'Collusion With Austerity' Will Sink Obama, say Progressives

Tuesday, February 26, 2013 by Common Dreams  
An 'elite bipartisan consensus' sends the bill for Wall Street’s mess to the middle class and the president has done far too much "playing along"
- Jon Queally, staff writer


As the deadline of the so-called "budget sequestration" nears, progressives are warning President Obama that his obsession with giving credence to the "cut the deficit" antics of Republicans is a trap and that if Democrats don't jettison the failed "economics of austerity" immediately, they'll have no one to blame but themselves.

Richard Eskow calls it "Washington's Stupid, Destructive Game."

Robert Kuttner, his colleague at the Campaign for America's Future, names it "The Sequestering of Barack Obama," while The Nation's Katrina vanden Huevel says it's not the president, but "common sense" that's being locked up in Washington as Democrats systematically trade the proven economics of stimulus spending—which has so far saved the economy from ruin following its collapse in 2008—for the 'slash and burn' politics of the Republican party.

With the usual candor, Princeton economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman marked the whole debacle down last week as the "Sequester of Fools."

What these progressive voices have in common (in addition to acknowledging the ridiculous nature of the debate by Beltway establishment figures) is agreement that President Obama and the Democrats—far from winning a public opinion "blame game"—are sadly playing directly into the hands of a Republican Party hell bent on pushing an economic austerity agenda on the country at a time when the exact opposite course is needed.

And the chorus of alarm against the President's strategy—namely his willingness to cut programs like Social Security and Medicare while simultaneously embracing the flawed wisdom of budget cuts and deficit reduction—is growing.
As recently as today, in remarks made at a shipbuilding plant in Virginia, Obama said:

Now, the reason that we're even thinking about the sequester is because people are rightly concerned about the deficit and the debt.

But, according to economists, that's exactly "not right." That's exactly "wrong." And this is the problem.

Writing at The American Prospect, Kuttner explains:

Though too few Democrats will come right out and say it, there is a far better path to both economic recovery and eventual stabilization of the debt ratio. We need to increase public spending in the next few years, using both deficit spending and higher taxes on the wealthy, to get the economy back on a high-growth path. Taxes on the wealthy are better put toward public investment than to deficit reduction. Taxing the rich is far less of a hit to purchasing power than hiking taxes on working families, who spend nearly all of their disposable income. With a program of economic expansion, we can reach a stable long-term debt ratio, but at a higher level of economic output and a more broadly shared prosperity. The goal is economic recovery—and the recovery improves the debt ratio, not the other way around.

Among the economists in this camp are Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, as well as Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, James Galbraith of the University of Texas, and former Biden chief economist Jared Bernstein. In a recent article for the Economic Policy Institute, economists Josh Bivens and Andrew Fieldhouse observed that the “output gap”—the difference between what the economy is producing and what it is capable of producing—is now about a trillion dollars a year. If you cut the budget in such circumstances, you slow growth and get further away from stabilizing the debt ratio. The problem is that these people are not part of the conversation at the White House, which is a dialogue among Obama’s top aides, the corporate austerity-mongers, and Republicans, all of whom believe in deficit reduction.

At the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Dean Baker says the clear problem is that both parties have played into the idea that deficits are a problem when, in fact, the opposite is true.

"Rather than being a bad thing," Baker writes, "the deficit is providing a needed boost to the economy." And challenging the idea that deficit reduction will spur private spending, he adds: "There is no plausible story whereby private-sector demand will fill the gap created by a smaller deficit."

"Colluding in the politics of budget austerity has left Obama with no real capacity to offer the public investment that the economy needs for a robust, broadly-based recovery, and leaves him with the prospect of a weak economy between now and the end of his term–unless he drastically shifts course and repudiates the entire view of the budget and the economy." -Robert Kuttner

Robert Reich, UC Berkeley economist and former labor secretary, argues that unless Obama and the Democrats confront the two-headed lie of "austerity economics and trickle-down economics" pushed daily by the GOP, "the nation will continue to careen from crisis to crisis, showdown to showdown."

The problem is not deficits, according to Reich, but "too few jobs, lousy wages, and slow growth." He continues, "Cutting the budget deficit anytime soon makes the problem worse because it reduces overall demand. As a result, the economy will slow or fall into recession – which enlarges the deficit in proportion."

If you want proof, says Reich, just look at what austerity policies have done to economies across Europe.

Yet, as vanden Huevel writes, "most of Washington — from the newly reelected Democratic president to the self-described insurgent Tea Party Republicans — is ignoring this reality to focus on cutting deficits." She writes:

The Republican Congress seems intent on letting the “sequester” take place — the idiotic across the board cuts that were explicitly designed to be anathema to both parties. Senate Democrats call not for repealing these cuts, but for “paying for” delaying them for a few more months.

Why this fixation? Deficits aren’t careering out of control. In fact, as the Congressional Budget Office reports, in relation to the economy, the deficit has fallen faster over the past three years than at any time since the demobilization after World War II. Calls for cutting Medicare benefits ignore the reality that the slowing rise in Medicare costs has already cut about $500 billion from its projected costs over 10 years compared to estimates made two years ago.

Meanwhile, Kuttner argues that by playing into the GOP's mantra on 'cutting deficits' as a legitimate strategy, Obama has "miscalculated both the tactical politics of the sequester and the depressive economic impact of budget cuts on the rest of his presidency."

He continues:

Long term, colluding in the politics of budget austerity has left Obama with no real capacity to offer the public investment that the economy needs for a robust, broadly-based recovery, and leaves him with the prospect of a weak economy between now and the end of his term–unless he drastically shifts course and repudiates the entire view of the budget and the economy.

And later notes:

As the Greeks have painfully learned over and over again, you can cut spending and raise taxes, and the deficit just keeps growing larger—because you are destroying your economy. The same has been demonstrated for Spain, Portugal, and Britain. Something similar occurred on a more modest scale in the fourth quarter of 2012 right at home.

And George Lakoff, professor of linguistics and political analyst, says that until Democrats confront the GOP's moral stance—one that actually favors the pain imposed by austerity—the Democrats and Obama continue to miss an opportunity to discuss the "heart of the problem" that undergirds the ongoing series of fights over the economy. What that demands, says Lakoff, is a vocal challenge on the part of the Democrats and progressives to address the "moral divide at the heart of our public life."

"Whether they know it or not, those pushing for smaller deficits are promoting less growth and more unemployment." - Dean Baker, CEPR

Taking a deeper look at Republican intentions, Eskow says the ongoing debate amounts to a "hostage crisis" in which austerity economics is being forced on "an unwilling population – [cloaked] in a false debate about how to do it, not about why we shouldn’t do it at all."

And to Republicans, argues Kuttner, it hardly matters if the fight now hurts them in the short term, when their eyes are fixed on 2014 and 2016 when few voters will likely remember the current series of events.

"An austere budget slows the recovery and leaves the Democrats with no economic bragging rights going into 2014 and 2016," he writes.

But would the GOP be so cynical as to trash the economy for political gain? Yes, says Kuttner, before concluding that in upcoming election cycles: "nobody will much remember who was more at fault in the sequester battle of early 2013. The voters will be looking at their own economic situation, and it won't be pretty."

And as Baker concludes: "Whether they know it or not, those pushing for smaller deficits are promoting less growth and more unemployment. It would be the best possible outcome of the sequester debate if this simple point could be made in polite circles in Washington again."

But it's not to be. As vanden Huevel laments:

This elite consensus ignores how we got into the fix we are in. The deficit was under 2 percent of gross domestic product in 2007 and the debt under 40 percent of GDP when Wall Street’s wilding blew up the housing bubble and drove the economy into the Great Recession. Wall Street got bailed out, but the deficit soared to 11 percent of GDP and Americans lost nearly 40 percent of their wealth. You’d think anyone so fixated on avoiding another Pearl Harbor moment would focus on making certain Wall Street was properly shackled, and the too-big-to-fail banks broken up.

But the elite bipartisan consensus is focused on sending the bill for Wall Street’s mess to an already battered middle class, by weakening the basic pillars of a family’s economic security — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And they are a lot closer than anyone thinks. The sequester is just the first of a series of austerity bombs that the Republican Congress will use to extort cuts in these benefits.

It’s time to stop such extortionists from holding our country’s economic future hostage.

The most notable hostage of the austerity trap, however, seems to be President Obama himself. And unless he changes course soon, his critics say, it will be more than his legacy that gets sunk.

Lesser Evilism, 2012

A Vote for Obama Now Might Be More Evil Than It Was in 2008

by MICHAEL KAUFMAN

 

At this time of year it is not uncommon to become wistful and look back at the time that has passed, but oddly enough, I find myself becoming nostalgic for the time of the last Bush administration. I remember it as a time when people still expressed opposition to a regime that had contempt for them. It was scarcely possible to be in any social setting without people grumbling about Bush and expressing their disgust, even people of an apolitical nature.  How freely the “F”-word, fascist, was bandied about!  Anti-Bush sentiment permeated the culture to such an extent that there were even books written discussing the merits of assassinating the president……and that was just the pacifists!*

Now, even mild expressions of disapproval are largely absent. These days who is saying she is ashamed to be from Hawaii, Chicago, Kansas, Indonesia? Or that Obama doesn’t care about black people? Who is singing “Let’s Impeach the President”?  Occupy Wall Street is putting up a struggle and there are other pockets of resistance, but within the electoral system:

the citizens
don’t want to put up a defense
they enroll in accelerated courses
in falling to their knees**

Almost weekly, progressives and liberals are faced with some new “betrayal”, but they appear unable to rebel, bound by the self-imposed limits of the concept of the lesser of two evils.  Obama may be bad, they say, but the Republican will be much worse.  Many people appear to be absolutely committed to this pessimistic short term approach to a bleak situation and so will always vote for whomever they consider to be less damaging: Pinochet versus Duvalier, Suharto versus Saddam, Idi Amin Dada versus Mobutu Sese Seko. No matter how bad the choices, the doctrine of lesser evilism compels them to choose, they cannot opt out.  It seems appropriate to refer to this group as “purists”.

