Conservative Mystery Date & Judge Scalia, in "Legislative Soul Search!"

The Big Picture: A 40-Year Scan of the Right-Wing Corporate Takeover of America

Author and public intellectual Colin Greer tells us how we got where we are today. It's not a pretty picture, but hope is on the way.

By Don Hazen and Colin Greer, AlterNet
Posted on October 3, 2011

At this moment, there are growing protests on Wall Street in Manhattan, in Boston at the Bank of America, and in cities around the country. These embryonic and creative efforts are targeting the greed of the banks, the collusion of the corporate class with their corrupt elected officials, the high level of unemployment, the huge burden of student loans in a time of diminished opportunities, the increasing numbers of poor and hungry people, and much more. These protests, along with those earlier in Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio, are signs of revival of a long tradition of popular revolt against excesses of wealth and the corporate class.

The new protests come after a long dark period -- specifically the last 11 years of George W. Bush and Barack Obama -- during which time conservatives have gained more power and ability to control the national debate than they have in the past 75 years. The current right-wing power presence, spiked by the corporate media's obsession with Tea Party protests, came most immediately as a result of the Great Recession caused by the housing bubble and obscene corruption of the banks. This crisis was exacerbated by large-scale anger about the subsequent bank bailout, and corporate-backed attacks on the health care reform package passed by Congress. But that is just part of the latest political news.

 

The conservative ascendancy is hardly an overnight phenomenon. Rather, it represents a dynamic shift in American politics that has taken place over more than 40 years, beginning in the 1970s. During this time, conservative billionaire donors, corporations and the Chamber of Commerce, all invested in conservative think-tanks and communications infrastructure, while Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and a broad and deep media network of right-wing pundits have come to dominate the public discourse. 

 

Subsequently, the liberal/progressive side of the political equation has lost much of its influence from the period of the 1970s and early '80s. How this has happened over time is little understood. In fact, the lack of protest and effective organizing against the right wing during the Tea Party ascension especially has been a mystery to many, and a source of great frustration.

 

Colin Greer, a transplanted Brit, has observed and engaged in every phase of progressive politics. Greer is the author of a number of books (with his best-known being The Great School Legend), has been a professor at Brooklyn College of CUNY, and for many years has served as president of the New World Foundation, known in the philanthropic world for its commitment to supporting grassroots organizing and providing seed money for many of the most effective progressive political efforts over the last decades. Over this long period, Greer has had a cat-seat view of all the forces that have shaped our last 40-plus years.

 

He has a big-picture take on the turmoil and politics of this period, as major shifts -- globally, economically and culturally; the tectonic plates of change and reaction -- have reshaped our world in ways we have yet to fully understand. AlterNet sat down with Colin Greer in his office in New York in late September.

 

Don Hazen: Why have conservatives succeeded so dramatically in this period, and liberals and progressives are arguably the weakest in decades? 
Colin Greer: There is no single causal factor. The shaping of these two divergent paths begins in the 1980s when you had the last flourish of an expansive society. But the last three years of the '70s were characterized by stagflation and disappointment and took a great toll, forfeiting a real sense that the constant growth of openness in American society and economy was endlessly sustainable. Fast-forward to the present and we have the twin dominance of austerity, i.e. eviscerating public spending as the solution to economic crises; and aristocracy, represented by the protected tax and profit oasis of the wealthiest 1 percent.

It’s instructive to note that events in the U.S. are not in isolation. Back in the '60s and '70s when progressive movements were in ascendency, the liberation themes of the time were part of a global anti-colonial uprising, and broad disgust at the war in Vietnam. Today, trade policies and globalization means that the other major economies of the world are also in the grips of a greed and hyper-profit which is in the process of discarding hard won values, rights and decent living conditions.

DH: That was Carter and also the hostage crisis too at the end of the '70s, yes? 
CG: Yeah, it’s about how social and economic consciousness changed. Carter’s inability to act effectively in the hostage crisis or to defeat stagflation reinforced a national feeling of malaise and weakness. That’s why Reagan campaigned on "hope in America" versus Carter's kind of dismal, high-standing morality, an apparent inability to act from strength. It was the beginning of a long term of undermining the presumption of multi-dimensional social and economic expansion, which had flourished since World War II.

So in the 1980s you had Reagan, along with the last flourish of direct political action on the left and the last gasps of the global social change that characterized the 1960s and '70s; i.e. the fight against apartheid, which succeeded in turning the Reagan administration around to support the anti-apartheid/ divestment movement, and you had the Nuclear Freeze movement.

DH: These were the last grassroots successes of the left?
CG: Yes. Although one can never do a one to one equation, the Freeze was a factor in Reagan's shift in nuclear arms negotiations with the Russians and the anti-apartheid divestment strategies, fueled by a popular movement with strong student leadership, which created shantytowns on campuses throughout America, helped win that struggle.

But then there was a dramatic change in direction when the air traffic controllers went on strike. Reagan seized the moment, and fired the air traffic controllers, destroying PATCO, their union. That was the beginning of the end of the labor deal with capital; a deal that was carved out in the Cold War in which labor got negotiated settlements here at home for its support for the Cold War abroad. In a sense it was anti-red internationally and social democratic here in the United States. And that deal went through the beginning of the 1980s, until Reagan, responding to the conservative base, changed the ground rules. And with it, labor's guaranteed negotiating strength ended.

We have seen a diminishing power of labor since. And we've also seen a shrinking power of popular movements on the left as well, so that by the time we got to the invasion of Iraq, a million people in the street could be ignored. How different that was from the last gasps of enduring popular protest against Reagan’s contra-aid and its illegal processes.

DH: Those demonstrations against the Iraq invasion seemed like a big deal at the time, a major accomplishment, and around the world as well.
CG: Yeah, but for only one day. What is required is the ability to constantly bring people out and not end it when there’s no popular response. You need to get the news story, and push the politicians to shift. We're up against the kind of new politics in which they didn't shift and we didn't come out with continual resistance, and that inability to resist played out in the 1990s when you have a Democratic president who was disappointing over and over, with no popular mobilization against his deregulation of the finance industry or his welfare reform initiative.

DH: Is it possible to have a popular movement against a disappointing Democratic president?
CG: I think it was in 1992, but only theoretically; it didn't happen. By the 1990s, because progressives in a sense had been disciplined by the reduced power of labor, by the new power of the right, the visceral fear that Republicans would be worse, and the fact that a certain amount of administration figures came from progressive organizations and might still influence policy, all contributed to a lack of action against Clinton policies  And there is another crucial point: by the time we get to late 1980s and 1990s, social movements on the left were essentially demobilized into NGOs and legislative agendas, so progressive politics became more about winning elections, seeking legislative reform,  and building not-for-profit institutions that represented progressive vision and options. There no longer was a base beyond labor, which was itself shrinking.

DH: How sudden was this shift from more popular movements to foundation-funded projects? 
CG: It happened over time. The trends were growing in the early '70s because progressives had control over a lot of federal spending, and a lot of activists had access to all the major agencies. There was a kind of flourish of success and even progress under Nixon.

Legislative efforts were working. We especially got environmental legislation, and it looked like the courts were on our side. Meanwhile the right, in earnest, started building both its base and its options, with think tanks, organizations and communications capacity. But by 1990, the left so to speak, except for labor, had become almost entirely dependent on foundation support, which was based in the IRS 501 (c) (3) tax structure which required grant recipients to be non-partisan. But it was influential at the level of government and so it felt like it could deliver through the lobbying capacity of NGOs and by winning in the electoral, legislative and judicial spheres.

In the '80s, when they saw the right-wing agenda through Reagan taking serious root, many groups worked on voter registration to expand the electorate, but were constrained again by the IRS rules. It took a Jesse Jackson presidential campaign as a reminder that you need a popular base to move an agenda and to build a popular base to undercut the climate of low taxes, high profits, and the growing transfer of public assets into private control. Jackson created a social movement—he went to organized farmworkers, he worked with gay activists, he really did see that campaign as a progressive, social movement campaign.
But after Jackson (‘84 and ‘88) that kind of campaign mobilization didn't happen again until Obama. And Jackson did exactly what Obama did. He demobilized his campaign agency.

He turned into a kind of not-for-profit organization, and Obama turned it into the Democratic Party. But they are two moments -- and it's interesting that both black figures produced the sense of a national movement. But the end of the Jackson campaign coincided with end of '80s, and that was where the Democratic Leadership Council, that Clinton led, emerged strongly and represented the shift to a "new progressive politics" where they made progressive mean something else. Imagine if the Jackson campaign had remained mobilized in relation to the Clinton administration and/or if the Obama campaign had remained live going into the 2010 elections when victories on the right were won by small margins.  

