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Bill Scher

By Bill Scher
Executive editor of LiberalOasis.com

No matter what happens on Tuesday, progressives will not have unfettered control of Washington, just as we have not the last two years, the last decade, the decade before that, or the decade before that.

We will have to fight for more change. The question is: who will we have to fight?

The last two years, while the Tea Party has been a loud sideshow, on policy matters we have mainly fought right-leaning Democrats.

We fought them over the size of the Recovery Act. We fought them over the scope of health care reform and Wall Street reform. We fought them over how to avert a climate crisis.

It’s been annoying.

But the center of gravity of all those debates been to the left of center: How much active government is needed to get the economy back on track? What kind of regulations are needed to rein in health insurers and big banks? How should a carbon cap be structured?

If Democrats lose control of Congress, the Tea Party will no longer be a sideshow. It will be playing a direct role in setting the policy.

In turn, the fights will be very different. (more…)

David Sirota

By David Sirota
Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist

In the last 72 hours, we’ve finally seen the outlines of the inevitable Democratic civil war that’s been brewing over taxes and spending. Both sides argue that their way is the path to economic prosperity – and so the question is, which side represents a fact-based argument, and which side represents fact-free theorizing?

Before answering that question, let’s first outline which side is which.

On one side is the Obama administration and progressive Democrats, pledging to keep its promise to let the Bush tax cuts for the very wealthy expire on schedule. Most on this side want to reinvest some or all of the recovered tax money and plow it into domestic spending that would rebuild crumbling infrastructure and economically support those hard-hit by the recession.

On the other side are conservative Democrats in Congress who are becoming increasingly brash in their declarations that either today’s middle-class Americans or tomorrow’s middle-class Americans (via. debt interest payments) should have to pay higher taxes or suffer through slashed services/benefits in order to prevent today’s wealthy from paying any more. This is a varied group, but a nonetheless powerful one in its diverse motivations.

For instance, you have many “Blue Dog” Democrats. Afflicted with a debilitating case of Selective Deficit Disorder, these Democrats cite their devotion to deficit hawkery as reason to vote against unemployment benefits – but also defend policies like the Bush tax cuts. Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson is about the best example of this. (more…)

Berry Craig

By Berry Craig
Author of “True Tales of Old-Time Kentucky Politics: Bombast, Bourbon and Burgoo”

The snow-softened rubble of the Continental General Tire plant at Mayfield, Ky., reminds me of a scene in “New in Town.” We rented the movie from a video store the other night.

Lucy Hill, played by Renee Zellweger, is a high-powered corporate executive from sunny Miami. She’s been sent in snowy wintertime to a small Minnesota community similar to Mayfield, my hometown, first to downsize, then close, a food processing plant that her company owns. Plant secretary Blanche Gunderson, played by Siobhan Fallon, accidentally finds a list of workers Hill plans to lay off. She gently confronts Hill.

“I made that a long time ago,” Hill protests. “I made that list before I even knew you.”

“It’s OK to pull the rug out from under folks as long as it’s nobody that you know?” Gunderson replies. “It’s OK because we’re just silly Podunk Minnesotans, right?  We talk funny and we ice fish and we scrapbook. We drag Jesus into regular conversation. We’re not cool like you, right? So we don’t matter.”

German-owned Continental finished pulling the rug out from under Mayfield three years ago. Our economy hasn’t recovered from the loss of the plant. It might not ever. Opened in 1960 by the U.S. company General Tire, the plant produced car and truck tires. Most went to auto plants in Detroit and elsewhere for new vehicles. At one time, the Mayfield factory provided jobs for some 2,200 union and 400 salaried employees.

In 1987, Continental bought General Tire, which ultimately became Continental Tire North America. In 2007, Continental shut the Mayfield factory after several months of drawing down production and laying off workers. A salvage firm bought the plant and is demolishing it for scrap.

I wonder if Continental figured Mayfield plant workers were “just silly Podunk” Kentuckians who talk funny? It doesn’t get nearly cold enough to ice fish in the Bluegrass State. But scrapbooking and talking Jesus are common in these parts.

