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Just four months ago, Americans told the Romney-Ryan team: “No.” The electorate rejected them. Many voters objected to Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan treating them the way arrogant 1 percenters treat “The Help.”

Rep. Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, exposed his condescension toward the masses when he described 60 percent of Americans as “takers.” Mitt Romney illustrated his when he referred to 47 percent of Americans as slackers too lazy to take responsibility for their lives, a moment captured on video by a member of “The Help,” Scott Prouty, who was working as a bartender at the $50,000-a-plate fundraiser where Romney said it.

Last week, Ryan revealed the election loss left him unchastened. He remains intent on telling “The Help” what to do. The princeling of the royal Republican team reprised his prosperity-for-the-rich-austerity-for-the-rest budget. Although the public rejected that path in November, Ryan continues to insist he’s correct and the majority is wrong. He doesn’t care what they want. Like any pampered princeling, he doesn’t tolerate challenges from “The Help.”

He said as much at a news conference after releasing a budget that even the conservative Wall Street Journal described as nearly a twin to the one he and Romney ran on. Here’s what Ryan said after he was asked why he was pushing ideas that the American people spurned in November:

“The election didn’t go our way — believe me I, I know what that feels like. . .That means we surrender our principles? That means we stop believing in what we believe in? . . .We think we owe the country solutions to the big problems that are plaguing our nation. . .We’re showing our answers.”

What Ryan calls answers are the same old schemes, the ones to which the majority of Americans said, “No!” But the consensus of the populace doesn’t matter to Ryan. During the campaign, he and Romney made it perfectly clear they don’t like and don’t respect “The Help.”

The contents of the Ryan budget demonstrate that as well. His proposal, like his previous budgets, would damage or destroy government programs that workers cherish, from Medicare and Medicaid to Pell Grants and food stamps. While Ryan’s budget slashes the living daylights out of those, it awards the wealthy and corporations additional gigantic tax breaks. (more…)

Mike Lux
Co-founder and CEO, Progressive Strategies

Readers may remember my last, shall we say, dialogue with the great Republican thinker Todd Akin. Akin is rapidly becoming one of my favorite Republicans because he articulates the party’s true positioning on issues so well. He has been back in the news recently with this gem of a quote about student loans: “America has the equivalent of the stage-three cancer of socialism because the federal government is tampering in all kinds of stuff it has no business tampering in.” While Mitt “Etch A Sketch” Romney and other Republicans are back-pedaling as fast as they can on the student loan issue to make it sound like they don’t want student loan interest rates to go up, Todd Akin and the other right wingers who control the Republican party are digging in, questioning the whole idea of whether the government should even be involved in student loans.

Please, keep speaking out, Congressman. Your country, your Party, and my Party especially all need you to keep making clear the true Republican position on student loans.

There couldn’t be a clearer distinction between Republicans and Democrats, between conservatives and progressives than on this issue. What Democrats, progressives, and incidentally the American people believe is that one of the best ways to rebuild the great American middle class is to invest in our young people’s education through both high-quality K-12 public education and through grants and loans for college students. Thomas Jefferson’s dream of public education for all, Abraham Lincoln’s idea of a land grant university system, FDR’s plan for a GI Bill for our country’s soldiers so they could get a college education after serving their country, and Claiborne Pell’s bill that gave grant money for college students in need helped create the legacy of a strong middle class in this country. We created a way for poor and working class kids to get a good education and make a better life for themselves than their parents had, and that made us a stronger country.

The American middle class, the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, was not built by accident. It was built brick-by-brick by the generations that came before. It was built by raising our wages through the power of the labor movement and the minimum wage; it was built by providing incomes, health care, and a safety net for our senior citizens and those with disabilities and those who had hard times; it was built by protecting us from financial speculation and the specter of bank runs; it was built by investing in roads, bridges, highways, and rural electrification; it was built by investing in the kind of R&D that created the transistor chip and the Internet; it was built by encouraging entrepreneurship and small business strength through vigorous anti-trust enforcement; and it was built by investing in the education of our young people. Education was one of the cornerstones. (more…)

Mike Lux
Co-founder and CEO, Progressive Strategies

When conservative Congressman Todd Akin a few months back suggested that liberalism was a “hatred of God,” I postulated that given the overwhelming support for liberal and progressive values in the Judeo-Christian Bible, perhaps he had never bothered to actually read the Bible. With Rick Santorum’s recent comment that Obama’s agenda is “Some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology,” I am now beginning to wonder if Santorum, Akin, and other conservatives are just reading a different Bible entirely than the one I read.