I suspect that many who claim to make such a clearheaded appraisal actually possess a predetermined bias, and so believe the Democrats’ evil, as if an equation from a calculus text, can approach ever closer, but can never cross the Republicans’ axis. In order to effectively engage these people, however, one must take them seriously and try to answer the question of who is actually the lesser evil. I would begin by suggesting that although it used to be taken for granted that Bush was the worst president ever, in those areas in which the president is able to operate without the need for 60 senators, Obama has actually been worse.  To test this notion, a simple question for the purists: Can you name one country on the planet where the policies of Obama have been less militaristic than those of Bush?

(Expect either Iraq[hah!] to be offered in response, or a very long pause.) In the area of civil liberties we can echo Obama’s hero and ask: Is the Bill of Rights better off today than it was 3 years ago? This should “frame” the discussion for introducing as much detail as you desire, or, given the level of ire so many of this group possess, is allowed.

In these two areas most at the mercy of the unitary executive those at the outer edges of dissent among the Democrats seem to have it precisely backwards—Bush was Obama lite.  But we must remember that George W. Bush is not running in 2012, that unless Dick Cheney makes a last minute entrance into the race, Obama will be competing with someone who has not prosecuted illegal wars, rained down missiles on the heads of civilians, had people incarcerated and killed without trial. So many of the Obama loyalists rely on the subjunctive mood to carry their argument about who is the lesser of two evils. It would be prudent to follow the lead of another president, who also received rather too much credit for being slicker than the Bush who preceded him, and pay strict attention to what the meaning of “is” is. By doing this, who is the lesser of two evils becomes quite clear.

But I should try not to be so rigid; let’s play along and try to divine what the Republican candidate would do. Let’s imagine that the favorite, Mitt Romney, wins the election. Will he be a greater or lesser evil that our current president?  Their similarities have been often mentioned, most notably their health care plans. Similarities exist also in outward characteristics: Romney is seen as a slickly packaged empty suit with little of substance to offer; Obama has been frank that this applies to him as well, confessing in his writings to being a “blank slate”. There really aren’t so many ways we can be sure about Romney’s eventual policies– after all, it isn’t very wise to believe what any politician says.

This fact of life actually would be slightly to Romney’s advantage—Obama lied to get the support of those to his left, whereas Romney is seeking support from those on his right, so it is probable that he would be not quite as evil in reality as he is promising on the campaign trail to be.  Liberals could also feel proud for supporting him and striking a blow against religious bigotry, regaining the good feelings they had in 2008.  In those matters where the president needs the support of congress, Romney would have to move to the left in order to get anything passed. In the seemingly unrestrained role as commander-in-chief we have no way of knowing what the real essence of Romney is that ultimately would be revealed if he were to reach the position of near absolute power.  It is feasible, I suppose, that he will turn out to match or even surpass the icy viciousness, the elegant brutality of Obama, but it is far from certain. What is certain is that, given what we know at this time, a vote for Obama in 2012 is a much greater evil than it was in 2008.

Liberals Get 'Déjà Vu' and Complain Dems Have Bungled in Debt Talks

Friday, October 28, 2011 by The Hill

Déjà vu

by Mike Lillis 

 

Liberals on and off Capitol Hill agonized Thursday that supercommittee Democrats had bungled early negotiations over a budget deal and put their party in a position to be bested again by Republicans.

By proposing significant cuts to Medicare and Medicaid as an early offering, liberals said the panel Democrats weakened their party’s negotiating position as Republicans, who have ceded no ground on their central anti-tax message, sat back and watched.

"My fear is that this is déjà vu all over again,” said Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), one of the dozens of liberals who thought the White House cornered itself in the summer debt-ceiling talks by floating similar entitlement cuts to the GOP in negotiations led by Vice President Biden.

“This is essentially what happened in the Biden talks,” Welch said. “The Democrats were putting concrete proposals on the table [including entitlement cuts] and the Republicans never came forward with concrete revenues to match it.

“The Democratic side was negotiating against itself,” Welch added. “As a strategy, that won’t work.”

While some Democrats said their deficit package is evidence that they’re the more serious negotiators, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) shrugged it off and remarked it was “time for everybody to get serious” about the talks.

In a memo highlighting the Republicans’ blanket opposition to new tax hikes, Boehner’s office said the Democrats’ plan is “not a serious proposal.”

“Republicans have been willing to discuss new revenues, but this offer is rooted in unacceptable tax increases, which would have a negative impact on the economy and jobs,” the memo reads.

Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee ( PCCC), a liberal activist group, echoed Welch’s message Thursday, saying the Democrats’ early offer to cut Medicare and Medicaid is “just incompetent negotiation strategy.”

“If Democrats on the [supercommittee] are proposing cuts to Medicare, Medicaid or other middle-class benefits, that is fundamentally out of step with what the 99 percent of Americans are crying out for right now,” Green said in an email. “The middle class has sacrificed enough — it’s time for Wall Street and the wealthy to finally pay their fair share, and voters need Democratic politicians to get that.”

A former House Democratic staffer sounded a similar note, saying the Democrats could use a lesson in how to squeeze more of their priorities out of the ongoing bipartisan talks.
“Though the [Democrats] won’t likely bite on Medicare offsets (i.e., bene[fit] cuts) w/out revenue, the cuts are now, nevertheless, out there,” the staffer, who is now a health policy analyst, said in an email. “Someone really should give these guys a primer on negotiating skills!?!”

The liberals are furious with the sweeping $3 trillion deficit-reduction proposal presented Tuesday by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) to Republicans on the deficit panel. The plan includes hundreds of billions of dollars in entitlement cuts and more than $1 trillion in new tax hikes — a package along the lines of the “grand bargain” negotiated over the summer by President Obama and Boehner that eventually died in favor of a more modest deal focused on spending cuts.

The proposal offered by Baucus — which was endorsed by a majority of the six Democrats on the deficit panel — features roughly $400 billion in Medicare reductions, including significant cuts to senior benefits. A number of liberal Democrats hammered the proposal this week, warning that benefit cuts under Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are a nonstarter.

“I don’t want to hear Democrats suggesting that we have those types of cuts in Medicare,” Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, told The Hill on Wednesday. “I hope that’s not true.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, however, declined to join those critics on Thursday.
“It’s no use asking me about specific things until we see the whole package,” Pelosi said during a press briefing in the Capitol.

The California Democrat reiterated her party’s insistence on a “balanced” deficit-reduction plan, suggesting that she and her caucus won’t support a package that fails to spread the pain of austerity across a class spectrum.

“It’s not fair to say to a senior, ‘You’re going to pay more for Social Security, and we’re not going to touch a hair on the head of the wealthiest people in our country,’ ” Pelosi said.
Democrats also hammered a Republican counteroffer that would cut the deficit by $2.2 trillion over 10 years and generate up to $640 billion in new revenue.

Consistent with the Republicans’ vows not to impose new taxes, the revenues originate from increased user fees and tax-revenue increases the GOP says will accompany an overhaul of the tax code.

Democrats said it focused too heavily on middle-class benefit cuts without balancing them out with tax hikes on the wealthy.

“As reported, Republicans’ stubborn refusal to come forth on real revenues as part of a deficit reduction package threatens any real progress in the Select Committee,” Rep. Sandy Levin (Mich.), senior Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement.

“Their unwillingness to ask anything of the very wealthiest even as they propose devastating cuts to Medicare and Social Security is totally unacceptable.”

Yet liberal activists argue that the Democrats’ proposal is little better.

“This plan protects the status quo for the 1 percent while the 99 percent are expected to sacrifice vital healthcare they need to survive,” said Jim Dean, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s brother and the chairman of Democracy for America, a political action committee with 1 million members.

“Democracy for America will oppose any Democrat who votes for a plan that cuts Medicare or Medicaid.”

Progressive Groups Unveil 'Contract For The American Dream'

Tuesday, August 9, 2011 by Huffington Post
by Sam Stein

WASHINGTON -- In the wake of the deal to raise the nation's debt ceiling, widely viewed as yet another setback for the progressive community, advocacy groups on the left are redoubling efforts to change the political narrative.

S&P's decision to downgrade the United States' debt and the market selloff that followed has only emboldened those voices who believe the main structural problem plaguing the economy has less to do with debt and more to do with a lack of economic growth.

On Monday afternoon, MoveOn.org and Rebuild the Dream announced a campaign to build up a popular movement that could match (if not surpass) the debt reduction crowd in both size and energy. And they have borrowed a concept from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) as their organizing principle.

The campaign, led by Van Jones, President of Rebuild the Dream; Justin Ruben, Executive Director of MoveOn.org; and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), among others, is debuting a new Contract for the American Dream. They describe it as "a progressive economic vision crafted by 125,000 Americans … to get the economy back on track." Its debut will involve a nationwide day of action, as well as an ad in The New York Times to run sometime this week, organizers said.

The basic premise of the campaign is that America isn't broke, it's merely imbalanced. In order to stabilize the economy, politicians should make substantial investments in infrastructure, energy, education and the social safety net, tax the rich, end the wars, and create a wider revenue base through job creation.

"Many of our best workers are sitting idle, while the work of rebuilding America goes undone," reads one bullet point of the Contract. "Together, we must rebuild our country, reinvest in our people and jump-start the industries of the future. Millions of jobless Americans would love the opportunity to become working, tax-paying members of their communities again. We have a jobs crisis, not a deficit crisis."

