Blogs: David Sirota

Lame Duck Agency Gifts to Corporate Donors Officially Begin

David Sirota — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 23:16:57 -0400

Per the reporting I've done for my book and for the New York Times magazine on Western populism and energy politics, check this out this story from the Associated Press. Basically, the Bush Bureau of Land Management looks like it is trying to crush progressives state and local efforts to better regulate oil and gas drilling in the Rocky Mountain West.

This smells like one of those lame-duck, industry gifts that presidents try to give corporate donors on the way out of office - not sure it will work, but the shenanigans have officially started.

This is an ongoing series from the national tour for THE UPRISING. You can order The Uprising at Amazon.com or through your local independent bookstore.

Uprising Against Oil & Gas Drilling Intensifies In the West

David Sirota — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:24:38 -0400

ST. LOUIS - The St. Louis archway, which I visited yesterday, may bill itself as the gateway to the West, but the real gateway this election to the West for Democrats could be through oil and gas politics.

A few weeks back, I wrote a New York Times magazine story on the prairie populist backlash to unbridled oil and gas drilling in key swing regions of the Rocky Mountain West that could be decisive in the upcoming presidential and congressional elections. This is a big theme in my book, THE UPRISING.

Today, Democracy Now! has something of a follow-up report, looking more deeply at just how much drilling is going on. Goodman's report coincides with the raucous fight in Colorado to tighten rules regulating oil and gas drilling.

Goodman is a great journalist, and though her show is often ignored in the blogosphere, it is an essential part of the growing progressive media infrastructure (and I differentiate the progressive media infrastructure from the partisan media noise machine). She was kind enough to have me on her show a few weeks back - and this report on the politics of oil and gas is terrific.

Check out Goodman's report - it offers more examples of local conservative constituencies fighting back against the national Republican Party's efforts to turn the Rocky Mountain region into an energy colony. If Democrats stand tall against the right's "drill at all cost" mantra, they could indeed win over a wide swath of independent and GOP voters who know the gas price profiteering crisis we face has nothing to do with a crude oil supply shortage - and that the "drill" mantra is a slogan to help pad oil industry profits.

This is an ongoing series from the national tour for THE UPRISING. You can order The Uprising at Amazon.com or through your local independent bookstore.

Want A Progressive Movement? Then Support Progressive Voices.

David Sirota — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 09:10:53 -0400

We tend to complain a lot about not having progressive voices in the media, and yet we watch how the conservative movement rams their voices into the media through books and publications. When conservative authors sell lots of books or conservative magazines build a big circulation, the rest of the media comes calling. It's a pretty simple formula, and that's why one of the things I tell audiences at my events is that by buying a progressive book or by subscribing to a progressive magazine, you are engaging in an act of movement building. This concept is at the heart of my new newspaper column today.

In the column, I promote three terrific books from three terrific progressive authors - The Real McCain from Cliff Schecter, The Big Sort from Bill Bishop and Bad Samaritans from Ha-Joon Chang.

Since the column began back in September, I have tried to use it as a platform to promote the great work of progressives. Doing that expresses the same impulse that led me to create the Progressive States Network - a group that spends most of its time promoting the terrific work of others at the state level. Such efforts try to counter one of the worst traits that plagues the left: territorialism.

Let's be honest: today, there is still very little national movement-building infrastructure designed to help promote the work of others. The multimillion-dollar progressive institutions in Washington spend almost no time promoting or supporting the work of anyone other than themselves, leaving many local groups, organizers, writers to feel completely alone in their work. The same can be said for some of the biggest Internet-based groups and blogs. (As just a personal aside: After my own book tour when I start trying to find a new job, I am considering a major career change completely out of politics and writing for fear that it is impossible to make a living in this line of work, especially if you don't live in Washington, D.C...I tell you this not to lament and not feeling awful about it - it just may be a fact of life, though I will admit I am a bit surprised about it in that I thought it might feel like the landscape was a bit less bleak after scratching and clawing to get a column into 45 newspapers and writing two NY Times betsellers...any job ideas are welcome...but I digress).

