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Leo Jennings

By Leo Jennings
Political consultant with Rubenstein Associates

Sometimes clichés become old clichés because they have enduring value.  Here’s one that puts the consequences of the 2010 election in perspective: “Timing is everything.”  That is because the Democrats didn’t just lose hundreds of important elections here in Ohio and across the nation, they lost the future as well.

Of course some may argue that I’m being far too pessimistic.  After all, we have elections every two years, and candidates always say that the next election is the most important one that’s ever been held.  Often such rhetoric is pure hyperbole.  But the truth is that there are elections and then there are ELECTIONS—like the one in 2010.

2010 was one of those elections because people around the country not only voted for candidates, they also decided who would control the process of drawing new state legislative and Congressional district lines based on the results of the just-concluded Census. And, as any student of American history will acknowledge, the party that draws the lines—that “holds the pencil” to use the vernacular–employing a combination of gerrymandering, state-of-the-art technology, and the exercise of raw political power almost always dominates public policy formation for the next decade, if not longer.

In case you haven’t noticed, the GOP won the pencil and the nearly limitless power that goes with it. (more…)

Certainly, we, the believers in the idea that a strong middle class requires a strong labor movement, know there’s not the time to build our own “hitchin’ post” for the 2012 elections.

Labor’s wagon has no place else to go but support the re-election efforts of our current Democrat President. The reality of “No Place Else to Go” has not served the middle class, or labor, well since the Reagan Revolution in the 1980s.

I wish to suggest that organized labor start to form a third political party of its own. Some accounts have the T-Bag movement as larger than labor now is. Certainly they are more vocal and more exposed in our media. In under two years, they are a force to be reckoned with, bought and paid for by billionaires not caring much for “We the People.”

Labor has natural allies and common interests with a much larger percentage of the country than just the card holders. Union household consumer spending benefits most of the small and family owned shops and businesses in this country. Union rules and lobbying efforts made and kept all our work places safer and nicer places to work. Labor has a natural alliance with the “Green Movement.” It also has historically been on the correct side of many of the social issues facing our nation the last 100 years.

I absolutely believe the labor movement represents the shrinking middle classes’ last best hope for their own and for America’s renewed strength in the world.

To start to build the coalition of the like-minded, on a target date 2016, would serve labor and the rest of us well. A legitimate break from the Democrats planned for 2016, at least a viable foundation for that new “hitchin’ post ” will get the right-of-center politics back on the middle class with more than lip service because we’ve got no where else to go.

These are historic times, in the absence of bold organized pro-middle class leadership, the billionaires win. They may have already won.

David Heffelfinger
Wichita, Kan.

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David Sirota

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

A sovereign nation investing its wealth in its domestic economy seems like a no-brainer, especially during a global recession. But in this crazy age of American politics, even that has become a controversial notion.

This is the subtext of a dispute that simmered beneath the pomp and circumstance of this week’s U.S.-China summit. As The New York Times previously reported, the Obama administration is calling on the World Trade Organization to use its power to halt the Chinese government’s wind-energy fund specifically because the money is “contingent on … manufacturers using parts made in China rather than foreign-made components.” The program, along with the Chinese regime’s broader domestic procurement requirements for wind farms, have helped the Chinese wind industry capture almost half of the global market for turbines.

Setting aside the bilateral wrangling over WTO arcana, China’s industrial policy success carries a basic lesson: When a nation couples public spending with incentives that encourage domestic corporate investment, an economy tends to grow its own wealth-building industries. That’s simple enough to understand, right?

Evidently, not within our own government. As “Buy China” policies now economically supercharge the world’s most populous nation, the White House and congressional Republicans have opposed many of the very “Buy America” proposals that might help us keep up—and that obstruction has come at a steep price. (more…)

Robert Borosage

By Robert L. Borosage
Co-Director Campaign for America’s Future

Speaker Nancy Pelosi will relinquish the gavel to the perpetually tanned, lachrymose Republican leader John Boehner when the new Congress convenes next January. It will be four years after that January 4, 2007 day when she “broke the marble ceiling” and became the first woman Speaker in the two century history of the House.