The name of the campaign is, of course, a reference to the Contract for America that Gingrich authored in the run up to the 1994 congressional elections. In the context of the current debate in Washington, the principles it promotes resemble a liberal pipe dream more than an actual outline for potential legislation. President Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress have, after all, been openly willing to throw entitlement reforms into the debt reduction discussion. And the notion that this Congress will decide to make future stimulus-like investments ignores Republicans' complete dismissal of such measures.

And yet, if you look at the specific suggestions, there is overlap between what the Contract advocates and what the president has endorsed -- mainly on the transportation and clean energy fronts. More than that, the Contract fills the obvious need for liberal advocacy groups to build a popular movement in support for their ideological side of the debt debate, something that has been clearly and at times painfully missing as a counterpoint to Washington's current obsession with austerity.

Read the full Contract below:

ContractDream

Liberals Frustrated by Pace of Obama's Change

(Obama's change ran off with his Hope. Neither exists anymore.--jef)

Friday, June 17, 2011 by Associated Press

by Ken Thomas 

MINNEAPOLIS — What's a frustrated liberal to do? Democrats on the ideological left are grousing that President Barack Obama is just not that into them, and they're soul searching at a big weekend meeting about the strained political relationship as he seeks re-election.



Might they stay home when he asks them to vote for him again?

"We were promised he would be our fierce advocate. And I don't think he has been fierce and I don't think he likes to advocate very much," said John Aravosis, an editor with AMERICAblog who has written about gay rights issues.

But Obama's advisers hope that between now and November 2012 the president can persuade this critical part of his base to turn out in droves again, and the wooing by aides was well under way Friday.

"I promise he is as frustrated as you are," White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer told about 2,400 bloggers and activists attending the annual Netroots Nation conference. He assured them they were "a very important part of the coalition that got him here."

Not that it feels that way for many liberals who consider Obama's record a mixed bag at best when it comes to championing their causes.

They see him as being too willing to compromise with Republicans on such issues as dropping the proposed public option for the health insurance overhaul and extending George W. Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest. They're pleased he signed a law to repeal the ban on openly gay service members, but many feel that happened only after incessant pressure on the White House.

Others complain that Obama has embraced big business, unimpressed by Wall Street regulation changes and annoyed that Obama appointed General Electric chief executive Jeff Immelt to lead a presidential advisory council on competitiveness even as the company avoided paying federal taxes in 2010.

One panel at the conference reflected the rift: "What to Do When Your President Is Just Not That Into You." Moderator Joan McCarter jokingly called it "The 'president isn't our boyfriend anymore' panel."

Taken together, it all raises the question of whether liberals, who always play important fundraising and volunteering roles for Democratic presidential candidates, will be energized when Obama runs for re-election next year or whether they will stay home on Election Day and deny Obama a critical contingent of grass-roots foot-soldiers.

It's not as if liberals are likely to back someone else. Obama doesn't have a serious Democratic primary opponent, and liberal views are ideologically opposed to many espoused by the Republican Party's presidential candidates.

"We have to hold this administration accountable, but we will get a choice between President Obama and our worst nightmare," said Lily Eskelsen, vice president of the National Education Association.

To a certain degree, there's a political upside for Obama if liberals are cranky — he may appear to be more a centrist candidate and that may make him more attractive to the independent voters who often decide close elections.

Obama advisers acknowledge the base is frustrated, but they expect liberal voters to rally around the president in next year's election. (I wouldn't if I were them...--jef)

"While there is always more work we can do and we take absolutely nothing for granted and will work every single day, we have very good support from his base and are ready to build on that," said Obama campaign manager Jim Messina in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
Despite the complaining, liberals' impressions of Obama have not slipped in recent months. But they didn't improve, either, following the killing of Osama bin Laden, as happened among other ideological groups.

In the May AP-GfK poll, 62 percent of liberals rated Obama's presidency as outstanding or above average, statistically similar to August 2010. Among moderates and conservatives, however, Obama's ratings on this question ticked upward. Likewise, Obama's overall approval ratings among liberals have hovered around 80 percent for the past year in AP-GfK polling, with no discernible bump following the al-Qaida leader's death.

The reception Pfeiffer got when he was interviewed onstage by Kaili Joy Gray of the Daily Kos website underscored the tension between Obama and some liberals.

Questioned about the president's policies on the economy, gay rights and tax cuts, Pfeiffer argued that Obama has worked hard to get his agenda through a divided Congress during a time of hardship.

Pfeiffer said the White House would serve as a check against Republican efforts to undercut Medicare, privatize Social Security and repeal the health care overhaul. Obama, he said, would work to bring wireless technology to rural areas, develop alternative energy sources and offer tax incentives for small business.

But the audience was clearly skeptical. The interview grew tense at times, and Pfeiffer was booed when he responded to a question about a 1996 legislative-race questionnaire in which Obama had said he supported gay marriage. Pfeiffer said someone else had filled out the questionnaire and Obama was "evolving on the issue" along with the rest of the nation.

Gray also pushed Pfeiffer for details on whether the administration would offer a comprehensive job-creation bill. "With a 9.1 percent unemployment rate, why wouldn't we have a jobs bill?" she said icily.

Frustration, if not anger, was clear.

At one panel, Dan Choi, an Iraq War veteran who was discharged for being gay, ripped up an Obama campaign pamphlet and tossed it into the air when an aide to Obama's political organization told him that the aide personally wasn't supportive of gay marriage.

"I believe that I'm an equal citizen," Choi scolded the staffer.

Elsewhere at the conference, liberals questioned the president's commitment to the DREAM Act, which would give a path to legal status for young people who were brought into the United States without documents as children and who either plan to attend college or join the military. It stalled in Congress last year.

Some activists want Obama to use his administrative powers to protect those who would be covered under the legislation from being deported. And they complain about the Obama administration's deportation of nearly 400,000 immigrants in 2010, a record, while noting his efforts to court Hispanics as he seeks a second term.

"Obama has the guts to deport our mothers, deport our fathers, deport our people and then come to us and say 'I want your vote'? Please," said Felipe Matos, a Miami immigration activist.

For all the griping, many liberals here appear resigned.

They know Obama is their only option to ensure Democrats continue to control the White House. They point to efforts in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere to strip away collective bargaining rights from most public workers as an example of what could happen if Republicans win.

Said former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, a one-time Democratic Party chairman: "The alternative is in clear sight."

+++++++

(The Democrats sure do takea lot for granted. If any halfway decent independent candidate runs on a platform that includes anti-corporate legislation, Obama will lose. That candidate so far doesn't exist, but the other possibility is very likely: people will stay at home on election day, and he will lose. I really don't want a Republican president--I would not vote for one--but I don't want Obama as president any more, either. The article's tease mentioned that the crowds at the Net Roots Forum loudly booed Obama several times after his name was mentioned. Like the rest of the Democratic Party, he has sold out the left, and the left has no advocate in the US government.

This article fails to mention Obama's list of broken campaign promises, all 5 of our wars, and glosses over unemployment and the economy. Instead, they focus on gay rights and immigration--important issues, true--but those aren't the top issues for the 2012 election, not even close. 

The economy and war. 

Those two issues, if not dealt with correctly, are enough to bring this country crashing down for real. And Obama has made both worse since he has been in office.--jef)

Enough Budget Slashing, Let's Flip

Thursday, June 16, 2011 by OtherWords
A powerful solution to state deficits is to invert each state's tax structure.

by Shannon Moriarty

 

Our country once had a more widely shared appreciation for both public services and the workers who provide them, including firefighters, teachers, and police officers. Today, however, state legislatures across the country are singing a very different tune. Instead of raising new revenue to protect those services and workers, states are slashing from their budgets the things that make our nation strong.

Cutting to get out of a deficit is like digging to get out of a ditch. It puts everything we value at risk. But it doesn't have to be this way.

What if there were a solution to state deficits that would raise significant revenue, encourage investment, and create jobs — without cutting vital public services? And what if the revenue required by such a solution could be generated solely by making tax systems as fair as most Americans think they ought to be?
The solution is simple: we need to turn states' fiscal status quos upside-down — literally.

United for a Fair Economy's new report, Flip It to Fix It: An Immediate, Fair Solution to State Budget Shortfalls, demonstrates that one powerful solution is to invert each state's tax structure. We calculated how much revenue state governments would raise if they flipped their current effective tax rates at the 50th income percentile and had the top 20 percent of income-earners in each state pay taxes at the same rate as the poorest 20 percent.

The results of this fiscal flip are quite dramatic. By turning each state's tax system on its head — from regressive to progressive — states would raise an additional $490 billion in revenue, easily wiping away the combined $112 billion state and local government budget shortfalls. The lake of red budget ink that has stained capitals across the nation would disappear overnight.

The report shows the extraordinary regressiveness of our current state tax structures. In plainer terms, low- and middle-income taxpayers are paying a greater share of their incomes in taxes than the wealthiest taxpayers in every single state in the nation. Relying on such an unsustainable structure is economically unsound and bad for our communities. And as several recent studies have pointed out, flipping them would be consistent with the majority of Americans' perception of "fair."

Achieving the "flipped" system would require significant changes in our state tax structures. For example, states would need to rely less on regressive sales taxes and raise more revenue from income taxes, in part by levying higher tax rates on the wealthiest Americans.

Of course, the biggest hurdle to achieving this inverted model is a lack of political will. But state-level elected officials can no longer ignore the fundamental roots of their deficit problems. Slashing essential public services and jobs will only drag us further away from achieving the kind of tax fairness that most taxpayers are already demanding.

America's 51st State?

