By: Harold Meyerson Like Poe’s purloined letter, the Republican plan to heist the 2012 presidential election sits before us in plain view. And going Poe one better, it is perfectly legal. Rigging the already anti-democratic electoral college should not become the way to win the White House, says Harold Meyerson
The first part of the strategy has been unfolding for months. Since the 2010 elections brought Republicans to power in numerous swing states, officials in many of those states have made it harder for minority, poor and young voters to cast their ballots. GOP governments have been curtailing early voting (in Ohio and Florida) and requiring voters to produce official photo-identification cards (in Wisconsin). In South Carolina, the poll tax lives again: Voters who want an official photo-ID card must present a passport or a birth certificate, neither of which can be obtained for free.
Recently a new ploy has emerged, focused on the electoral college. In Pennsylvania, Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R) has proposed changing the way the state’s electoral votes are tallied in presidential elections. (A state’s electoral votes reflect the number of its U.S. congressional districts, plus two more for its Senate seats.) Instead of having all of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes go to the candidate who carries the state’s popular vote, as is the long-standing practice in Pennsylvania and 47 other states, Pileggi wants to apportion those votes by congressional district.
Since Bill Clinton carried Pennsylvania in 1992, the state has gone Democratic in every presidential election. In 2008, Barack Obama carried Pennsylvania with 55 percent of its popular vote, thereby winning its 21 electoral votes. But if Pileggi’s plan had been in place, John McCain would have been given 10 electoral votes by virtue of winning 10 congressional districts. Obama would have been awarded nine for the nine congressional districts he carried, plus two for carrying the state’s popular vote.
The 2010 Census reduced Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation from 19 to 18, and the Republican legislature and governor have drawn new lines intended to create GOP majorities in 12 of the 18 districts. Under Pileggi’s plan, Obama could carry the state in 2012 — by winning huge majorities in heavily Democratic Philadelphia — and still lose the majority of its electoral votes.
Tom Corbett, Pennsylvania’s Republican governor, has said he’ll support the Pileggi plan. Other swing states that came under GOP control after 2010 could adopt their own versions: Thus Obama could carry Michigan, thanks to strong support in Detroit, or Ohio, as a result of big numbers in Cleveland and Columbus, and still lose most of those states’ electoral votes.
Ultimately, what Pileggi’s plan does is extend to the states the electoral college’s bias against popular-vote majorities. The electoral college, after all, was created out of a compromise so that Southern whites wouldn’t be outvoted by Northerners in the House of Representatives or in presidential elections. The compromise was to tally slaves in apportioning congressional districts among the states, and then award the presidency to the winner of the states’ electoral vote, not of the nationwide popular count. In 2000, Al Gore won half a million more votes than George W. Bush, but through the magic of electoral-college apportionment and a Republican Supreme Court, Bush won the White House. Under this new Republican scheme, candidates who win a state’s popular votes could still lose the majority of its electoral votes.
Considered in tandem with the drive to reduce voting among minorities and low-income citizens, the emerging Republican opposition to popular-vote democracy makes long-term strategic sense. With each year, the nation’s population and electorate become less white, even as the Republican Party becomes more and more a white folks’ party. As minorities and the poor tend to cluster in cities, in heavily Democratic congressional districts, apportioning a state’s electoral votes by congressional district creates an opportunity for GOP electoral gains even though the party’s share of the popular vote is waning. By contrast, a number of states controlled by Democrats (most recently, California) are trying to scrap the electoral college by conditionally pledging their electoral votes to the winner of the nationwide popular vote; the shift would take effect if and when enough states to elect a president go this route.
It may be that the 2012 presidential election ends in a landslide victory, no matter how the electoral votes are apportioned. But suppose a Republican wins only by virtue of vote suppression and plans such as Pileggi’s. There would be no basis to challenge the legality of the winner’s claim. The same cannot be said of his legitimacy. And if Rick Perry or Mitt Romney takes office solely by virtue of such anti-majoritarian chicanery, Democrats should not hesitate to challenge his presidency — based as it is on flouting majority rule — at every turn. They should refuse, for starters, to confirm his Cabinet appointments.
Rigging the already anti-democratic electoral college should not become the way to win the White House.
About The Author: Harold Meyerson — is an OP-ED Columnist for the Washington Post — His is generally viewed as the most liberal voice on the Post op-ed page.
PLAYLIST: Republican Election Fraud — How They Steal Elections
By: Donna Brazile GOPs 2012 game plan is to keep voters home: Across America, Republican lawmakers have talked a big game about cutting budgets, but they also are seeking reductions to something much more fundamental: Americans’ voting rights. From coast to coast, the GOP is engaged in what appears to be a coordinated, expensive effort to block voters from the polls.
The motivation is political — a cynical effort to restrict voting by traditionally Democratic-leaning Americans. In more than 30 states, GOP legislators are on the move, from a sweeping rewrite of Florida’s election laws to new rules for photo identification in Ohio, Wisconsin, North Carolina and more than 20 other states.