At the time, Republican pundits mocked Democrats for the choice of a “San Francisco liberal” woman as Speaker, suggesting she’d be a weak leader, unable to control the conservatives in the ever disputatious Democratic party, and easy to burlesque in campaigns across the country.

But this was Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro Pelosi, raised in a tough Baltimore Italian political family, who imbibed politics with her mother’s milk. Republicans soon discovered that Democrats had chosen not just the most progressive, but also the most effective and powerful Speaker in memory.

She was disciplined, shepherding her flock of progressives, Blue Dogs, New Dems, blacks, Latinos, women and good old boys, to focus on core issues — the kitchen table concerns that Americans worry over every night at home, the challenge to George Bush’s disastrous wars abroad. She was tireless, intent on consolidating her majority and helping Democrats to take the White House. She was practical, raising record sums of money in fundraisers across the country, the necessary coin of America’s debauched politics. She was tough, getting members to take votes they wanted to duck, forging the majorities she need to overcome unified Republican opposition. And she was, for better and worse, independent, willing to block the left’s efforts to impeach the president or end funding for the war that she thought would be damaging electorally.

In the face of the Bush White House and launch of the Republican strategy of obstruction through misuse of the filibuster, Pelosi produced far more in her first term as Speaker than anyone expected; far more, for example, than the much ballyhooed Gingrich Contract with America Congress in 1995-96. (more…)

Robert Reich

By Robert Reich
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

Two important victories for President Obama this week — the New Start anti-ballistic missile treaty with Russia to reduce weapons and re-start inspections, and the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell after a 17-year ban on gays in the military.

Why have Senate Republicans been willing to break ranks on these two, while not a single Republican went along with Obama’s plan to extend the Bush tax cuts on the first $250,000 of income? Why has Obama consistently caved on economic and taxes, but held his ground on foreign policy and issues like gays in the military?

A hint of an answer can be found in another Senate defeat for Obama over the last few weeks that got almost no attention in the media but was a big one: Republicans blocked consideration of the House-passed Disclose Act, which would have required groups that spend money on outside political advertising to disclose the major sources of their funding.

The answer is this. When it comes to protecting the fortunes of America’s rich (mostly top corporate executives and Wall Street) and maintaining their strangle-hold on the political process, Senate Republicans, along with some Senate Democrats, don’t budge. (more…)

Zach Carter

By Zach Carter
Economics Editor, AlterNet; Fellow, Campaign for America’s Future

Several key House Democrats are circulating a letter urging support for new regulations that would crack down on what critics say are rampant foreclosure abuses in the nation’s banking system.

The letter, authored by Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.) encourages federal banking regulators to rein in practices at bank divisions called “mortgage servicers.” Servicers are responsible for collecting and processing payments, charging late fees, negotiating with troubled borrowers and implementing the foreclosure process. Servicers have been criticized for committing widespread fraud in recent months, charging improper fees and incorrectly evicting borrowers.

The three House Democrats have already signed the letter, including House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.), House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and Rep. Laura Richardson (D-Calif.).

The letter from lawmakers comes one day after more than fifty economists, consumer advocates and banking experts urged regulators to take action on mortgage servicers. Federal Regulators are currently divided over whether or not to use new powers to regulate mortgage securities granted by this year’s Wall Street reform bill to crack down on servicing abuses. The FDIC wants to take the opportunity to rein in servicers, but the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency are resisting the new rules, although spokespeople for both agency say they support stronger standards for mortgage servicing. (more…)

The stakes are too high to sit this one out. Make your voice heard over the din of dollars secretly given by corporations to Republicans. Vote today!

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…)

On Tuesday, for hope and progress, put the car in D:

This Nov. 2, remember the damage working people suffered at the hands of Republicans.

Vote for Democrats.