I won't go into the details of the three books I promote in the column - you can read the column for that. The point of this post is for us all to try to understand this problem we face, and work in our own ways to overcome the selfish territorialism that plagues our movement.

When you see authors promoting their work, don't get angry and accuse them of "self-promotion" - and especially don't get angry and then whine and moan that we don't have voices in the media. Instead, help promote the author's work, whether it's my book or someone else's. When you hear of a new progressive organization in your community, don't immediately get angry that others aren't joining your group - reach out and try to see where you can work together. When you see a blog like OpenLeft ask for financial contributions, don't get mad - make a contribution. You get the idea.

Let's be clear - sites like OpenLeft, DailyKos, FDL, and Huffington Post; groups like the Campaign for America's Future and all the grassroots organizations I have worked with on my tour are examples of working to overcome the problem. The most exciting part about this book tour for me has been to meet with thousands of people who are doing the real work of movement building at the local level - not just writing on a blog venting and fuming but doing no long-term organizing. Out of this uprising can come a movement - if we all work together. And working together means, among other things, buying progressive books - whether that's THE UPRISING, the books I profile in my column, or other books.

You can read the whole column at the San Francisco Chronicle, the Denver Post, Ft. Collins Coloradoan, the Vail Daily, TruthDig, In These Times, Credo Action or Creators Syndicate. The column relies on grassroots support, so if you'd like to see my column regularly in your local paper, use this directory to find the contact info for your local editorial page editors. Get get in touch with them and point them to my Creators Syndicate site. Thanks, as always, for your ongoing readership and help contacting local editors. This column couldn't be what it is without your help.

This is an ongoing series from the national tour for THE UPRISING. You can order The Uprising at Amazon.com or through your local independent bookstore.

The Growing Power of the Fair Trade Uprising

David Sirota — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:32:19 -0400

LOUISVILLE, KY - I spent yesterday in Ohio's three biggest cities - Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati. With the Buckeye State among the hardest hit by lobbyist-written trade policies, it wasn't surprising that NAFTA was at the center of discussion at events for THE UPRISING in Ohio (you can listen to my Ohio NPR interview from yesterday here for a taste).

Over the last few years, polls show the public has moved to something of a consensus position on trade: full-on opposition to NAFTA-style pacts. That's for good reason as this Associated Press report shows. Tearing down tariffs and protections without regard for the consequences is not only a dangerous departure from the policies that built America's economy, but also a deliberate way to force American and foreign workers into a wage-cutting, environment-destroying, union-busting race to the bottom.

The AP story shows the destructive domino effect of NAFTA and the subsequent NAFTA-style agreements like China PNTR. When multinational corporations shift jobs to Mexico, right-wing trade fundamentalists in Washington offer up a "let them eat cake message" telling workers in Ohio that the shift at least helps impoverished workers south of the border. Then, of course, those workers in Mexico are forced to slash their own wages to compete with desperate workers in China. When the jobs inevitably shift to China, Mexico is left in shambles, and then Chinese workers are forced to slash their own wages to make sure jobs don't go to Vietnam or North Korea, where corporations are angling to employ enslaved labor.

Meanwhile, many of these trade fundamentalists like Tom Friedman and Fareed Zakaria flaunt their supposed environmentalism and humanitarianism by publicly worrying about issues like global warming and the erosion of human rights in the developing world - even though the domino effect they cheer on creates pressure on governments to reduce their pollution controls and human rights in order to retain foreign investment.

The problem, of course, is that it's hard to argue with NAFTA backers because they aren't interested in facts. It was none other than Friedman who admitted he vigorously backed a recent NAFTA-style trade deal without even bothering to read it. He, like every other reporter and commentator in Washington, calls NAFTA-style pacts "free trade" - despite the fact that they include thousands of pages of protectionist provisions for corporate profits, despite the fact that even the original architects of NAFTA have long admitted that these agreements aren't free, but instead create "managed" trade. That's the big problem - these deals are managed to enrich the elite at the expense of the rest of us.

