Sign Krugman's "Manifesto For Economic Sense"

By Isaiah J. Poole, cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future

Tom Tomorrow

Economists Paul Krugman and Richard Layard, the latter of the London School of Economics, today posted a "Manifesto for Economic Sense" that lays out a sound framework for reviving the global economy.

"I’ve been arguing for a long time that policy makers have misunderstood the nature of our economic crisis, mistaking symptoms for causes, and responding in ways that make the situation worse," Krugman wrote yesterday on his blog at The New York Times. The goal of the manifesto is, in the words of the manifesto itself, to "offer the public a more evidence-based analysis of our problems" and change the direction of the economic debate away from austerity and toward using government as a kindle for rebuilding the middle class.

"A key priority now is to reduce unemployment, before it becomes endemic, making recovery and future deficit reduction even more difficult," the manifesto says.

Many of the signatures on the manifesto are those of economists and policy experts, but you are encouraged to sign the manifesto as well to show your agreement with its basic principles.

In an op-ed in the Financial Times, Krugman and Layard explained the thinking behind the manifesto. "More than four years after the financial crisis began, the world’s major advanced economies remain deeply depressed, in a scene all too reminiscent of the 1930s," the piece begins, because their economic leaders, and conservatives in the United States, insist on replicating the failed economic strategies of the 1930s before the New Deal.

Instead, the manifesto calls for economic experts and policy makers to speak up more loudly against the arguments that "austerity will increase confidence and encourage recovery"—there is no evidence that austerity policies are having that effect anywhere in the world—and that a key causes of our weak economic recovery are structural, rather than a general lack of spending and demand.

The statement echoes the same themes of our own 2010 "Don't Kill Jobs" economic manifesto, signed by more than 300 economic experts. That statement urged the president and Congress to "redouble efforts to create jobs and send aid to the states whose budget crises threaten recovery by forcing them to lay off school teachers, public safety workers, and other essential workers. It also makes sense to invest in public service jobs—and in infrastructure projects for transportation, water, and energy conservation that will make our economy more productive for years to come."

If our political leadership had taken that message to heart in 2010, it would not have been necessary for Krugman and Layard to post their own manifesto with the same message. But Washington conservatives still refuse to admit the failures of their policies and end their wrong-headed obstruction in Congress. It's exasperating to have to repeat the message over and over, but as the Krugman-Layard manifesto concludes, "The whole world suffers when men and women are silent about what they know is wrong."

Government Is Not The Problem

Robbie Conal

Democrats have been on the defensive about the role of government at least since Ronald Reagan declared in his first inaugural address that  "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."  Reagan was so effective in portraying government intervention as nothing more than providing assistance to Cadillac-driving welfare queens that his successor, Bush the Elder, was able to  disparage his opponent Michael Dukakis merely by referring to him as a "liberal."  And when the Democrats finally took back the White House, it was Bill Clinton who boasted in his second State of the Union address that "the era of big government is over." 

E.J. Dionne argues in an excellent column today that we must "turn Ronald Reagan’s declaration on its head: Opposition to government isn’t the solution. Opposition to government was and remains the problem."

Decades of anti-government rhetoric have made liberals wary of claiming their legacy as supporters of the state’s positive role. That’s why they have had so much trouble making the case for President Obama’s stimulus program passed by Congress in 2009. It ought to be perfectly obvious: When the private sector is no longer investing, the economy will spin downward unless the government takes on the task of investing. And such investments — in transportation and clean energy, refurbished schools and the education of the next generation — can prime future growth.

Yet the drumbeat of propaganda against government has made it impossible for the plain truth about the stimulus to break through. It was thus salutary that Douglas Elmendorf, the widely respected director of the Congressional Budget Office, told a congressional hearing last week that 80 percent of economic experts surveyed by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business agreed that the stimulus got the unemployment rate lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been otherwise. Only 4 percent disagreed. The stimulus, CBO concluded, added as many as 3.3 million jobs during the second quarter of 2010, and it may have kept us from lapsing back into recession.

So when conservatives say, as they regularly do, that “government doesn’t create jobs,” the riposte should be quick and emphatic: “Yes it has, and yes, it does!”

Indeed, our unemployment rate is higher today than it should be because conservatives blocked additional federal spending to prevent layoffs by state and local governments — and because progressives, including Obama, took too long to propose more federal help. Obama’s jobs program would be a step in the right direction, and he’s right to tout it now. But he should have pushed for a bigger stimulus from the beginning. The anti-government disposition has so much power that Democrats and moderate Republicans allowed themselves to be intimidated into keeping it too small.

As Dionne concludes, "It is past time that we affirm government’s ability to heal the economy, and its responsibility for doing so."

Hijacking The Wisconsin Uprising

Why Electoral Politics Sold Out the Popular Uprising in the Badger State -- and Why It’s Not All Over 

By Andy Kroll, cross-posted from TomDispatch

The revelers watched in stunned disbelief, cocktails in hand, dressed for a night to remember. On the big-screen TV a headline screamed in crimson red: "Projected Winner: Scott Walker." It was 8:49 p.m. In parts of Milwaukee, people learned that news networks had declared Wisconsin’s governor the winner while still in line to cast their votes. At the election night party for Walker's opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, supporters talked and cried and ordered more drinks. Barrett soon took the stage to concede, then waded into the crowd where a distraught woman slapped him in the face.

Walker is the first governor in American history to win a recall election. His lieutenant governor, Rebecca Kleefisch, dispatched her recall challenger no less decisively. So, too, did three Republican state senators in their recall elections. Democrats avoided a GOP sweep with a win in the sixth and final senate recall vote of the season, in Wisconsin's southeastern 21st district, but that was small consolation. Put simply, Democrats and labor unions got rolled.

The results of Tuesday's elections are being heralded as the death of public-employee unions, if not the death of organized labor itself. Tuesday's results are also seen as the final chapter in the story of the populist uprising that burst into life last year in the state capital of Madison. The Cheddar Revolution, so the argument goes, was buried in a mountain of ballots.

But that burial ceremony may prove premature. Most of the conclusions of the last few days, left and right, are likely wrong.


The energy of the Wisconsin uprising was never electoral. The movement’s mistake: letting itself be channeled solely into traditional politics, into the usual box of uninspired candidates and the usual line-up of debates, primaries, and general elections. The uprising was too broad and diverse to fit electoral politics comfortably. You can't play a symphony with a single instrument. Nor can you funnel the energy and outrage of a popular movement into a single race, behind a single well-worn candidate, at a time when all the money in the world from corporate “individuals” and right-wing billionaires is pouring into races like the Walker recall.


Colin Millard, an organizer at the International Brotherhood of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental, and Reinforcing Iron Workers, admitted as much on the eve of the recall. We were standing inside his storefront office in the small town of Horicon, Wisconsin. It was night outside. "The moment you start a recall," he told me, "you're playing their game by their rules."

From Madison to Zuccotti Park and Beyond

A recap is in order.

The uprising began with Colin Millard. The date was February 11, 2011, when Walker "dropped the bomb," as he later put it, with his "budget repair" bill, which sought to gut collective bargaining rights for most public-employee unions,  Later that day, a state Democratic Party staffer who knew Millard called him and pleaded with him to organize a protest. Millard agreed, even though other unions, including the AFL-CIO, urged him to back out. Don't make a fuss, they advised. Let's call some lawmakers and urge them to oppose Walker's bill. "Fuck off," was Millard's response.

On the Sunday after Walker unveiled his bill, Millard rounded up more than 200 people and marched down Lake Street, past the John Deere factory and Dannyboy's Bar, to the home of Republican Jeff Fitzgerald, the speaker of the state Assembly and a Walker ally. Fitzgerald lived a mile or two from Millard in Horicon. "I've got a message for Scott Walker," Millard told the crowd outside Fitzgerald's house. "This is my union card and you can pry it from my cold, dead hand."

As rumors spread of more protests, Walker threatened to call out the National Guard to deal with the protesting public workers. That's when popular outrage erupted. Students marched on the state capitol, and then a local teaching assistants union led the effort to take over the capitol rotunda, transforming intermittent protests into a round-the-clock occupation. Organizers provided food, shelter, health care, day care, education, and a sense of purpose for those who had taken up residence inside the capitol.