Say Hello To Baja Arizona
Ian Power-Luetscher | May 13, 2011 | TPM

It's hard out in Arizona for a liberal. From recently announced deep cuts to health care and education, to the now infamously tough immigration law currently tied up in court battles, Arizona remains one of the country's more reliably conservative states. However, a group of Arizonans from the Tucson area are looking to distance themselves from the more conservative policies of their state, literally, by seceding. Headed up by Tucson attorney and former state Democratic Party Chairman Paul Eckerstrom, SOS or "Start Our State," is calling for the progressive alcove of Pima County, located near the Mexican border, to break off from the rest of Arizona and form the 51st state, tentatively called "Baja Arizona."

It's a daunting task and one with little hope for success, but with a petition drive in full gear, SOS's political action committee has grown from a group of democrats with an idea, to a fledgling movement. "Start Our State," in their own words, aims "to establish a new state in Southern Arizona free of the un-American, unconstitutional machinations of the Arizona legislature and to restore our region's credibility as a place welcoming to others, open to commerce, and friendly to its neighbors."

Baja Arizona wouldn't be the smallest state in the country, it's a fact that SOS optimistically points out via their Facebook home base. They'd be larger than a handful of other states like Connecticut, New Jersey and Delaware, and Pima County's population of of 1,020,200, according to the most recent census, gives it a denser headcount than Montana, Alaska, Delaware, or either of the Dakotas. America's even full of state-split precedents: Maine was an exclave of Massachusetts until 1820 when it was carved off to become the 23rd state and West Virginia broke off from the rest of Virginia after refusing to become part of the confederacy during The Civil War.

That's not to say the quest for statehood is easy though. To even get the idea of "Baja Arizona" on the table, SOS must get 48,000 petition signatures by June of next year. With that, the proposal would go on a 2012 ballot in Pima County to ask voters if they support petitioning Arizona lawmakers for permission to split away, Reuters reports.

According to NPR Eckerstrom and organizers aren't having trouble getting people to sign, but the local ballot, if it's successful, is a non-binding resolution. The ballot would serve to test the waters and measure interest more than anything else, it's the first step in a long and difficult process, involving state legislature, the governor, and ultimately the U.S. Congress.

Also according to NPR, SOS and Paul Eckerstrom remain optimistic, understanding Baja Arizona's slim chances, yet still looking to make a point. "If we do this vote, at least we can send a message not only to the state Legislature but also to the rest of the nation to tell the rest of the nation that not everybody in Arizona is crazy."

Trapped in Own Propaganda/Hippie Sacrament/Obama Pot Garden?(3 articles)

Hillary Clinton Needs a Mirror
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

One of the wishes that readers often express to me came true today (May 11). I was on the mainstream media. It was a program with a worldwide reach--the BBC World Service. There were others on the program as well, and the topic was Hillary Clinton’s remarks (May 10) about the lack of democracy and human rights in China.

I startled the program’s host when I compared Hillary’s remarks to the pot calling the kettle black. I was somewhat taken aback myself by the British BBC program host’s rush to America’s defense and wondered about it as the program continued. Surely, he had heard about Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo detainees, CIA secret torture prisons sprinkled around the world, invasion and destruction of Iraq on the basis of lies and deceptions, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya. Surely, he was aware of Hillary’s hypocrisy as she demonized China but turned a blind eye to Israel, Mubarak, Bahrain and the Saudis. China’s record is not perfect, but is it this bad? Why wasn’t the Chinese Minister for Foreign Affairs criticizing America’s human rights abuses and rigged elections? How come China minds its own business and we don’t?

These questions didn’t go down well. None of the other interviewees or guests thought that Hilary had made a good decision, but even the Chinese guests were not free of the common mindset that frames every issue from the standpoint that the West is the standard by which the rest of the world is judged. By pointing out our own shortcomings, I was challenging that standard. The host and other guests could not escape from the restraints imposed on thought by the role of the West as world standard.

What has happened to the West is that it can see itself and others only through the eyes of its own propaganda. There was a great deal of talk about China’s lack of democracy. As the BBC program was being broadcast, the news intruded that Greeks had again taken to the streets to protest the costs of the bailout of the banks and Wall Street--the rich--being imposed on ordinary people at the expense of their lives and aspirations. The Irish government announced that it was going to confiscate with a tax part of the Irish people’s pension accumulations. It simply did not occur to the host and other guests that these are not democratic outcomes.

It is a strange form of democracy that produces political outcomes that reward the few and punish the many, despite the energetic protests of the many.

Political scientists understand that US electoral outcomes are determined by powerful moneyed interests that finance the political campaigns and that the bills Congress passes and the President signs are written by these interest groups to serve their narrow interests. Such conclusions are dismissed as cynicism and do not alter the mindset.

While the program’s host and guests were indulging in the West’s democratic and human rights superiority, the American Civil Liberties Union was sending out a bulletin urging its members to oppose legislation now before Congress that would give the current and future Presidents of the United States expanded war authority to use, on their own initiative, military force anywhere in the world independently of the restraints imposed by the US Constitution and international law.

In other words, in the great American “democracy,” the president is to become a Caesar.

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Living Free, Outside the Mainstream
By JOHN SINCLAIR
The legalization of medical marijuana by means of a ballot initiative approved by 62 percent of Michigan voters in the 2008 election signaled the end of the drug war that's raged unchecked for almost a half-century without appreciable positive effect. Any fool can see that the use of recreational drugs by our citizens has not been diminished or in any way abated by the efforts of the legions of police, prosecutors, judges and jailers sworn to stop us from getting high.

In my last column I surmised that perhaps the War on Drugs wasn't really about drug use per se but was launched as an attack on certain sectors of our citizenry whose commitment to social change was seen as presenting a threat to the dominant order and the political, economic and cultural imperatives established as the foundation of corporate consumer society.

During the decade from 1965 to 1975, hippies turned their backs en masse on mainstream America and its perverse value system, refused to fight its wars, and attempted to create an alternative way of life based in sharing, tolerance and self-realization through collective effort and creative production. Their withdrawal from the reigning social contract presented a real challenge to the consumerist system and its operators: Until defecting to the hippie ideal, these young Americans had been expected to inherit and manipulate the machinery of exploitation and control devised by generations of rich white people to maintain their privileged existence at the top of the social order.

It's hard for people today to picture the world the hippies populated as our numbers grew from a few isolated pockets of bohemianism and weirdness in disparate parts of the country into a movement of millions of determined young white people demanding a new and better world for all Americans and a swift end to the militarism, racism, sexism, economic exploitation and banal popular culture at the core of the established order.

Hippies were united by their belief in personal freedom and its manifestation in the way they looked and acted and conducted their daily lives outside the social mainstream. As a general rule, hippies had long hair, wore funky clothes expressing their disdain for the consumer ideal, opposed the war in Vietnam and increasingly refused to join the armed forces, didn't have a real job and didn't want one, often embraced collective work for the common good and lived as equals in communes and creative groupings, actively appreciated diverse forms of artistic expression and lived with music at the exact heart of their lives.

Hippies loved to gather in the thousands at concerts in the parks where the bands played for free and the people danced and laughed and had a ball together over and over again. They also turned out in ever-increasing numbers for rallies and demonstrations in opposition to the war in Vietnam and in support of racial equality and social justice.

Hippie musicians created startling new forms and imaginative extensions of the African-American musical idioms introduced into their lives through the magic of repeated radio airplay of 45 rpm records by innovative artists such as Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Bo Diddley, Ray Charles, James Brown, Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye. But what bound hippies together above all else was marijuana as a component of everyday life. A hippie smoked weed, everybody knew that, and hippies smoked weed together, in every possible circumstance.

Despite the positive and progressive aspects of the hippie philosophy and the hippies' committed social practice in pursuit of its principles, despite the brilliance of their music and art forms, despite their heartfelt visions of a better world based in peace and love and social equality for all, hippies were demonized as criminal narcotics users to be apprehended, brought before the bar of justice, convicted and sent to prison or scrutinized by the narcotics police and courts for years as felonious probationers.

Nothing else the hippies did was against the law. Even our protests and demonstrations were protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Our lifestyle, our living and working arrangements, our music and cultural practices, our gatherings and public celebrations, however unusual or offensive to mainstream values, were well within the strictures of the law. Only our mass recreational, medicinal or spiritual smoking of marijuana — which we well knew was at the very least not a narcotic, and very possibly a beneficial natural healing resource with no discernible negative social effects — brought trouble with law enforcement and provided the police with a socially acceptable way to punish these renegades from the American Way whose very presence seemed to violate every established standard of normal behavior.

My own case exemplifies this. I was a socially active poet, performer, underground journalist, cultural organizer and community broadcaster who also spoke out for the legalization of marijuana starting in 1964 and actually smoked marijuana on a daily basis. I was arrested by the Detroit Narcotics Squad three times for possession and sales of narcotics — very small amounts of marijuana in fact — and served a total of five years probation, six months in the Detroit House of Correction, and 2-1/2 years of a 9-1/2- to 10-year prison sentence before my legal challenge to the constitutionality of Michigan's narcotics statutes eventually resulted, in 1972, with the existing law declared unconstitutional; marijuana was then removed from the narcotics category and possession of small amounts of marijuana reduced to a misdemeanor with a one-year maximum sentence.

My writings and public activities, however offensive or disturbing to guardians of the social order, were constitutionally protected. But my use of marijuana as a righteous component of daily life branded me as a criminal — a felon — subject to the brutal invasion of my life itself by the criminal justice system and its enforcers in uniform or plainclothes.

I'm out of space for this installment, but with your permission I'll continue to pursue this line of thought here in seeking a full understanding of the destructive impact of the War on Drugs on harmless marijuana smokers and on the fabric of our social order itself. Our lives — and our national life as well — have suffered immeasurably from the imposition and unbridled growth of the police-state mechanism that's been built up on our backs.

Me, I've been sick of this shit for all of my adult life, and I just hope I'll live long enough to see the War on Drugs dead and buried and the full range of its punitive apparatus dismantled and finally discredited once and for all.