Just like it's impossible to argue about reality with deranged religious fundamentalist terrorists, it's impossible to argue with deranged trade fundamentalists who cloak economic terrorism in the language of enlightenment. It gets to the point where Limousine Libertarians in wealthy enclaves like Boulder take to the websites of major newspapers to cite charts showing the decimation of Americans' wages as proof that NAFTA works for Americans.

Left for dead, of course, is a place like Ohio.

Wealthy pundits from New York and Washington drop into the Buckeye State every four years to berate the occasional Democratic presidential candidate who dares to question NAFTA at the quadrennial photo-op at an abandoned manufacturing plant. In the general election, those Democratic presidential candidates then inevitably hire teams of Wall Street insiders who back NAFTA as their top economic advisers, and then scurry to business publications to reassure corporate lobbyists that no, they aren't really serious about reforming our trade policy. Their Republican opponents, meanwhile, head to places like Colombia to tell the right-wing regime there that America - that purported beacon of freedom to the world's masses - will be helping murderous developing-world governments continue to brutalize workers.

But this quadrennial cycle of deception may finally be changing - and not because of the benevolence of any presidential candidate, but because the political tectonics of trade have shifted so dramatically thanks to those who are doing the unglamorous - but critical - work of leveraging real power.

Groups like Public Citizen and the Citizens Trade Campaign have ignored the Partisan War Syndrome that plagues parts of the blogosphere and the progressive left, and used this election as an instrument of the uprising - rather than seeing the election as an objective unto itself. They have, for instance, used the hard-fought Democratic primary to elicit concrete commitments on trade policy from the candidates - including nominee Barack Obama. Those efforts have been supported by a group of industrial state lawmakers, who have similarly leveraged the election as a way to force a conversation about trade into the national political debate. That conversation has been so intense it even wedged its way into the Republican presidential nomination through the candidacy of Mike Huckabee - a candidacy that won Republican primaries in some of the most conservative states based, in part, on his fair trade message.

These moves around trade suggest the emergence of true movement thinking out of the tumult of the uprising I describe in my book. This fair trade movement may continue to be ignored by the media (and, frankly, much of the blogosphere), but it represents one of the most encouraging transpartisan developments of the last few years. Out of the shadows of the crumbling factories that I have driven by here in Ohio may indeed come real change - if this movement continues to coalesce.

This is an ongoing series from the national tour for THE UPRISING. You can order The Uprising at Amazon.com or through your local independent bookstore.

Debating NAFTA On Fox

David Sirota — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 10:42:00 -0400

I debated my latest newspaper column on NAFTA with Neil Cavuto of Fox Business. Watch it here:

Countering GOP Racism With A Class-Based Uprising Message

David Sirota — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:24:30 -0400

Earlier this week, I wrote a short dispatch about Barack Obama dancing around the issue of trade - an issue at the heart of the populist uprising on both the right and left. Now today, my syndicated newspaper column explores the issue more thoroughly, showing precisely the opportunity the GOP's inevitable racism and nationalism with a populist line on trade.

John McCain is taking an extremist position on the issue - to the point of doing a public event today with Canadian industrialists to promote NAFTA. This extremist position presents a huge opportunity for Obama in states that have been destroyed by NAFTA-style trade policies - swing states from Maine to North Carolina to Ohio.

The problem is that Obama still seems hesitant to take a strong position on trade. He has hired one of Bob Rubin's chief confidantes as his top economic adviser, and he gives speeches depicting those who are pushing a strong fair trade agenda as Luddite protectionists.

This speaks to what we discussed last night for THE UPRISING at a big event here in Chicago at In These Times: the notion of progressive pressure as a positive force for Obama. We have to keep the pressure on Obama to take a strong position on issues like trade - and we have to use the election to leverage that pressure.

Of course, there are those who claim that any pressure against Obama imperils his electoral chances, but that's a farce. In 2006, progressive pressure on Democrats forced the party to take a stronger line on Iraq - and that stronger line helped them win the 2006 election. The same can be the case with Obama on the issue of trade - and if we are effective, we can help him both take a majority position on the issue and win the election.