As a result, 11% of Americans — 21 million citizens of voting age who lack proper photo identification — could be turned away on Election Day. And these people tend to be most highly concentrated among people of color, the poor, the young and the old.
Florida’s mess
The Florida Legislature recently sent an overhaul of the state’s election code to Republican Gov. Rick Scott. Among other things, this bill would slash early voting from 14 days down to eight. And it would, according to the non-partisan League of Women Voters, impose fines on voter registration drives for all completed voter registration forms that are not returned to the state within 48 hours — a big reduction from the current 10-day deadline.
Yet another hurdle: Voters who had moved to another county (potentially millions of people) would not be able to update their addresses at the polls on Election Day. Under the proposed law, these voters would have to cast a provisional ballot, which used to be cast when a voter’s eligibility was questioned. Such ballots sometimes are not counted. Do we really want to see Florida’s 2000 election controversy replayed?
In the states pushing for strict photo ID requirements, Republican lawmakers have argued that voter impersonators need to be stopped. Yet in Ohio or Wisconsin — two swing states where GOP legislatures are pushing for mandates — there is no record of this ever happening.
Unnecessary, costly
But not all Republicans support voter IDs. Jon Husted, Ohio’s secretary of state, says “a better way” would be to rely on a utility bill, government-issued check, or bank statement at the polling place — as now permitted in Ohio.
In the largest disconnect from their campaign rhetoric, Republicans ignore the high cost of these laws. In the four years since Indiana passed the nation’s first such requirement, it has spent more than $10 million to provide free state ID cards. The Institute for Southern Studies estimated that a similar ID law in North Carolina would cost $18 million to $25 million over three years — money that could be used to keep cops on the street or teachers in the classroom.
So these voting hurdles won’t improve the integrity of our elections, but they will change the face of the electorate.
President Obama was swept into office with overwhelming support from newly registered voters, minority voters and youth voters. I suppose it’s not a surprise, then, that heading into the 2012 election, these are the groups who will be most affected by these restrictions.
In my career, I have felt the elation of a hard-fought, successful campaign and the crushing defeat of an equally grueling loss. I’ve learned that campaigns are about which side makes the more compelling case to the electorate.This is what makes our democracy great. What the GOP is attempting to do is change the rules of the game, leaving only their players on the field.
About The Author: Donna Brazile, a Democratic political strategist is a university professor, author, columnist, and the Democratic National Committee’s Vice Chair of Voter Registration and Participation. The author of the best-selling book Cooking with Grease: Stirring the Pots in American Politics. She can be seen as a political contributor on CNN and ABC as well as “This Week with Christiane Amanpour.” Ms Brazile is the author of Cooking with Grease: Stirring the Pots in AmericaBiographies & Memoirs). Visit her website at: http://donnabrazile.com/ | Follow Donna on Twitter: http://twitter.com/donnabrazile.
By: Andrew Kimbrell It was Teddy Roosevelt who with characteristic aplomb dubbed the presidency a “bully pulpit.” T.R. used the nation’s highest office as the perfect platform to rally the American people around a vigorous and, in his case, often controversial agenda. With Obama, we have, for the most part, an empty pulpit.
During the campaign, Obama identified himself as a “progressive.” During his presidency, however, we have witnessed an ongoing failure to rally his base and the American people around a progressive agenda. In the absence of a progressive voice resonating from the White House, the radical Right continues to dominate the political noise, forcing its policy narratives into the media and policy decisions. Even as the nation is galvanized by the union-busting tactics of state Republicans in Wisconsin and elsewhere, perplexed by the bombing of Libya, and the growing prospect of the dismantling of our public sector the President seems content to triangulate between the two parties and mostly hole up in the White House poring over poll numbers with his small cadre of Wall Street-centric advisors.
Let’s be clear: the Republicans have been as cynical, malevolent, obstructionist, and downright zany during this administration as anything I have seen in the twenty-five years I have been a D.C. denizen. This includes the overtly racist “birther” attacks now hopefully finally put to rest. But as T.R., who was also routinely libeled, knew, it is not the job of the president to accept roadblocks from his enemies in Congress and then quietly whisper “uncle.” It is his job and that of his surrogates to aggressively go out to the public with a principled message and progressive narratives and to marshal the millions who support them to contact Congress and change their obstructionist and misguided ways.
This has been the signature failure of the Obama administration. Instead of standing on principle, Obama’s modus operandi has been to accede before the battle has really been joined. We have seen this repeatedly in the major issues of his presidency: the emasculation of the so-called “stimulus package“; the abandonment of the health care public option; acceding to the Bush tax cuts; failure to push for effective global warming legislation; surrendering to the hawks on the Afghan war; failure to stand up for the rights to public trial for those detained in Guantanamo; and now complicity in irresponsible and unnecessary cutting of critical government services.