In support of the occupiers, the daily protests outside the capitol grew into crowds of 10,000, 25,000, then upward of 100,000. People marched in the snowy streets to challenge Walker, Wisconsin Republicans, and their political donors. Tractors circled the capitol in protest, as did firefighters and cops, even though their bargaining rights had been exempted from Walker's "reform" proposals. By now, Madison had captured the nation's attention.

A two-week occupation of the capitol and months of protests didn’t, however, deter Walker and Republican lawmakers. He signed his budget repair bill, known as Act 10, into law in March. But that doesn’t mean the Wisconsin uprising had no effect. For one thing, the "Walkerville" occupation of the grounds outside the state capitol helped inspire the "Bloombergville" protest in New York City targeting Mayor Michael Bloomberg. That, in turn, would be a precursor to the Occupy Wall Street events of the following September and later the Occupy movement nationwide. Without Wisconsin, without the knowledge that such things could still happen in America, there might never have been an Occupy.

Hijacking the Uprising

By the time Occupy Wall Street took off, the Wisconsin uprising had swapped its come-one-come-all organizing message for a far narrower and more traditional political mission. Over the summer of 2011, the decision was made that the energy and enthusiasm displayed in Madison should be channeled into recall elections to defeat six Republican state senators who had voted for Walker's anti-union Act 10. (Three Democratic senators would, in the end, face recall as well.) By that act, Democrats and unions hoped to wrestle control of the senate away from Walker and use that new power to block his agenda.

The Democrats won two of the 2011 recalls, one short of gaining control of the Senate, and so the Republicans clung to their majority.

What followed was more of the same, but with the ante upped. This time, the marquee race would be the recall of Walker himself. Launched last November, the grassroots campaign to recall the governor put the populist heart of the Wisconsin uprising on full display. Organizing under the United Wisconsin banner, 30,000 volunteers statewide gathered nearly one million signatures to trigger the election. The group’s people-powered operation recaptured some of the spirit of the Capitol occupation, but the decision had been made: recalling Walker at the ballot box was the way forward.

The Walker recall effort would, in fact, splinter the masses of anti-Walker protesters. Many progressives and most of the state's labor unions rallied behind former Dane County executive Kathleen Falk who, in January 2012, announced her intent to challenge Walker. Tom Barrett, who had lost the governor’s race to Walker in 2010, didn't announce his candidacy until late March, his entry pitting Democrat against Democrat, his handful of union endorsements pitting labor against labor. Unions pumped $4 million into helping Falk clinch the Democratic nomination. In the end, though, it wasn't close: Barrett stomped her in the May 8th primary by 24 percentage points.

By now, the Madison movement was the captive of ordinary Democratic politics in the state. After all, Barrett was hardly a candidate of the uprising. People who had protested in the streets and slept in the capitol groused about his uninspired record on workers' rights and public education. He never inspired or unified the movement that had made a recall possible -- and it showed on Election Day: Walker beat Barrett by seven percentage points, almost his exact margin of victory in 2010. Democrats and their union allies needed to win over new voters and old enemies; by all accounts they failed.

And had Barrett by some miracle won, after a few days of celebration and self-congratulation, those in the Madison movement would have found themselves in the same box, in the same broken system, with little sense of what to do and, in a Barrett governorship, little hope. Win or lose, there was loss written all over the recall decision.

The Fate of the Uprising

The takeaway from Walker's decisive win on Tuesday is not that Wisconsin's new populist movement is dead. It's that such a movement does not fit comfortably into the present political/electoral system, stuffed as it is with corporate money, overflowing with bizarre ads and media horse-race-manship. Its members' beliefs are too diverse to be confined comfortably in what American electoral politics has become. It simply couldn’t be squeezed into a system that stifles and, in some cases, silences the kinds of voices and energies it possessed.

The post-election challenge for the members of Wisconsin's uprising is finding a new way to fight for and achieve needed change without simply pinning their hopes on a candidate or an election. After all, that's part of what absorbed the nation when a bunch of students first moved into the Wisconsin state capitol and wouldn’t go home, or when a ragtag crew of protesters camped out in lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park and wouldn't leave either. In both cases, they had harnessed the outrage felt by so many Americans for a cause other than what’s usually called “politics” in this country.

And they were successful -- even in the most traditional terms; that is, both movements affected traditional politics most strongly when they weren’t part of it. The Occupy movement, for all its flaws, moved even mainstream political discourse away from austerity and deficit slashing and toward the issues of income inequality and the hollowing out of the American middle and working classes.

Avoiding politics as we know it with an almost religious fervor, Occupy still managed to put its stamp on national political fights. Last October, for instance, Ohioans voted overwhelmingly to repeal SB 5, a law that curbed collective bargaining rights for all public-employee unions. Occupy’s "We are the 99%" message reverberated through Ohio, and the volunteers who blitzed the state successfully drew on Occupy themes to make their case for the law's repeal. Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, which spent $500,000 in Ohio fighting SB 5, told me at the time, "Every conversation was in the context of the 99% and the 1%, this discussion sparked by Occupy Wall Street."

The money that flowed into Walker's recall fight speaks loudly to the disadvantages a Wisconsin-like movement faces within the walls of electoral politics and the need for it to resist being confined there. On the post-Citizens United playing field, the unlimited amounts of the money that rose to the top of this society in recent decades, as the 1% definitively separated itself from the 99%, can be reinvested in preserving the world as it is and electing those who will make it even more amenable. The advantage invariably goes corporate; it goes Republican.

Historically, the Republicans have long been the party of big business, of multinational corporations, of wealthy, union-hating donors like Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and Amway heir Dick DeVos -- and in recent decades the Democrats have followed in their wake sweeping up the crumbs (or worse). And here’s the reality of a deeply corrupt system: unless Congress and state legislators act to patch up their tattered campaign finance rulebooks, the same crew with the same money will continue to dominate the political wars. (And any movement that puts its own money on changing those rules is probably in deep trouble.)

In the wake of the recall losses, the people of Wisconsin's uprising must ask themselves: Where can they make an impact outside of politics? The power of nonviolent action to create social and economic change is well documented, most notably by Jonathan Schell in his classic book The Unconquerable World. The men and women in Schell's invaluable history -- Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and his civil rights fighters, the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel, and so many others -- can serve as guides to a path to change that doesn't require recall elections. Already mainstays of the Madison protests have suggested campaigns to refuse to spend money with businesses that support Walker. "Hit 'em where it hurts. Pocketbooks," C.J. Terrell, one of the Capitol occupiers, recently wrote on Facebook.

Wisconsinites could also turn to one of their own: Robert "Fightin' Bob" La Follette. He created his own band of "insurgents" within the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Republican Party. Together they formed the Progressive Party, which fought for workers' rights, guarded civil liberties, and worked to squeeze corruption out of government.

Ultimately, however, the decision on what comes next rests in the hands of those who inspired and powered the Wisconsin uprising. And with an emboldened Governor Walker, there should be no shortage of reasons to fight back in the next two years. But success, as Tuesday's election made clear, isn’t likely to come the traditional way. It will, of course, involve unions; it might draw on state and local political parties. But in the end, it's in the hands of the people again, as it was in February 2011.

The future they want is theirs to decide.

Andy Kroll is a staff reporter in the D.C. bureau of Mother Jones magazine. He is also an associate editor at TomDispatch.com. He has covered Wisconsin politics since the first protests ignited in February 2011.

Wisconsin Post-Mortem

DonkeyHotey

"Money can't buy you love, but it sure can by you power."  As  Matt Rothschild says:

Walker raised seven-to-ten times as much money as Barrett did. The governor collected six-figure checks from a rogue’s gallery of the far right: Bob Perry of Swift Boat infamy gave $500,000. Sheldon Adelson gave $250,000, Richard Devos gave $250,000, Foster Friess gave $100,000.

A wrinkle in Wisconsin campaign finance laws, which allows for unlimited contributions to a candidate between the time recall papers are filed and the day that the election formally gets scheduled, gave Walker four and a half months to sit on the lap of every rightwing roofer in Missouri (two of whom gave him $250,000 checks), every conservative Wall Street financier, every reactionary Texas oilman that he could find.

