Mad as Hell, But Don't Want to Join The Tea Party?

By Jamie Court, Author, The Progressive's Guide To Raising Hell/President Consumer Watchdog
Huffington Post
September 15, 2010 09:03 AM

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The Tea Party is on a roll with its upset Senate primary victory in Delaware. If the rest of us don't start raising hell, the Tea Party will have us living it.

Are you mad as hell but don't want to join the Tea Party? Do you still want to get the change you voted for in 2008? That's most Americans, but the right wing is the only wing talking about its anger.

Public outrage is the most powerful force in the world if you know how to leverage it and turn it into power. That's why I wrote The Progressive's Guide To Raising Hell, published today by Chelsea Green, to show average Americans how their common anger can be turned into power using the force of public opinion online and offline.

Award-winning filmmaker Robert Greenwald made this short video about Raising Hell and its battle-proven, step-by-step tactics that artfully sums up the book's essence.



I have spent two decades fighting and winning campaigns against insurance companies, Big Oil, utilities, banks, and corrupt politicians. The tactics of turning anger into change are the same regardless of whether you are trying to win a Senate primary, pass a ballot measure or get an insurer to pay a claim.

Change is no simple matter in America politics, as Americans have recently learned so well.

Elections rarely produce the change they promise because too often ballot victories leave intact the ways power is exercised, and on whose behalf. The special interests that fund and curry favor with our legislators may rebalance their party allegiances, but not their self-interest.

Anger, not hope, is the fuel of political and economic change. As things grow worse and worse, public rage grows more intense--and so does the energy for making things better. And in 2010 in America, anger rules, but it needs to be vectored and focused if it is to succeed in fueling the type of change that the majority of Americans believe in.

If progressives walk away, rather than engage, the Tea Party and GOP will capture the popular anger and turn it against government, rather than focus it rightly back on the targets of the 2008 election: Wall Street, health insurers, polluters, the military industrial complex, and the politicians they buy. If we want progress, the kind that polls show 60 percent of Americans believe in, we need to do more than vote every two to four years or wait for Obama to learn the tactics of confrontation.

We need to make demands. We need to raise some hell. The alternative is giving up the reins of government to a flash mob that wants to do nothing but destroy it.

As Goes Arizona, Whither Goes the Nation?

by Randall Amster, Professor, Prescott College, AZ
Commondreams.org
Sept. 6, 2010


We are now fully through the looking glass here in the state that has become synonymous with reactionary fear-mongering and institutionalized intolerance. To wit:
Our sitting governor gets stumped during the "introductions" portion of a televised debate, winds up righting herself with the glorious phrase, "I have did everything I could do," and then proceeds to storm out of a post-debate media session when the questions get too hard. The federal government has sued our swaggering Sheriff Joe Arpaio for failing to comply with information requests pertinent to a wider investigation over his Kafkaesque policies and practices. And State Sen. Russell Pearce, sponsor of the infamous SB 1070, continues to prattle on about "anchor babies" and the need to abolish the 14th Amendment to save the republic.

This might all be funny if it wasn't indicative of a pattern that is being emulated in other states.

Even after her gut-wrenching and now legendary "pregnant pause" during the debate, Jan Brewer still leads her Democratic rival Terry Goddard by double-digits in the polls largely due to the mere fact that she signed SB 1070 into law. No wonder candidates for high office from Florida to California (both states with significant Hispanic populations) are parroting this strategy and explicitly running on an anti-immigrant platform. From the Eastern Seaboard to the Rust Belt, states are looking to imitate Arizona's "zero tolerance" approach to immigration (an apt phrasing if ever there was one). Even on a popular train route across the northern U.S., which doesn't cross any borders, passengers are subjected to routine "where are your papers?" inquiries based largely on their outward appearance.

The truly remarkable thing about this metastasizing xenophobia is that it is based entirely on empirical falsehoods, by most respectable accounts.