Continental claimed it had to close the Mayfield plant. The company said the factory was too old, too outmoded and had the highest production costs of any of its North American factories.

The plant union, United Steelworkers Local 665, tried to help Continental keep the plant going, says Terry Beane, who was the last president of Local 665. The union offered to extend our labor agreement and commit to workforce restructuring, if the company would make an equal commitment to invest in the plant and this community.

Beane and Wayne Chambers, the plant’s last vice president, even met with Continental executives. Said Beane:

The Germans looked me in the eye. They looked Wayne in the eye. They said they appreciated our comments on good old Mayfield. They also said:

“We are a global company, and we are going to build our tires wherever we want and as cheaply as we can.”

“Wherever” meant low-wage countries overseas or nonunion Continental facilities stateside, Chambers said.

Nothing else in “New in Town” reminded me of what happened to the Mayfield plant. In the movie, the workers end up buying their factory and running it themselves.

The Hill character goes with the workers. She’ll be plant manager and apparently the new bride of Ted Mitchell, a union official and widower played by Harry Connick Jr. You get the idea that Lucy, Ted, Blanche and everybody else are going to live happily ever after.

I’ve never heard of a real corporate executive who had a conscience attack and sided with workers at a plant he or she was about to downsize or shut. I don’t know of any members of Local 665 who have found better jobs than the ones they had at the factory.

Chambers works part time for the Steelworkers helping former plant employees get their health benefits. Beane fills snack machines for a local vending company. The tire factory, which won awards from car manufacturers for quality tires, is fast becoming heaps of crushed concrete and snapped off steel girders. It looks like images of bombed-out World War II buildings you see on the Military Channel on TV.

Every day, cranes with red, yellow and lime-green arms knock down more of the factory, which sprawled over several acres. The crane arms bob up and down like the bald heads of buzzards picking at road kill on busy, four-lane U.S. 45 North, which runs past the plant site.

Says Chambers:

People worked at the plant from all over western Kentucky and even Tennessee. Now all those good jobs are gone. It’s just like in the Depression.

Chambers knows Mayfield is not the only town that is minus a big plant. “All across the country, people are in the same bad shape,” he said. “It’s all because of corporate greed. These big companies just want to make all the money they can. They ship our jobs out of the country and don’t care who gets hurt.”

What Continental did was legal, thanks to right-wing Republicans and to some “Blue Dog Democrats,” most of them from Southern right-to-work states. They’re always glad to keep government and unions “off the back” of Big Business.

Big corporations and their friends in politics, the pulpit and the media, call busting unions and shipping jobs and production abroad or to “right to work” for less states “free enterprise.” (The “free enterprisers” also blame “greedy unions” when they close unionized plants.) When conservatives say “free enterprise,” they mean union free. They also mean free of meaningful government regulations that do things like safeguard the lives and limbs of workers on the job, protect consumers against dangerous products and shield the environment against pollution that can make us sick or even kill us.

Heaven help the republic, “free enterprisers” declare, if government does anything significant on behalf of “silly Podunk” workers against the avarice of big corporations like Continental.

Go ahead and slam me as a “socialist.” But I’d like to see Congress slap a hefty tax on companies—foreign-owned or domestic—that move plants from the United States to low-wage countries. I’d like to see a law passed that would give workers a real say in how their companies operate, like workers have in Sweden, whose workforce is nearly 70 percent unionized. (Count me in favor of the Employee Free Choice Act, too.)

A more accurate name for “free enterprise” is “social responsibility free enterprise.” Continental didn’t feel any responsibility toward its employees or to our town, indeed to our region. Profit, not people or the communities where they live, mattered most with the company. Of course, there are dozens of other corporations like Continental, which closed another unionized ex-General Tire plant in Charlotte, N.C.

Chambers and Beane won’t have Continental tires on their vehicles. Nor will I and many others in and around Mayfield. As Chambers notes:

The tires [Continental is]…shipping to this country aren’t any cheaper to the consumer. Sometimes, they cost even more.