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Obama Never Promised You a Pot Garden
By FRED GARDNER

Drug-policy-reform advocates are complaining bitterly that they have been double-crossed by Barack Obama. "What's Behind the Obama Administration's About Face Regarding Medical Marijuana?" asked Paul Armentano of NORML in the Huffington Post May 5. 

"Obama's Sudden, Senseless Assault on Medical Marijuana," was the headline on a piece by Scott Morgan, associate editor of Stopthedrugwar.org. According to Morgan, "Recent months have brought about what can only be described as the rapid collapse of the Obama Administration's support for medical marijuana." 

This is way wrong. There is nothing "sudden" or unprecedented about the DEA raids and other oppressive measures emanating from the Department of Justice. And neither Obama nor the DOJ ever expressed unambiguous support for medical marijuana. It was the reform honchos themselves who misread and misrepresented Administration policy. How could they? And why did they?

On Counterpunch we characterized Obama's approach as "fakes left, goes right" from the start. We provided a chronology of Administration actions and statements regarding marijuana, that is worth reading in its entirety if you promise to come back. 

Two days after Obama's inauguration, DEA agents raided a South Lake Tahoe cannabis dispensary run by a wheelchair-bound activist named Ken Estes. They took five pounds of herb and a few thousand dollars. "A typical rip-and-run," is how Estes described it. 

There was a certain poetic injustice to Ken Estes being the feds' first target of the Obama era. A working-class dude with courage enhanced by his disability, Estes used to run a dispensary in Berkeley. When the city gave him the boot for being located too near a school, the three other dispensary owners did not come to his defense. They tsk-tsked about Estes' operation being "too loose," in contrast to their own fine, upstanding establishments. To paraphrase Pastor Niemoller, "When they came for Ken Estes..." 

On Feb. 3, 2009, DEA squads raided four dispensaries in the Los Angeles area. On Feb. 11 DEA agents participated in a raid on the MendoHealing Co-op's grow in Fort Bragg. 

JeanMarie Todd, who was detained, reported: "I saw two DEA agents amongst the sheriff's deputies, so I said, 'I thought Obama had called off these raids.' A deputy replied, 'We haven't gotten the message.'"

Like Ken Estes, MendoHealing's David Moore got zero support from the leaders of the medical cannabis industry in Northern California. He had once offended them by lowering prices at the MendoHealing dispensary in San Francisco. So, "When they came for David Moore..." 

On Feb. 25 Attorney General Attorney Eric Holder and Acting DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart held a press conference to bemoan drug-related violence in Mexico. The presence of Leonhart indicated that the new Administration was going to continue fighting the War on Drugs in the same old ways. (Holder had the perfect pretext for replacing her that week. Rachel Maddow had revealed that Leonhart spent $123,000 of public funds on a charter flight to Colombia instead of using a plane from DEA's huge fleet.)

Ignoring the significance of the Administration keeping Leonhart at DEA, the reform honchos seized on Holder's vague, meaningless response to an unexpected question about the raids on medical marijuana providers, to claim that he opposed them! The Marijuana Policy Project posted a video clip headlined "Holder Says 'No More DEA Raids' in Press Conference." But Holder never spoke those words! The phonies at MPP just made it up! 

At another press conference March 18 Holder told reporters that Justice Department "policy is to go after those people who violate both federal and state law. To the extent that people do that and try to use medical marijuana laws as a shield for activity that is not designed to comport with what the intention was of the state law, those are the organizations, the people, that we will target. And that is consistent with what the president said during the campaign."

Reform leaders again claimed a big win and some reporters fell for it. "Today's comments clearly represent a change in policy out of Washington," Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance told the Los Angeles Times. The New York Times ran a piece headlined "Dispensers of Marijuana Find Relief in Policy Shift" that quoted Nadelmann (son of a rabbi) saying that the feds now recognize state medical marijuana laws as "kosher."

On March 23, US District Court Judge in California, George Wu, postponed the sentencing of Charles Lynch —a Morro Bay dispensary operator who by all accounts had sought to comply with state law— and asked the US Attorney to provide a written statement elucidating Administration policy. A definitive response came from H. Marshall Jarrrett, director of the office that oversees all U.S. Attorneys:

"In response to your request, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General reviewed the facts of this case to determine whether the prosecution of Mr. Lynch comports with the Department of Justice's policies with respect to marijuana prosecutions. Based on the facts of this case, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General concurs with your office that the investigation, prosecution, and conviction of Mr. Lynch are entirely consistent with Department policies as well as public statements made by the Attorney General. Accordingly, you should seek to proceed with the sentencing recommendations which your office has filed with the court."

Our piece about the Jarrett letter in Counterpunch April 21 was headlined "No More Ambiguity: Obama's DOJ Backs Prosecution of Medical Marijuana Providers."  It began: "It's official —under Barack Obama, the Department of Justice will not restrain federal prosecutors targeting medical marijuana providers. Any lingering hopes that the new Administration would implement change in this area were blasted April 17 when U.S. Attorney Thomas O'Brien forwarded to District Judge George Wu a letter from DOJ clarifying ObamAdmin policy..." 

The Administration gave drug-policy reformers another occasion to cheer (but not a real reason to cheer) in October '09 when David Ogden, the second-highest official at DOJ, issued a formal "Memorandum for Selected United States Attorneys on Investigations and Prosecutions in States Authorizing the Medical Use of Marijuana." 

We reported at the time that the Ogden memo "restated the mixed messages Attorney General Eric Holder had sent out verbally."  But to this day —at least through May 5, when Paul Armentano cited it— reformers contend that the toothless memo was meant to restrain U.S. attorneys like Joe Russoniello (who had been advising his counterparts that all dispensaries are illegal under state law because profits are being made). 

The Ogden memo made it clear than any dispensary was, as Russoniello put it, "fair game" for the DEA. "Prosecution of commercial enterprises that unlawfully market and sell marijuana for profit continues to be an enforcement priority of the Department," wrote Ogden. How can law enforcement determine if a given business is making a profit without raiding the premises, seizing their books and computers, their cash on hand, and their herb?   We slugged our report, "With wins like this…"

Why did the pro-cannabis reformers misinterpret and misrepresent Obama Administration policy so consistently and for so long? Why did Ethan Nadelmann afix his "kosher" seal to Obama's baloney?  Wishful thinking is not a good enough excuse. Political leaders owe the rank-and-file accurate information and analysis. Obviously it is advantageous for fund-raising purposes to report success, and this was certainly a factor.  But it wasn't just their own interests that the reform honchos were advancing with false claims of Administration support.

Above all, the honchos were serving the interests of Cannabis-industry entrepreneurs eager to attract customers and investors. Starting in the fall of 2008, the line "Obama is going to let it happen," induced countless thousands of people to visit pro-cannabis doctors and then their local dispensaries.  The most successful California dispensary operators developed franchising ventures and pitched investors, using Obama's alleged hands-off approach as part of their pitch.  "Money that was sitting on the sidelines came in after the election," is how one of them summarized the boom that continued through 2009 and well into 2010,

It peaked that fall when Eric Holder warned that if California voters passed a legalization initiative, the feds would "vigorously enforce" federal law to block its implementation. Holder's threat turned the tide against Prop 19, making it seem like a futile and costly gesture of defiance instead of a practical source of revenue for the insolvent state. In the same period, federal threats forced Oakland to back away from (ecologically disasterous) plans for four big industrial grow ops. 

What's happening in recent months —the threatening letters from US attorneys to state officials, the tax audits of dispensaries, banks refusing to handle dispensary accounts, etc.— is an escalation, not a change of policy.  It's a surge, to use the term the Drug Warriors undoubtedly used when they planned it.  And you can bet they did plan it  —that there were meetings involving DEA, and Joe Califano's Prohibitionist think tank at Columbia University, and strategists from Johnson & Johnson, just as there had been after Prop 215 passed in '96... It's got all the earmarks of an orchestrated campaign.

House Progressives: End The Wars, Save The Economy

Wednesday, April 13, 2011 by TalkingPointsMemo
by Evan McMorris-Santoro

Representatives from the 77-member House Progressive Caucus gathered at the Capitol on Wednesday to roll out their plan to cut the deficit and put the budget back into balance. Their simple solution: pull the troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, install a public option for health care, raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations and voila, America is fixed.

The caucus plan, known as The People's Budget, was explained in some detail by Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs last week.

Today, progressive members extolled the virtues of the plan as members sat waiting for President Obama to introduce a deficit reduction plan many Democrats worried would sacrifice necessary spending on the altar of a mistaken understanding of fiscal responsibility.

Sachs was on hand at Wednesday's presser. He called the progressive plan "the only budget proposal that makes sense in this country."

The Republican budget plan authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) "obviously would destroy our government and hit the poorest people in this country all for the sake, the obsessive sake, of lowering tax rates further for the richest people in this country."

"And unfortunately, the President goes halfway," Sachs added. "When he speaks today, he's also talking about freezing, cutting the civilian discretionary budget in this country."

The members said their budget fixes things the right way.

"We feel [our budget] is rooted in fairness, recognizing that if this country's going to work, it's got to work for everyone," Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), co-chair of the caucus, said.

Grijalva said the American people want a budget that will "preserve Social Security" and "enhance Medicare and Medicaid." Americans want "education to be invested in" and they want "policies that will create jobs."

The way to get there, Grijalva and the rest of the caucus members at the press event today said, is through an increase in taxes and ending the wars.

"We want to cut," Grijalva added. What's on the progressive caucus chopping block? "Eliminating unnecessary weapons systems from the Defense Department, eliminating huge tax credits for oil and gas industries, eliminating subsidies for new nuclear power plans," Grijalva said.

The plan would "eliminate the deficit," supporters say, and put the nation budget in surplus by 2021. Read the whole plan here.