On top of that, the Koch Brothers poured in millions through their front groups, and the RNC funneled money in, as did other Republican organizations.

Thus, John Nichols writes:

The Wisconsin result—which followed upon a campaign that saw Walker outspend his Democratic challenger by perhaps 8–1, as the governor’s billionaire backers flooded the state with tens of millions of dollars in “independent” expenditures on his behalf—should send up red flares for Democrats as they prepare for this fall’s presidential and congressional elections. The right has developed a far more sophisticated money-in-politics template than it has ever before employed. That template worked in Wisconsin, on behalf of a deeply divisive and scandal-plagued governor, and it worked.

But, as Nichols is quick to point out, organized money will not always beat organized people, and the anti-Walker forces had other disadvantages.  First, it must be noted, "they were let down by national Democratic players who never quite recognized that Republican National Committee chairman Reince Preibus and “independent” groups on the right were testing and perfecting strategies for November."

As Rothschild tells it, in contrast to the "rightwing moneymen and the Republican Party," who understood the importance of this election, "the DNC was stingy, and Barack Obama couldn’t find Wisconsin with GPS and a flashlight. Hell, he was in Minneapolis on Friday and didn’t even bother to drive across the Mississippi to set foot in Wisconsin. He never showed up. Neither did Joe Biden. All Obama did was send a tweet on election morning."

Another problem was the unpopularity of recall elections, generally.  Rothschild notes that exit polls showed that "60 percent of Wisconsin voters said recall should be used only for “misconduct” in office, and not for other reasons."

It is important to recognize, therefore, that Walker won not, as Republicans want us to believe, because of the popularity of their ideas, but because of their staggering financial advantage, because the organized right made Walker's victory a national priority, and due to legitimate concerns voters had about using the recall procedure. 

Nevertheless, as Greg Sargent states, "Scott Walker’s victory in tonight’s recall battle is a major wake-up call for the left, Democrats, and unions about the true nature of the new, post-Citizens United political landscape, and it should force a major reckoning among liberals and Democrats about what this means for the future."

Wisconsin Needs You

As Meteor Blades at Daily Kos puts it:

Wisconsin progressives have inspired us, invigorated us and built an aggressive fight against the right-wing's continuing efforts to smash unions, trash equal pay for women, give tax breaks to corporations, raise taxes on low-income people and make it harder for voters to actually vote. Today that battle culminates in the recall election against Gov. Scott Walker. But it's far more than just an effort in one state against one governor. Whatever its unique qualities, it epitomizes the struggle we face nationwide. Today, we progressives are all Wisconsinites.

If you're in Wisconsin, We Are Wisconsin has field offices around the state running canvasses you can participate in.  If you don't live in Wisconsin, you can still help get out the vote by clicking here and signing up for Friends and Neighbors, created by the AFL-CIO and Workers' Voice, which will put you in touch with Wisconsin voters you have already connected with online.

The Jobs Babble

 By Robert Borosage, cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future

Anne-Maree Hunter

The Jobs Babble

Everyone is talking jobs and saying nothing. The inadequate recovery is sputtering and no one is doing anything. In the war on unemployment, no one has picked up a gun. We’re going through the motions, waiting for the misery to ratchet up, the cities to blow, corporate profits to tank before anything is done.

Bill Maher captured the reality when he mused that it wasn’t surprising Republicans thought Democrats had a secret plan if Obama were re-elected, because they hadn’t told anyone about what they planned to do. The Democratic appeal, he suggested, is “vote for us, we’re lame, but the other guys are nuts.” And so they are.

Romney’s campaign, of course, is all about jobs, twenty-four seven. Actually, it is all about the absence of jobs. Romney offers no coherent plan to produce jobs, beyond a generic, “Trust me, I’m the man from Bain.” Good luck with that. House Speaker John Boehner is “on message,” as they say, repeating relentlessly his question: “Where are the jobs?” But Boehner and his Tea Party compatriots have no plan for jobs either. Instead they have a plan for austerity – deep cuts in spending in every government service except the military.

Last weekend, Ross Douthat, one of the few pundits for whom the label “thoughtful conservative” isn’t an oxymoron, tried to imagine a Romney recovery. He used the book by Edward Conard, Romney’s former partner at Bain, to suggest the Bain vision: Greed is good. The Bush economy was humming. More inequality, more financialization, more speculation will renew America. So embrace the current Republican agenda – deregulate Wall Street, cut top end taxes, slash government spending, and let her rip.

This is, of course, Romney and Boehner’s agenda. Only problem with it is that, as Paul Krugman has noted, we’re already living in a mild version of that policy. Republicans forced Obama to sustain the top end Bush tax cuts, as a price of getting unemployment insurance and the payroll tax cut for workers. Government spending – state, local and federal – is going down, not up, contrary to right-wing fantasies. Government workers are being laid off, not hired.

We know the result. Sputtering growth, record corporate profits, growing inequality, declining household incomes, mass unemployment. Boehner’s “job creators” aren’t creating jobs. Douthat is smart enough to realize that the Bush economy didn’t work for most Americans even before it blew up. So he invokes a study by a Chicago conservative, Luigi Zingales, who suggests that what ails America is a corrupted crony capitalism similar to what plagues his Italian homeland. Zingales, and Douthat call conservatives to embrace a “free-market populism,” that will roll back the subsidies, tax dodges, and cartels in private and public sector.

But even Douthat couldn’t get himself to believe that Romney, much less Boehner’s Republicans, could summon up the courage for that. These Republicans fight to the death in defense of billion dollar subsidies to Big Oil and Big Agra and Big Pharma. The Koch brothers aren’t funding “free market populism;” they are expecting a huge return on their investment – and they’ll get it if Romney wins.

But if Republicans have nothing to say about jobs, neither do Democrats. They are terrified by polls that say voters are concerned about deficits. So every jobs program has to be “paid for” – and almost by definition, small. Obama issues a “to do list” for Congress that even his aides have a hard time pretending to be excited about.

Ironically, there really isn’t much of a secret about what needs to be done. The only question is how deep the crisis must go, how crippling the pain must be, before it gets done.


Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz have been campaigning for action. But we don’t need to take Nobel Prize winning economists as our guide. This week the sober conservative editors of the Financial Times detailed the common sense steps that were needed from America.

First, they called on the Federal Reserve to announce another round of qualitative easing. But with interest rates at record lows, there is little scope for monetary policy. With a yield of 1.45%, 10 year Treasury bonds are now cheaper than free. (They are earning less than the inflation rate). Investors are essentially paying the US to hold their money in a safe place.

Those same low interest rates offer the US a remarkable opportunity to rebuild the country. There will never be a better time to do the “internal improvements” that we need to make – rebuilding roads, bridges, mass transit, sewers, fast trains, airports, and retrofitting public buildings, building up renewable energy and more.

This is work that must be done. But now we can borrow the money at virtually no cost to finance it, and put to work a construction industry that is now idled, and help get the economy going. As the editors of the Financial Times conclude, “whatever is invested at these rates is likely to pay for itself in higher growth and revenues. “ This is what most would call a no brainer.

This isn’t all that should be done. Reviving Richard Nixon’s “revenue sharing” – a tip of the hat to E.J. Dionne – would send money to states and localities to rehire teachers and cops. The President has suggested a jobs corps for veterans, so no one who risks their life in battlefields abroad will be cut down in economic crossfire at home. That could sensibly be expanded with urban and green corps, targeted to areas of obscene levels of youth unemployment, to insure that young people under 25 don’t start their lives in idleness, depression, drugs and despair. And we should start making the long term investments – in world class education from pre-K to college, in research and development, in new energy – vital to our economic future.

These can be paid for by ending the subsidies Republicans protect, shutting down corporate tax havens, and fair taxes on Wall Street speculation and the rich.