Illegal immigration in the U.S. has been sharply declining over the past decade. Violence on the U.S. side of the border with Mexico has likewise been steadily dropping. Crime rates among immigrant communities are on par with or lower than those with similar demographics. Immigrants (legal and illegal alike) put more into the public coffers than they take out through social services. Obviously we can play these sorts of "lies, damn lies, and statistics" games indefinitely, going back and forth citing studies and sources to support divergent positions. But this type of "battle of the experts" bantering gets us nowhere productive, and misses the larger points that most need our attention.

Before speaking to some of those "bigger picture" issues, a few more salient lessons from the desert are in order before they wash up on your local shores.

It turns out that the governor's inner circle of advisors includes a number with various personal and professional stakes in the prison-expanding revenues likely to be generated by the influx of immigrant detainees yielded by SB 1070. The governor is guided by lobbyists and close operatives of the Corrections Corporation of America, which capitalizes to the tune of millions per month on warehousing transferred undocumented individuals. While the racialized nature of "breathing while brown" laws is obvious, equally so is the financially interlocking character of the legislative parties involved and their pecuniary interests. It is likely that similarly dubious connections exist whenever race-baiting politicians fan the flames of ignorance and persecution.

Another intriguing wrinkle from the annals of Arizona is the blatant hijacking of the Green Party ballot line, ostensibly by Republican operatives with a stake in siphoning votes from Democrats in contested districts and generally gumming up the electoral works with more platforms for their narrow ideology. Under a quirk in Arizona law that allows individuals to appear on the general ballot if they receive even a single vote (their own, perhaps) in an open primary without an official minor party nominee, Republicans managed to place stealth candidates on the roster in a number of contests around the state. Knowing that some left-leaning voters will choose the Green candidate without further inspecting their actual views and values, this could be sufficient to tip the balance in close races toward the Republicans. And under the state's Clean Elections law, these calculating efforts even wind up being funded by the taxpayers.

I suspect that some of these tales may resonate with themes prevalent in your area. Or soon will.


Continue reading here.

Randall Amster, J.D., Ph.D., teaches Peace Studies at Prescott College, and is the Executive Director of the Peace & Justice Studies Association. His most recent book is Lost In Space: The Criminalization, Globalization, and Urban Ecology of Homelessness (LFB Scholarly 2008). And here is the rest of it.

WHY DEMOCRATS DON’T GET IT

 “JOBS-JOBS-JOBS” What a joke! And Democrats repeat that over and over every election cycle, hoping to get elected. A futile exercise while ignoring the real elephant in the economy. Same is true for immigration reform – totally useless promises until free trade agreements and policies, especially NAFTA, are confronted and made “fair” for the middle class who once owned their businesses and good jobs – yes, having a good job with fair wages and benefits is something to own just as a small business is. And, this applies to almost extinct US farmers in the farmbelt, as well as farmers in Mexico and Central America, that were destroyed by NAFTA's corporate free-for-all in once self-sufficient rural economies. After Democrats deliver on fair trade agreements and policies, THEN they can promise “JOBS-JOBS-JOBS” and real immigration reform. They are both trampled by that same elephant. We never seem to get to the root cause of why we don’t have good jobs and why migrants are dying in the Desert -- over 230 known dead this fiscal year since October 1, 2009! We must address the predatory “free trade” policies and agreements before the economy, not just ours, the global economy, can be healthy and a viable middle class restored and migrants cease to die in the Desert.   Paul Barby  Read this article.

INTERNATIONAL LABOR RIGHTS FORUM

NAFTA

ILRF has been at the forefront of thought regarding the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) since its inception. Our position is that that unless more enforceable labor rights provisions are established in the agreement, there will be benefits of free trade but these benefits will not go to poor workers. While the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC) was put in place under NAFTA to promote the protection of basic worker rights, the agreement lacks adequate enforcement mechanisms. As a result, corporate profit takes priority in the market place over the rights of laborers.  [Emphasis added.