"Budgets set priorities," Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), the other chair of the caucus, explained. "You can look at any nation's budget, or any family's budget and you can determine what they value, what they think really matters."

"Now what we think in the progressive caucus matters...is equity," he continued. "That means we ask the most wealthy Americans to help us carry the load of the expense of this nation. Another key value we care about is peace. So we're getting out of these wars, they're not bringing peace to America and they're incredibly expensive, not only in dollars but in the lives of our American soldiers."

This is the fourth time the caucus has introduced its own budget, and Grijalva told reporters that though a budget predicated on tax increases and an end to the wars is a decided longshot on Capitol Hill, introducing it puts the progressive message into the debate over how to clean up the national budget mess.

"The motivation was to compare and contrast," he said. "We are trying with this budget to say that there are other choices out there for the American people. It's not always the choice of compromising in the middle or playing around the edges."

Rep. John Conyers (R-MI), a member of the caucus and a veteran of his share of longshot political fights, said that the only way plans like his caucus' budget will come to pass is if progressives fight for it in the way the tea party has fought for policies similar to the Ryan budget.

"It's about time we start joining with our allies and marching, and protesting and going to the White House," he said. "The rhetoric is beautiful, the speeches are great, but until we start protesting with thousands of people backing up the Progressive Caucus, we're just another group that issues press releases on Wednesday."

The Levers of Power

If Progressives Wanted to Win

By DEAN BAKER

As we mark the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth, his most important legacy has gone largely overlooked. Reagan helped to put a caricature of politics at the center of the national debate and it remains there to this day. In Reagan's caricature the central divide between progressives and conservatives is that progressives trust the government to make key decisions on production and distribution, while conservatives trust the market.

This framing of the debate is advantageous for the right since people, especially in the United States, tend to be suspicious of an overly powerful government. They also like the idea of leaving important decisions to the seemingly natural workings of the market.

It is therefore understandable that the right likes to frame its agenda this way. However, since the right has no greater commitment to the market than the left, it is incredible that progressives are so foolish as to accept this framing.

In reality, the right uses government all the time to advance its interest by setting rules that redistribute income upward. As long as progressives ignore the rules that are designed to redistribute income upward, they will be left fighting over crumbs. There is no way that government interventions will reverse a rigged market. For some reason, most of the people in the national political debate who consider themselves progressive do not seem to understand this fact.

To take the most obvious example, fighting inflation has come to be seen as bakerthe holy grail of central banks; a policy that it is supposed to be outside of the realm of normal political debate. On slightly more careful inspection, the inflation fighting by the Fed and other central banks is actually a policy that is designed to ensure that the wages of ordinary workers do not grow too rapidly.

When central banks jack up interest rates to tame inflation, the CEOs at Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan won't be out on the street. The people who lose their jobs will be factory workers, store clerks and other less privileged workers. Raising unemployment among the group of less-educated workers keeps their wages down.

In other words, controlling inflation is about making sure that the wages of less-educated workers don't rise relative to the wages of more educated workers. And, the central banks have a license to push as hard as they like in this direction.

Incredibly, the vast majority of progressives go along with this central bank squeeze. They accept the absurd notion that this upward redistribution by the central banks is simply apolitical monetary policy and agree not to criticize the central bank. As a practical matter there is nothing that Congress could plausibly do in the way of downward redistribution that would offset the upward redistribution from the Fed's tightening.

This is not the only policy lever that progressives are happy to turn over to conservatives. The exchange rate has enormous impact on the relative wages of workers who have been subjected to international competition through trade policy. If the dollar is over-valued by 20-30 percent against other currencies, then this is giving a subsidy to foreign producers relative to domestic ones of this magnitude.

Doctors and lawyers are smart enough to know that this sort of competition will drive down their wages and incomes. This is why they maintain strong barriers that prevent them from being subject to international competition in the same way as autoworkers and textile workers.

Unfortunately, the people who represent ordinary workers fail to understand this simple point. Therefore, exchange rate policy rarely is featured prominently in political debates, even though it is another huge cause of the upward redistribution of income that we have seen over the last three decades.

Similarly, patent and copyright policy lock off large areas of the economy in monopolies assigned to large corporations and wealthy individuals. The United States now spends more than 2 percent of GDP, $300 billion a year, on prescription drugs that would likely cost less than one-tenth this much if they were sold in a competitive market. The $270 billion handed to the drug companies each year through government-provided patent monopolies is five times as much money as what was at stake with the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Yet, here as well progressives largely ignore patent and copyright policy.

The battles that occupy progressives' energies are almost invariably trivial in their impact relative to these three fulcrums of the economy. In effect, conservatives have managed to gain control of the most important levers of economic activity and left the crumbs for progressives to fight over in the political sphere.

It would be very hard to challenge the right's control over these levers, but the first step is to simply recognize them. Unfortunately, there is little appreciation among progressives of their importance. Instead we get great histrionics over policies that really won't have very much impact, even if they might be wrong-headed.

It seems that progressives have taken a pledge to be the Washington Generals of national politics. The policies that have led to the most massive upward redistribution of income in the history of the world go largely unchallenged, while we instead fight endlessly over the Reagan-Bush tax breaks to the rich.

Obama Picks Bank, Telecom, & Pharma Lobbyist to Be Chief of Staff

Here We Go Again: Obama ushers a telecom lobbyist, chief architect of NAFTA and current Midwest chairman of JP Morgan Chase into the #2 job in the White House.
By Ari Berman, The Nation
on January 7, 2011

Rahm Emanuel is off running for mayor of Chicago, but his ghost will soon be making a return to the White House in the form of fellow Chicagoan Bill Daley, who President Obama is naming as Rahm’s replacement today. The post is currently filled by low-key Obama aide Pete Rouse.

Daley, brother of outgoing Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, was Commerce Secretary under Bill Clinton, the chief architect of NAFTA, chairman of Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, a top adviser/fundraiser for the Obama campaign and, most recently, Midwest chairman of JP Morgan Chase. He shares the corporate centrism of Emanuel and, when it comes to economic issues, may be worse. AFL-CIO head John Sweeney once said that Daley stood “squarely on the opposite side of working families.”

Daley lobbied for telecommunications giant SBC, publicly chided the Obama administration for pursuing healthcare reform (he serves on the board of drugmaker Merck), advised the Chamber of Commerce on Wall Street regulation (they wanted less of it) and reportedly urged Obama’s team to drop the most popular provision of the financial reform bill—the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. When Daley joined the board of the corporate-aligned Democratic group Third Way in July 2010, board chairman John Vogelstein said that Daley’s tasks would include “reforming entitlements”—a clever code word for cutting Social Security and Medicare. Yet, despite all this, Obama is making Daley the focal point of his White House in year three. Didn’t the president learn anything from Rahm’s disastrous tenure at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

This week Politico reported that Republican House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa brazenly asked over 150 companies and trade associations to specify which regulations and consumer protections they’d like to gut in the new Congress. It was precisely the type of story Democrats should pounce on to paint the GOP as a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate American. Instead, the Obama administration is close to appointing a JP Morgan exec to burnish its “pro-business” credentials. Talk about mixed messaging!

In fact, the Obama administration has tried its damndest to plot the “moderate, centrist course” that Daley accuses them of forsaking—abandoning the public option in healthcare reform, loading up the stimulus with tax cuts, extending the Bush tax cuts, escalating the war in Afghanistan, and stepping away from potentially divisive fights over immigration reform and cap and trade. Indeed, it’s amazing that the administration doesn’t get more credit from the business community for saving the banks, rescuing the auto industry, stabilizing the economy and preventing another great depression. Americans want jobs and relief from the federal government and Obama administration, not another banker running the show.

"Another Mistake" is Consensus on Obama's new Chief of Staff

"A Real Mistake": Progressives on Obama's Choice of Chief of Staff
by Carol E. Lee - Thursday, January 6, 2011 by Politico
Adam Green, one of the most prominent progressive voices, was quick to criticize President Obama's decision on Thursday to make William Daley his next chief of staff.

US President George W. Bush speaks during a meeting with former Cabinet secretaries and senior government officials, including Bill Daley, former Secretary of Commerce, on free trade agreements at the White House in Washington, DC, February 26, 2008. "This was a real mistake by the White House," Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said in a statement. "Bill Daley consistently urges the Democratic Party to pursue a corporate agenda that alienates both Independent and Democratic voters. If President Obama listens to that kind of political advice from Bill Daley, Democrats will suffer a disastrous 2012."

Green says a big concern for progressives is Daley's opposition to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau being overseen by Elizabeth Warren, in addition to his opposition to the "public option" during the health care debate.

Daley has argued that Democrats should seek a more moderate stance, a position that has angered liberals who were already upset with some of the compromises brokered by Obama's previous chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.

The liberal blogger Jane Hamsher, a frequent White House critic, described the pick as "an interesting choice, considering [House oversight committee Chairman Darrell] Issa is going to be investigating Fannie and Freddie, and Daley was a Fannie Mae board member. Fannie is the third most hated company in America. It's sort of like painting a sign on your back that says ‘Kick me.' "

Ezra Klein, a liberal writer for The Washington Post, said: "The Daley pick seems like a bad idea to me. The particular theory of politics he espouses seems woefully detached from the realities of the modern partisan environment -- as Jon Chait says, it effectively means 'allowing extreme positions to redefine the parameters of the debate.' But you can certainly read this post as evidence that Daley is a singular political talent, and the Obama administration would be well served by hiring someone able to sustain these sorts of contradictions."