He cites a newspaper advertisement for a tire store in Paducah, near Mayfield.

It was in the Paducah paper. There were five different brands in the ad. Size for size, Continentals were the most expensive.

Scorn me as “naïve,” or as a “bleeding heart,” too. But I don’t see how downsizers and plant closers can live with themselves. I guess that makes me “just another Podunk” working stiff unwise in the ways of “free enterprise.”

Admittedly, I don’t “drag Jesus into everyday conversation” very often. But I thank the Good Lord that the basics of my Presbyterian upbringing have stuck with me to age 60. I try hard to live by what Christians call the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” (The same principle is also found in other faiths.)

Five days a week, I drive one or the other of my American-made cars past the tire plant going to and from the community college in Paducah where I teach history. It saddens me to see less and less of the plant standing each time I go by. I know the Good Book says we’re supposed to love people who harm us. But I also get angry when I see Continental’s handiwork.

The Continental bosses, who make big money, live in big houses and drive big cars, probably don’t give Mayfield a thought. But they ought to visit our town, drive out Highway 45 and watch the rubble rise. They also could tool around town and see the empty store buildings and the open spaces on our court square where other stores have been torn down.

The “Conti” brass could bring publicists from the PR division of Continental Tire North America, which is headquartered, not coincidentally, in South Carolina, a “right to work” state.

The flaks could take pictures of the ruins of the Mayfield plant for one of their glossy-paged annual reports for stockholders. After all, what happened where I live was good old American “free enterprise.”

***

Berry Craig is a member of AFT Local 6010

David Sirota

By David Sirota
Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist

For those still clinging to quaint notions of the American ideal, these have been a faith-shaking 10 years. Just as evolutionary science once got in the way of creationists’ catechism, so has politics now undermined patriots’ naive belief that the United States is a functioning democracy.

The 21st century opened with a handful of Supreme Court puppets appointing George W. Bush president after he lost the popular vote – and we all know the costs in blood and treasure that insult wrought. Now the decade closes with another cabal of stooges assaulting the “one person, one vote” principle – and potentially bringing about another disaster.

Here we have a major congressional push to fix a health care system that leaves one-sixth of the country without coverage. Here we have 535 House and Senate delegates elected to give all 300 million of us a voice in the solution. And here we have just 13 of those delegates holding the initiative hostage.

In the Senate, both parties have outsourced health care legislation to six Finance Committee lawmakers: Max Baucus, D-Mont.; Kent Conrad, D-N.D.; Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M.; Mike Enzi, R-Wyo.; Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. The group recently announced it is rejecting essential provisions like a public insurance option that surveys show the public supports. Meanwhile, seven mostly Southern House Democrats have been threatening to use their Commerce Committee votes to gut any health care bill, regardless of what the American majority wants.

This, however, isn’t about the majority. These lawmakers, hailing mostly from small states and rural areas, together represent only 13 million people, meaning those speaking for just 4 percent of America are maneuvering to impose their health care will on the other 96 percent of us.

Census figures show that the poverty rates are far higher and per-capita incomes far lower in the 13 legislators’ specific districts than in the nation as a whole. Put another way, these politicians represent exactly the kinds of districts whose constituents would most benefit from universal health care. So why are they leading the fight to stop – rather than pass – reform?

Because when tyranny mixes with legalized bribery, constituents’ economic concerns stop mattering.

Thanks to our undemocratic system and our corrupt campaign finance laws, the health care industry doesn’t have to fight a 50-state battle. It can simply buy a tiny group of congresspeople, which is what it’s done. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, health interests have given these 13 members of Congress $12 million in campaign contributions – a huge sum further enhanced by geography.

Remember, politicians trade favors for re-election support – and the best way to ensure re-election is to raise money to for TV airtime (read: commercials). The result is an amplifier of tyranny: Precisely because the undemocratic system unduly empowers legislators from sparsely populated (and hence cheap) media markets, industry cash can more easily purchase tyrannical obstruction from those same legislators. In this case, that means congresspeople blocking health care reform that would most help their own voters.