More on the NAALC

The ILRF believes that due to the NAALC’s ineffectiveness, NAFTA has been detrimental to workers throughout North America. It has resulted in harmful downward pressures in labor markets—benefiting corporations at the expense of workers in the US, Canada, and Mexico.  [Emphasis added.]

[Paul Barby comment:  for 30 years or more the political battle cry of democrats has been jobs, education and health care.  So where are the jobs Democrats have promised for years?  They are impossible to achieve so long as free trade agreements dominate the global economy.  And what use is education except to train the multitude of workers necessary to produce the corporate profits they don’t share in?  Finally, thanks to Obama, we have universal health care but only a modicum of what is needed because of conservative (free-traders) opposition.  Until Democrats get the cojones to take on free trade issues, “jobs-jobs-jobs” is trite, worn-out, ineffective political rhetoric and migrants continue to die.  Come on, Democrats.  Get a clue.  Take on NAFTA and the rest of the free trade agreements and policies to make them fair to everyone, not just corporate investors.] 

The ILRF has found that in the case of both the US and Canada, NAFTA not only failed in its promise to create high productivity export jobs with better wages, but contributed to pushing more than one million workers out of higher wage jobs and into lower wage positions in non-trade related industries. In the U.S., poor women in apparel industries were particularly hurt, who held two-thirds of jobs that were lost.

NAFTA has brought about systematic changes in the Mexican economy and labor market. Through the 1994 agreement Mexico was opened to US subsidized agricultural goods; this has damaged Mexican markets, businesses, and farm workers which cannot compete with the artificially cheap prices. The Mexican corn industry for instance, a longstanding integral part of Mexico’s economy, has suffered severely from heavy US corn subsidies. Since NAFTA’s inception cheap US corn (kept artificially cheap at the expense of US taxpayers) has flooded into Mexico, driving down the real prices for corn received by Mexican farmers: from 1994 to 2003, prices dropped by some 70%. This is unsurprising considering the fact that in the year 2000, US subsidies equaled ten times Mexico’s entire agricultural budget. Since Mexico became vulnerable to US subsidies, the real minimum wage has declined by 20 percent; half of Mexico’s population now lives in poverty.  [Emphasis added.]

[Paul Barby comment:  NAFTA drives immigration from rural Mexican communities that depend upon agriculture.  Just as with jobs, we cannot curb nor adequately reform immigration until “free trade” agreements are replaced by “fair trade” agreements that provide equal treatment for labor and resources with what capital presently enjoys and benefits.  Free trade agreements allow capital to exploit labor and resources as it floats around the globe to find cheaper labor and lax resource regulations.]

While the agreement has generated the decline of Mexico’s corn industry, causing rural poverty, it has also opened new corporate-driven jobs to Mexican workers. It has thus caused an overall shift in the nature of Mexican employment. On the positive side, access to employment has provided new economic opportunities. Unfortunately, it has come hand in hand with systematic violations in the workplace. A significant number of the jobs created have been in the unregulated informal sector, where labor enforcement is virtually non-existent. Many workers have also turned to employment in the maquiladoras, corporate-driven sweatshops. [Emphasis added.]  Social benefits in maquiladoras are virtually non-existent and occupational health and safety regulations are substandard. Wages are almost 40% lower than those paid in heavy non-maquila manufacturing industries, and because of forced mandatory overtime, workers are subject to long and grueling working hours. This is particularly difficult for women workers who often are faced with the double burden of continued traditional home-work and childcare.

In 2005 ILRF contracted research on the plight of women maquila workers, who comprise the bulk of the workforce. The report found that women suffer under a variety of forms of sexual discrimination. Mandatory overtime increases a woman’s susceptibility to forced sexual relations with employers and/or to sexual harassment both within and beyond the workplace. Moreover, in maquiladoras pregnancy and urine tests are commonly used as preconditions for continued employment.