Most sensibly, this program for revival and renewal would be accompanied by a hard knuckled, no holds barred, everything on the table drive to get our books in order once the economy recovers. That requires unrelenting focus on the three things that drive our budget out of whack. Not Social Security and Medicare, but the real deal: shackling Wall Street which just blew up the economy and effectively doubled our debt to GDP; ending our commitment to endless wars and policing the world which we cannot afford; and fixing our broken health care system, the most corrupted of our crony capitalism, now squandering about twice what other advanced countries spend per capita on health care with worse results. Everything else – the so called “grand bargain” that would trade cuts in Medicare and Social Security for tax reforms – is simply using the crisis to take another hit out of working families. When the rewards aren’t shared, shared sacrifice is for suckers. When you weren’t invited to the party, you shouldn’t be stuck with the bill.

Wisconsin Recall: A Battle We Can't Afford To Lose

By Isaiah J. Poole, cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future

For the progressive movement, it's put up or shut up time in Wisconsin.

We said that we despise the agenda of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. We cheered the thousands of people who occupied the state capitol in 2011 to protest Walker's ramming legislation crippling public employee unions through the legislature. We celebrated when a legislature recall election led to the ousting of two of the state senators who backed the legislation. And we were bolstered when a record number of signatures put a Walker recall election on the ballot.


But now that it's crunch time, we are dangerously close to losing it all. And the consequences of a recall defeat are almost impossible to overstate. Imagine the gloating on Fox News and the right-wing blogs if Walker wins on Tuesday, and the claims that our insurgent movement for rebuilding the middle class is bloodied and can be left for dead.

If we are really serious about standing up against the unholy alliance of conservative extremism and corporate money that has imposed an austerity agenda on the working class while further enriching the wealthy, then we need to help the people in Wisconsin who are trying against the odds to win this Wisconsin recall.

We're asking people this weekend to sign up with Worker's Voice and contribute time to help get out the vote against Walker.

Workers' Voice is a new political action committee affiliated with the AFL-CIO that offers get-out-the-vote tools that leverage the power of your social networks with information in the voter file.
You can help identify voters, make phone calls, or send your own personalized direct mail to people you know. And you can do it all from home, no matter where you live. And in an election race that polls suggest could go either way, every phone call, every email, every knock on a door will matter.

What has me particularly fired up is an article progressive commentator Sally Kohn has posted on The Daily Beast, with a headline that claims "Democrats Lose Momentum in Wisconsin: The left has seemed more comfortable being angry than channeling that emotion into influence."

I respect Sally Kohn and think she's a smart political analyst. But I would really like to see her proved wrong.

Her sense is that grassroots progressives did a good job pulling together a movement based on opposition to Walker's policies—not just on labor rights but also on a budget that, like national conservative policies, cuts services vital to the middle class and poor while cutting taxes to the wealthy and corporations. But the momentum fell apart when it came time to take that energy and translate it into actual change at the ballot box.

"Progressives have had a far harder time yoking grassroots activism to electoral politics than conservatives, who quickly managed to translate Tea Party rabble rousing into political power," Kohn writes.

It is true that progressives need a more solid strategy for electoral and political gains in the face of how, with the aid of the Citizens United ruling, the right and its corporate backers have dominated the political landscape. That is a key focus of the Take Back the American Dream conference, where many of the plenary meetings and strategy sessions will be focused both on how progressives can score gains in the November elections and on how progressives can affect the course of economic policy during December's "taxmageddon," when Congress must decide how to handle the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, payroll tax relief and a deal on federal spending.

But, as The Nation's John Nichols told me in my interview with him today, people power has already accomplished more in Wisconsin than skeptics in either the left or the right expected. As he reminds us, the Capitol protests were supposed to quickly fizzle, but they didn't. The public was supposed to massively turn against supporters of public employees, but they didn't. The Walker recall was expected to flail in the midst of the harsh Wisconsin winter. It didn't.

So now we come to this moment, where it will become clear to the nation whether the 99 percent can in fact use people power to push back against the 1 percent and insist on government policies that restore a measure of prosperity to the majority of Americans, not just those at the very top.

Workers Voice is one way you can help, but it is of course not the only way. However you choose to get involved, this is the time to move from the sideline to the front line.

Then, at our Take Back the American Dream conference, we can do the work of building on a Wisconsin victory. That conference will feature Paul Krugman, Van Jones, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ai-jen Poo, Sandra Fluke, Gov. Howard Dean, Melissa Harris-Perry, Chris Hayes and Katrina vanden Heuvel. (Click here to register.)


When you consider all that is at stake throughout the country, as conservatives continue their assault on worker's rights and economic security at both the state and national level, we literally cannot afford to lose on Tuesday.

What The Bain Debate Is Really About

By Terrance Heath, cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future

DonkeyHotey

The 2012 presidential election may go down as one of the strangest political seasons in recent memory, for the simple reason that the influence of the financial sector in politics, policy and the economy has caused Republicans to sound like Democrats and Democrat to sound like Republicans — usually with confounding results.

When Republicans sound like Democrats, like Newt Gingrich attacking Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital, they tend to start arguments they can't win. When Democrats start sounding like Republicans, like Cory Booker defending Bain Capital, they tend forfeit arguments they could win. That's because, in both cases, the politicians are arguing about the wrong things, in order to avoid the real argument  — the one America needs to have, and Americans need to win; the argument over what kind of economy we will have going forward.

Gingrich's attack on Romney's record confused many conservatives, who equated it with an attack on capitalism itself. Newark Mayor Cory Booker echoed the concerns of confused conservatives when he called the Obama campaigns ads attacking Romney's record at Bain Capital a "nauseating" attack on private equity, labeling them a distraction. "It's either going to be a small campaign about this crap or it's going to be a big campaign, in my opinion, about the issues that the American public cares about," Booker said.

What Booker, Democrats like him, and conservatives now lauding his diatribe ignore or don't realize is that the issues affecting voters don't come much bigger and don't get much more real than the kind of capitalism Bain represents.

Bain Capitalism

As Digby said, if Romney is going to run on his Bain Capital record and tout his private equity background as his main qualification for the presidency, then his track record at Bain is fair game. I summed up that track record in my original post about his brand of "vulture capitalism."

A former managing partner at Bain, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, made it clear that job creation was never the point at Bain.

Bain managers said their mission was clear. "I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation," said Marc B. Walpow, a former managing partner at Bain who worked closely with Romney for nine years before forming his own firm. "The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors."

Under Romney's leadership, Bain certainly created wealth for its investors, no matter what happened to the companies it acquired or the the people worked for them. The Wall Street Journal's revealing look at Romney's time at Bain shows that 22% of the companies Bain invested on under Romney's watch either filed for bankruptcy, reorganized, or closed their doors — sometimes with substantial job losses. As Pat Garofalo pointed out, that's nearly one fourth of the companies Bain invested in.



Some failed so badly that Bain lost its investments. That didn't put a damper in returns, though. Bain produced about $2.5 billion in returns for its shareholders, out of just $1.1 billion invested. (Romney did alright, too. His campaign estimates his take during his term at Bain as anywhere from $190 million to $250 million. That's enough for a lot of $10,000 bets.)

The LA Times piece makes it clear that Bain and its investors profited, no matter what happened to the companies in its portfolio. According to the Wall Street Journal, 70% of Bain's returns came from just 10 deals. The LA Times article notes that "Four of the 10 companies Bain acquired declared bankruptcy within a few years, shedding thousands of jobs." Still, Bain profited in eight of those ten deals, including three of the four that went bankrupt.

That's the way "vulture capitalism" (as I like to call it) works. Bain and its shareholders profited in the end, no matter what else happened.

That's the part of the story that the Gingrich movie seems to tell: what else happened. We know what happened on Wall Street when Mitt Romney came to town. A few people — Mitt Romney included — made a lot of money. Now we know what else happened on Main Street when Mitt Romney came to town.

What happened to those companies and the people who worked for them begins to read like a casualty list: 1,700 jobs lost at Dade International, more than 700 jobs lost at GS Industries, 200 jobs lost at American Pad and Paper (Apmad). After a while, it's easy to forget that these numbers represent the lives of real people, whose job loss sent shock waves through their families and communities; people like Donny Box and Randy Johnson.