Because here’s the thing: while you can — if you really work hard to do it — find verses here and there supporting a more conservative political point of view on certain specific issues, there is simply no way to read the Bible I read and not come to the conclusion that it is overwhelmingly supportive of helping the poor, showing mercy to the weak, refraining from judging, treating others as you would treat yourself, calling on the wealthy to give their money to the poor, and all kinds of other liberal, lefty, progressive values. You would have to ignore a great deal of Genesis and Exodus, with their talk of being our brother’s keeper and bringing justice to the poor, oppressed slaves in Egypt; you would have to skip over a great many of the verses of Psalms with its poetry about justice and mercy for the poor and the widow; you would have to avoid the books of the Prophets almost entirely since so much of what they are angry about is the Israelite society’s mistreatment of poor people and immigrants in their midst. Then there is the New Testament, where between St. Paul, the relatives of Jesus, and the big guy himself, there are so many verses on these subjects that it is virtually impossible to ignore them.

In fact, as I noted in my piece about Todd Akin, Jesus talks about mercy to those in trouble in 24 verses of the Gospels, tells people not to judge in 34 verses, tells people to love and forgive even their enemies in 53 verses, tells people to love their neighbors as themselves and treat others as they would want to be treated in 19 verses, and specifically tells people to help the poor and/or spurn riches and the wealthy in 128 verses. (more…)

Congressman Charlie Bass, R-New Hampshire, voted to end the protections that the new health insurance reform law provides for working Americans, but he retained for himself the benefits he tried to deny to everyone else. Daily Kos, Blue America and other progressive blogs sponsored ads like this one challenging Republican health care hypocrites like him who voted to keep working Americans from getting the same health care they have. There is no excuse for them to accept government-sponsored health insurance while they attempt to repeal protections for everyone else.

Transcript:

Equal protection. It’s the American way.

But when it comes to health care protections, Congressman Charlie Bass thinks he deserves better than you.

Congressman Bass gets affordable health care, with protections against insurance companies cutting him and his family off. No lifetime limits. No annual caps. No preexisting conditions.

But last month Bass voted to deny you and your family these same protections. That’s not equal. That’s not fair.

Even worse, Congressman Bass voted to:

– raise health insurance premiums

– take away prescription drug benefits for seniors

- and deny insurance for sick kids

That will make it tougher for you to get affordable health care.

But don’t worry, Congressman Bass is all set – since his vote didn’t apply to the health plan he gets as a member of Congress.

Call Congressman Charlie Bass and tell him: health care protections that are good enough for Congress should be good enough for ALL of us.

Paid for by Daily Kos and American United for Change. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Dailykos.com and Americansunitedforchange.org

Robert Creamer

By Robert Creamer
Political organizer, strategist and author

The proposed tax deal between Republicans and Democrats lays out in clear relief the sharp contrasts between Republican and Democratic priorities.

Democrats have demanded major economic benefits for the middle class:

No increase in middle class taxes;

Continued payment of unemployment benefits to the millions who are out of work because there are five job seekers for every job;

A payroll tax holiday for employees (not corporations) that would save a couple making $70,000 a year $1,400 next year.

Continuation of tax benefits for middle- and low-income families that were included in the Obama stimulus bill — including expanded college tuition deduction that provides support for eight million students; and expanded versions of the child tax credit and earned income tax credit that benefit low income working families.

Republicans demanded big time benefits for the wealthy and the country’s largest corporations:

Tax breaks for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans;

An estate tax provision that increases the number of millionaires who are entirely exempt from inheritance tax, and lowers the tax rate for the multimillionaires and billionaires who are covered.

