Netroots 2012

Can A Grand Bargain Be An Opportunity?

Dave Johnson — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 20:18:37 -0400

As I mentioned Friday in "Real Jobs At Stake" I attended a blogger meeting with Rhode Island's Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. The meeting was put together by Americans for Tax Fairness, a new coalition formed to help win the coming fight over the expiring Bush tax cuts.

Background

Two years ago the Republicans set a trap by holding unemployment benefits hostage, demanding the Bush tax cuts be extended for 2 years, dramatically increasing the country's debt. Obama paid the ransom to free the hostage, the Republicans have since then cut unemployment anyway, and now are springing the trap, running ads against Obama that say Obama increased the debt.

That extension of the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of this year. Republicans and other servants of the 1% are ginning up a serious battle to keep that from happening. Meanwhile some Democrats aren't helping matters. The President is proposing to restore Clinton-era tax rates only on those making more than $250,000. Now some Democrats are pre-caving even before negotiations begin, and raising that figure to $1 million. (Because people who make between $250 thousand and $1 million are't rich I guess, if you are used to the people that members of Congress and the Senate hang out with.) Americans for Tax Fairness wants a $250K cutoff.

From the press release announcing the launch of the coalition:

“We established Americans for Tax Fairness to help make the economy work for all,” said Americans for Tax Fairness Campaign Manager Frank Clemente. “To achieve this goal, we need adequate levels of investment in critical areas like education and rebuilding infrastructure that create and sustain jobs. We also need a balanced and equitable approach to the federal budget challenges we face, which includes protecting critical services for the middle class and the most vulnerable. This requires that we all pay our fair share of taxes, especially big corporations and the richest 2 percent making more than a quarter of a million dollars a year.”

There are proposals on the table to end the Bush tax cuts for those making $1 million a year. One of the coalition members, Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ), estimates that 43 percent of the tax revenue would be lost if the threshold for extending the Bush tax breaks is set at $1 million in income rather than at $250,000 – the level President Obama has proposed. In addition, CTJ estimates that half of the breaks resulting from moving the threshold from $250,000 to $1 million would go to people with income exceeding $1 million.

From the Meeting

The following is from notes of Senator Whitehouse's comments.

Our side fights a guerrilla war, without a top-down message structure.

We offer a lot in substance and facts: Taxes right now are upside-down, with people at the top paying lower rates than the middle.

Here are some facts: 65% of people making over $1 million pay a lower tax rate than people in the middle class.

In 1930 the ratio of taxes was for every $1 in individual taxes we got $1 in corporate taxes. Now it is $6 individual for every $1 in corporate taxes.

With their taxes down but (and the result of) their political contributions up, corporations now fund our politics, not the country. The result is that corporations not only don’t pay much in taxes they have enough control that they do what economists call seeking rents.

On the other hand, most of the Republican “facts” are wrong or misleading.

On understanding what is going on, the public is way behind us. (We are not communicating our positions in ways that reach the public and resonate.) So if we bring something up once and move on we take a punch. But if we keep bringing these things up, if we are persistent, then the public starts to learn. Attention brings public awareness. In the Bible it took several times before the walls of Jericho were brought down.

The Coming "Grand Bargain"

Still from notes, summarizing Senator Whitehouse's comments:

Republicans learned that hostage-taking works. It pays off. So now instead of fighting on bills they want to do a debt ceiling drama and attach their stuff to it.

Framing the question is very important as the grand bargain debate begins.

Do we let them expire first, and not let a lame duck session of Congress happen? (Nothing is going to pass before the election, so the only way to change something before the expiration at the end of the year is to do it in a "lame duck" session -- after the election but before the people elected take office, and the people tossed out leave office.)

The President says he will veto bush tax cuts, but that obligates him to be reelected.

After Jan 1 norquist pledge expires by fiat.

A lame duck session won’t happen if house or senate changes, because the winning side will want to wait for their control to come in.

He is worried about an October surprise where they get the entire Republican machine (Fox, Limbaugh, lobbyists, op-ed writers, bloggers, etc.) on a message, try to get a stampede going, A stampede is not a rational process

Can we block Simpson Bowles? That requires 40 on our side to hold out. So it depends on how attractive the offer is.

Be prepared, legislation is chaotic, things can happen, if we have to take a hit then why now do something for us, like remove the cap on Social Security payroll taxes in exchange for the hit we take.

Other things can come out of that chaos if we are ready: environmental taxes, fuel taxes, we should be thinking about things like this. We should be prepared to seize moments and grab things we have wanted in the chaos of legislation

So a grand bargain can also be an opportunity. IF they remove the cap on Social Security.