DH: I assume when you say progressive came to mean something else, it meant moderate? 
CG: In a sense once you had Murdoch and Fox and a growing conservative infrastructure, it labeled the DLC—transfused Democratic party—as the left. Any real left was marginalized into virtual invisibility and anonymity, the center was moved significantly to the right, and progressives increasingly pushed into protecting eroding rights and benefits, without a political infrastructure or national leadership of its own. In the electoral arena, in the media, and in the mainstream foundation world, moderate was called left or liberal, and leaders in pursuit of public office more and more have eschewed the liberal label by moving ever so profoundly to the right.

DH: So the middle became the left, and the conservatives keep moving successfully to the right -- a trend we have seen reach the present moment of the far, far right influencing the political process. And there has been no pendulum swinging back, that's for sure.
CG: Yes, and one of the critical ingredients in this huge shift rightward over the last few decades, as I inferred earlier, was the end of the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet Union had a profound effect on two things: 1) the idea that there was a left alternative, and that there was a path to reform that had the best interest of the public at large as its highest priority, and had the "state" involved directly in business and the interest of public; and 2) the shift of states in the Soviet orbit to capitalism basically made capitalism the world model. So then it was a question of what you did in the framework of capitalism, not challenging its framework. That's been the umbrella for China, India, Brazil. All over, left groups moved into the electoral arena, and didn't challenge the capitalist model. As a result, we now have a global context that advances austerity and aristocracy in support of a global capitalism that has declared war on the social contract.

In the Scandinavian model, they're more responsive to public conditions, but not to challenging capitalism itself. I'm not arguing that we need a left to challenge capitalism because it isn't clear that we do have that option. But what we're faced with now is that any system that has monopoly status moves toward tyranny. So we're now seeing that 40 years of the rogue rise of the right has produced a tyrannical right. All of the conditions, the improvements around tolerance and cultural openness and responsibility for the poorest of the poor, the perspective that a healthy society is one that has a priority to care for all its people -- those standards have so diminished so that you have candidates now talking about the fact that people may have to starve. And that’s now a legitimate thing to say.

Killing gets cheered by the GOP grassroots. The four GOP debates so far are really interesting because they indicate something really seriously bad.

DH: The rise of the Tea Party, aided by its intense promotion by the corporate media, has given the public the sense that there is a powerful angry grassroots movement underway. How does that play out? 
CG: Tyranny grows first of all in the establishment of a legitimation of its point of view, even on the margins. You can see it in Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry, a war hero, and with Murdoch and Roger Ailes growing Fox. There is the constant testing of a model that is very similar in tone to the most successful moment of progressives in the 1960s. It reaches into high levels of rhetorical hysteria. When we were on the streets 40 years ago there was a kind of  hysteria -- police were the enemy. There's a similar level of hysteria now. What that means is basically that on the road to power, most people committed to power will use the "crowd" -- they construct a crowd. You need the crowd, even if it's only a tiny fraction of the population. If the crowd is visible through spectacle then you start conditioning the public's readiness to act, and you encourage readiness of others not to act.

So in the present political reality, you have the convergence of the crowd's mentality, with the readiness to be tyrannical in leadership, with leaders in Congress like Jim DeMint, Eric Cantor, and of course funding for it all from the Kochs. This tyrannical style of leadership has grown through the Bush years to a dramatic level, and has not been effectively challenged by Obama. You have the growth of the crowd and the paralysis of public at large. When you look at poll data there is no way in which the public agrees with the Tea Party or with right-wing political figures, but it is paralyzed, and paralyzed serially over time.

A million people on the street didn't get listened to over the Iraq invasion, or the defeat of Kerry through usurping of the public stage by Swift Boat in 2000. Then the inability of Gore to fight for his election followed by the Supreme Court decision which gave us eight years of Bush. The choice to fight or not is rarely a popularly held prerogative until the public bursts forth as perhaps in the Arab Spring. Until such moments, leadership is top down, especially in the electoral arena, where money and incumbency determine authority and good judgment.

The Tea Party is the latest in a series of experiments -- remember the Promise Keepers and the Christian Coalition back in the '80s -- to advance right-wing politics from the margins to a new center. We've been holding them off time and time again but not by producing anything for the future. Instead we have benefitted from the cultural victories of the '70s and '80s that have become enshrined in entertainment conventions and interpersonal lifestyles. In both realms we have taken great strides to persuade Americans that young people should have the vote at 18, that women are equal, that abortion is pretty much something you can argue rhetorically but hard to lose practically, but now we're losing ground on everything. The death penalty for a while looked like we were humane, we don't just kill people -- we're losing ground on that. We didn't go to war casually -- we've lost ground on that.

DH: Without tension of competing systems, is there an inevitable march to the extreme? Is there a theory that most extreme seems to always win out?
CG: The fact is, a society grows into tyranny over time as the most powerful cultivate extreme crowd behavior, which, unless resisted can have a contagion effect into the public at large, paralyzing resistance and recruiting frightened supporters. While clearly minority politics, the Tea Party zealots who cheered at death and execution much as Sarah Palin once called on us to “Drill, baby, drill!”ought to be a reminder and a warning. But I don’t know any mainstream media that treated the cheers for the death penalty and barbarous inhumanity to the sick as a story truly worth engaging. The crowd is the critical thing that tyranny requires eventually -- the mobilization of the crowd. With recessions every 10 years, the circumstances periodically creates the possibility for angry people to be organized into a crowd. Progressives did that. The New Deal was about using the circumstance of the depression to organize a progressive crowd.

DH: Mostly organized by the Communist Party. But we have no capacity to do that now?  
CG: and the Socialist party. But there was a plethora of organizations. And no, we have no apparent capacity do that now, although we desperately need it. New protests and organizing efforts are definitely sparks of hope. But that kind of action is primarily on the right.

DH: It's a resource question, too? 
CG: Yes, and it's also a planning and leadership question. The Socialist party, Catholic Workers, Communists -- they were planners, they had an agenda not limited by electoral and legislative politics, and not dependent on foundation resources for scale. Forty years ago a dozen small progressive foundations could help support strong action and analysis. The big checks now come from professionalized, very mainstream foundations that do not, as was the case with the earlier funders, institutionally identify with a progressive world view.

DH: The Kochs write the big checks for the right today. So is the weakness primarily an issue of class -- resources staying in the educated class? 
CG. No. It is that and it is something deeper, more psychological. When I was in England a bit ago, I was talking to a Syrian cab driver, this was in the middle of the Arab Spring. I said, why is it that you've got (this was before the riots) English kids protesting at Trafalgar Square against tuition increases? You've got women in Rome -- a million people -- protesting against Silvio Berlusconi. The next day they've all gone home, the kids have gone home. In America we had the resistance against the Iraq war, they went home. But in Egypt they came back every single day. In Yemen they come back every day. And he said, "Well, we in the West have freedom. They don't have the freedom."

So there is someway in which we have the consciousness here that we have something that could be lost that we don't want to risk. In the Middle East, there is nothing left to be lost.

DH: So fast-forward to the present. How has the right-wing philosophy which has dramatically increased its influence, changed the nature of government? 
CG: What we are up against is the constant reduction of compassion as the highest priority in how you make public policy and deliver public goods. The right wants to take public space. They want to take public resources. In response, progressives get lost in the message of to trying to re-instill belief in government. With the government argument, I think we're missing the point, both in terms of compassion but also that it's not not about belief in government. It's about who owns government and what it's for. Despite the right's anti-government rhetoric, their practice is pro government. But it is government for them. So we must challenge the principle of who owns government. We are saying they've diminished the belief in government, but why does Rick Perry want to become president of the United States and, in effect, CEO of the nation’s investment engine, that is, government.

It's not because he doesn't believe in government, it's because he wants to control government. They want to control and privatize government resources. Capitalism is exhausted here. It needs more public money. It’s always needed public money, it needs more now. When you look at the growth of capitalism in America from railroads all the way to the computer, it's publicly funded. I say to people what do Velcro and GPS have in common? They were both created by the military. And who is making a profit from that? Does the public get any return for its investment?

But if we had a conception of government that was not only tax agent, service  deliverer, but also an investor  in the economy like a bank, and it was entitled to a return just the way a bank gets return, we'd have plenty money.  But we don't treat ourselves as the investor. But every major technological growth has been publicly invested in. If we were a shareholder in Microsoft because we invented the computer, it would be a very different terrain. So the reinvention of capitalism is the issue, and the reinvention of government is what is happening. So capitalism is directly claiming public investment now.

DH: Can you provide a current example of the privatization impulse?
CG: Charter schools are a very good case study for the impulse. Forget anti-unionism;  forget whether or not they work, because they don't. But even if they did they are not cheaper. Charter schools are simply the transfer of public money to profit-making activity. That's the system they are steadily building -- prisons, schools, public parks, there's a conversion of the whole system into an investment of capital which is a major extension of what's always been true.