It's also easy to miss the point that this is just how the brand of "head I win, tails you lose" capitalism Bain practiced under Romney's leadership is suppose to work; as the Obama campaign illustrates in a new video and slideshow about how Bain made $100 million on its $5 million investment in Ampad, even while sending the company into bankruptcy and its 1,500 employees to the unemployment line. Bain Capital made profits no matter what happened the companies in its portfolio. Nearly one fourth of the companies Bain invested in during Romney's tenure either went bankrupt, reorganized, or simply shut down — often with significant layoffs. Seventy percent of Bain's profits came from just 10 deals, four of which resulted in bankruptcy.

"Extracting Value"

Romney's factually challenged, incredible shrinking claims of being a "job creator" at Bain notwithstanding, his former Bain colleague got it exactly right. Bain wasn't in the business of creating jobs, and Romney wasn't in the business of creating jobs. Bain's mission, and Romney's job as its chief, was simply to "create wealth" for its investors. Period.

Bain Capital and Mitt Romney were in the business of creating even more wealth for its already-wealthy investors. They were apparently very good at it, too. But the kind of wealth Bain and Romney worked to create isn't the kind of wealth that leads to more widely shared prosperity. It's not the kind of wealth that grows the economy, according to the CBO. Nor is it the kind of wealth that leads to job creation, according to Moody's Analytics, because it doesn't get put back into the economy to support existing jobs or spur job creation by boosting demand. The wealthy don't spend their tax cut windfalls, but save them and invest them in the stock market instead; putting their money to work making money, rather than putting their money to work keeping people working and putting people to work.

The success or failure of the companies in its portfolio were beside the point. When he's not claiming the mantle of "job creator," Romney casts himself and Bain as "fixers" who acquired "broken" companies and made them better —more efficient, and more profitable. But that wasn't the point at Bain. To some extent, Bain and Romney profited from practices that were more about extracting value from its acquisitions than "fixing" them. (The language about "extracting value" is even repeated in some of Bain's own material.)

That's what Bain Capitalism is about: "extracting value" with no investment in the fate of the companies in its portfolio, the people who work from them, or the communities that rely on them.

 "What This Job Is All About"

Cory Booker called the debate over Bain Capital a "distraction" that threatened to make the election a "small campaign" about small ideas, instead of a "big campaign" about "the issues the American public cares about." In his remarks at yesterday's NATO summit, President Obama made the case for why Romney's record at Bain Capital is relevant to a "big campaign" about "issues the American public cares about." (And he managed it without even calling Booker a "jackass.")

… [T]he reason this is relevant to the campaign is because my opponent, Governor Romney, his main calling card for why he thinks he should be President is his business expertise. He is not going out there touting his experience in Massachusetts. He is saying, I’m a business guy and I know how to fix it, and this is his business.

And when you’re President, as opposed to the head of a private equity firm, then your job is not simply to maximize profits. Your job is to figure out how everybody in the country has a fair shot. Your job is to think about those workers who got laid off and how are we paying for their retraining. Your job is to think about how those communities can start creating new clusters so that they can attract new businesses. Your job as President is to think about how do we set up a equitable tax system so that everybody is paying their fair share that allows us then to invest in science and technology and infrastructure, all of which are going to help us grow.

And so, if your main argument for how to grow the economy is I knew how to make a lot of money for investors, then you’re missing what this job is about. It doesn’t mean you weren’t good at private equity, but that’s not what my job is as President. My job is to take into account everybody, not just some. My job is to make sure that the country is growing not just now, but 10 years from now and 20 years from now.

So to repeat, this is not a distraction. This is what this campaign is going to be about -- is what is a strategy for us to move this country forward in a way where everybody can succeed? And that means I’ve got to think about those workers in that video just as much as I’m thinking about folks who have been much more successful.

The president is off to a good start on taking the debate where it needs to from here; from the particulars of Romney's record at Bain Capital to what it represents, and the economic choices facing America. But, as I pointed out before, the business practices of companies like Bain mean profit for the investor class, and pain for the 99%. Now, president Obama needs to make it personal.

This is pretty good, but I think it's going to have to get a lot more forceful. Obama has this habit, which you learn as a writer over time is really unconvincing. He very often makes an assertion without illustrating it, without saying why. It leaves listeners confused because he hasn't really put meat behind the assertion.

But he is on the right track here. I don't think this is such a difficult needle to thread. In fact he could get a lot more emotional mileage out of this sort of thing. Like how? Like so:

"The people who lost their jobs because of Mitt Romney's creative destruction, those are precisely the people the president has to think about most. Those are the people who write the letters that I read every night before I go to bed. Those are the people who need my help the most of all. Mitt Romney and his fellow investors will mostly be just fine. I think about the other people. Governor Romney says, explicitly, has said many times, of lost jobs, that's capitalism, that's just the way it goes. Do you want a president who watches an American factory shut down and says, 'Well, that's capitalism?'"

Choosing Capitalism

"Do you want a president who watches an American factory shut down and says, 'Well, that's capitalism?'"

It recasts Romney's answer to questions about bankruptcies, shutdowns, and layoffs Bain left in its wake as a Rumsfeldian "stuff happens" response to the economic consequences of Bain's practices. Stuff doesn't just happen. Stuff happens because other stuff happens. The debate is basically about whether we should regulate some stuff in order to keep it from happening, and what we should do about the stuff that happens as a result.

We are, as E.J. Dionne writes, not in the middle of a national argument about capitalism versus "socialism," but a much needed discussion about what kind of capitalism we want.

The Bain conversation has already been instructive. Romney’s friends no less than his foes have had to face the fact that Bain’s purpose was never about job-creation. Its goal was to generate large returns to Bain’s partners and investors. It did that, which is why Romney is rich.

Romney wants to focus on the positive side of his business dealings that did create jobs. He wants to brag about the companies Bain helped bring to life, among them Staples, Sports Authority and Domino’s.

That’s fair enough. But having made an issue of Bain on the plus side, he also has to answer for the pain and suffering — or, as defenders of capitalism like to call it, the “creative destruction” — that some of Bain’s deals left in their wake.
This leads naturally to the question of how creative the destruction wrought by our current brand of capitalism actually is. Since the dawn of the leveraged buyout era three decades ago, many friends of capitalism have questioned whether loading companies with debt as part of these deals is good for companies and for the economy as a whole.

What's the alternative to the "vulture capitalism" practiced by firms like Bain Capital? What it's called varies, I've heard it called "Inclusive Capitalism" and "the New Economy movement." It's components are just beginning to take shape, as more people envision a capitalism that better spreads the benefits of the "productivity revolution," that regulates the worst of capitalism's "creative destruction," and incorporates a safety net to catch those left behind by the market.
This may be another debate in which President Obama could benefit from following Vice President Biden's lead.

Vice President Biden’s speech last week in Youngstown, Ohio, drew wide attention for its criticism of Romney as someone who just doesn’t “get it.” But when Biden moved beyond Romney, he offered an energetic broadside against the new world of finance, and he picked the right venue to make his case: a noble blue-collar town that has been battered by the winds of globalization and economic change.

“You know the difference between having an economy that makes things that the rest of the world wants, and having an economy that is based on financialization of every product,” Biden told his listeners. “You know the difference between an economy . . . that’s built on making things rather than on collateralized debt, creative credit-default swaps, financial instruments like subprime mortgages. That’s not how you build an economy.”

This campaign isn't just about Bain, or Mitt Romney's past. It's about our future. It's about the kind of new economy we want to build.

Robert Reich Explains How We Need A New Era Of Reform Based On Public -- Not Private -- Morality

Romney Has Public Morality And Private Morality Upside Down

by Robert Reich, cross-posted from his website



Mitt Romney’s reaction to J.P. Morgan Chase’s mounting losses from reckless trades is “the market will take care of it.” His spokesman says “no taxpayer money was at risk” so we don’t need more financial regulation. Romney has even promised to repeal Dodd-Frank if he’s elected president.

Yet at the same time, Romney has come out strongly against same-sex marriage. He’s also against abortion. He has no problem with government intruding on the most intimate of decisions a person makes.

He’s got private and public morality upside down. He doesn’t want to regulate where regulation is necessary — at the highest reaches of the economy, where public immorality has cost us dearly, and will cost even more unless boardroom behavior is constrained. Yet he wants to regulate where regulation is least appropriate — at the level of the individual, in bedrooms and other intimate spaces, where private morality should govern.