My own opinion? During the questioning I asked, if the point is reducing deficits, don't the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts, and the cuts in military spending do just that?

If you really want to keep the Bush tax cuts for people making less than $250K or whatever, let the Bush tax cuts expire and then next year push a new tax cut, and call it the Obama tax cuts. (And push up the deficit with tax cuts that tell the public taxes are bad therefore government is bad...)

#nn12 Panel: Why Can't Apple Make Your iPhone in America?

Dave Johnson — Sat, 09 Jun 2012 12:20:19 -0400

Following are my prepared notes for my talk on the Netroots Nation panel, Why Can't Apple Make Your iPhone in America? except cleaned up to make me look better:

We used to make things here, and then came free trade and then China opened up, and we moved a lot of manufacturing there, including electronics. We say Apple here, because Apple is the most obvious, and because the supposed values of Apple conflict dramatically with what we now know about the working conditions of the people who make their products. But we mean ALL OF THEM.

We used to think that China got so much business because labor was cheap. The elites, benefiting from that, said take advantage of the low prices, and our workers can move on to better more productive pursuits.

Of course, intentionally undercutting the wages of our own workers was bad enough. And using that as a wedge to break unions was bad enough. But the story of our trade deal with China is much worse than that.

Not too long ago stories about the working conditions of Chinese electronics workers started to be heard. We started hearing about protests, strikes, and then about suicides at these factories.

The reports reached wide audiences from a New York Times report, How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

This report hilited Steve Jobs telling President Obama that these jobs are never coming back, and the reason was not the lower cost of labor. The reason was that in China they could make workers do things that they can’t make them do here. They can make them live in dorms where they wake them up at midnight to stand for hours on assembly lines, or use neurotoxins that let them clean many more screens in a day. They can dump horrible stuff into the environment. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Ask Chen Guangcheng the blind lawyer who just arrived in the US about how people are treated there.

The business advantage China offers is not low wages, it is that in China the people do not have a say, and here people have a say.

When people have a say they say they want better pay, health care, retirement, vacations, sick pay, protections, worker safety, clean environment and taxes to support the country – things like that – the very things China offers to let our businesses escape from.

So what China offers is that China is “business-friendly.” Because people there do not have a say, so they can’t ask for the things people should have.

Corporate conservatives here say we should be more business friendly, we should lower wages, lower taxes, stop taking care of the environment, stop all those pesky health and safety and environmental inspections, stop telling businesses what they can and cannot do, and all the rest. They say we should be more like China.

What they are saying is that we should abandon the benefits that democracy brought to We, the People – the 99%

in order to enrich a few people – the 1%.

When we opened up our borders to goods from China, and let this treatment of workers and the environment offer advantages to our elites,
we made democracy a competitive disadvantage.

But wait, there’s more.

There is another difference to consider. Look what China offers our business leaders. Chinas provides them with this exploited labor force at little cost. Beyond that China also subsidizes the manufacturing that is done there. They spend a great deal on manipulating their currency to keep prices of goods made there very low. They will build you a factory, pay for your electricity, and so much more.

China offers our business leaders an amazing deal – a deal that they can’t refuse. The owners and managers of our companies get really, really rich if they play along with China. Nerver mind if the companies go away later, they’re rich.

China offers these things to our business leaders for a reason. This is the reason : China sees itself as a country, and we no longer do.

China competes with us as a country. But our businesses see themselves as GLOBALIZED, not as part of a country.

So since we – at least our businesses – no longer see themselves as part of a country we are not responding to this competition. We are not mobilizing to fight back.

In fact, China has essentially recruited our own business leaders to fight against our own government.

Look at the effects on our country since we entered into this deal with China.

They are luring our businesses to move our jobs, factories, industries and technologies there for the private gain of a few, at the expense of us as a country, and we let that happen.

The trade imbalance is bankrupting us as a country. It has already drained trillions from our economy, weakening us and strengthening them.

They are smart, they do this as a NATIONAL strategy, as a country competing with us as a country, and the result is that in a competition between countries we may have already lost.

There are many things we can do about this. China can still be a partner, and there are many things we can help lift the wages and open things up for working people there.

We can require American companies to behave in the interest of their own country and of our democratic system, for one thing.

We can immediately require that imports not exceed exports by issuing import licenses based on exports.

We can demand that China actually trade with us, using that huge accumulated trade surplus to buy goods and services made here. This is dramatically in their interest – imagine what would happen to our economy if China started actually trading with us, buying American-made goods. Then the thriving American economy would boost the purchases of Chinese goods in return! That they don’t do this, and instead use those resources against us, manipulating currency, subsidizing companies, tells us they are not playing an economic game, they are playing a nationalist game of strategic domination. As a country.