Read the whole column at the San Francisco Chronicle, Denver Post, Ft. Collins Coloradoan, In These Times, TruthDig, Credo Action or Creators Syndicate. Then go pick up a copy of THE UPRISING to read more about how trade policy is fueling a backlash on both the right and left.

This is an ongoing series from the national tour for THE UPRISING. You can order The Uprising at Amazon.com or through your local independent bookstore.

Are We Not Allowed to Talk About McCain's Iraq Position?

David Sirota — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:06:24 -0400

MINNEAPOLIS - During this whirlwind book tour, I've had trouble keeping up with the minute-to-minute trajectory of television's political debate. However, I didn't know that it is now considered out of bounds to talk about John McCain's support for staying in Iraq for 100 years. Watch this clip of me debating GOP hack Terry Holt on Fox News late last week to see what I'm talking about.

You'll notice that Fox News anchor Megan Kelly interrupts me when I mention that McCain has said he is OK with having America stay in Iraq for 100 years. She says that's taken "out of context" and that I'm spinning, while Holt chuckles. Have I missed something here? Are we now no long allowed to talk about McCain's statements on Iraq?

Here's the video of McCain saying he doesn't mind if American troops are in Iraq for 100 years. Here's CNN's report of McCain defending that statement. Here's the video of McCain doubling down, saying that in fact he's OK with America being in Iraq for 10,000 years.

Yet, somehow, mentioning this is billed as unfair by the media, and laughed at by Republican strategists.

Admittedly, this is an interchange on Fox News, which leans Right in its coverage. But still - it seems absurd for any media to bat down a relevant discussion about McCain's incredibly extreme position on the most important national security issue we face.

Let me be clear: I appreciate Fox asking me on to discuss politics and my book - I really do. For all of us trying to get out a progressive message, we need to take the media opportunities as they come - especially when much of the traditional "liberal" media blatantly ignores progressive voices in favor of promoting the same old Serious Voices from Washington.

And I think an interchange like this is a good one to have - even if I'm being berated as "spinning" by mentioning the undebatable facts of what John McCain has repeatedly said.

As THE UPRISING shows, there is a very powerful uprising on in this country - it is about a backlash to things like the war, and about a backlash to an media/political Establishment that tries to crush debate on major issues. The more that backlash gets a hearing through media interchanges like this, the more that backlash will intensify - and the closer our uprising will be to achieving real change.

This is an ongoing series from the national tour for THE UPRISING. You can order The Uprising at Amazon.com or through your local independent bookstore.

Debating Grover Norquist, America's Leading Fake Populist

David Sirota — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 10:25:15 -0400

SEATTLE - This week on my national book tour, I had the opportunity to debate conservative leader Grover Norquist on KUOW - Seattle's NPR affiliate. The topic of the debate was my new book, THE UPRISING, and specifically the rise of populism in American politics. You can listen to the debate here - it begins about half way into the interview.

Norquist, one of the architects of the original conservative uprising of the 1980s and 1990s, is a good indicator of where the conservative movement is today. As you can hear, the Right is angry with the Bush administration for not being more conservative on a whole host of issues - and you can sense from Norquist how ideologically bankrupt conservatives really are today.

For a generation or so, the Right has dynamically adapted its reactionary ideas to sound like a populist, anti-Establishment, for-the-little-guy agenda. But thanks to all the crises we now face from those ideas - an energy crisis, stagnant wages, national security catastrophes, a global warming emergency - it has become much easier for progressives to unmask the Right as what I called Norquist: Fake populists.

The concept of fake populism is an important one as we move into the superheated general election campaign.

Just as Norquist tries in the debate to package environmental degradation, oil industry handouts and tax cuts for billionaires as policies designed to help us regular folks, so will John McCain try to present more NAFTA-style trade deals and more war in Iraq as populism. And the more we label it for what it is - fake populism - the more we will show the country the difference between a true majority agenda and the Beltway elitism of the Right.

What struck me most about the debate with Norquist is how truly out of touch with ordinary people he really is.