Of course, there is talk of circumventing the 13 obstructionists and forcing a un-filibuster-able vote of the full Congress. Inside the Washington palace, the media court jesters and political aides-de-camp have reacted to such plans by raising predictable charges of improper procedure, poor manners, bad etiquette and other Versailles transgressions.

But the real crime would be letting the tyrants block that vote, trample democracy and kill health care reform in the process.

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David Sirota is the bestselling author of the books “Hostile Takeover” (2006) and “The Uprising” (2008). Find his blog at OpenLeft.com or e-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com

David Sirota

 

By David Sirota
Author of “The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populists Revolt”

Taking a moment away from my book and column-writing, I just want to make a really important point that we all need to remember about the so-called “Blue Dogs” and “conservative Democrats” who are working their asses off to prevent real health care reform.

The Villagers in the D.C. media (ie. the power-worshiping pundits and journalists who preen around the nation’s capital telling the Rest of Us what to think) continue to claim that “Blue Dogs” and “conservative Democrats” come from “moderate districts,” and this is supposed to clearly explain their opposition to health care reform and progressive taxation to pay for said health care reform. This is propaganda at its worst – or, propagandists might say, at its best.

Polls have long shown us the country is basically unified in support of progressive economic positions. Indeed, there have been so many polls showing Americans strongly supporting universal government-sponsored health care, more progressive taxation, fairer trade deals, a Wall Street crackdown, and an end to grotestque bailoutism that I’m frankly sick of linking to all of them so much.

If we are a divided nation, we are divided on some hot-button cultural issues (guns, god, gays, yadda yadda…we’ve all heard it before). So sure, when Villagers in D.C. portray a senator like Max Baucus (D-MT) as representing his state’s fondness for guns when he votes against gun control, that’s an accurate portrayal. But when Villagers depict Baucus, who represents one of the poorest states in the country, as opposing real health care reform because he’s from a “conservative state” and is merely forwarding along his constituents alleged desire for insurance-industry shilling, that’s a lotta horse$&*%. And it’s the same for “Blue Dogs” from Appalachia and the rural South – when they differ with Obama on cultural issues, it’s probably because their constituents differ with Obama on cultural issues. But when they differ with him on a core economic issue like, say, taking on the health insurance vipers and reforming the system, they are, for the most part, $&*% ing all over those same constituents.

What’s really going on is this: “Blue Dogs” and “conservative Democrats” tend to represent swing states and districts – that is, states and districts that are among the very few that aren’t gerrymandered and therefore actually play host to competitive elections. Because of this, their re-election races tend to be especially expensive, which means these politicians have to raise a ton of cash for television ads. How, pray tell, do career politicians raise a ton of cash? They trade their votes and legislative maneuvers for corporate campaign money, most of it coming from special interests in Washington who have little to no grassroots support/connection to the politician’s state/district. The special-interest, D.C.-centric nature of these bribes is only enhanced by the fact that many of the “Blue Dog” and “conservative Democratic” districts/states are rather poor, meaning the money-sucking politicians are all but compelled to rely on out-of-state cash for their warchests.

All of this creates a closed circuit that serves the status quo. A “conservative Democratic” politician from a swing state needs to raise millions to finance a competitive campaign. There’s not a lot of loose money lying around the district, considering the recession and the destitution of the very kind of district “conservative Democrat” tend to come from. So the “conservative Democrat” ends up relying on money from D.C. special interests like, say, health insurers - interests that are largely hated in the “conservative Democrat’s” state and have little grassroots connection to the state. That money then buys votes that prevent stuff like health care reform that would most benefit the constituents of economically struggling states like the “conservative Democrat’s” state.

In the end, because of this kind of transaction, the state remains destitute, and the politician remains in office, keeps raising out-of-state cash, and keeps insisting with a $&*%-eating grin that it’s crazy – just crazy! – for anyone to think their votes could be influenced by millions of dollars. Meanwhile, the cycle starts right over on whatever new economic issue is coming down the pike – all while the $&*% Villagers in D.C. use euphemisms like “conservative Democrats” and “moderate districts” to explain it all away with an absurd storyline that insists because a politician comes from a state that loves guns, he has to oppose health care reform.