It's a way of government supporting the expenditure of money, but it has been organized so that it stays in private control. And in private control it's become increasingly privileged in how the decisions are made. So you've got hedge fund people now funding charter schools -- they are the largest engine behind charter schools. And so they care about education. Some of them even believe public schools are so bad we need this alternative.

But there's not a lot of thinking about about whether profit is compatible with learning. If profit is the major goal and keeping costs down is the major goal, then how do you have learning be the major goal? That's exactly the contradiction. If you're going to have learning be the major goal, you have to invest in it like you would a war. You don't in a war say the major goal is how to make profit and we'll only fight the war according to the profit.

DH: With the enormous investment in military arms, and more recently mercenaries, it seems like we are headed there.
CH: Well, that is one reason we have more war. But in the end you can't sell to the public that the measure of our success here is profit. And in education, were saying basically you can trust profit. The market will give you better results. There's no reason to believe that. The public hasn't accepted it, although it's getting pushed on them because of the power that's established in the state houses. Also, what's not well understood, is there are three kinds of charters. So the privatization has three identities and they're being merged. One is public school experiments with the charter system. The second is not-for-profit charters run by not-for-profit organizations are closer to the base. The third is the for-profit charter.

The first two models are perfectly fine. We have private schools and parochial schools which have tax exemptions so they're only quasi private. Those two forms are part of the American education fabric, so having another thing called charters wouldn't be a problem. It's nice to experiment with different forms of government organization and curriculum. But the for-profit charter is a very different entity and to allow it to be conflated with the other two is basically to let the Trojan horse in.

DH: As a longtime foundation executive, how has philanthropy exacerbated the progressive weakness? 
CG: Foundations mostly gave money according to sociology or class, so people gave money to organizations led by people most like them, or slowly there was entry of people who were not like them but were being identified by people like them, and also very little money when you think about it. If you take the most successful community based organization in philanthropy at community based building level, it's probably SCOPE in Los Angeles.

And they went from a $5,000 grant to its founder from New World Foundation to a $3 million, maybe a $4 million budget, which took 25 years to get to. We have a number of very strong local and state organizations that have built powerful bases to influence local politics, pioneering such inventions as “living wage,” and “community benefits.” But to date this is a record of policy reform and some electoral victories for local leaders, all of which is very important. It is, however, not yet a coherent, comprehensive and compelling base for challenging the structural realignment of capitalism in our time.

DH: What are the consequences of that lack of a base to challenge the excesses of capitalism? 
CG: So middle-income workers and people in impoverished communities are all under serious attack by this realignment, and are not yet organized in an aggressive agenda of their own within a worldview they share. I think there’s a sense that we have more to lose than to gain in such action at this time, but time may be running out on that one. Most people do have a certain level of freedom, they have a lot of harassment -- but they have a certain level of freedom. And for the average African American who is now 25 -- they have family that experienced the change so they are freer than they were.

They don't get off the street curb when they're coming up to a white person. They can be on the street with a white date or partner. There have been significant changes, not necessarily lasting changes, but changes that make you feel you've got something. The real danger is now that the economy can't produce the benefits it was producing, and the greed in capitalism has gone to such an extreme, that the Captains of capitalism seem not to be concerned about the social order dangers that the extreme inequalities create, which opens the gates to fascism.

When you have the a tyrannical crowd, you have the tendency to tyranny, you have the crowd behaving the way they did in those four Republican debates. So while they're only a minority, they're setting a tone. In the first debate nobody was willing to say that a dying child, a very ill child, should get medical care. In the second debate you've got cheering for the death penalty. In the third debate you've got the call to kill, for a young man who's on life support. And in the fourth debate the gay soldier is booed. So you've got this extreme hysteria that is not being challenged.

DH: So you can imagine serious political repression here in the USA? Where is the hope? 
CG: I think we know what’s going to come down. I think people know. People are afraid. There's an implicit fear. And also there are moments when spontaneity breaks out. Who knows, we may be lucky enough that spontaneity e.g. at Occupy Wall Street that will help produce a social movement. And all that's been funded and developed will be ready to move. We don't have that now. There was a kind of serial violence that you couldn't have predicted, when Martin Luther King was assassinated. The Nuclear Freeze movement was not predictable when it suddenly flourished. You can't predict them. But it's obvious why after they happen.

So we don't know that we don't have the ground for something major to happen. In almost every state, strong organizations have been developed that might well be the basis for movement capacity when forces outside of their own terrain call them to new and unified action. If one looked at the black churches before the Civil Rights Movement flourishes of the 1960s, they probably would not have looked as strong one by one as they did when called to unified action. So too with their leaders.  Indeed, so too with the Tea Party and right-wing movements. The external call for the latter has been heavy duty private money and a driving corporate agenda that is committed to reversing the deals it made since the 1930’s. 

But what’s observable is the right has established an ideology and a worldview, a sense of what’s right and what’s wrong that has captured enough of public to dominate news with visible activism, and to paralyze public at large. That doesn't mean they can hold onto it, but that’s the phenomenon were facing. The economy has no ability to buy the public back into the equation. This recent disaster relief controversy is an example. We are unable to buy back into the equation of what looked like we had won forever -- that  is the public good.

We've lost a major piece of the ideology that was built over 40 or 50 years -- that we care about people in pain. If we don't have the ideolology that we care about people in pain as your basic ethical compass, then you have the kill mentality. Because we're always balancing between compassion and fear. If compassion doesn't dominate and you don't have resources to feel you can be compassionate without paying a high price yourself, then you're going to turn to fear to protect what you've got, or reach your hand out for what you can get.

I think the health care debate is an interesting case to consider in all this. Obviously, the social benefit is intrinsic to a progressive perspective. The kind of health care reform we’ve received is, for a variety of reasons, insufficient and insecure. Foundation funding for advancing public education and lobbying ran to the millions of dollars but it was all silo policy oriented and for the most part, top down. If that kind of money could have been used to help build a comprehensive foundational commitment to social welfare and organizational capacity, a partial achievement might well have helped produce a powerful movement advance.

DH: Does that loss of the moral compass, along with the fear, have to translate into passivity? How do we combat that?
CG: Well, I don't know that were not doing some of what is necessary. We have to reinvest in the ideology… lots of organizations have gotten lost in the idea that you have to invest in resurrecting belief in government. This is about messages. Elections may be fought on messages. Social movements are about consciousness. We have still to invest psychically, financially and organizationally in rebuilding a shared consciousness for a threshold number of Americans that is characterized in the idea that we want a compassionate society and that government is the best vehicle to deliver that.

One thing I didn't mention about the '80s that the assault on government that Reagan led, the left created earlier. We talked about problems of welfare system, about the ineffectiveness of the education system -- that was us. Cloward and Piven, me, everybody. We undermined that system. We didn't have a sense, probably because we were young, that you win a victory and then you evolve the maturity of that victory. We wanted it to be correct, and the right will suffer the same hubris -- they're moving way beyond their ideological reach, beyond the ability to deliver it.

DH: So, what happens in the interim? What about political repression?
CG: As Eric Cantor said, "People could starve." He said, "If you haven't saved for a rainy day yourself, that's your responsibility."

That's the opposite of compassion; that generates fear. And if you have violence on the street, they will have their own excuse for political repression. If there is an excess of even the right-wing on the street you could have the excuse of police intervention that looks like it's in public interest. But we have work to do, not least is to protect the moment. By that I mean, we should give serious thought about the impact of colluding in the electoral defeat of this president by undermining him publicly and reducing his viability as a candidate. The alternative is truly dangerous.

At the same time, we must think of ourselves in a political era that calls for breaking from the conventions of recent political discourse that has narrowed our social and political vision. It’s time to name what is happening in our country without hysteria, but to be clear that the next elections are part of a struggle for a social and cultural threshold that will determine the quality of life and democracy in this country.

And we need to keep in mind what's always been true in the politics of social movements -- they are the province of the young. Just look for example at how the brave young people in the Dream Act campaigns have actually won victories against inhumane ICE practices. They took and they take risks. Now, as other young people are stepping up to make powerful statements, take risks, try new tactics, they need our support and understanding.

ALEC Exposed: How Corporations Are Taking Over Our Democracy

Thursday, July 14, 2011 by The Progressive
by Ruth Conniff

Today the Center for Media and Democracy rolled out a new web site, ALEC Exposed, based on a massive leak of information from the American Legislative Exchange Council, the powerful coalition of corporations, right-wing foundations, and state legislators who have been literally writing the laws at the state level to push their pro-business, anti- democracy agenda.

For many years, big corporations, including Kraft, Pfizer, WalMart, and AT&T, to name a few, have been paying hefty dues to belong to a group that gives them access to state legislators. The legislators, for a much smaller fee, get to attend annual conferences, receive briefings from ALEC, and get the honor of putting their names on boilerplate legislation the groups drafts.