This is a person who in the face of $4.50 gasoline and $40 billion in ExxonMobil profits tells us that we should give away more policy goodies to the oil companies. This is a person who in the face of polls showing the public thinks the tax system is fundamentally unfair in the wake of the Bush tax cuts, says we should nonetheless push forward with even more regressive tax cuts. This is a person who in the face of massive budget deficits and social service cuts, says we should slash corporate tax rates, even though our effective corporate tax rate is among the lowest in the industrialized world. This is, in short, a person who is so insulated inside the Beltway and so coddled by the Big Money interests that have financed his career that he quite literally has no idea that there's an uprising going on throughout the country - and no official photos of him with statues of Ronald Reagan can hide that reality. He seems genuinely unaware of the trends on both the Right and Left that I report on in my book.

Of course, I praise Norquist at the beginning of the debate for his tactical brilliance in building a movement (and he is featured in my book because of this). The pressure he has put on Republicans from the Right has been remarkably effective - and progressives could learn a thing or two about the value of a more confrontational attitude towards Democrats on our own issues for our own uprising. That said, I think this debate shows that the conservative movement is indeed buckling under the bankruptcy of its ideas. And as we continue building our uprising and exposing their fake populism, we are getting closer to the truly exponential change that has marked other uprising moments in American history.

Listen to the full debate here, and then go pick up THE UPRISING at Amazon.com or through your local independent bookstore. Also, make sure to check the book tour schedule at www.davidsirota.com/uprising - I hope to see you on the trail!

This is an ongoing series from the national tour for THE UPRISING. You can order The Uprising at Amazon.com or through your local independent bookstore.

Why NAFTA Is An Anger Point Fueling The Uprising

David Sirota — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 16:50:06 -0400

I'm home for a day and a half here in Denver before heading out for the Midwestern leg of THE UPRISING book tour.

One of the things I've been finding when talking to groups is a palpable anger at our current trade and globalization policies - an anger from both progressives and conservatives that I meet. And yet, we continue to get this kind of nonsense from Serious Thinkers in major newspapers:

"All discussions of the victims of trade ignore the considerable benefits: the exports we sell and the lower prices for consumers at home. Since poorer Americans spend a higher proportion of their incomes on low-wage imports (shoes from China, for instance), trade can also be seen as favoring the less well off. If only politicians would stop preaching to them otherwise."

In reading this, our reaction should be if only insulated journalists would stop preaching fact-free rhetoric, perhaps we could actually have a discussion about the real impact of our current trade policies.

You'll notice that the author of the piece, Roger Lowenstein, offers no actual facts to back up his assertion that so-called "free" trade "favors the less well off" - other than a flippant Freakonomics-ish reference that seems smart merely by being counterintuitive. Yes, we are led to think - corporate lobbyists are crafting trade deals to help poor people. Of course that has to be true if someone as Serious as Lowenstein is writing something so absurd. If it's that absurd yet in a major newspaper, it just HAS to be true, right?

Wrong.

What Lowenstein and other Serious Trade Thinkers refuse to discuss is how inflation has been outpacing wages during the era of "free" trade. What that empirically proves is that, in fact, ordinary workers are losing out in the "free" trade deal.

The "free" traders' argument says that while NAFTA-style policies drive down wages and eliminate jobs, those policies are ultimately a good bargain for all workers because the wage-cutting, environment-destroying competition brought on by these policies lowers the price of goods.

However, if inflation (aka. the price of goods) is outpacing average wages (aka. how much workers get paid), that means on the whole workers are losing out in the deal. Sure, some goods may be priced lower because slave labor in China is now making more goods, but domestic wages here are EVEN lower than that, meaning the whole scenario screws over ordinary people. Wages, after all, are only as good as their purchasing power.

Lowenstein's rhetoric is merely one drop in the ocean of fact-free propaganda in our economic debate today. As economist Ha-Joon Chang shows in his book "Bad Samaritans," despite the well-known history of our country (and every other industralized country) using fair trade policies and strategic tariffs to build our economy into the powerhouse it is, we continue to be told that "free" trade is the only way forward.