[Paul Barby comment:  Don’t misconstrue my comments.  Corporations are necessary in our global economy – but they cannot be the only beneficiary, thanks to free trade economic policies.  True capitalism requires a balance between resources (raw materials), labor (energy to produce) and capital (lubricant to enable fair enterprise)].  Yes, this is a federal issue, not a state issue, but until this wheel squeaks from the grassroots, nothing will be done.

http://www.laborrights.org/creating-a-sweatfree-world/changing-global-trade-rules/nafta

The Real Lesson of Labor Day

By Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2010
RobertReich.org

Welcome to the worst Labor Day in the memory of most Americans. Organized labor is down to about 7 percent of the private work force. Members of non-organized labor — most of the rest of us — are unemployed, underemployed or underwater. The Labor Department reported on Friday that just 67,000 new private-sector jobs were created in August, which, when added to the loss of public-sector (mostly temporary Census worker jobs) resulted in a net loss of over 50,000 jobs for the month. But at least 125,000 net new jobs are needed to keep up with the growth of the potential work force.

Face it: The national economy isn’t escaping the gravitational pull of the Great Recession. None of the standard booster rockets are working. Near-zero short-term interest rates from the Fed, almost record-low borrowing costs in the bond market, a giant stimulus package, along with tax credits for small businesses that hire the long-term unemployed have all failed to do enough.

That’s because the real problem has to do with the structure of the economy, not the business cycle. No booster rocket can work unless consumers are able, at some point, to keep the economy moving on their own. But consumers no longer have the purchasing power to buy the goods and services they produce as workers; for some time now, their means haven’t kept up with what the growing economy could and should have been able to provide them.

1. The Origin of the Crisis

This crisis began decades ago when a new wave of technology — things like satellite communications, container ships, computers and eventually the Internet — made it cheaper for American employers to use low-wage labor abroad or labor-replacing software here at home than to continue paying the typical worker a middle-class wage. Even though the American economy kept growing, hourly wages flattened. The median male worker earns less today, adjusted for inflation, than he did 30 years ago.

But for years American families kept spending as if their incomes were keeping pace with overall economic growth. And their spending fueled continued growth. How did families manage this trick? First, women streamed into the paid work force. By the late 1990s, more than 60 percent of mothers with young children worked outside the home (in 1966, only 24 percent did).

Second, everyone put in more hours. What families didn’t receive in wage increases they made up for in work increases. By the mid-2000s, the typical male worker was putting in roughly 100 hours more each year than two decades before, and the typical female worker about 200 hours more.

When American families couldn’t squeeze any more income out of these two coping mechanisms, they embarked on a third: going ever deeper into debt. This seemed painless — as long as home prices were soaring. From 2002 to 2007, American households extracted $2.3 trillion from their homes.

Eventually, of course, the debt bubble burst — and with it, the last coping mechanism. Now we’re left to deal with the underlying problem that we’ve avoided for decades. Even if nearly everyone was employed, the vast middle class still wouldn’t have enough money to buy what the economy is capable of producing.

Where have all the economic gains gone? Mostly to the top. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty examined tax returns from 1913 to 2008. They discovered an interesting pattern. In the late 1970s, the richest 1 percent of American families took in about 9 percent of the nation’s total income; by 2007, the top 1 percent took in 23.5 percent of total income.

It’s no coincidence that the last time income was this concentrated was in 1928. I do not mean to suggest that such astonishing consolidations of income at the top directly cause sharp economic declines. The connection is more subtle.

The rich spend a much smaller proportion of their incomes than the rest of us. So when they get a disproportionate share of total income, the economy is robbed of the demand it needs to keep growing and creating jobs.

What’s more, the rich don’t necessarily invest their earnings and savings in the American economy; they send them anywhere around the globe where they’ll summon the highest returns — sometimes that’s here, but often it’s the Cayman Islands, China or elsewhere. The rich also put their money into assets most likely to attract other big investors (commodities, stocks, dot-coms or real estate), which can become wildly inflated as a result.