One of the many new pieces of information to emerge from the impressive ALEC Exposed project is that the corporate members of this group vote these bills out of their own, corporate committees before passing them on to their pet legislators.

"We've discovered through a whistleblower that these corporations actually vote on these bills behind closed doors, before legislators or the people they represent even hear about them," Lisa Graves, the director of the Center for Media and Democracy said today.

If you live in a state like Wisconsin, the results of this coordinated assault on democracy are all too evident.

Much of the group's legislation--privatizing the public schools, taking away collective bargaining rights, loosening environmental regulation, even suppressing the vote--got a huge boost when ALEC foot soldiers, including Governor Scott Walker and the heads of both of Wisconsin's legislative chambers, took power. The group's hard work and careful planning for just such an opportunity over the last two decades accounts for the head-spinning all-fronts attack ordinary citizens are currently enduring in Wisconsin.

State representative (and Progressive magazine blogger) Mark Pocan went "behind enemy lines" to write a piece about attending an ALEC conference for The Progressive Magazine back in March 2008, in a darkly comic piece titled "Through the Corporate Looking Glass".

That piece is more relevant--and less funny--now that ALEC has become even more powerful.

A big controversy erupted when Professor William Cronon at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, blogged about ALEC's corporate takeover of the state and became the target of Republican attacks and had his emails seized by Governor Scott Walker's administration.

Walker and Co. will be even less pleased when they see ALEC Exposed.

The site, which posts and analyzes more than 800 bills produced by ALEC, is a treasure trove of information, including never-released text of the actual ALEC bills broken down and organized by topic, information about the corporate membership of ALEC's task forces on particular issues, the names of ALEC's state chairmen, and the effects of the bills: on working people, schools, the environment, consumer rights, and our democracy.

"We know that we are standing on the shoulders of some tremendous investigative work," Lisa Graves said in a press conference on the roll-out, "But we believe this is a special contribution."

Reporters and citizens can now look at bills that were introduced in their states under the names of their elected officials, and trace the actual, corporate origins of these profoundly anti-democratic efforts.

"We know, for example, that Kraft has been the head of the task force for ALEC responsible for anti-union bills," Graves said.

On the schools issue, which I wrote about in a Progressive cover story a couple of months ago, it turns out that Connections Academy, the company that runs Wisconsin's virtual charter schools, which are poised to displace bricks-and-mortar public schools throughout the rural parts of the state under a Republican proposal, is the head of ALEC's task force on education.

The Center for Media and Democracy deserves a lot of credit for this tremendous addition to our understanding of what is happening to our states. Now, as ALEC Exposed puts it, it's up to us to dig in and spread the word.

Taking the Side of the Billionaires

Friday, May 27, 2011 by Consortiumnews.com
America’s Right – from the NFL lockout to Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget – side with the billionaires in what amounts to an escalating class war against the middle class and the poor
by Robert Parry

If American football fans end up facing a fall without NFL games, they probably won’t blame George W. Bush and other Republican presidents for packing the federal courts with right-wing judges, but it was two Bush appointees who reversed a District Court ruling that would have ended the lockout of players.

The Appeals Court judgment encouraged the NFL’s hardline billionaire owners to resist making the kinds of compromises that a few less intransigent owners recognize could easily resolve the impasse.

Now, the hardliners simply assume that Republican judges will keep siding with the NFL owners and thus enable them to beat down the players, eventually assuring the billionaire owners a bigger piece of the revenue pie – even if that means losing some or all of the 2011 season.

What many average Americans, especially white guys, don’t seem to understand is that whatever the populist-styled rhetoric of Fox News or Rush Limbaugh, the Right’s default position is to side with the billionaires – and to show little or no regard for the fate of anyone else, whether NFL players or sick senior citizens.

Still, one must give the Right credit for having worked hard refining how to phrase its arguments. Right-wingers even have turned the term “class warfare” against the Left by shouting the phrase in a mocking fashion whenever anyone tries to blunt the “class warfare” that the billionaires have been waging against the middle class and the poor for decades.

On right-wing TV and talk radio across the country, there are tag teams of macho men pretending that ”class warfare” exists only in the fevered imagination of the Left. But billionaire investor Warren Buffett has acknowledged the truth: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

The right-wing propagandists further earn their keep by disparaging science as “elitist.” So, even as the dire predictions from climate-change experts that global warming will generate more extreme weather seem to be coming true, many Americans who have listened to the “climate-change-deniers” for years still reject the scientific warnings.

While no single weather event can be connected to the broader trend of climate change, the warnings about what might happen when the earth’s atmosphere heats up and absorbs more moisture seem to be applicable to the historic flooding in some parts of the world, droughts in others, and the outbreak of particularly violent storms.

Heat and moisture are especially dangerous ingredients for hurricanes and tornados.

Ironically, the parts of the United States hardest hit by this severe weather are those represented predominately by Republicans who have been at the forefront of obstructing government efforts to address the global-warming crisis.

Flooding, hurricanes and tornados have inflicted horrendous damage on Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee, Missouri and Oklahoma – all part of the Republican base.

God’s Punishment?

If televangelist Pat Robertson were a left-winger instead of a right-winger, he might be saying that God is punishing these “red states” for doubting the science of global warming.

However, even as the U.S. news obsesses over the violent weather, mainstream media stars have steered clear of whether global warming might be a factor. It’s as if they know that they’d only be inviting career-damaging attacks from the Right if they did anything to connect the dots.

The Right also is not eager to explain how these catastrophes will require emergency funding and rebuilding assistance from the federal government. After all, you don’t want Republican voters to understand that sometimes “self-reliance” alone doesn’t cut it; sometimes, we all need help and the government must be part of that assistance.

In the case of the killer tornado that devastated Joplin, Missouri, House Republicans, without a hint of irony, are extracting the funds for disaster relief from green energy programs, which remain a favorite GOP target since many Republicans still insist there is no such thing as global warming.

At both state and national levels, Republican leaders have lined up behind climate-change deniers, with former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty just the latest GOP presidential hopeful to apologize for his past support of a cap-and-trade system aimed at reducing global-warming gases.

Any serious move toward alternative energies would, of course, be costly to the giant oil companies and their billionaire owners, like David Koch of Koch Industries who has spent millions of dollars funding right-wing organizations, such as the Tea Party. The Right’s media/political operatives know better than to bite the hand that feeds them.

GOP orthodoxy also disdains tax increases on the rich or even elimination of tax breaks for the oil industry. The Republican insistence on low tax rates for the wealthy, in turn, has forced consideration of other policy proposals to achieve savings from services for average Americans.

That is why congressional Republicans have targeted Medicare with a plan that would end the current health program for the elderly and replace it with a scheme that would give subsidies to senior citizens who would then have to sign up for health insurance from private industry, which has proven itself far less efficient in providing health care than the government.

The GOP budget, drafted by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, would impose the Medicare changes on seniors beginning in 10 years.

Most attention on the Ryan plan has focused on estimates that it would cost the average senior citizen more than $6,000 extra per year, but the proposal also has the effect of privatizing Medicare, meaning that the government would make direct “premium support” payments to profit-making insurance companies whose interest is in maximizing profits, not providing the best possible care for old people.

While the Ryan plan would achieve budget “savings” by shifting the burden of health-care costs onto the elderly, Ryan’s budget also would lower tax rates for the wealthiest Americans even more, from 35 percent to 25 percent. Partly because of that tax cut, Ryan’s budget would still not be balanced for almost three decades.

Class Warfare

Thus, the battle lines of America’s “class warfare” are getting more sharply drawn. The conflict is now over the Right’s determination to concentrate even more money and power in the hands of the rich by hobbling any government capability to protect the people’s general welfare.

If the Right wins, individual Americans will be left essentially defenseless in the face of unbridled corporate power.

Ryan’s Medicare plan may be just the most striking example because it envisions sick old people trying to pick their way through a thicket of private insurance plans with all their confusing language designed to create excuses for denying coverage. It is not an exaggeration to say that Ryan’s tight-fisted Medicare plan could consign millions of Americans to a premature death.

The Right’s priorities hit home at a town hall meeting held by Rep. Rob Woodall, R-Georgia, when he chastised one of his constituents who worried that Ryan’s plan would leave Americans like her, whose employer doesn’t extend health benefits to retirees, out of luck.

“Hear yourself, ma’am. Hear yourself,” Woodall lectured the woman. “You want the government to take care of you, because your employer decided not to take care of you. My question is, ‘When do I decide I’m going to take care of me?’”

However, another constituent noted that Woodall accepted government-paid-for health insurance for himself.