A business tax break for companies who invest in new capital equipment.

There you have it. No clearer map exists as to who is on whose side. The Republicans have held the middle class hostage so it could continue huge tax breaks for the tiny sliver of the population whose incomes have skyrocketed at the same time the incomes of everyday Americans have actually dropped and the recklessness of Wall Street has cost eight million Americans their jobs. (more…)

Les Leopold

By Les Leopold
Author, “The Looting of America”

If future job creation reaches about 208,000 jobs per month, the average monthly job creation for the best year for job creation in the 2000s, it will take almost 140 months (about 11.5 years) to reach pre-recession employment levels. In a more optimistic scenario with 321,000 jobs created per month, the average monthly job creation for the best year in the 1990s, it will take 59 months (almost 5 years). ~Michael Greenstone, Adam Looney The Long Road Back to Full Employment: How the Great Recession Compares to Previous U.S. Recessions, The Brookings Institution

This may be the first time in American history that the super-rich are experiencing an economic boom while the rest of us are coping with serious economic difficulties. Even during the depths of the Great Depression there was some equality of suffering. Of course, the wealthy weren’t exactly standing in bread lines wondering if they’d ever work again. But the rich and the poor both felt the crisis. This time around, it’s a Tale of Two Cities: the super-rich are doing just fine, thanks to taxpayer largess, even as the rest of us are staggering through the highest sustained unemployment level since 1937.

Our Wall Street billionaires easily weathered the financial storm that they themselves created. It’s as if nothing had happened. The financial reforms Congress passed are weak. The biggest banks actually are bigger. And Wall Street profits and bonuses are approaching record highs. That’s in stark contrast with the fact that more than 29 million Americans are without work or have been forced into part-time jobs.

With the Republican landslide, the super-rich have nothing to fear from Congress. No need to worry about tax increases or tighter regulations now. The hedge funds will be able to hang on to their 15 percent tax rate (by claiming their earnings as capital gains) while raking in $900,000 an hour (not a typo). Meanwhile the pressure mounts to cut social spending — because, of course, we’ve got to combat the large deficits we racked up by giving tax breaks to the rich, bailing out Wall Street, and dealing with the financial crash that Wall Street created. (We get a deficit commission instead of a jobs commission?)

But the real mystery is how quiet progressives are. We seem constitutionally incapable of facing the enormity of the employment crisis.

As far as I can tell, most liberal advocacy groups are carrying on as if the economy hadn’t crashed at all. It’s like we’re all stuck in our remote silos — each working on our own separate issues. We have no shared vision, shared programs or shared will to tackle the broader unemployment crisis. We hope the economy will somehow resurrect itself so that we can go on fighting for our favorite cause without any further interruptions.

Meanwhile, the right, especially the Tea Party, definitely is in crisis mode, and they have a plan. In my opinion they have misidentified the crisis – big government and debt – and have the wrong plan — cut taxes and government spending. But they have a vision, they have passion, and they’re not afraid to challenge not only the Democrats, but the Republicans. They’ve hit on a clever theory to explain the jobs crisis, one that can’t be disproved by facts: It’s caused by big government’s interference in the economy. The solution: slice government spending and regulations so that free enterprise can prosper. And if unemployment still remains high after budget cuts–well, then we just didn’t cut enough. It’s a perfect Catch 22.

And the rest of us are saying… what? What do environmentalists propose to do about the jobs crisis? What is the women’s movement’s economic program? What do progressives involved in healthcare or education think we should do to create the 22 million new jobs we need to get back to full employment?

Yes, there’s a lot of positive discussion about rebuilding our economy through green jobs and renewable energy. But the scale of these proposals is far too small to put much of a dent in the unemployment numbers. Are we all too afraid to say what’s really needed?

We need hundreds of billions of dollars of public investment, right now, paid by taxes on the super-rich.