Unfortunately, as I said, China’s trade strategy has helped create a situation where many of our own elites are fighting against our government.

This is an approximate answer I gave to a question in the Q&A:

There is high unemployment in Silicon Valley, higher than Flint, almost 1/4-1/3 of the big office buildings are empty, the downtowns have dozens of vacant storefront, and cities like Stockton have as many empty houses as cities li9ke Flint. The difference is this is all newer, so it looks better, doesn't LOOK like blight, but really it is the same thing as what is going on in the rust belt.

"Real Jobs At Stake"

Dave Johnson — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 12:03:01 -0400

I attended a blogger meeting with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) to talk about Americans for Tax Fairness, a coalition that has formed to help win the coming fight over the expiring Bush tax cuts. As you remember, two years ago the Republicans held unemployment benefits hostage, demanding they be extended for 2 years. Obama went along, the Republicans since then cut unemployment anyway, and now are campaigning that Obama increased the debt. I will write about the coming tax-cut-expiration fight in depth later, but the Senator said something important on a different issue that I want to bring to your attention. He said the Transportation Bill is important, it is now, and "real jobs are at stake."

The transportation bill is also called the highway bil. Senator Whitehouse said that the transportation bill is being held up for no reason. The Senate has approved it. The House won't pass it. "Why are they jamming the highway bill?" The Senate has passed a bipartisan bill that both sides agree on, there is no partisan argument for not doing this. There is no defense for Republicans stalling it. They do not have a counter-story they are just stalling it to stall it.

We are losing projects and jobs day by day. This isn't just about hiring one person, it is about big projects that hire a lot of people. It's about a bridge, not just one job.

I want to add, once again Republicans are blocking an important bill that would help the country and create jobs. Are they sabotaging the economy to turn people against government and the President as an election strategy?

Eric Schnederman: "Thank You For Pushing Me"

Isaiah J. Poole — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 21:44:49 -0400

There were rumblings that Thursday's Netroots Nation keynote address by Eric Schneiderman, the New York attorney general and the head of an Obama administration task force on Wall Street fraud, was going to be disrupted by protestors. And indeed, as Schneiderman began to speak, several people stood up with signs, with slogans like "Prosecute the big banks," and two or three people yelled something toward the podium.

Schneiderman responded with a "Thank you." It turned out that the demonstrators were helping Schneiderman make one of the central point of his speech about movement-building. "Public leaders and officials do not create movements," he said. "Movements create leaders."

"Speaking candidly, our civic and political officials are inherently inclined towards caution. They move when movements push them," he said. "Frankly, we get from public officials what we make them give us, and that is as true of our friends as it is our opponents."

This has been a continuing theme of Schneiderman, reassuring progressives working on financial reform that he is their ally when it comes to holding Wall Street accountable for its role in the financial crisis and giving activists permission to be impatient with him and the political system in which he is working, with the rationale that as he is pushed from the outside, he will be able to accomplish more on the inside.

The fact that the disruption was mild and quickly fizzled masks the level of impatience and frustration that some activists feel toward Schneiderman, which reflected itself in an earlier Netroots Nation panel on efforts to fight the big banks on such issues as foreclosures and mortgage right-downs. One of the milder comments came from Max Berger, an Occupy movement organizer, who called Schneiderman "a good dude that doesn't want to admit that he's getting rolled."

Schneiderman is likely to be asked to more directly address concerns like those at the Take Back the American Dream conference June 19, when he will be on a panel moderated by MSNBC host Alex Wagner that includes Heather McGhee of Demos and OurFuture.org's Richard Eskow.

Schneiderman, meanwhile, has been working to beef up the prosecutorial firepower at his disposal. Earlier this week George Zornick of The Nation reported that Schneiderman added former assistant U.S. attorney Virginia Chavez Romano to his team. She is employed in the state attorney general's office but is being detailed to assist Schneiderman's task force work. "Romano participated in the criminal indictments of Credit Suisse employees earlier this year for falsifying prices tied to collateralized debt obligations," Zornick reported.

During his keynote address, Schneiderman sad that progressives need to focus not just on the "transactional politics" of winning short-term political deals but also on the "transformational politics" that can change the national narrative that drives transactional politics. It is the latter that "requires us to reshape the assumptions about politics and economics and most essentially about human nature that prevent people from embracing policies that will make their lives better.

"Let us never lose sight of the fact that the greatest damage done by the contemporary conservative movement was not any law they passed. It was the transformation of the consciousness of millions of Americans that led them to embrace policies that hurt them."