“You are not obligated to take that if you don’t want to,” the woman said. “Why aren’t you going out on the free market in the state where you’re a resident and buy your own health care? Be an example. …

“Go and get it in a single-subscriber plan, like you want everybody else to have, because you want to end employer-sponsored health plans and government-sponsored health plans. … Decline the government health plan and go to Blue Cross/Blue Shield or whoever, and get one for yourself and see how tough it is.”

Woodall answered that he was taking his government health insurance “because it’s free. It’s because it’s free.”

Self-reliance, it seems, is easier to preach to others than to practice yourself.

Woodall’s explanation recalled the hypocrisy of free-market heroine Ayn Rand, whom Rep. Ryan has cited as his political inspiration. In her influential writings, Rand ranted against social programs that enabled the “parasites” among the middle-class and the poor to sap the strength from the admirable rich, but she secretly accepted the benefits of Medicare after she was diagnosed with lung cancer.

A two-pack-a-day smoker, Rand had denied the medical science about the dangers of cigarettes, much as her acolytes today reject the science of global warming. However, when she developed lung cancer, she connived to have Evva Pryor, an employee of Rand’s law firm, arrange Social Security and Medicare benefits for Ann O’Connor, Ayn Rand using her husband’s last name.

In 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand, Scott McConnell, founder of the Ayn Rand Institute’s media department, quoted Pryor as saying: “Doctors cost a lot more money than books earn and she could be totally wiped out.”

So, when push came to shove, even Ayn Rand wasn’t above getting help from the “despised government.” However, her followers, including Rep. Ryan, now want to strip those guaranteed benefits from other Americans of more modest means than Ayn Rand.

It seems it’s okay for average Americans to be wiped out.

Hypocrisy, Hypocrisy

While the Right’s penchant for hypocrisy is well-known (note how many Republicans involved in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton had their own extra-marital affairs), the bigger mystery is why so many average-guy Americans volunteer to fight for the rich in the trenches of the Right’s class warfare.

Clearly, the Right’s propaganda with its endless repetition is very effective, especially given the failure of the American Left to invest significantly in a competing message machine. The Right also has adopted the tone of populism, albeit in support of a well-to-do economic elite.

Yet, perhaps most importantly, the Right has stuck with its battle plan for rallying a significant percentage of middle-class Americans against their own interests.

Four decades ago, President Richard Nixon and his subordinates won elections by demonizing “hippies,” “welfare queens” and the “liberal media.”

Then, in the late 1970s, a tripartite coalition took shape consisting of the Republican Establishment, neoconservatives and the leaders of the Christian Right. Each group had its priorities.

The rich Republicans wanted deep tax cuts and less business regulation; the neocons wanted big increases in military spending and a freer hand to wage wars; and the Christian Right agreed to supply political foot soldiers in exchange for concessions on social issues, such as abortion and gay rights. Ultimately, each part of the coalition got a chunk of what it wanted.

From Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, the rich got their taxes slashed, saw regulations rolled back and gained a larger share of the nation’s wealth and political power. The neocons got massive military spending and the chance to dispatch U.S. soldiers to kill Israel’s Muslim enemies. The Christian Right got help in restricting abortions and punishing gays.

But what did the American middle-class get?

Over those three decades, the middle-class has stagnated or slipped backward. Labor unions were busted; jobs were shipped overseas; personal debt soared; education grew more expensive, along with medical care. People were working harder and longer – for less. Or they couldn’t find jobs at all.

With today’s Tea Party and the Ryan budget, the Right’s coalition is staying on the offensive. If the House budget were passed in total, tax rates for the rich would be reduced another 10 percentage points; military spending would remain high to please the neocons (who foresee a possible war with Iran); and Planned Parenthood and other pet targets of the Christian Right would be zeroed out.

Yet, with the proposed elimination of traditional Medicare, the Ryan budget has lifted the curtain on what the Right’s “free market” has in mind for most average Americans, who could expect to find their lives not only more brutish but shorter.

The real-life-and-death consequences of the Right’s tax cuts, military spending and culture wars are finally coming into focus. If you’re not rich – and can’t afford to pick up the higher tab on health care – you’re likely to die younger. Or your kids might have to dig into their pockets to help you out.

Less extreme but still troubling, another consequence of the Right’s remarkable success over the past three decades might become apparent on your TV screens this fall.

Thanks to all those right-wing judges packed onto federal appeals courts by Reagan and the two Bushes, American football fans might not have the NFL to watch.

The NFL’s lockout of its players seemed to be ending several weeks ago when a lower-court judge ruled against the billionaire owners, but the NFL’s lawyers confidently filed an appeal to a three-judge panel on the Eighth Circuit, knowing that they would surely get one dominated by Republican judges.

They did. Steven Colloton and Duane Benton, two Republicans appointed by George W. Bush, constituted the majority on the panel and reflexively sided with the NFL’s owners.

The ruling should have surprised no one. After all, the Right’s default position is almost always to side with the billionaires.

One View of the American Crisis

Sunday, April 17, 2011 by Consortium News
by Robert Parry
Some readers tell me that I devote too much time to the historical context of the American political/media crisis. They say I should focus more on its current manifestations, especially when there are so many to address. And these readers have a point.

However, I think that without the context – and without understanding how the various U.S. political/media forces evolved over the past several decades – much of what is happening today doesn’t make sense, nor are the solutions readily apparent.

Only by analyzing how the country got into its current mess can there be any hope of figuring a way out. In that sense, this history is like the thread that the Greek hero Theseus unrolled as he made his way through the Minotaur’s maze and then rewound the thread to guide himself out.

So, from my six-plus decades on this planet and my three-plus decades as a Washington-based journalist, here is my ground-level view of what has happened to the United States:

Generally speaking – and with a number of glaring exceptions – the post-World War II period was a time when the institutions of the Republic functioned along the lines of what we learned in our public school civics classes.

The federal government drew from the lessons of the Great Depression and the New Deal to improve the country’s general welfare by creating conditions that helped expand the middle class.

After World War II, government programs helped veterans buy homes and get educated. Construction projects, like President Dwight Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System, brought the country together and increased productivity.

President John Kennedy’s space program pushed the scientific frontiers, propelling the United States into the world lead in computer technology. President Lyndon Johnson enacted Medicare for senior citizens whose health needs were being ignored by for-profit insurance companies.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the federal courts also began to address the shameful history of racial segregation, as a violation of the U.S. Constitution and particularly the 14th Amendment’s mandate for equal protection under the law. As the civil rights movement pressed the issue in the streets, the courts began striking down Jim Crow laws and other forms of discrimination.

In the 1960s and well into the 1970s, the U.S. press corps also functioned closer to its ideals of skepticism toward power. Correspondents covering the Vietnam War warned the nation of the folly, and the New York Times and other newspapers braved the wrath of President Richard Nixon by publishing the Pentagon Papers, with the backing of the U.S. Supreme Court.

When Nixon’s anger over the Pentagon Papers spilled into his political paranoia, the White House “plumbers” were soon planting bugs in Democratic headquarters at the Watergate. After Nixon’s burglars were arrested and the President mounted a cover-up, the Washington Post led the way in defying White House power and exposing the scandal.

With Congress conducting serious Watergate investigations and federal prosecutors demanding Nixon’s internal tapes of his own conspiracy, the Supreme Court again sided with the institutions of justice, rejecting Nixon’s arguments of an imperial presidency. Nixon was forced to resign.

Functioning Institutions

So, by the mid-1970s, it could be said that the institutions of the Republic were operating, more or less, as intended. There were real checks and balances. The rights of citizens, especially racial minorities and women, were finally being protected; the press was exposing wrongdoing; accountability was imposed on the Executive for constitutional and legal violations.

Of course, these institutions had been pushed by popular movements, millions of citizens demanding redress of longstanding grievances. There was also a vibrant “underground press” and other outlets for disseminating information when the mainstream media didn’t. It was Dispatch News that exposed the My Lai massacre and Ramparts that revealed CIA penetration of student groups.

Yet, while this progress toward a more perfect union made undeniable headway in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the changes also bred resentment in the South and in many white areas of the North.

The demand for racial justice was viewed as infringing on traditions of white preference and superiority. Many men objected to the women’s movement, too. Meanwhile, social conservatives hated the “counter-culture” and the sexual revolution.

As early as the 1950s, the pushback from the Right was evident in calls for the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren and the physical assaults on blacks seeking to integrate schools, lunch counters and other public institutions. White segregationists denounced the press as “liberal” for its coverage of the civil rights struggle. The federal government was viewed as infringing on states’ rights.

The resistance grew in the 1960s as Alabama Gov. George Wallace and other right-wingers rallied blue-collar whites against “hippies,” feminists, “uppity” blacks, academics, environmentalists and “unpatriotic” journalists. These Americans saw their traditional way of life under siege, and they were backed by wealthy businessmen who worried that their dominance of the economy might be threatened.