But as I said to start this post, the public is starting to figure out just how much it is being lied to on trade and globalization. Polls show rank and file Republicans and Democrats are angry at the NAFTA nonsense from the media and from politicians - and that anger has become one of the impulses fueling the uprising I write about in my new book. The question now is whether that uprising is going to force the next Congress and the next president to change.

This is an ongoing blog series from the national book tour of The Uprising. You can order The Uprising at Amazon.com or through your local independent bookstore.

An Uprising Leader for VP

David Sirota — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:32:25 -0400

SEATTLE - As the vice-presidential speculation intensifies, we cannot lose sight of just how intense the populist uprising is in our country today - and how it is, fundamentally, a backlash to conservative economic policies and liberal capitulation in the face of those policies. This is what the cover of my new book, THE UPRISING, metaphorically depicts - and what the cover of this recent edition of The Economist portrays, as well (they look alike, don't they?). And this is why my new newspaper column this week says that Barack Obama should not pick Hillary Clinton for vice president - but an anti-Clinton.

It is undeniable that Hillary Clinton - whether you like her or not - represents Clintonism, a brand of politics that is about trying to appease Big Money while pretending to serve ordinary people. It is politics that tries never to answer organized labor's age-old question: which side are you on? Of course, even with such "third way" nonsense, practitioners of Clintonism always end up taking a side - money's side - whether it's championing NAFTA, deregulating the telecommunications industry, voting for the bankruptcy bill, supporting the war in Iraq, or shredding important Wall Street laws like the Glass-Steagall Act.

As I've been traveling the country for the national tour for THE UPRISING, I can see just how intense the anger is at this kind of politics. Right now, for instance, I'm here in Seattle where the sharp edge of lobbyist-written globalization policies fuels fears of job outsourcing in the high-tech industry (read The Nation magazine's excerpt of THE UPRISING here to see what I'm talking about). It's the same thing all over the globe. As Bloomberg News today reports, the planet is in the midst of rejecting Clintonism's neoliberal economic agenda. "Fueling the backlash is a convergence of trade-related anxieties," the news service writes. "National-security concerns, worries about food safety and sufficiency, the desire to protect local jobs and the environment."

These policies - and the very politics of Clintonism - are what was soundly rejected in the Democratic presidential primary, as Barack Obama rode the progressive side of the uprising to victory. Now, as John McCain channels his own version of Clintonism - ie. pushing more NAFTA and endless war in Iraq - Obama can use his vice presidential selection to state that indeed the era of Clintonism is over, and the era of the uprising is on.

As my column this week shows, there are a number of progressive populists available as runningmates - whether senators like Sherrod Brown, governors like Brian Schweitzer or labor leaders like Anna Burger.

These alternatives to Clinton would help woo swing states or swing constituencies vital to winning the general election and reshaping the electoral map for a generation.

The question, of course, is whether Obama has the guts to make such a populist move. After all, Big Money is starting to get very scared about what's going on. As just one example, take a look at this Forbes magazine article in which business groups say they now fear a major resurgence of organized labor. That fear has already translated into major pressure on Obama - pressure that resulted in him appointing a Wal-Mart apologist and Wall Street-connected economist as his top economic adviser. You can bet the pressure will only intensify on him to pick an icon of corporate-worshiping Clintonism as his runningmate.

Pick up a copy of THE UPRISING to get the full picture of the populist revolt now impacting the presidential contest. You can read the whole newspaper column at the San Francisco Chronicle, the Denver Post, the Ft. Collins Coloradoan, In These Times, Credo Action, TruthDig or Creators Syndicate.The column relies on grassroots support, so if you'd like to see my column regularly in your local paper, use this directory to find the contact info for your local editorial page editors. Get get in touch with them and point them to my Creators Syndicate site. Thanks, as always, for your ongoing readership and help contacting local editors. This column couldn't be what it is without your help.

This is an ongoing blog series from the national book tour of The Uprising. You can order The Uprising at Amazon.com or through your local independent bookstore.