Why are progressives so timid? Part of the answer lies in our permanent attachment to the Democratic Party. It seems that we can’t ever imagine a time when it would be appropriate to abandon or at least openly fight with the Dems — even those who abandoned us long ago. What will we do as the remaining Blue Dogs move even further to the right, joining with the Republicans on deficit reduction, gutting health care reform, outlawing abortions and stonewalling on climate change? One thing is certain — the Democratic Party is in no mood to lay out a bold national proposal to create the millions of new jobs we need. Most are tacking to the “center” to avoid the fate of Russ Feingold, the very best of the bunch.

What would a massive job creation program look like?

Let’s start with a no-brainer: We hire an army of at least one million installers to weatherize every home and business in the country. Hiring all these workers –at decent wages –through tens of thousands of local contractors will probably add another 400,000 jobs (in addition to the original million) as these re-employed workers spend their earnings. Households and businesses will save on their energy bills, and we’ll reduce global warming emissions. The budget crisis facing state governments will ease as tax dollars start pouring in and unemployment insurance claims plummet. We’ll trigger an economic upswing that’s also good for the environment.

Next, we should fund free higher education at all public colleges and universities, a social good that will also open up the job market by drawing people from the workforce into the educational system. A hiring and construction boom on campuses all over the country will generate a flood of jobs for our millions of unemployed construction workers. This is precisely how the GI Bill of Rights averted what could have been a staggering unemployment crisis after WWII — a time when millions of returning veterans were coming back home in search of work. Through the GI bill, three million instead went to school. Congressional studies show that the GI Bill returned almost $7 dollars of economic growth for every dollar invested — probably the best investment the federal government ever made.

We should also invest massively in alternative energy research, in rebuilding and enhancing our infrastructure, and in meeting a myriad of other needs in our communities. Ask every town in the country to come up with ten projects that need doing right now, and then have the federal government fund them. The ripple effect would wake up our slumbering economy.

Oh, but won’t all this cost a fortune? Aren’t we already tapped out from Wall Street bailouts and the half-assed stimulus program (not to mention two wars)?

Good question — it gets us to the best part of our in-your-face program. We need to make those who crushed our economy, and whom we so generously bailed out, foot the bill. The American people, I believe, would support a windfall tax on financial profits and bonuses and eliminating tax loopholes on hedge funds to fund the jobs we so desperately need.

Time for a Jobs Party?

Will any of this pass in the near future? Of course not. But it’ll never happen if we don’t propose what is really needed.

We have no prayer of tackling the jobs crisis until we articulate a clear-cut agenda and start pressing for it. And we can’t do it alone. We need a sustained, organized voice independent of the Democratic Party that focuses clearly on the jobs crisis. In fact, we should take a cold hard look at creating a Jobs Party. Maybe, one day, it would become a third party that would truly vie for power. But at the very least it could create the same kind of chaos among the Democrats as the Tea Party is creating among the Republicans. Wouldn’t it be nice to see Democratic officials, fearing primary fights, tripping all over themselves to proclaim their allegiance to the Jobs Party agenda?

Right now, the only conversation we’re hearing on jobs is a boring rerun of failed neo-liberalism – cut taxes on the super-rich, deregulate big business and pray for rain. Instead, we need to force politicians to engage in a much more aggressive national conversation about jobs. How are we are going to create the 22 million new jobs to get us back near full-employment?

Will it really take eleven years or more, as the Brookings Institution study (cited above) suggests, for us to get these jobs back? That’s up to us. A Jobs Party with moxie could speed up the timetable during this new era of joblessness.

Maybe all this sound fanciful and unrealistic. But let’s remind ourselves of how fast the world is changing. Did anyone believe that President Obama could go from being America’s darling to chopped liver in less than two years? Did anyone believe that a Tea Party would become a “credible” force among more than 40 percent of the electorate by pushing an agenda that died with Barry Goldwater a generation ago?

Actually, the most fanciful path of all might be hoping we can muddle through indefinitely with the Democrats while ignoring the employment crisis as we plug away, day after day, inside our issue silos.

Come on — let’s say what we really believe in before we forget how.

***

Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street’s Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009. He is working on a new book, “How to Earn $900,000 an Hour: The Rise of Wall Street Billionaires and the New Class War,” which is to be published in 2011.