This is a dangerous confusion. It should be a matter of personal choice whom to marry and when to have children. But it is undoubtedly a matter of public choice whether big banks should be allowed to take the kind of risky bets that plunged the economy into the worst downturn since the Great Depression, and whether people with great wealth and should be able to buy our democracy with huge campaign contributions.

Please see the attached video and pass it on.

 Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.  He writes a blog at www.robertreich.org.  His most recent book is Beyond Outrage.

Occupy May Day

Eric Drooker

 By Sarah Van Gelder, cross-posted from Yes Magazine

If the mainstream media was confused about Occupy Wall Street in its early days in Zuccotti Park, they’re bound to be completely befuddled this May Day.

May Day already has a lot piled on it. In pre-Christian Europe, May Day was a time to dance, light bonfires, sing, and carry on in celebration of the changing seasons. May Day also marks the anniversary of the 1886 Haymarket massacre, which occurred during a Chicago strike for the eight-hour work day. Also called International Workers’ Day, it’s a holiday in more than 80 countries.

And most recently, the U.S. immigrants right movement has used May 1st for massive street demonstrations and strikes aimed at reforming laws and policies that result in imprisonment, deportation, and discrimination against undocumented people.

This May Day, the Occupy movement is getting involved, calling it “The day without the 99 percent.” What will May Day look like with so many traditions riding on it?

May Day Collaborations—from Bike Caravan to Free University

The way plans are shaping up, in at least some locations around the United States, it could be big, festive, and importantly, include elements of all the May Day traditions. And it could be profoundly different than the big days of action we’ve seen in the past. In the weeks leading up to May Day, various movements have been collaborating. And people will not only be protesting, they’ll be liberating spaces for education, the arts, general assemblies, and teach-ins.

There will be marches, of course. Some permitted, planned, and predictable. Others will be spontaneous, possibly disruptive. In spite of all the police planning (and collaboration with Wall Street private security forces) law enforcement will be kept guessing.

There will be fairs, free food, teach-ins, music, bicycling, marches, and fiestas.

In New York, occupiers are leading up to May Day by organizing 99 pickets in support of workers around the city, from jazz musicians to taxi drivers to laundry workers. The LGBTQTSGNC (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Queer, Trans, Two-Spirit and Gender Non-Conforming) contingent will be out in force. They’ll be a “Guitarmy” marching from New York’s Bryant Park to Madison Square Park, with 1,000 guitars.

At Madison Square Park, there will be a Free University, organized by students fed up with tuition hikes and a student debt burden that’s now reached $1 trillion. Educators will bring classes to the park, there will be skill sharing and workshops.

At Bryant Park, they’ll be a “free” market—where everything is actually free— as well as public art and “opportunities for action.”

In Los Angeles, bike and car caravans will travel to the city center from the four cardinal directions. Along the way, there may be union strike action, and there will be “flash occupations,” free food, and direct action along the way, targeting the foreclosure crisis. Tuition hikes, income inequality, immigrant rights, police violence, the criminalizing of the homeless—the Los Angeles caravans each will focus on some combination of these topics.

In the San Francisco Bay area, nurses and social workers have declared a strike. Bridge and transportation workers and occupiers will attempt to shut down the Golden Gate Bridge. There will be “flying pickets” to shut down banks and business associations.

In Seattle, the group Hip Hop Occupiers to Decolonize is inviting artists, families, and the general public to a day of music, dance, live art, and speakers. There will also be marches of immigrants, occupiers, and workers.

Seattle occupiers will be serving free breakfasts to get the day off to a good start, something that can get you fined in Philadelphia, where the mayor has made it illegal to feed the hungry in city parks.
In Portland, occupiers plan to occupy a vacant home and hold a block party.

In Kalamazoo, Mich., they’ll be camped out on the sidewalk in front of the Bank of America, and there’s a good chance they’ll be doing civil disobedience to stop the auction of public land for hydraulic fracking.

The list goes on and on, from small towns in Wyoming to the place where it all started, lower Manhattan.

This broad range of topics and tactics may bewilder mainstream pundits, but it reflects a transformation in activism as profound as anything that’s happened in social change over the past decades. People are moving out of their isolated interest groups and causes. They’re coming together in a shared analysis, demonstrating their agreement about sources of some of our biggest problems—the overwhelming power of Wall Street and big corporations and our society’s continuing struggle with exclusion of people based on their race, gender, sexual orientation, immigration status, etc. And they’re developing shared ambitious goals and bold strategies that add up to real power and real possibility.

As often happens in the planning of a big event, some of the most important work began well before the actual day, with undocumented workers, union organizers, occupiers, and students coming together to plan events. They’re mixing it up across races, ages, backgrounds, and interests.

It’s a day without the 99 percent, say organizers. No work. No school. No housework. No shopping. No banking.

Even more than what people won’t be doing on May 1, though, the day is about showing up and protesting, but also building the world we want.



Creating a Different World

That part of Occupy seldom gets reported on. The media is too fixated on police action and on its own angst over whether Occupy has (or should have) a list of demands. What is too often missed is that the movement is about occupying the space and the time to create a different world. People outside the political establishment understand that conventional way of doing things doesn’t work anymore. Too many people are hurting.

The wealth of the 1 percent, dangled in front of the rest of us like a carrot, is more and more out of reach. The austerity budgets, the decaying of our towns and cities, the decline of schools and rising costs of college, the disruption of people’s live through immigration raids and deportations, the foreclosures, evictions, homelessness are increasing people’s thirst for change.

And we’re using up our heritage of natural resources, undermining the stability of the climate and the ecological systems that support life in order to channel more and more wealth to the 1 percent?
Few now believe that one or two changes in policy will solve The Mall of this. A financial transaction tax and the restoration of Glass-Steagall would help—and there will be people calling for both on May Day. But what people increasingly understand is that these fixes would not be enough.
Instead, it will take we the people recreating a society, way of life, democracy, and livelihoods that make sense for today.

This May Day—of, by, and for working people (and people who wish they had work), immigrants, and everyone else in the 99 percent—could be a place to begin creating that new world.

Sarah van Gelder is co-founder and executive editor of YES! Magazine and editor of This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99 Percent Movement. She will be doing live commentary on May Day at Free Speech TV, as part of a collaborative effort of independent media organized by The Media Consortium.

Why Does It Seem Everything Republicans Say And Do Is A Trick Or A Lie?

By Dave Johnson, cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future

DonkeyHotey

In today's Progressive Breakfast: Republicans say student-loan interest rates are high because of "Obamacare." House Republicans are trying to block the Violence Against Women act, using a ruse. They oppose the Dream Act and offer a false compromise to make it look like they support the concept. And that's just from today's news.

Why is there so much deception, propaganda, misdirection, distraction and general subterfuge coming from Republicans? Maybe its because they understand what We, the People would do if we understood their real agenda.

Some Of The Most Repeated Deceptions

Here are a few of the most-repeated deceptions that corporate conservatives and Republicans indoctrinate,m saturate and bombard us with:

Tax cuts increase revenue? This one has been around for a long time, and is completely false. Republican tax cuts have always caused deficits. This is the point, the plan, to force the government into debt and then claim we need to cut the things democracy does for citizens. This is why Bush said that it was "incredibly positive news" when his first budget took the country from a huge surplus to a huge deficit. (Yes, that is in quotation marks because it is a quote)

Obama tripled the deficit? (Bush's last budget had a whopping $1.4 trillion deficit - Republicans -- Fox, etc. -- tell people this was Obama's.) (Please click through.)

Obama made the recession worse? Mitt Romney has been repeating this one. These Three Charts To Email To Your Right-Wing Brother-In-Law show clearly how Obama's policies stopped the downward spiral where we were losing hundreds of thousands of jobs a month and and brought us back to (not nearly enough) job-creation.

A Long, Long List

How long would this list be? How many lies and deceptions can you think of, even just off the top of your head? Actually you'd go crazy trying to gather examples of all the deceptive propaganda we are subjected to on a daily, hourly, even minute-by-minute basis.