Though the Right decried the national press corps as “liberal,” it actually was run by businessmen who were mostly conservative and protective of the establishment. Many top news executives chafed against the era’s progressivism and the anti-establishment tone of reporters as much as other businessmen did.

By the 1970s, the American Great Backlash was gaining strength. Well-placed conservatives, such as Lewis Powell (who later became a Supreme Court justice) and William Simon (who was Nixon’s Treasury Secretary), were calling for massive investments in a right-wing infrastructure of media, think tanks and attack groups to reverse the nation’s progressive trends.

Simultaneously, as the Vietnam War was winding down, the Left largely dismantled its own media infrastructure that had become a powerful grassroots force in the 1960s and early 1970s but was deemed too expensive.

In a short time, the vibrant “underground press” of the Vietnam era disappeared; flagship publications, like Ramparts and Dispatch News, were closed; popular radio outlets, like WBCN in Boston, were bought up by media conglomerates; key liberal outlets, like The New Republic, fell into the hands of neoconservatives.

Much of the Left bought into the notions that media was not essential; that working inside the Washington system was corrupting; and that “local organizing” was the key to the future. Other leftists fell victim to the vanity of perfectionism, putting their own political purity ahead of any practical idea for improving the lives of average citizens.

Competing Trends

So, in the mid-to-late 1970s as the Right was shifting its focus to national battles and investing more and more in getting its messages out to every corner of the country, the Left was dismantling its media, decamping from Washington, and dreaming that somehow “organizing” around local issues would create a grassroots movement for revolutionary change.

These two trends – the rise of the Right’s national propaganda machine and the collapse of the Left’s ability to reach the broad public – consolidated with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Though now viewed through the gauzy mythology that surrounds his legacy, the real Reagan was a rigid right-winger who had opposed many of the social advancements of the era.

Reagan denounced Medicare as socialist tyranny; he cracked down on the anti-war movement while governor of California; he aided and abetted right-wing death squads in Latin America; he opposed environmentalism and other government regulations; he worked to roll back civil rights, especially affirmative action aimed at ameliorating the legacy of discrimination against minorities and women.

Upon taking office in 1981, with the Senate under Republican control, Reagan and his team began systematically deconstructing the institutional safeguards that had defined the New Deal and post-World War II-era.

The Reagan administration took special aim at the federal appeals courts, especially the most influential one in the District of Columbia, installing right-wing and neocon ideologues as judges, the likes of Laurence Silberman. Reagan also appointed environmental “regulators” who detested regulations and civil rights attorneys who opposed efforts to improve the lot of blacks and other minorities.

Reagan emphasized, too, expanding the Right’s propaganda capabilities, coordinating with the growing network of right-wing media and attack groups that went after troublesome journalists and intimidated political critics.

Meanwhile, without the competitive pressure from the “underground press,” the mainstream media charted its own rightward course following the prevailing winds, often with a conservative or neoconservative at the helm.

At the Associated Press, where I worked, the top executive, general manager Keith Fuller, hailed Reagan’s election in 1980 as a worthy repudiation of the excesses of the 1960s:

“As we look back on the turbulent Sixties, we shudder with the memory of a time that seemed to tear at the very sinews of this country,” Fuller said during a 1982 speech in Worcester, Massachusetts, adding that Reagan’s election had represented a nation “crying, ‘Enough.’ …

“We don’t believe that the union of Adam and Bruce is really the same as Adam and Eve in the eyes of Creation. We don’t believe that people should cash welfare checks and spend them on booze and narcotics. We don’t really believe that a simple prayer or a pledge of allegiance is against the national interest in the classroom.

“We’re sick of your social engineering. We’re fed up with your tolerance of crime, drugs and pornography. But most of all, we’re sick of your self-perpetuating, burdening bureaucracy weighing ever more heavily on our backs.”

Fuller’s sentiments were common in the executive suites of major news organizations, where Reagan’s reassertion of an aggressive U.S. foreign policy also was widely welcomed.

At the New York Times, executive editor Abe Rosenthal, an early neocon, vowed to steer his newspaper back “to the center,” by which he meant to the right. At the Washington Post, neocons also began asserting control over the editorial policies of that newspaper.

Losing the Thread

In short order, the institutions of the Republic, which had checked Nixon’s crimes, ceased to function in that way. Instead, the institutions reversed roles, becoming cheerleaders – and enforcers – for the powerful.

The “professionals” of Official Washington quickly sniffed the change in the air. Many learned to survive by honing their senses on where the safe boundaries were. Those who didn’t or wouldn’t go along – ethical journalists, diligent civil servants and some independent-minded members of Congress – soon found themselves on the outs.

Yet, even as the nation’s institutions stopped providing meaningful checks and balances in the 1980s, some individuals continued to do their jobs.

During much of the decade, the failure of the Republic’s institutions was masked somewhat by the fact that some individuals stepped into the breach. There were still a few courageous investigators on Capitol Hill; a handful of journalists who would risk their careers to get out important stories; and some civil servants who believed in doing their jobs honestly.

Perhaps the most striking case of this was the work of Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, a traditional Republican conservative who nevertheless took seriously his responsibility to investigate the Reagan administration’s worst scandal, the secret sale of weapons to Iran and the diversion of profits to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels.

Despite Walsh’s establishment pedigree, Official Washington turned on him en masse. Especially after he broke through the Iran-Contra cover-up in 1991, he was subjected to withering attack – from leading Republicans, such as Sen. Bob Dole, and from the right-wing news media led by Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times.

But Walsh also faced ridicule from the mainstream news media, such as the Washington Post where he was mocked as some crazed Ahab pursuing a white whale or as some out-of-control weirdo who would leave Washington a “perceived loser.”

Indeed, by the early-to-mid-1990s, there was little distinction between the mainstream news media and the right-wing press. Even when documented evidence emerged shedding light on the criminality of Reagan and his team, there were no institutions – and by then few individuals left within those institutions – daring to take note.

First the institutions failed; then the individuals who had dared to fight on disappeared.

Planting a Flag

It became clear to me that trying to get the mainstream news media to publish important information was a losing battle if that information went against the grain of right-wing orthodoxy or mainstream conventional wisdom.

In fact, I had grown tired of trying to convince editors and producers who feared losing their jobs that they had a responsibility to take on such stories and such risks. Beyond exhaustion, I felt guilt when I looked into their eyes and saw how scared they had become, a fear that would sometimes translate into anger at even the suggestion.

My reaction to this grim reality was to look for a place where the flag of honest journalism could be planted and defended. I thought I might have found such a spot with the emergence of the Internet and our creation of the Consortiumnews.com Web site in 1995.

Of course, the downside was that the journalism would not have the large audiences that my work did when I was at the AP or Newsweek or PBS “Frontline.” But I thought readership might grow significantly if I were able to raise the necessary money to ensure that our stories got more attention.

That, however, proved more difficult than I had expected. Wealthy progressives remained locked into the thinking of the late 1970s, which held that expenditures on information were wasteful; that reporting the news was somebody else’s job. Maybe they believed – or wanted to believe – the Right’s propaganda about the “liberal” media that, in reality, didn’t exist.

Instead, they favored either direct giving (such as helping the poor or buying up endangered wetlands) or support for "organizing" efforts (such as seeking some regulatory change, like curbing money in politics).

I argued instead that the scarce money available should be invested in creating honest content and courageous outlets.

While direct giving was surely noble, it ignored the power of the Right’s propaganda machine to undermine any worthy cause. By destroying the New Deal and Great Society, right-wing legislators could create more poor people than any well-intentioned liberal benefactor could feed and house.

Regulation, like restricting money in politics, also might sound good but was either impractical or easily reversible by right-wing judges and politicians. All the money that progressive foundations invested in campaign finance reform was negated in 2010 by one 5-4 decision of a Supreme Court dominated by appointees of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.


The hard truth is that there are no shortcuts to correcting the imbalance that now exists in the U.S. political/media system. It will take money, time and energy to build an infrastructure that can successfully challenge the propaganda from the Right. It will also require many on the Left to admit that their judgments over the past three decades have been faulty.

But the consequences of the Right’s strategy – and the Left’s miscalculations – are apparent in the audacity of today’s congressional and statehouse Republicans in proposing the virtual repeal of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and even Teddy Roosevelt’s progressive era.

The Right feels it is strong enough to impose its Ayn Rand vision of a winner-take-all society and deploy its vast resources to prevail on Election Day.

It is possible that the Republicans have overreached this time, with their ambitious agenda of slashing domestic spending, replacing Medicare with a voucher system, and lavishing more tax reductions on the rich.