Meanwhile, as the economy grows, the vast majority in the middle naturally want to live better. Their consequent spending fuels continued growth and creates enough jobs for almost everyone, at least for a time. But because this situation can’t be sustained, at some point — 1929 and 2008 offer ready examples — the bill comes due.


Continue reading here.

Jan Brewer : Private Prisons and Lobbyists

HAPPY LABOR DAY!

May I offer my thanks and congratulations to the members of organized labor on this Labor Day 2010.  Indeed, it is the American labor movement that fought to protect American jobs and brought us fair wages, safe workplaces and reasonable employee benefits.   

In the words of John F. Kennedy, Our unions have fought for aid to education, better housing, and further development of our rich natural resources.  They speak not for narrow self-interest, but for the public interest and the people.

The celebration of Labor Day would be all the more meaningful if Arizona's appointed governor and the Republican-led legislature had not so clearly turned their backs on the struggles and concerns of the middle class working sector. The work force which is the backbone of Arizona must be allowed to share the fruit of their labor through just wages, fair taxes, affordable health care, a strong public education system and job opportunities for their sons and daughters. 

We acknowledge the mutual dependence of capital and labor. It has been well said "neither capital can do without labor, nor labor without capital."  This mutual dependence can exist only in the atmosphere of honesty, fairness and justice.  The current governor and legislature have failed to recognize this standard. 

Arizona deserves better than what the last two years have wrought.

                                                                                                    
                                                                                                     Don Jorgensen, Chair LD 26 Democrats

Brigadier General Adams: Senate Must OK U.S.-Russia Pact on nuclear arms

By John Adams
Arizona Republic
Sept. 6, 2010

The case for U.S. Senate ratification of the New START Treaty is straightforward:

It makes us safer.

And for precisely that reason, Defense Secretary Robert Gates declared it has "the unanimous support of the U.S. military." New START would put a cap on Russia's strategic nuclear arsenal, re-establish and strengthen the verification regime that allows U.S. inspectors to keep tabs on Russia's weapons. It would also enhance cooperation to prevent nuclear terrorism and strengthen our national security.

Senior Republican and Democratic officials from the last seven administrations have testified in favor of New START. Seven former commanders of the U.S. Strategic Command urged the Senate to ratify it. Thirty high-level national-security experts - including Bush and Reagan officials like Colin Powell and Frank Carlucci - signed an open letter in support.

In short, there is an overwhelming consensus among the military and national security establishment in support of the treaty. Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona has raised a number of questions about the treaty, and over the course of 21 Senate hearings and briefings over the last five months, those questions have been addressed.

His primary concern appears not to be with the treaty, which he called "benign," but rather with the separate question of whether there is enough funding to maintain the U.S. nuclear arsenal in the years ahead. He claims there may be cost overruns in future years for some projects and has threatened to hold up a vote on the treaty unless he is satisfied.

On the substance, Sen. Kyl's call for even more funding runs counter to the thinking of our military leadership and those in charge of our nuclear weapons. The U.S. secretary of Defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, STRATCOM commander and NNSA director have all said the administration's proposed $80 billion plan for modernization of the nuclear-weapons infrastructure over the next decade - a significant, 10 percent increase over current levels - is more than adequate. Substance notwithstanding, the treaty should not be held hostage over this unrelated matter.

I'll tell you why. Rejection or delay of this treaty carries serious consequences. By the time the Senate Foreign Relations Committee votes in mid-September on whether to send it to the floor for ratification, it will have been more than 280 days since U.S. on-site monitoring of Russia's nuclear weapons and facilities was suspended.

Ratification of New START allows those vital verification measures to resume, whereas failure to ratify prolongs the gap in monitoring and the associated risk, a prospect the Pentagon has called "costly and destabilizing." Sen. Kyl recently acknowledged that he was unaware that inspections of Russian weapons had been suspended since last December when the original START expired. Side issues should not hold this treaty hostage, to the detriment of our national security.