This is the swamp of propaganda and corruption that passes for “democracy.” At least we can be aware of it, and stop pretending rank-and-file voters’ cultural conservatism automatically means they want their congressman to be an economic corporatist.  

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David Sirota is a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future. Find his blog at OpenLeft.com or e-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com

David Sirota

By David Sirota
Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist

The health care debate has reminded us that there really are three separate but coordinated armies that defend the status quo in Washington — and will defend that status quo, whether on health care or any other economic issue. In my newspaper column today, I look at who these factions are, and what their motives are. You can read the column here.

In a nutshell, you have the Land Rover Liberals, many coming from the 14 out of 25 wealthiest congressional districts that Democrats now represent. Right now, their opposition to health care and tax reform is being led by Boulder, Colorado Rep. Jared Polis (D).

You also have the Corrupt Cowboys — those lawmakers from very poor, mostly Southern and Western parts of the country. These people give themselves Americana sounding nicknames like “Blue Dog Democrats” or “Main Street Republicans” so as to pretend their opposition to health care comes from their being down home guys “representin’ the folks back home.” Of course, these same lawmakers are among the most rapacious corporate fundraisers and lobbyist-connected insiders in Congress. And as I pointed out yesterday, there’s no evidence that the districts and states the Corrupt Cowboys represent despise health reform by virtue of the fact that they are culturally conservative bastions. In fact, Nate Silver says there’s exactly the opposite evidence:

There’s not really any evidence that health care reform is unpopular in the Blue Dog districts. Although there are exceptions, most of the Blue Dog districts are fairly poor. A Quinnipiac poll released earlier this month suggested that while 53 percent of voters overall think “think it’s the government’s responsibility to make sure that everyone in the United States has adequate health care,” 61 percent of voters making under $50,000 do. Also, while Quinnipaic did not break out the results for moderate and conservative Democrats, which are plentiful in these Districts, one can reasonably infer them. In this poll, 79 percent of liberals agreed with the statement as did 77 percent of Democrats — not a very big difference. Since almost all liberals are Democrats and about half of all Democrats are liberals, that suggests that support for health care reform among non-liberal Democrats is something like 75 percent.

Thus, the story about the honest, god-fearing, good ol’ boy cowboys opposing health care reform out of representational obligation has only been able to become conventional wisdom through the Millionaire Media — the elite national press corps, chock full of very wealthy people, that disseminates the most pernicious kind of anti-reform propaganda. These are the same people who insisted we should immediately rush $12 trillion in bailout cash out to Wall Street speculators, and who now insist that 64 years of debates over a $1 trillion health care proposal is inappropriately “rushing” health care reform. They are also the voices who are actually deriding health care reform as an inhumane proposal to legislatively waterboard the poor, persecuted richest one percent.

In the column, I look at the motives of all these groups, and give President Obama huge props for taking them on. As a sometime critic of Obama, I really think he’s doing a fantastic job right now, and the news this morning from the New York Times that “the president planning trips across the country” to campaign for health care reform is just fantastic. He’s going to have to take on the three groups I discuss in my column — and if he can beat them, we’re going to get universal health care.

Read the whole column here.

The column relies on grassroots support — and because of that support, it is getting wider and wider circulation (a big thank you to all who have helped with that). 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.

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David Sirota is the bestselling author of “Hostile Takeover” (2006) and “The Uprising” (2008). Contact him at ds@davidsirota.com.

Robert Kutner

Robert Kuttner
Co-Founder and Co-Editor of The American Prospect
One of the most coyly ambiguous lines in President Obama’s Inaugural Address was his pledge to “end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.”

That sounds high-minded, but you can read the promise two ways. Some heard it as a reproach to Republican ideology and to President Bush, who was seated nearby. Others heard it the latest reiteration of Obama’s desire to move beyond dogma per se and to achieve a new synthesis.