In a statement, MoveOn.org Executive Director Justin Ruben said Daley has "close ties to the Big Banks and Big Business" and that the announcement is "troubling and sends the wrong message to the American people." He added: "Americans are looking to the White House for economic plans that will create jobs and reign in Wall Street's excesses, and it's up to Daley to prove that he's not carrying water in the White House for the big banks that took our economy over the cliff. As the President continues to reshuffle his staff, particularly his economic team, it is now more important than ever that he focuses on rebuilding a middle class and developing policies that create more jobs on Main Street, not on Wall Street."

The Morning After

Until Pigs Fly ...With Michael Moore

By JOSEPH G. RAMSEY

In his recent post-election interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! activist film-maker Michael Moore, in tones of mourning more than anger, expressed his frustration with the Democratic Party and Barack Obama for (yet again!) naively falling into the Republican trap of offering “bipartisanship” and “compromise” rather than any sort of bold progressive change. Anticipating Obama’s post-election speech, Moore likened the leadership of the Democratic Party to the “abused” partner who over and over again submits to an “abuser.” How many times, he pondered, are the Democrats going to extend the hand of “compromise and bipartisanship” to a Republican Party that smacks that hand down, or worse, uses that extended hand to pull the Dems down prone to the ground? How many times, he asked, do we have to witness this spectacle of pointless conciliation (and the abandonment of bold fights for progressive reform that such centrist conciliation entails) before the Democrats learn their lesson? How long until the victim stops submitting to the abuse and stands up for him/herself, and, say… ends the relationship?

This of course not the first time, Michael Moore has made such a public lament. Nor is he alone in (again and again) voicing such sentiments. Independent and “progressive” media is full of this stuff.

But it is long past time to turn Moore’s analogy back upon him and other would-be left-wing supporters of the Democratic Party. Aren’t you, Michael, and those who share your (pro-worker, anti-war, anti-corporate) sensibilities yourselves like the abused victim, continually (even cynically, knowingly) submitting to the abuse of a Democratic Party that ignores (or pays only lip-service) to your concerns, priorities, and prescriptions? (Except of course when your contagious lack of “enthusiasm” for a corporate centrist can be blamed for a lag at the polls.)

And yet, like the abused victim, you keep trying to make the relationship work. Turning out the vote for a Party that turns you out the door (that is, if you dare to raise a single subversive idea). All the while you do your bit to keep others from bolting ahead of you.

You fantasize that the party leadership is merely temporarily under the spell of a bad influence, or a losing political strategy. Poor advice is the problem. You repeat again and again, despite all the sell-outs and false promises and continued abuse (not to mention the bombs raining down on civilians abroad), that Barack is still “really a nice guy,” that he has a “good heart,” and that he “means well.” (No doubt Bush and Cheney and many war-criminals before them have loved their families and friends too, though this is not an argument against their criminality.) You continue to convince yourself (and others) that it is possible –if not necessarily likely—that your abusers will change their ways and suddenly start listening to you. No matter that they have ignored you , barred you from their table, and stomped all over your hopes and proposals time and time again…This time it could be different. This time they can change. This time Obama just might bring the left in as policy advisors and political strategists. This time he may listen to what we have been saying all along…

Thus, you say engage in fantasies:

“If Barack Obama got on the TV/radio tomorrow and said X…”

“If he would only tell the American people Z…”

And on and on…Until pigs fly…

The sick farce here is not only that such fantasies of hypothetically acting as the advisors to the president rest on false assumptions about the rulers’ attitudes towards the politics of people like you, Michael. (Have you forgotten how much Barack’s ears resemble Bush’s?) Or that such fantasies suppress the fact that the Democratic Party answers to the same corporate, financial, and imperialist interests as the Republicans. What is really pathetic about such delusions is that by keeping us focused on what “they” (the rulers) should or could do, you keep us from thinking about what we can and should be doing today, tomorrow, the next day, to bring about the kind of world that we would like to see.

Don’t mourn for abusers. Organize independently of them, you might say. Organize to get rid of them altogether. Or better, to get rid of the system that makes them possible (and necessary).

But so long as people are stuck in seeing the world through Barack’s eyes—and speaking for Barack’s ears!—they cannot but fail to grasp the situation that they are in: how late the hour is; how badly radical change is needed. Nor can people in such a trance see the freedom of action that does still exist within our dire situation, including avenues for transformation of the situation itself through action that can occur despite, against, and behind the backs of these so-called “leaders.” Moore and his ilk would lead us to fantasize that the only real power lies within the halls of those slave-built buildings in Washington. Yet in fantasizing us into advisors to the President, Moore is turning himself—and worse others—into timid spectators instead of courageous actors. This is no way to build the consciousness, nor the courage in people that is necessary for us to challenge the established powers and create new power bases outside the halls of government.

Thus, even as Moore ponders the possibility of a wide open 4-way race for President in 2012 (in which the Tea-Party run their own candidate, and the angry neglected left follows suit), even here, he does not call boldly for this left campaign to start today but rather “hopes” that the Obama administration and the Democrats are thinking about this possibility and modulating their strategy in light of it…that is, to head off the possibility of a situation emerging where a strong left candidacy becomes possible! But for God’s sake Michael, if even an “anti-capitalist” progressive like you is not willing to boldly launch (or plausibly threaten to join if not to lead) such a left bloc, then why in the hell would Obama and company feel the need to “move left” to head off such a “possibility” in the first place?!

With “left opposition” like this, who needs supporters!

Moreover, the fact that Moore’s first instinct is to “look ahead” to the next election (!) rather than towards what we should be doing outside and beyond electoral politics—and certainly outside and beyond Democratic Party politics!—is itself a sign of the problem.

Instead of advising “them,” which is to say, pretending to be one of “them,” why not speak to US, Michael? Why not speak with us, your viewers, your fans, the workers, the teachers, the critical thinkers, the struggling people that actually value the films that you have made? Why not speak to and with the left, including to the mass base of the Democratic Party that is so taken for granted, used, abused, and ignored by the Party leadership? Why not turn away from the murdering bastards in power and come join the people?

This revolution could use some good film-makers.

Russ Feingold, the Senate's True Maverick

by John Nichols - Thursday, September 23, 2010 by The Nation

When Russ Feingold jogs onto the stage of the Barrymore Theatre on a Friday night in Madison, Wisconsin, a thousand old-school progressives—not liberals avoiding the L-word but heart-and-soul believers in a political ethic that traces back to the trustbusters and anti-imperialists of a century ago—rise to cheer the living embodiment of their faith. The three-term senator speaks to them in the language of another time in America, when populists shouted from the backs of farm wagons and urban radicals mounted soapboxes to spread the social gospel. "There is no institution in our society that is safe from the power and greed and corruption of these corporations," rages Feingold, who speaks against the warping of foreign policy by military contractors, the molding of the national debate by consolidated media and the pay-to-play politics of business interests, before lowering his voice for a dramatic declaration: "Now, after they attacked the media, the Congress and the executive branch, they have managed to corrupt the US Supreme Court."

Echoing former Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette, whose memory he has come to honor with activists from across the state, the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act says he knows there are reasons to fear big government. "But," he adds, in a speech that decries the High Court's decision to let corporations spend as they choose on elections, "there is one thing that's worse: government controlled by, dominated by, corporate special interest."

For Feingold, though he is locked in a brutal battle with a free-spending millionaire Republican who cloaks allegiance to Wall Street in the populist rhetoric of the Tea Party, the essential question of the moment has less to do with party politics than with the money that's turning the major parties into two sides of one corporate coin. His re-election fight is being covered by much of the national media as just another partisan horse race, one of several in which senior Democratic senators, like California's Barbara Boxer and Washington's Patty Murray, are in unexpectedly tough re-election struggles that could determine whether their party retains control of the Senate. But Feingold's race raises more basic questions about how much our politics are becoming nationalized and homogeneous, about whether the parties are more than mere extensions of sitting presidents or in opposition to them, about whether there is a place for the independent man or woman of principle—especially one who rejects the dictates of Wall Street and multinational corporations—in an increasingly managed and manipulated Senate.

Feingold has taken these questions on the road in a campaign that is like no other this year. With the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling opening the floodgates for special-interest spending, the Senate's fiercest campaign finance reformer says the Court is "turning our system of government and our democracy into another example of what is essentially corporate naming rights."

"What do they want us to do: choose between Republican toothpaste and Democratic toothpaste?" asks Feingold over an approving roar from the crowd that has gathered on a late summer night. The progressive faithful are with him, but the polls show Feingold struggling to keep even with GOP businessman Ron Johnson, who has pledged to spend as much as $15 million on a campaign so carefully plotted to exploit frustration with President Obama, fears about the economy and anger at Washington that it appears to have been squeezed from Karl Rove's tube. The contrast is sufficiently stark that the result on November 2, no matter what happens elsewhere in the country, will tell us something about the politics of our era.

Everything about Feingold's Senate career has been a fight against a future where Crest Democrats do battle with Colgate Republicans. More than his sometime ally John McCain, the man from Wisconsin is the Senate's true maverick. And unlike McCain, whose "independence" always had about it an air of self-absorption and attentiveness to the media, Feingold has never been a maverick for the sake of being a maverick. His eighteen years in the Senate have been defined by a steadiness of commitment that pays little regard to presidents or parties.

Feingold opposed Bill Clinton's North American Free Trade Agreement and normalization of trade with China; he opposed George W. Bush's Central American Free Trade Agreement; now he is challenging attempts by the Obama administration to advance trade policies that do too much for multinational corporations and too little for workers and farmers here and abroad. Feingold was the leading Senate critic of Clinton's failure to abide by the War Powers Act; he opposed Bush's rush to war in Iraq and was the first senator to call for a timeline to bring the troops home; now he complains that the Obama administration is not moving fast enough to wind that war down. Feingold noisily challenged constitutional abuses during the Clinton and Obama years, and as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Constitution subcommittee, he is pressing the Obama administration to get serious about civil liberties. Feingold opposed Clinton's proposal to loosen bank rules, arguing that doing so could threaten financial stability; he opposed Bush's bank bailout; and he was the sole Democrat to object that the reforms Obama backed did not go far enough because they did not do away with "too big to fail" banks and did not adequately protect consumers or taxpayers.