But the fact that the Republicans and the Right would even dare undertake such a radical approach is itself proof of how far they believe they have come in controlling government institutions and media outlets, how successfully they have negated the Republic's checks and balances.

To find a route out of this political/media maze, the Democrats and the Left may have to start rewinding the string of history and retracing the steps that got them so lost in the first place.

"Shock Doctrine" Unleashed by Right-Wingers in Wisconsin and Throughout the Country: Naomi Klein

For decades right-wing ideologues have exploited crises to push through an agenda that has nothing to do with resolving those crises. Wisconsin is no different.
By Amy Goodman and Naomi Klein, Democracy Now!
Posted on March 9, 2011

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AMY GOODMAN: As a wave of anti-union bills are introduced across the country in the wake of the Great Recession, many analysts are picking up on the theory that award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein first argued in her bestselling book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In it, she reveals how those in power use times of crisis to push through undemocratic, radical, free market economic policies.

Nobel Prize-winning economist, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, recently referenced the book in his column called "Shock Doctrine, U.S.A." He wrote, quote, "The story of the privatization-obsessed Coalition Provisional Authority [in Iraq] was the centerpiece of Naomi Klein’s best-selling book The Shock Doctrine, which argued that it was part of a broader pattern. From Chile in the 1970s onward, she suggested, right-wing ideologues have exploited crises to push through an agenda that has nothing to do with resolving those crises, and everything to do with imposing their vision of a harsher, more unequal, less democratic society.

"Which brings us to Wisconsin 2011, where the shock doctrine is on full display," Krugman wrote.

Well, Naomi Klein joins us in our studio for the hour. In addition to The Shock Doctrine, she’s the author of two previous books: No Logo: Taking Aim at Brand Bullies and Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate. She’s currently writing a new book which focuses on the public relations campaign distorting climate change facts.

Naomi Klein, welcome to Democracy Now!

NAOMI KLEIN: Hi, Amy. Great to see you.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to have you with us. Let’s talk Wisconsin. What do you see is happening in this uprising?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, first of all, it’s such an incredible example of how to resist the shock doctrine. And it should not be in any way surprising that we are seeing right-wing ideologues across the country using economic crisis as a pretext to really wage a kind of a final battle in a 50-year war against trade unions, where we’ve seen membership in trade unions drop precipitously. And public sector unions are the last labor stronghold, and they’re going after it. And these governors did not run elections promising to do these radical actions, but they are using the pretext of crisis to do things that they couldn’t get elected promising to do.

And, you know, that’s the core argument of and the thesis of the book, is not that there’s something wrong with responding to a crisis decisively. Crises demand decisive responses. The issue is this backhanded attempt to use a crisis to centralize power, to subvert democracy, to avoid public debate, to say, "We have no time for democracy. It’s just too messy. It doesn’t matter what you want. We have no choice. We just have to ram it through." And we’re seeing this in 16 states. I mean, it’s impossible to keep track of it. It’s happening on such a huge scale.

Teachers’ unions are getting the worst of it. March 8th was International Women’s Day. This is—you know, as you pointed out on your show, it’s overwhelmingly women who are providing the services that are under attack. It’s not just labor that’s under attack; it’s the services that the labor is providing that’s under attack: it’s healthcare, it’s education, it’s those fundamental care-giving services across the country, which could be profitable if they were privatized.


AMY GOODMAN: In Ohio, more than 20,000 people marched to oppose the Republican Governor John Kasich’s attempted anti-union legislative putsch. Kasich recently defended his policy proposals on Fox & Friends.

GOV. JOHN KASICH: It’s part of a big piece of reform. Come March the 15th, we will be reforming Medicaid, K-through-12, higher ed, prisons. It is going to be a reform agenda in Ohio like no one has ever seen, all designed to get us in a good position. In terms of unions? I respect unions. I come from a union family. I mean, the idea that we’re attacking anybody is—look, what we’re attacking: poverty, joblessness. OK, that’s what I’m attacking. And all I’m doing is saying to everybody, participate. Everybody jump in this. Together, we can make Ohio stronger. If we do not do that, you know, then we’ll continue to lose jobs, and that means misery for everybody. That’s not going to happen. We are going to be successful here.

AMY GOODMAN: Republican Governor John Kasich, going back to his old haunt. He was a commentator for a long time for Fox and, before that, a conservative congressman.

NAOMI KLEIN: You know, the reason why this isn’t working and why people are so outraged by it and why they’re in the streets and we’re finally seeing the resistance in this country that we have seen in Europe, with this chant, "We won’t pay for your crisis," that really started in 2008 in Greece and spread to Italy and France and England—and, you know, the rest of the world has been waiting for the United States to—you know, how much are Americans going to take of this? It seems that Americans were willing to say, you know, "We will pay for your crisis, and would you like a tax break with that?" Right? And finally, they went too far. And so, that resistance is finally happening.

And this attack on collective bargaining, the reason why people won’t take it is precisely because they understand that this is not shared pain. It is not being shared equally. The people who created the crisis in the first place are not sharing the pain. And the injustice of this response is so blatant. This isn’t just any economic crisis. This tactic has worked. And this is, you know, what I’ve tracked over a 30-year period, that it is really easy to use an economic crisis—people panic, hyperinflation, issues like that. In the '90s, when Newt Gingrich was Speaker, it was possible for him to argue that the source of the budget crisis really was so-called entitlement programs. You cannot do that in this moment in history because everybody understands that the crisis was created on Wall Street, it was created through speculation and greed, and a decision was made to bail out the bankers with public money and to pass the bill on to the public. And they're seeing the bonuses back. They’re seeing the outrageous salaries. They’re seeing corporations not paying their taxes. And it’s just too unjust. It’s just so morally outrageous. And then to turn on the television and talk about everybody sharing the pain? I mean, people are just not that stupid. Thankfully.

AMY GOODMAN: And where does the Obama administration fit into this? We have played that clip of President Obama when he was running for president, saying, "If anyone challenges your collective union rights, I will be walking with you."

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah. Well, I mean, this is the irony of this moment, and this is—it really is about democracies. Scott Walker was not elected with a mandate to bust unions and to strip collective bargaining rights. He did not mention that in his campaign. He talked about balancing the budget. He made some vague statements, you know, about shared sacrifice. But he absolutely did not campaign promising to do what he is now doing. Obama, on the other hand, campaigned promising to strengthen union rights. He promised, again and again, whenever he had a labor audience, that he was going to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, and he promised to stand with them.

And, you know, one of the things that’s so important for us to understand about why—you know, there are many reasons why the resistance is so strong in Wisconsin and why they’ve become this beacon for not just the rest of the country, but the world, and so much of it, I think—you know, my colleague at The Nation, John Nichols, has written beautifully about it this week in a cover story where he talks about the rich sense of collective history, of collective memory, and the fact that people know their progressive history in Wisconsin, so they’re harder to exploit. You know, they’re not going to fall for the latest Fox News messaging, because they know their history. But, you know, this is—there’s something else that’s going on here. And, well, I mean, I’ll just let you take it from there.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let me ask you about Michigan. About a thousand people rallied in Michigan—

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN:—reminiscent of Wisconsin. Talk about the proposal there.

NAOMI KLEIN: ... there’s so much going on that these extraordinary measures are just getting lost in the shuffle. But in Michigan, there is a bill that’s already passed the House. It’s on the verge of passing the Senate. And I’ll just read you some excerpts from it. It says that in the case of an economic crisis, that the governor has the authority to authorize the emergency manager—this is somebody who would be appointed—to reject, modify or terminate the terms of an existing contract or collective bargaining agreement, authorize the emergency manager for a municipal government—OK, so we’re not—we’re talking about towns, municipalities across the state—to disincorporate. So, an appointed official with the ability to dissolve an elected body, when they want to.

AMY GOODMAN: A municipal government.

NAOMI KLEIN: A municipal government. And it says specifically, "or dissolve the municipal government." So we’ve seen this happening with school boards, saying, "OK, this is a failing school board. We’re taking over. We’re dissolving it. We’re canceling the contracts." You know, what this reminds me of is New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, when the teachers were fired en masse and then it became a laboratory for charter schools. You know, people in New Orleans—and you know this, Amy—warned us. They said, "What’s happening to us is going to happen to you." And I included in the book a quote saying, "Every city has their Lower Ninth Ward." And what we’re seeing with the pretext of the flood is going to be used with the pretext of an economic crisis. And this is precisely what’s happening. So it starts with the school boards, and then it’s whole towns, whole cities, that could be subject to just being dissolved because there’s an economic crisis breaking collective bargaining agreements. It also specifies that—this bill specifies that an emergency manager can be an individual or a firm. Or a firm. So, the person who would be put in charge of this so-called failing town or municipality could actually be a corporation.

AMY GOODMAN: Whose government they dissolve, a company takes over.