We will soon learn which it was. Obama, the president who would be post-ideological, is at last having his first encounters with the realities of polarized politics. Exhibit A is the stimulus package.

Obama has been more than generous in offering the Republicans far more tax-cutting as part of the recovery program than sound policy warrants. Will they reciprocate and support the rest of the package?

At Obama’s meeting last Friday with Congressional Republican and Democratic leaders, Republican Congressman Eric Cantor of Virginia was making the case that more tax cuts would be more stimulative than public spending. Obama replied in a jocular way according to those present, that the issue had been settled by the election, and “I won.”

Nothing post-ideological about that assertion.

More important, perhaps, was Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s reported statement that Senate Republicans would not filibuster against the stimulus package. But this may have been short-lived. In the official Republican response to the President’s remarks Saturday urging passage of the plan, House Republican leader John Boehner scoffed that the plan would “spend a whopping $275,000 in taxpayer dollars for every new job it aims to create, saddling each and every household with $6,700 in additional debt.”

On the Sunday talk shows, Republicans turned up the rhetoric. Even John McCain, who Obama went out of his way to court, called for more tax cuts and indicated he would vote no unless they were included.

The bill can squeak through without Republican votes, assuming no filibuster. But a more difficult balancing act may come within the Democratic Caucus. Obama needs not only some Republican backing or at least a Republican agreement not to filibuster. He also needs the support of the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats. Their mantra has been that deficits are far too large. They were calling for spending cuts (and some tax increases) back when the deficit was less than 3 percent of GDP.

Even without Obama’s proposed $820 billion recovery program, the Congressional Budget Office’s latest budget projection shows a deficit of $1.2 trillion this year, or 8.3 percent of GDP. The sharp increase in the deficit is the result of the recession, which reduces economic activity and hence tax receipts. With enactment of the stimulus, the deficit temporarily rises to over 10 percent of GDP–the biggest deficit since World War II.

Most of the Blue Dogs, who include House Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt of South Carolina, acknowledge the need for a temporary increase in public spending. Spratt’s opposite number, Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND), warned at a recent hearing that the United States was headed for a fiscal catastrophe. Conrad acknowledged “the need to have an economic recovery package that will add to deficits and debt in the short-term.” But he went on to sound the alarm about the “unsustainability of our current fiscal condition.”

This also suggests an ideological division that will be hard to paper over. After four decades of bipartisan assaults on government, many progressive Democrats (this writer included) hope to use the stimulus as a down-payment on an expansion of government services such as affordable housing and early childhood education that have been chronically under-funded, as well as long term investments in green energy and smart infrastructure.

But the 49-member Blue Dog Coalition in the House and Senate fiscal conservatives such as Conrad see the stimulus as a one-shot. They want sharp spending cuts as soon as the immediate crisis is past, to pay for the fiscal sin of a temporary deficit hike.

If you look at the details of the Obama recovery plan, however, it includes a lot of outlays that don’t look like one-shots: laying more than 3,000 miles of electric transmission lines; installing 40 million “smart” utility meters to help reduce energy use; weatherizing 2 million homes and most federal buildings. Among the other infrastructure investments are improving security at 90 major ports and modernizing the nation’s water system. These needs and others like them don’t end after two years.

Obama said Saturday in his first radio and video address, “This is not just a short-term program to boost employment. It’s one that will invest in our most important priorities — like energy and education, health care and a new infrastructure — that are necessary to keep us strong and competitive in the 21st century.”

Sounds good to me, but he will face ideological qualms from the fiscal conservatives within his own party, as well as from most Republicans. So the bipartisan honeymoon is unlikely to last, and I’d say, good riddance. Obama’s real challenge is to mobilize public opinion–not just to win general approval ratings but to make it very hard politically for anyone in either party to oppose his recovery program or to demand crippling budget cuts down the line as the quid pro quo. That’s what leadership is all about.

It’s show time. Call me out of date and ideological, but it’s reassuring when President Obama reminds himself and his opponents that “I won.”