They are very good at it. They can afford to pay professionals to come up with stuff that really twists people's thinking. They can afford the best pollsters and focus groups to help come up with the best-sounding phrases that resonate with people's core understandings of things. And they can afford the constant repetition that actually forms people's core understanding of things to begin with.

What's a few hundred million spent on creating and disseminating deceptive propaganda, when you get back billions upon billions through tax breaks, wage cuts, offshoring jobs, gutting pension funds, privatizing public assets, killing efforts to get us off of oil and coal, and the rest of the plutocrat 1% agenda?

Why The Lies?

Why are they using deception, distraction, misdirection instead of honest, open, transparent, fact-based ? Why are we constantly bombarded with this nonsense? There is a simple answer: Republican policies are designed to help the 1% at the expense of the 99%. It takes a lot of effort to talk a blue-collar worker into accepting wage cuts and giving up a pension so the 1%'ers can buy a yacht and a private jet.

Spring Has Sprung For The 99%

The Next Stage For The 99% Spring

By Isaiah J. Poole, cross-posted Campaign for America's Future

This past weekend, tens of thousands of people participated in what amounted to the largest effort to train progressives in nonviolent direct action in recent history. But for those who missed out in the wave of "99% Spring" training sessions, organizers today launched an online training page that people can use individually or in groups.

The 99% Spring training sessions offer coaching on how to talk about what's wrong with the economy, how a cadre of corporate leaders and conservative ideologues hijacked our democracy, and how citizens can channel their passions in ways that will enable them to regain some measure of control.

I attended a session Saturday at the Communications Workers of America headquarters in Washington and had an experience similar to the one Josh Harkinson reports on in Mother Jones. I joined with a diverse group of about 35 other people who began the day by sharing personal stories and watching videos that set the context for our learning how to put our bodies on the line for our values.

Harkinson writes that while there has been some resentment that groups such as MoveOn.org have been trying to co-opt the Occupy movement, the 99% Spring is perhaps better viewed as the Occupy movement forcing online mobilization groups to rethink their strategies. Justin Ruben of MoveOn.org concedes as much.

"It's clear that the sorts of tactics we've engaged in in the past are no longer enough," Justin Ruben, MoveOn's Executive Director, wrote in an email to his staff last week, arguing that the growing corporate influence on policy-making has left the group little choice but to take to the streets. In a subsequent interview with Mother Jones, he added, "We know that whoever wins in November, they are still going to be listening more to the 1 percent than to the rest of us because our political system is completely broken. So we don't have the luxury of not engaging in this kind of action."

A good opportunity to use the 99% Spring training is coming up May 9, when Bank of America is holding its annual shareholders meeting in Charlotte, N.C. The annual shareholders meeting of Wells Fargo in San Francisco is also being targeted April 24. As efforts continue to stall to have mortgage write-downs for underwater homeowners and prosecutions for bankers whose actions caused the economic crash, the need for hundreds of thousands of people trained in nonviolent direct action is as great as ever.

The online training session can be completed in less than two hours, in segments at your own pace. You will be rewarded with a better understanding of how we have gotten into the mess that we are in and a sense of how like-minded people can work together to set things right. Plan today to take the training.

Progressive Lessons: Campaign Early And Often

Ilya Sheyman, the 25-year old former national mobilization director at MoveOn, ran an impressive grassroots progressive campaign to become the Democratic candidate for Congress in Illinois' newly drawn 10th Congressional District.

Sheyman mobilized more than 650 volunteers and nearly 20,000 individual donors. He garnered attention and support from progressives across the country and won the backing of the Progressive Change Campaign Committe, MoveOn and Democracy for America.  He was endorsed by former DNC Chair Howard Dean, progressive icon former Senator Russ Feingold, the Sierra Club, labor leaders from AFSCME to the Illinois Federation of Teachers and the Steelworkers, and many others.

He even out-fundraised his primary opponents and was leading in the polls up to election day.

But Ilya Sheyman lost in the Democratic primary to businessman Brad Schneider by eight points.  What happened?

 Amanda Terkel summed it up:  1) low turnout; 2) negative advertising, painting Sheyman's opponent as more conservative then perhaps he was, backfired; and 3) the flaws inherent in a 25-year old candidate who looked even younger than 25. 

Here's Sheyman's own analysis:

1) Late Money and Who Is the Progressive

We ran on the same platform from day one: Put people back to work through federal jobs legislation, restore fairness to our tax system, and invest in America.

Our main opponent entered the race as a self-described "pro-business" moderate. Eventually, we pushed the whole field of candidates to come out for an agenda that looked a lot like ours -- ending the Bush tax cuts, eliminating the cap on income subject to Social Security taxes, and letting Medicare negotiate bulk rates on prescription drugs.

Our opponent then defined himself first as the progressive in the race, through a direct mail program starting two months before Election Day. Meanwhile, we held off on any paid communication with voters for an extra four weeks -- not knowing about the windfall of contributions that would come in at the end, which would have enabled us to have run as aggressive a mail program as he had.

So the takeaway isn't that a progressive can't win -- our opponent won because he ran as a progressive, thanks, in part, to the power of our campaign's message.

2) Astonishingly Low Voter Turnout

For the second election in a row, voter turnout hit a record-breaking low, not only in the 10th District, but all over the Chicagoland area, throwing off some of our targeting plans and strategy.

Illinois has a problem when it comes to voter disenfranchisement and civic engagement. A big reminder from this race is that if progressives are going to win, we need to focus on turning that trend around and getting voters to feel a stake in the political process again.

3) Last Minute Smear Campaigns Work

In the 10th District, Jewish voters are a key bloc. I should know -- I'm a product of that Jewish community, where my family and I have lived since arriving in this country as Jewish refugees from the former Soviet Union in 1991.

Despite my personal history and my pro-Israel positions, something happened in the final week of our race.

Those who opposed my candidacy sought to cast a shadow of doubt over my commitment to a Jewish democratic homeland in the State of Israel, through a dishonest whisper campaign, the extent of which I may never fully know.

This highly targeted effort -- in robocalls, emails, and synagogues -- combined with the very low voter turnout in the election, undoubtedly had a disproportionate effect on the outcome, and came too late for us to respond meaningfully. It also proves the importance of early voter-to-voter organizing. We had the truth on our side -- but we didn't organize as effectively in that community -- my community -- to deliver the facts and counteract the dishonest attacks.

Sheyman was quick to point out that the lesson was not that progressive campaigns don't work or that young people can't run for office.  As he argues: 

If you've got an idea or a deeply held conviction, if you're going to run on progressive values, and work hard every day to build something real -- skip the line. Don't wait. Even if they say you're too young, or that it's not your turn.

The challenges this country faces are far too great to let something as arbitrary as age, or the conventional wisdom, stand in the way of you helping steer this country in a new direction.

A Progressive Budget Or The Ryan Plan: American Dream Or American Nightmare

 Who Pays The Bill For Wall Street's Mess?

By Robert Borosage, cross-posted from Campaign For America's Future

DonkeyHotey

Yesterday, House Republicans rolled out their budget plan in the Washington version of a Hollywood movie opening. There was a star turn for Budget Chair Paul Ryan at a conservative think tank. Gaseous rhetoric -- "liberties endangered, time to choose" -- fouled the air. There were dueling videos, and furious salvos of partisan messaging. And a backup document -- the "Path to Prosperity" -- festooned with tables for wonks to wallow in.

Today, with fewer trumpets and less fanfare, the Congressional Progressive Caucus releases its budget plan -- A Budget for All.

Each of the two documents is designed to define a message. Their contrasts help clarify the real choices the country faces. Federal deficits exploded after Wall Street's excesses blew up the economy. The questions now are who gets the bill and when does the payment start? Ryan's Republican budget and the CPC's offer starkly different answers that would take the country in starkly different directions.

The Bathtub Fantasy

"My goal is to cut government... to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." Grover Norquist.

Ryan's Republican budget, like a speedo bathing suit on a corpulent geezer, is revealing, but not flattering. Even by Washington standards, this is a remarkably dishonest document. It claims to be serious, but offers targets that are simply preposterous. It calls for leveling with the American people, but cravenly ducks laying out who will pay for top end tax cuts. It calls itself a "blueprint for American renewal" while systematically trampling the American dream.