Much has been made this election season of Democrats distancing themselves from Obama; but Feingold and the president parted company years ago. The Illinoisan said during his 2004 Senate campaign that he saw Feingold as a role model. But once in the Senate, Obama kept clear of Feingold's effort to censure Bush over abuses of privacy rights and the Wisconsinite's lonely defense of arms control treaties. Feingold cast his Wisconsin primary vote in 2008 for Obama over Hillary Clinton, and he backed Obama's economic stimulus and healthcare reform. But he opposed Timothy Geithner as treasury secretary, objected to Obama's plan to surge more troops into Afghanistan and has complained loudly about the administration's uneven response to soaring unemployment.

This independent streak has frustrated Democrats who don't "get" Feingold's votes. He's not a movement politician, in the sense that his friend and frequent ally former Senator Paul Wellstone, was; while Wellstone worked with liberals when they said they needed him to take the lead in challenging conservative overreach in fights about the impeachment of Bill Clinton or the nomination of John Ashcroft as attorney general, Feingold cast the sole Democratic vote to continue Clinton's Senate trial and argued, based on their joint service on the Judiciary Committee, that Ashcroft was more respectful of the Constitution than anyone else George Bush would pick. Those votes infuriated interest groups and Democratic leaders in Congress. But many Feingold backers share the opinion of Wisconsin union activist Terry Fritter, who says, "A lot of people get mad at Russ when he casts one of those 'only Democrat' votes. Then they calm down and think, if Russ did it, there had to be a principle involved."

Over time, Feingold's antiwar and anticorporate record, as well as his defense of civil liberties, have made him a hero to progressive populists. "Russ is not shy about taking on the forces of arrogance and ignorance in my party," says author and activist Jim Hightower. Since the death of Wellstone, says Hightower, "Feingold's the one Democrat I don't have to apologize for." Unfortunately, Feingold's independence isn't inspiring the enthusiasm it once did among Wisconsin swing voters. He's running well with Democrats, but polls have him trailing among unaffiliated voters. And Republicans give him no more credit than they do party-line Democrats. "Politics are more partisan now, more cynical," says former Wisconsin Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager. "You used to hear people say, 'I don't agree with him on the issues, but he's his own man' or 'I'm not a Democrat, but I'm proud of him.' Now a lot more people are in their camps; they don't want to think someone on the other side might be honorable."

Lautenschlager's words apply not just in Wisconsin but nationally. Bush's Iraq War, abuses of civil liberties and failed economic policies have resulted in growing division between the two major parties. Rhode Island Democrats and independents, furious with Bush and Senate GOP leaders, refused to vote as they once had for liberal Republican Lincoln Chafee in 2006. Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter stopped believing that Democrats would cross over and vote for him, and Delaware Congressman Mike Castle learned—after his Senate primary defeat at the hands of a Tea Party firebrand—that there are no longer many moderates voting in GOP primaries. The remarkably unified "Party of No" response to Obama's initiatives by Congressional Republicans, combined with the relentless assault by right-wing media on Democrats and compromise-oriented "RINOs" (Republicans in Name Only), appears to have fostered an edgy and unforgiving partisanship even in states where ticket-splitting was once common. This explains the devolution of McCain on issues ranging from immigration to climate change; it also explains why Chuck Grassley, who once served as a reasonably rational "Bob Dole Republican" (working with Democrat Tom Harkin to enact the Americans With Disabilities Act), is now best known for repeating absurd claims about "death panels."

The bitter divisions over the Bush and Obama presidencies have highlighted longer-term shifts in the makeup and dynamics of the Senate. When Feingold arrived in Washington, regional differences and personal styles were still very much on display in what were far more ideologically diverse party caucuses. The Senate's most consistently antiwar member in the early 1990s was a Republican, Oregon's Mark Hatfield, who also happened to be a steady foe of the death penalty, school prayer and discrimination against gays and lesbians. There were more conservative Democrats from the South in those days, but there were also Southern Democratic populists like Fritz Hollings, who backed Jesse Jackson for president in 1988 and often sounded like Ralph Nader when talking about corporate power. New England Republicans weren't the faint hopes represented by the likes of Maine's Susan Collins; they were proud independents like Rhode Island's John Chafee, one of the biggest backers of moves to expand Medicaid coverage for low-income children and pregnant women. When the Senate debated whether to ban flag-burning, there were votes when more Republicans opposed the assault on freedom of expression than Democrats.

Feingold has seen the Senate grow more partisan and dysfunctional since the days when McCain crossed the aisle and asked the young reformer from Wisconsin to help him squeeze soft money out of national politics. The men and women of principle, the outliers who cast unexpected votes and who forged unlikely coalitions, have mostly been replaced by programmed politicians who dare not deviate from party talking points. The late Senator Robert Byrd—Feingold's ally in resisting the steady creep of executive power—worried aloud in his last years about the way the "history and tradition of being the world's greatest deliberative body is being snubbed."

Yet it is not merely an increasingly White House–focused politics—and the media that reinforce it—that has changed the character of the Senate. The most significant change has been in the way senators get elected and re-elected. In 1992, when Feingold first ran, most races cost millions, with only a few costing tens of millions. Candidates rarely relied entirely on home-state donors, but it was still possible to suggest that most politics was local. Now serious Senate contenders—if they are not independently wealthy—count on massive spending by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which collected $162 million and $94 million, respectively, in 2008, and on the myriad special-interest groups that have wildly inflated the cost of getting elected. And those staggering figures do not take into account the enormous spending by supposedly independent groups. The "money power," as Feingold's progressive forebears referred to it, has redefined Senate races and senators. "In most cases, candidates no longer control their own campaigns," says Ed Garvey, who once sought Feingold's seat and over the past quarter-century has been a leading campaign finance reform activist. "Even candidates who get into politics with the best of intentions start thinking they can't get re-elected without money from the party leaders, from the people in Washington, to keep their jobs. Senators get so reliant on the money that they reflect it; they stop thinking for themselves, stop thinking like the people who elected them. They just worry about getting the money."

More than any current senator, Feingold has resisted the march of money, not merely by fighting for campaign finance reform but by trying to get opponents to agree to limit spending and keep special-interest groups from pouring money into Wisconsin. But his opponent, Johnson, secured the GOP nomination with a promise to use his family fortune to mount one of the most expensive TV ad campaigns in Wisconsin history. Johnson's ads not only distort Feingold's record on specific issues but foster the fantasy that the only Democrat to oppose Obama's mild banking reforms is a rubber-stamp for president and party. "Russ Feingold normally and almost always votes on party lines," claims a Johnson TV ad. "He's right in the Reid, Pelosi, Obama camp." The claim is absurd—Feingold crosses party lines more frequently than all but six senators. But the relentless attacks have had an impact; Johnson pulled even with Feingold in summer polls, and the race moved from a "safe Democratic" rating to one of the year's most competitive. That's certain to steer more corporate money into Wisconsin. Karl Rove says he expects to raise $50 million to defeat Democrats, and Democracy 21's Fred Wertheimer says, "Shadow Republican groups formed by longtime party officials and party operatives are raising and spending hundreds of millions of dollars in this election."

So it is that Russ Feingold finds himself in the fight of his life. He has built a campaign fund of almost $14 million the hard way: with an average contribution of $53. In the past, that would have been more than sufficient to keep the poorest Democrat in the Senate competitive. But not this year, in the aftermath of Citizens United, with corporate money flowing more freely than ever before. Corporate-allied groups like the Club for Growth are already buying heavily to attack Feingold and support Johnson.

Feingold's sure he'll be outspent. But he's also sure he'll win. A political junkie whose father was active in Wisconsin's independent Progressive Party of the 1930s and '40s before becoming a Democratic stalwart in the factory town of Janesville, Feingold is betting it's still possible to counter organized money with organized people. Borrowing a page from Wellstone's remarkable re-election races of 1996 and 2002, Feingold is determined to "win this campaign at the grassroots." To that end, he has opened sixteen field offices, from Ashland on the shores of Lake Superior to Kenosha on the Illinois border. Twenty-seven regional steering committees have taken his campaign into the most rural counties. By early September, canvassers had knocked on more than 105,000 doors and made more than 107,000 phone calls to targeted voters. Feingold is doing much of the asking himself, keeping to a relentless schedule that sends him to the state's most Republican counties to compare notes on the Constitution with conservatives, who don't see many Democrats these days.

The tech-savvy Feingold campaign has 25,000 Facebook friends and 11,000 Twitter followers. Supporters even download "Feintunes"—the senator's picks of songs by Wisconsin artists like Bon Iver and the BoDeans. Yet while he embraces the bells and whistles of modern campaigning, Feingold is betting more on message than mechanics. "I still think people understand," he says, that they need senators willing to stand up to "the power and greed and corruption of Wall Street...the power and greed and corruption of the pharmaceutical companies...the power and greed and corruption of the health insurance companies." Feingold is counting on that understanding to see him through a year when more cautious Democrats may not make it. He says that like the progressives of old, he wants to beat the "money power" in this race so he can go back and fight it in the Senate. "I want you to know that I am committed to this cause because I think it goes to the very core of our democracy," the senator declared on that Friday night when he rallied the faithful.

"You do it, Russ!" came a shout from the crowd.

If Feingold does it, if he wins this race in this year, it will not be as just another Democratic senator. It will not be as a maverick, nor even as an idealist. It will be as a signal that maybe, just maybe, people power can still beat the money power. That senators aren't just extensions of parties and presidents, and that politics can be about something more than Democratic toothpaste versus Republican toothpaste.