Given the overwhelming bipartisan support for the treaty and the serious implications of failing to renew monitoring of the Russian arsenal, the Senate should heed the advice of those experts who command our nuclear weapons and maintain our arsenal - and promptly approve New START.

Brigadier General John Adams served as deputy United States military representative to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Military Committee in Brussels, Belgium, the highest military authority of NATO. He retired in 2007 after a 31-year career and now lives with his wife in Tucson.
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Democracy Now Study: CEOs Who Fired Most Workers Earned Highest Pay

A new study shows the CEOs who fired the most workers during the economic recession have also taken home the highest pay. According to the Institute for Policy Studies, the CEOs of the fifty corporations responsible for the worst layoffs were paid an average $12 million—42 percent more than the average for the Standard & Poor’s 500.

WATCH VIDEO



Executive Excess Report

Democracy Now: Educators Push Back Against Obama’s "Business Model" for School Reforms

Karen Lewis, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, and Lois Weiner, a professor of education at New Jersey City University challenge  education reform initiatives, including expanding charter schools and national academic standards that "vocationalize" schools by preparing students to work in a global economy. This agenda is  driven by conservative foundations.

WATCH VIDEO:

Take the "For Sale" sign off the Capitol lawn!

The Real News: Behind Mexico's Bloodshed

Whacking the Middle Class

When Wall Street Rules, We Get Wall Street Rules


By DEAN BAKER
Counterpunch
Weekend Edition Aug. 20-22

The middle class is getting whacked by the Great Recession. Fifteen million people are out of work, another 9 million workers can only find part-time jobs, and millions more have given up looking for work altogether. Those lucky enough to be employed are unlikely to see any substantial wage gains for years to come.

Millions of homeowners are facing the loss of their home and more than 10 million are underwater in their mortgage. Most of the huge baby boom cohort is approaching retirement with little other than Social Security to support them, now that the collapse of the housing bubble has destroyed their home equity and much of the rest of their savings.

This pain is infuriating for two reasons. First, this was an entirely preventable disaster. The housing bubble was easy to see. Competent economists had long warned of its dangers.

The second reason why the current situation is infuriating is that we know how to get the economy out of this mess. We just need to boost demand. This can be done either with much more government stimulus, more aggressive monetary policy from the Fed, or pushing the dollar down to boost exports.

If this disaster were preventable and we knew how to get out of it, why didn't our leaders try to stop it before it happened? Why don't they take the steps necessary now to get the economy moving again?

The answer to both these questions is simple: The politicians work for someone else. On Election Day, the politicians might need our votes, but they won't get to be serious contenders unless they've gotten the campaign contributions of the big money crew. And the moneyed elite has been using its control of the political process to ensure that an ever larger share of the economy's output is redistributed upward in their direction.

Click on picture

The reason that there was little interest in cracking down on the housing bubble is that Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and the rest were making a fortune from the financial shenanigans that fueled the bubble. Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin personally pocketed over $100 million from this fun. Why would they want the government to rein it in?

Of course, when the bubble did finally blow and threaten their banks with bankruptcy, the Wall Street crew just ran to the government for help. And they got trillions of dollars in loans and loan guarantees to ensure that they would not be victims of the crisis they had created. Now that they are back on their feet, with Wall Street profits and bonuses both again at near record levels, they see little reason to concern themselves with the measures that might set the economy right for the rest of us.

After all, the steps necessary to revitalize the economy could mean some inflation. This would reduce the value of the debt owned by the wealthy. And the wealthy don't see any reason that they should risk any of their wealth just for the good of the economy.

We have enormous ground to cover to restore an economy that works for the vast majority, but the first step is to know where we are. The upward redistribution of the last three decades has nothing to do with the market and a belief in "market fundamentalism." This is about a process where the rich and powerful have rewritten the rules to make themselves richer and more powerful.
Continue reading here.