He added that the stage is set for a transformation in a different direction, paralleling the change in the country's political direction after the 1929 financial crash. He credited the Occupy movement for helping to push the nation closer to that transformation by focusing national attention on income inequality and the conservative policies that led to the financial meltdown. And he credited the agitation from the progressive movement for empowering him and a small number of dissident attorneys general to object to a settlement with the nation's largest banks that would have left the banks immune from any prosecution for criminal wrongdoing.

When President Obama struck a more populist tone on economic fairness and holding bankers accountable during the State of the Union address in January, that "didn't happen because he got a new speechwriter. It happened because the agenda was changed," Schneiderman said.

Schneiderman said that progressives have too often elected a leader and then gone home. "Conservatives never go home," he said; they instead keep holding the people they elect to the fire. "Let's learn from our mistakes," he urged. "Keep pushing, keep fighting."

"Thank you for pushing me. Thank you for pushing the president," he said in closing.

The speech tapped into a recurring theme in other Netroots sessions—the need for progressives to become an independent force that must be reckoned with, one that commands respect because of its ability to both reward and punish. The Take Back the American Dream conference will pick up that theme, with strategy sessions that look beyond the November elections to building a movement that can continue a progressive transformation of our politics, elect candidates and move those candidates to govern from a progressive framework.

The Netroots Nation Conference -- ALEC Exposed

Dave Johnson — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 14:36:19 -0400

I'm at the Netroots Nation 2012 conference in Providence. The weather has been pretty good, a brief rainshower but otherwise sunny and pleasant day. There are panels all day, breakout sessions on various topics, state caucuses, parties, lunches, dinners, parties, receptions, parties, conversations in the hotel bar, late to bed, up early, jet lag, and another day of the same...

The conference center is just about perfect for this event, just the right size, comfortable, distances between sessions are not too great for human compatibility (unlike in some other cities), with a hotel attached and others right nearby. The restaurants,etc, within walking distance make for nice evenings. It seems like a nice town.

ALEC Exposed

I have been in private meetings so I cannot report on any of the sessions except the "Whose Law Is It Anyway? ALEC's Influence on State Legislatures and What We Can Do About It," led by: Rashad Robinson of ColorOfChange with panelists: Aniello Alioto of ProgressNow and ProgressNow Education, Kim Anderson of the National Education Association, Marge Baker of People For, John Carey of the National Public Pension Coalition and Lisa Graves of the Center for Media and Democracy, the publisher of ALECexposed.org. Description:

The American Legislative Exchange Council has been behind virtually every major right-wing state law in the past two years, including union-busting, teacher-bashing, voter suppression, attacks on immigrants, privatizing basic public services and gutting environmental and health regulations. Learn more about ALEC, who backs them and what you can do to stand in their way.

Lisa Graves thanked Daily Kos for fighting to expose ALEC even before ALEC Exposed came on line. She gave some background on ALEC, going back to the Powell Memo. She talked about how ALEC claims it does no lobbying, and showed a video, Dump You And Dump ALEC, Too:

Rashad then described Color of Change's multi-year to get corporations to stop funding ALEC. The have very successful in geting corporations to drop funding. Alec was successful for years, because they were able to work under the radar, without the public understanding the ways ALEC was influencing state legislatures.

Along with the efforts of others, such as Expose ALEC, the public has been learning about ALEC and the things they have been doing behind the scenes. As ALEC's shadowy work is exposed, corporations fear hurting their brands from the association. As I wrote in April, in Corporations Supporting ALEC Are Risking Damage To Their Brands,

Some companies are learning that supporting hyper-partisan groups can backfire when their customers find out about it. In recent weeks a number of companies are trying to distance themselves from the partisan, right-wing group ALEC before their brands become as damaged as Susan G. Komen for the Cure®.

ALEC, The American Legislative Exchange Council, is a shady, hyper-partisan, state-based lobbying group that was able to wield power by staying under the radar. Recently the Trayvon Martin shooting case exposed how ALEC helped push through a dangerous "shoot first" law in Florida. Now people are learning that ALEC is also getting state laws passed that limit the voting rights of minorities, limit the power of working people to negotiate for better wages and limit the power of citizens to fight for cleaner environment. So now the big corporations supporting ALEC risk being seen as fighting people's efforts to have a better life, and their brands are at risk.

Marge Baker described the associations between ALEC and right-wing think tanks and in voter suppression efforts. ALEC has an affirmative agenda to influence democracy by keeping people out, keeping them from voting. The organization has been captured by strong pro-corporate right-wing interests.

