was curated by wealthy industrialists years in advance. Many of the anti-science operatives who defended cigarettes are currently deploying their tobacco-inspired playbook internationally to evade accountability for the fossil fuel industry's role in driving climate disruption.

The study, funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institute of Health, traces the roots of the Tea Party's anti-tax movement back to the early 1980s when tobacco companies began to invest in third party groups to fight excise taxes on cigarettes, as well as health studies finding a link between cancer and secondhand cigarette smoke.

Published in the peer-reviewed academic journal, Tobacco Control, the study titled, 'To quarterback behind the scenes, third party efforts': the tobacco industry and the Tea Party, is not just an historical account of activities in a bygone era. As senior author, Stanton Glantz, a University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) professor of medicine, writes:

"Nonprofit organizations associated with the Tea Party have longstanding ties to tobacco companies, and continue to advocate on behalf of the tobacco industry's anti-tax, anti-regulation agenda."

The two main organizations identified in the UCSF Quarterback study are Americans for Prosperity andFreedomworks. Both groups are now "supporting the tobacco companies' political agenda by mobilizing local Tea Party opposition to tobacco taxes and smoke-free laws." Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity were once a single organization called Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE). CSE was founded in 1984 by the infamous Koch Brothers, David and Charles Koch, and received over $5.3 million from tobacco companies, mainly Philip Morris, between 1991 and 2004.

In 1990, Tim Hyde, RJR Tobacco's head of national field operations, in an eerily similar description of the Tea Party today, explained why groups like CSE were important to the tobacco industry's fight against government regulation. Hyde wrote:

"... coalition building should proceed along two tracks: a) a grassroots organizational and largely local track,; b) and a national, intellectual track within the DC-New York corridor. Ultimately, we are talking about a "movement," a national effort to change the way people think about government's (and big business) role in our lives. Any such effort requires an intellectual foundation - a set of theoretical and ideological arguments on its behalf."

The common public understanding of the origins of the Tea Party is that it is a popular grassroots uprising that began with anti-tax protests in 2009.

However, the Quarterback study reveals that in 2002, the Kochs and tobacco-backed CSE designed and made public the first Tea Party Movement website under the web address www.usteaparty.com. Here's a screenshot of the archived U.S. Tea Party site, as it appeared online on Sept. 13, 2002:

CSE describes the U.S. Tea Party site, "In 2002, our U.S. Tea Party is a national event, hosted continuously online, and open to all Americans who feel our taxes are too high and the tax code is too complicated." The site features a "Patriot Guest book" where supporters can write a message of support for CSE and the U.S. Tea Party movement.

Sometime around September 2011, the U.S. Tea Party site was taken offline. According to the DNS registry, the web address www.usteaparty.com is currently owned by Freedomworks.

The implications of the UCSF Quarterback report are widespread. The main concern expressed by the authors lies in what they see happening overseas as the Tea Party movement expands internationally, training activists in 30 countries including Israel, Georgia, Japan and Serbia.

As the authors explain:

"This international expansion makes it likely that Tea Party organizations will be mounting opposition to tobacco control (and other health) policies as they have done in the USA."

Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity are both multi-issue organizations that have expanded their battles to include other policies they see as threats to the free market principles they claim to defend, namely fighting health care reform and regulations on global warming pollution. The report's warning about overseas expansion efforts by Freedomworks should therefore also be heeded by groups in the health and environment arenas.

Finally, this report might serve as a wake-up call to some people in the Tea Party itself, who would find it a little disturbing that the "grassroots" movement they are so emotionally attached to, is in fact a pawn created by billionaires and large corporations with little interest in fighting for the rights of the common person, but instead using the common person to fight for their own unfettered profits.

AlterNet.org: Election 2012

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