Republicans have lined up like lemmings to sign Grover Norquist's infamous pledge never to raise taxes on anyone at any time. But turns out they even treat the quips of the conservative gadfly as gospel. As the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out, the Ryan budget, by its own numbers, assiduously pursues Grover's bathtub fantasy.

The Congressional Budget Office reports that under the Ryan budget, by 2050 most of the federal government would simply cease to exist. Ryan's budget would shrink all federal expenditures outside of interest payments, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and children's health to 3.75 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).

To translate that arcane measure, CBO notes that "spending for defense alone has not been lower than 3 percent of GDP in any year [since World War II]. " Ryan and Republicans call for increasing defense spending -- so the rest of the government would have to be cut to bathtub size. Ryan argues that the "challenges this nation faces are among the largest in its history," but the budget target he offers is, well, goofy.


Tribunes of the 1%

With this budget, Republicans choose to be the tribunes of the 1%. They send the bill not to the banks that blew up the economy or the wealthy that enjoyed the party, but to the elderly, the middle class and the poor.
 Consider:

• Cut Taxes on The Rich. At a time of extreme inequality -- with the top 1 percent capturing a staggering 93 percent of all income gains in 2010 -- Republicans would dramatically lower taxes on the wealthiest Americans and, by definition, raise them on working families.

[Ryan isn't candid enough to admit to that, of course. He extends the top end Bush tax cuts, cuts top income tax rates to 25 percent, sustains lower rates on wealth (capital gains, dividends, millionaires' estates) while claiming the reforms will raise as much money by eliminating loopholes and tax breaks that he refuses to specify. But the only way to raise enough money to do that is to go after the biggest deductions -- limit the mortgage deduction for middle class homeowners and/or cut the tax benefits for employers provided health care. The first would add to housing woes; the second would lead more employers to stop providing health care. Both reforms that would directly hit working families.]

• Cut Health Care for Millions. With health care costs soaring and employers cutting back on health insurance benefits, the Republican budget would add millions to the rolls of the uninsured by eliminating the Obama health care reforms, with no program in its place.

• End Medicare as We Know It. With boomers headed into retirement and soaring Medicare and Medicaid costs driving projected deficits, we have to get health care costs under control. But instead of taking on the drug and insurance companies and the hospital complexes that drive up costs, the Republican budget would end Medicare as we know it, requiring seniors to pay more. When today's 55-year-olds retire, they would discover that Medicare has been turned into a voucher or "premium support" program that will not keep up with health care costs, forcing them to pay thousands more out of their own pockets. The Republican budget would also cut Medicaid support drastically for the most vulnerable -- the impoverished, the disabled, and the terminally ill.

• Cut Access to College. With college tuition soaring and more and more people being priced out of the education they have earned and need, the Republican budget would solve the problem by cutting back on student loan and grant programs. They would ration college admission by income rather than by merit.

• The Poor Pay for Deficit Reduction. And with poverty rising, the Republican budget would require that the poorest and most vulnerable Americans bear much of the burden of reducing the deficits that exploded when Wall Street blew up the economy. (Although, again, Republicans don't admit which domestic programs would take the hit. But, by reducing spending on domestic discretionary programs by one third in 10 years, they insure devastating cuts in everything from Head Start to education to disease control.)

• Let America Decline. With our basic infrastructure -- from roads to schools to sewage systems -- in dangerous decline, the construction industry flat on its back, and interest rates near record lows, Republicans call for spending less, not more, on rebuilding America, costing jobs, and rendering our economy less competitive and putting more lives at risk.

• Make the World a Tax Haven. With global corporations growing ever more adept at using transfer pricing and overseas tax havens to avoid taxes here at home, Republicans would make the entire world outside the U.S. a corporate tax haven, ending any taxation on profits reported abroad, encouraging companies to move jobs and book profits abroad.

• Pad the Pentagon. With the U.S. spending almost as much on its military as the rest of the world combined, Republicans demand that we raise, not pare, Pentagon spending.

The Austerity Trap

Ryan's Republican Budget has one other fundamental message -- that America must turn its attention immediately to the "crushing burden of debt." Ryan would cut spending by over $500 billion in the first two years compared to the president's budget, while claiming to lower taxes by about $131 billion. That takes nearly a 2 percent of GDP boost out of an economy growing at about the same rate. Ryan brags that the Republican budget reduces deficits faster and lower than the president's budget. (Although given that he won't reveal how he pays for over $4 trillion in tax cuts and what programs would take the spending cuts, that is far from proven.)

Lost in the race for austerity is the reality that we desperately need jobs and growth. Although the economy has started to generate jobs, 25 million Americans are still in need of full time work. We have fewer jobs than we had a decade ago, and millions more people. This debate should be focused on jobs, not cuts.
Ryan and Republicans duck this by arguing that austerity will increase confidence, and "job creators" will get to work. But we have seen how austerity works in Europe, now teetering on the edge of recession. It not only costs jobs; it makes deficit reduction harder. Ryan's budget assumes a rate of growth that his spending cuts and layoffs are likely to undermine.

The Budget for All

In stark contrast, today the Congressional Progressive Caucus releases its FY2013 "Budget for All." (Not yet posted on web as this is written.) This will be offered as an alternative to the Ryan budget on the floor of the Congress and in the halls of public opinion. It, too, is a message document -- designed to show that common sense priorities do add up.

The CPC budget reduces deficits faster than Ryan does over the first 10 years. But the CPC begins sensibly, by boosting the economy with jobs measures in the early years. It calls for direct hiring programs -- a Student Jobs Corps and a School Improvement Corps among others. It would rebuild America with an infrastructure bank and bigger investment in roads, bridges and trains. It sustains investment in research and development, clean energy and manufacturing. And it repeals the austerity inflicted by the debt ceiling agreement.

The CPC assumption is that putting people back to work is the priority. And its budget shows this is not incompatible with deficit reduction.

As the economy recovers, the CPC would send the bill for deficit reduction to those who contributed to or benefited from the mess. It focuses on the "true drivers of our deficit -- unsustainable tax policies, the wars overseas, and the causes and effects of the recent recession" -- rather than going after programs for the poor and the elderly.

Hold Wall Street Responsible. The CPC would hold the banks accountable, imposing a "financial crisis responsibility fee" on the banks, raising $90 billion over 10 years and putting a brake on computer driven, nano-second financial speculation by imposing a financial transactions tax raising nearly $850 billion over 10 years.

Tax the Rich. Instead of lowering taxes on the rich, the CPC would raise them -- repealing the top end Bush tax cuts, taxing income from wealth at the same rate as income from work, raising tax rates on millionaires. The CPC would even impose a small temporary surcharge on individual fortunes over $10 million.

The CPC embraces Obama's minimum tax on overseas profits, curbs deductions for CEO stock options, and ends fossil fuel preferences. Perhaps its most controversial clause is its most sensible -- putting a price on carbon emissions, while aggressively refunding costs to working and poor families.

Reform Health Care. On soaring health care costs, the CPC would seek to limit costs, not send them to the most vulnerable. It would embrace the reforms built into the health care bill, add a public option to compete with private insurers, and require bulk purchase negotiations with drug companies for lower prices on drugs.

Pare the Pentagon. The Pentagon budget would be modestly pared over 10 years. Where Ryan ducks on Social Security, the CPC would act, lifting the income cap on Social Security taxes to secure the program.

The Choice

In his budget, Ryan suggests, "Americans, not Washington, deserve to choose the path their nation takes." These two budgets make that choice clear. The CPC would invest in jobs, preserve Social Security and Medicare, and call on the banks and the wealthy to pay a hefty share for getting us out of the hole we are in. Ryan's Republican budget would impose austerity, lavish benefits on the rich, end Medicare as we know it and send the bill for the mess to working families, the poor and the elderly. The CPC would invest in rebuilding the country and reviving the American Dream. Ryan would invest in policing the world and protecting the tax havens of multinationals, and turn the Dream into a fantasy. The Ryan budget stands with the 1%. The CPC with the rest of us. You get to choose.