Kim Anderson talked about what is at stake in ALEC's efforts to privatize schools: a $500 billion sector of the economy that they want to turn over to corporations. ALEC has written "model legislation" to sell off portions of our public education system to private corporate interests. Education that was designed to be free and open to everybody is being sold off to private interests. This is happening not just with education, but many things that are currently provided by democracy are being sold off to private interests to sell for their own profit.

John Carey talked about ALEC's role in the public employee pension battles. This "pension reform" war is having a terrible impact on the lives of millions. ALEC provides misleading information to undermine the retirement security of public employees.

Aniello Alioto said legislators and corporations are getting around the transparency of democracy by saying they are "letting their membership lapse" and said people should call their own legislators and ask them if they are ALEC and ask them why, and ask them to drop out. But we are seeing pushback, with ALEC and others hiring public communications firms, but people are not coming to their defense.

Also

Isaiah Poole is also at this conference, and has posted, How Activists Score Wins Taking On The Banks,

There is some good news in the fight for homeowners and against the big banks. Homeowners who are facing foreclosures because of unfair and often illegal practices by the major financial Goliaths are learning how to organize, how to shame bank executives and how to get local media attention.

But a panel of activists at Netroots Nation also expressed disappointment that there has not yet been any prosecutions of banking industry executives for any of the wrongdoing that led to the financial crisis and the millions of home foreclosures that followed.

Take Back the American Dream June 18-20

Coming up is the Take Back the American Dream conference in DC, June 18-20 where Van Jones, Paul Krugman, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ai-jen Poo, Sandra Fluke, Gov. Howard Dean, Melissa Harris-Perry, Chris Hayes, Katrina vanden Heuvel and many more will share ideas and forge the strategy to make sure that the 99% is heard.

How Activists Score Wins Taking On The Banks

Isaiah J. Poole — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 10:42:48 -0400

There is some good news in the fight for homeowners and against the big banks. Homeowners who are facing foreclosures because of unfair and often illegal practices by the major financial Goliaths are learning how to organize, how to shame bank executives and how to get local media attention.

But a panel of activists at Netroots Nation also expressed disappointment that there has not yet been any prosecutions of banking industry executives for any of the wrongdoing that led to the financial crisis and the millions of home foreclosures that followed.

That disappointment will greet Eric Schneiderman, the New York state attorney general who is also the head of an investigative task force on the financial crisis commissioned by President Obama, when he speaks tonight at a Netroots Nation plenary session.

Tracy Van Slyke, the director of New Bottom Line, one of the progressive grassroots organization leading the effort to break up the big banks and hold them accountable for causing the financial crisis, reflected the mood of the panel when she said that she was viewing the work of Schneiderman and the task force "with growing disappointment and growing anger" because of its slow progress.

Matt Browner-Hamlin, senior economic strategist at the Citizen Engagement Lab, said that top banking executives have already testified to actions before Congress that should lead to indictments, but so far they have not. There is a need for some real heroes in the fight against the big banks, Browner-Hamlin said, and "I had hoped that Schneiderman would be one of those heroes. Unfortunately, that's not going to be the case."

The heroes instead have been ordinary homeowners facing the threat of losing their homes who have found that by banding together with community activists and other homeowners they can often curb the big banks' worst behavior and begin to move public opinion on such issues as whether the big banks should be broken up.

"Those victories happen dramatically more often when homeowners organize and make their fight public," Browner-Hamlin said. Groups such as Occupy Our Homes have been able to win settlements for homeowners facing foreclosure by publicizing their plight, conducting defense actions that attract media attention, and ultimately embarrassing local bank executives into either working with the homeowner or have the bank's reputation further tarnished.

That's the principle behind such groups as the Home Defenders League, represented on the panel by Peggy Mears, an organizer with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment. That's one answer to the question of how to scale up such local actions so they begin to have a larger political impact, particularly on state legislatures, Congress and the White House.

Mears is part of an effort to get the California state legislature to pass a "homeowners' bill of rights" that would among other things make it easier for state regulators of homeowners themselves to pursue legal action against banks that use illicit means to push foreclosures.

"We have to fight the banks on every level, in every state," Mears said. But while Chase, Bank of America and their ilk are Goliaths, she said that progressives should remember that they are David, and "we have a slingshot, and that is the people."

There will be a session on "taking on the banks" at the Take Back the American Dream conference that will build upon the dialogue at Netroots Nation. Schneiderman is scheduled to appear at the conference, and there will be an opportunity to focus on the national-level political strategy for breaking up the banks, bringing wrong-doers to justice and restoring banking to its proper role of serving the financial needs of the Main Street economy.