NAOMI KLEIN: A company takes over. So, they have created, if this passes, the possibility for privatization of a whole town by fiat. And this is actually a trend in the contracting out of public services, where you do now have whole towns, like Sandy Springs in Georgia, run by private companies. It’s very lucrative. Why not? You start with just the water contract or the electricity contract, but eventually, why not privatize the whole town? So—

AMY GOODMAN: And what happens then? Where does democracy fit into that picture?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, this is an assault on democracy. It’s a frontal assault on democracy. It’s a kind of a corporate coup d’état at the municipal level.

[...]


AMY GOODMAN: Our guest for the hour is Naomi Klein—yes, the journalist and author. Her latest book is called Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. You can go to our Facebook page, and you can post questions there for her and just continue to participate in the dialogue. Let me ask you a question that came to us from Facebook. This is a question about the Madison protest for you, posted on our Facebook page. Kevin Williams—Kelvin Williams asks, "Are there any specific ways that Wisconsin workers can use the ideas in [your book] 'The Shock Doctrine' to go on the offensive and force true fiscal responsibility, perhaps even rolling back the compromise contract?"

NAOMI KLEIN: Mm-hmm. It’s a great question. I think what’s finally starting to happen, and this is—Wisconsin has really been going from one victory after another. This started off with an attack, but people have been—have just found such incredible reserves of resolve and dignity and collective history that the ground is shifting. So, the situation under which those compromises were made, those concessions were made, it’s changed. You know, people are feeling their power and their possibility.


AMY GOODMAN: I mean, it’s amazing now. The Governor, who was just elected, Scott Walker, a few months ago, is now—his popularity has dipped to the 30s.

NAOMI KLEIN: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: And even the conservative newspapers are asking serious questions.

NAOMI KLEIN: Mm-hmm, yeah. I mean, he clearly made a real miscalculation. I mean, what was obvious is that he was really playing to the national stage. He’s clearly a very ambitious guy. He’s got real national political aspirations. I think that’s clear. You know, in that conversation with fake David Koch, the prank call, he compares himself to Reagan. He compares his actions to Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers, that sort of "shot heard around the world" moment. That’s what he wanted, you know? And he is not getting that.

AMY GOODMAN: And then he said, first he fired the PATCO strikers, and then the Berlin Wall came down. He made that link.

NAOMI KLEIN: He said it. And it’s not a crazy link, in the sense that it was part of a frontal assault on labor and the left, and it continued for many, many years. But, you know, it’s not the ’80s anymore, and people are on to these tactics.

And I do think—you know, just coming back to that question—that it is possible. But the real key is that we have to be having the debate about where the money should be coming from. I mean, if there is a fiscal crisis—and in Wisconsin, there’s a crisis that was created by tax cuts, and this is why there’s so much outrage, because it comes back to that false claim that there’s shared sacrifice here. There isn’t shared sacrifice here. There are gifts that are being handed out to the elites. Scott Walker is governing based on this radical free market ideology that if we just create the perfect, most hospitable, most gentle, less demanding conditions for corporations to do business, then we’ll have a booming economy, and it will trickle down, and everyone will benefit. And that is exactly the ideology that Obama campaigned against—and won—saying we can’t keep giving more and more to the people at the top and waiting for it to trickle down. And that was a message that really resonated with voters.

One thing I wanted to come back to that I was starting to get at earlier about why what’s happening in Wisconsin is happening in Wisconsin and what we need to take from it is that when bad things are happening, it’s helpful to have a bad guy. And Scott Walker is a good bad guy. And he has galvanized progressives. And people have, you know, an enemy to organize around and to point out these disparities. It hasn’t happened at the federal level, despite the fact that Obama is also involved in attacking labor rights with his pushing of charter schools and draconian budget cuts. He’s not a good bad guy for progressives. So, we’re still in a situation where Obama is getting away with, in my opinion, shock doctrine-style tactics, because people don’t—still don’t want to believe that Obama is doing it, too. So, when you have an easy bad guy, a Republican governor who’s obviously trying to be the reincarnation of Ronald Reagan, you can mobilize the left. But it won’t just work if we are only going after the Republicans and if this is fought along just partisan lines, as opposed to being fought based on principle. No matter who is doing it, we need to be mobilizing, if it’s Obama, if it’s Scott Walker.

AMY GOODMAN: And the people that President Obama surrounds himself with, especially when it comes to the Wall Street insiders, especially as we move into the 2012 election, when it’s said Obama will raise more than a billion dollars for the presidential election?

NAOMI KLEIN: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of denial, still, about who Obama is and who he surrounds himself with. And, you know, we’re going to talk a little bit later about Tim DeChristopher, but I’ve said it many times: Obama is fundamentally a centrist. And I do think that when there is a mobilized progressive movement in the United States that is putting pressure on him, on Democrats in Congress, they will respond.

And that’s another lesson that we can take from Wisconsin. You know, I was talking, once again, to John Nichols the other day, and he said, "What’s really working here is that we have the inside-outside pincer." Right? You’ve got people in the streets, but you also have Democrat—Democratic lawmakers willing to put themselves on the line, being surprisingly courageous, leaving the state, and blocking it. So it isn’t just the people in the Rotunda. It isn’t just the protesters at the rally. It’s a kind of a partnership that’s going on. Why is that happening? Well, they looked out the window, and they saw their voters in the streets really committed and really mobilized, and that gave them courage.

And that’s something really important to remember about how—you know, so many liberal groups are involved in this gentle backroom lobbying, a token protest here and there, which says, "I’m willing to spend a couple of hours on a Saturday, but I’m not really willing to fight to win." And what’s going on in Wisconsin is something very different. It’s not just a rally on a Saturday afternoon. It is people really upending their lives for weeks and weeks and weeks on end. That sends a message to politicians who want to get re-elected that this is a big issue, a top priority. And they hear that.

Move Your Money

Supporting Democracy From the Base 
By DAVID D. LEEPER

Main Street Wisconsin—harbinger for the nation—is becoming aware that our democracy is being threatened by some very rich, powerful people. The super-wealthy are threatening the very core of our democracy as they consolidate more and more wealth and power. For those who recognize this conflict and want to resist, the first thing to realize is there is no quick-fix.

Abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote, in 1857, "If there is no struggle there is no progress.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." Benjamin Franklin reportedly told people that the form of government our founders had created "is a democracy- if you can keep it." Preserving our democracy is not something we can accomplish with one powerful demonstration. Like freedom, democracy's cost is eternal vigilance.

I receive dozens of requests each month to provide financial support for progressive organizations. They talk about matching the Koch funded tours or Karl Rove's mega fund ready to pour millions of dollars into Wisconsin campaigns. It is clear to me, however, that as long as these rich and powerful people are skimming the profits off the work, savings, and consumption of millions of Main Street folks, our contributions will never match the money they are now free to pump into any political campaign they choose. 

Money controls mass media and advertising, which has an undeniable effect on the public opinion we need to challenge the policies that are destroying our society. The Supreme Court decision in Citizens United has made it completely clear we cannot compete effectively by matching them dollar for dollar. It is tempting to fight fire with fire, but matching the political spending of billionaires is not a sustainable plan. We need to fight fire with water.

The Firefighters in Wisconsin have again taken the lead on this by taking their money out of the M&I Bank. M&I has provided strong financial support to Governor Walker, and individual firefighters were able to withdraw enough money in one day to force the Madison bank to close its doors early. We need to follow this lead. We need to understand that every dollar the Koch brothers pour into union-busting once belonged to one of us; then we gave it to them. We fuel the power of super-rich individuals and corporations when we use their banks and buy their services and products. We must stop paying for our own destruction if we are to have any hope of regaining our democracy. 

It is often difficult to follow the money and know who you are supporting in the products and services you purchase. Fox News and their advertisers, AT&T, and virtually any large bank, however, are clear examples of where we can start, and more and more web-sites are telling us which corporations advertise on Fox News and which companies the Koch brothers own. We have the power to put an end to the increasing centralization of wealth and power—if we have the discipline once we realize this is where the real battle is being fought. I recently heard my non-profit Group Health Cooperative advertising on Rush Limbaugh's show. I called the marketing director and told her I did not want my money funding Limbaugh's hate. I was told I was not the first to have complained about this and she would stop the advertising immediately. I asked her to write me when it had been accomplished.

A very basic start is to move your money and insurance to credit unions and mutual insurance companies. Beyond that, buy everything you possibly can—including gas—from cooperatives and small, locally-based producers. No more Bank America, McDonalds, Subway, or Starbucks; even when they are so convenient. This may cost more in the short-run, and it may mean we do not have access to 1000 ATMs, but it is a sustainable plan for regaining our democracy. If we want change without struggle and inconvenience, Douglass reminds us, we may as well quit now and allow the rollback to slavery.