***

This piece was first published on The Huffington Post.

Isaiah J. Poole

By Isaiah J. Poole
Executive editor of the blog site OurFuture.org

The conservative Blue Dog House Democrats, who borrowed heavily from Republican and Tea Party themes in an effort to save their jobs, floundered badly Tuesday. Meanwhile, Progressive Caucus members in contested races had much better success at getting re-elected in spite of some strong right-wing assaults.

Of the 54 seats occupied by members of the Blue Dog coalition, 27 of them were lost to Republicans. (That includes five held by incumbents who either retired or ran for the Senate.) On the other hand, all but three of the much larger group of Progressive Caucus members up for re-election won their seats, including six out of nine caucus members whose races were rated as competitive.

The three Progressive caucus members who lost their seats to Republicans are Reps. Alan Grayson, Fla., Phil Hare, Ill., and John Hall, N.Y. A fourth Progressive Caucus member, Carolyn Cheeks Kirkpatrick of Michigan, was defeated in a primary; her successor, Democrat Hansen Clarke, won 79 percent of the vote Tuesday. (more…)

Robert Creamer

By Robert Creamer
Political organizer, strategist and author

This Saturday, a broad coalition of progressive organizations will hold a massive One Nation Working Together rally — actually kind of a revival — aimed at allowing progressives to emerge from a defensive crouch, stand up straight and mobilize our forces to do battle in the decisive midterm elections.

Due to a navigational error, the U.S. 4th Infantry Division landed on the wrong inlet on Utah Beach in Normandy on D-Day in 1944. For hours the were disoriented and pinned down by German defenders. Then the only general to accompany the amphibious assault, General Ted Roosevelt (son of President Teddy Roosevelt), personally rallied his troops from the beach, over the seawall and established a beachhead that was critical to the successful invasion of France that ultimately ended World War II.

Saturday’s rally is aimed at energizing thousands of latter-day General Ted Roosevelts who can fan out across America and do the same for the progressive forces that can be successful on Nov. 2 if — together — we stand up straight, take the offensive and refuse to be pinned down by constant attacks from the right.

The president’s speech to 27,000 in Madison, Wisconsin, last Monday night fired up all present. It was a great start. But this weekend’s rally organizers plan to communicate one central message to the thousands of activists who will gather in Washington Saturday: The President and other Democratic political leaders are not the only ones responsible for rallying our forces. We are all the generals who will rally our troops off this beach. It’s up to us to take the leadership to prevent the Big Business, Wall Street-dominated, Tea-Party Republicans from reclaiming right-wing domination of American politics.

For forty years the right was on the offensive in America. At least when Bill Clinton was president, Democrats had a team on the field, but in so many respects the right-wing offensive continued until their crushing defeat in November 2008.

For the last 18 months, the progressive forces have once again been on the offense. But the entrenched corporate interests didn’t roll over and play dead. They fought tooth and nail — they lied, they bit, they poked eyes — and did everything in their power to stop change. (more…)

Marc Stier

By Marc Stier
Executive Director, Penn Action 

Over the next month, Penn Action will be sponsoring a series of events around Pennsylvania, some in conjunction with other groups, that aim to build a strong progressive movement to get voters who share our ideals out to the polls in November and then to keep the pressure on our elected officials to support progressive legislation over the next two years and beyond.

Why we need to take action now.

Why are we doing this? Because two years ago, we all worked together to elect a progressive President, and a Congress who would support him.

And, in the last two years, we’ve kept working as we helped President Obama and the Democrats in Congress pass a stimulus package that avoided a second Great Depression, a strong financial reform bill, and health care reform legislation that will go far in making quality health care affordable for all.

We have accomplished more for working people in the last two years than the last two Democratic Presidents accomplished in 12 years.

But we haven’t attained all we wanted.

The stimulus was not big enough to keep unemployment from rising to terrible levels. The financial reform bill was not strong enough. And the health care reform bill did not include a public option. And the reason we have not done more is that, while we elected a President and Congress in 2008, we haven’t built a movement strong enough to attain all we progressives want. (more…)