Of course, politics is the art of the possible and leading is often about compromising. This we know. But there is a critical difference between compromising on strategies versus compromising and even abandoning basic progressive principles and narratives as Obama has done. The immediate result is that the administration compromised badly or was outright defeated. Obama has not become a clever compromiser but rather a recidivist capitulator. But the longer-term damage of the president failing to step into the pulpit of the presidency has been the failure to counter the Right’s reactionary narratives with progressive narratives. This resulted in a disastrous failure to mobilize the base in 2010 and offered no encouragement for independents to join with progressives.
Not surprisingly half of the Democrats and the vast majority of youthful voters did not even show up at the polls in 2010. The House majority was lost and if it were not for the buffoonery of several Tea Party Senate candidates, the Senate would have been lost as well.
So what were some of the progressive narratives that have not even been articulated by Obama, and therefore left reactionary policy narratives to win the day? Every frustrated progressive will have his choices. Here are my top five:
1. Reactionary Narrative: Government is the problem. It is bad, even evil, and should be eliminated or privatized as much as possible
Countering Progressive Narrative: Government is good and a major part of the solution to our economic and social problems — large, robust local, state and federal government services are critical to our individual and national well-being
To be true to their “anti-big government” message, Tea Party rallies should have been festooned with signs such as “Fire the Fireman,” “No More Police,” “Bite the Postman,” “We Support Fewer Teachers and Overcrowded Classrooms,” “Collapse our Bridges — No More Infrastructure,” “We’ll Pave and Build Our Own Roads,” “Citizens for Salmonella,” “Unsafe Drugs for Everyone,” “Americans for a Weak Defense,” “Senior Citizens Against Medicaid and Medicare.” These signswere missing, of course, and instead we have the endless brow furrowing over “big government” in both parties as the discussion remains conveniently abstract.
This vagueness is important for the Tea Party and their big corporatefunders because the entire “big government is evil” narrative is incoherent once it is actually thought through. Everyone wants and needs robust and effective government services. However, in the 1980s the Reagan spinmeisters cleverly linked “big government” to “welfare moms” slurping vodka and driving Cadillacs, which had the advantage of being both apocryphal and racist. Over the last three decades “big government” has been artfully equated with helping the poor, immigrants, and other “undesirable” communities. This clever narrative about “big government” remains a rallying cry for the Right because large corporations use this mantra as a convenient cover to work against regulations that might protect the American people or the environment but cut into their profits. Additionally, the more the Right can cripple government through spending cuts the more they can show how it’s not working.
Meanwhile, it is indisputable that the two great crises in the Obama presidency, the financial meltdown and the gulf disaster, were both a direct result oftoo little government, too little regulation of corporations acting badly (actually criminally). So how is it conceivable that within just a few months of the Obama presidency “big government” suddenly became the culprit for our current economic malaise, rather than the failure of our government to reign in corporate influence and corruption that actually did cause it? Well in part it’s the empty pulpit problem. Perhaps in fear of the “big government” label, Obama simply has not forcefully reminded the American people that big government services are critical to each and every one of us, as are the public servants who perform them. Those first responders on 9/11, our teachers, firemen, police, health professionals, and those protecting our environment and ensuring our food and drugs are safe, are heroes not villains. They are the “care economy” that represents over 30 percent of our entire economy; they devote themselves to our collective welfare without the lure of profits and wealth.
Instead of standing up for government, for the care economy, and even expanding government programs to create an FDR-like jobs corps, Obama has frozen wages for public workers, defended the firing of teachers, and been mysteriously quiet during the recent Republican union busting jihad in the Midwest. Even worse, he has openly avowed his admiration for Reagan and his belief in limited government interference with the “invisible hand” of the free market.
It was jolting on the night of the 2011 budget compromise to hear Obama proudly proclaimed that we have made “the largest annual spending cut in our history.” Should we celebrate a 33 billion dollar “compromise” on the budget where the administration joins with the Republicans to further dismantle our public sector and public services. Certainly the President’s 2012 budget is far more humane than the Draconian, not to say loopy, Republican version It still is based on trillions in budget cuts and augers further compromises in the coming years with the Republicans as Medicare, Social Security, and the entire public safety sector is eroded. So we have a fundamental failure of the President to articulate the counter-narrative to the “evil big government” mantra. As a result instead of balancing the budget by taxing the richest among us, chopping corporate welfare to the oil companies and so many others, taxing currently untaxed major Wall Street transactions and massively reducing our defense budget including getting out of Afghanistan and other foreign adventures, the burden again falls on the beleagured middle class and the poor.
Republican Big/Small Government | Lower Taxes — Hypocrisy
2. Reactionary Narrative: Quality health care is a commodity available to those who can afford it.
Countering Progressive Narrative: Quality health care is a basic human right.
In 1944 as part of his “Second Bill of Rights” State of the Union Address FDR declared that “the right to adequate health care” for all Americans was critical for our progress as a nation. Unfortunately he died before being able to realize this goal. When Obama decided, rightly or wrongly, to prioritize health care he should have started with this basic progressive narrative. He should have rallied the millions of women, men, and children with no health insurance to declare that quality health care is a basic right and urged his base to relentlessly pressure Congress. The White House should have been working overtime to make sure the stories of the uninsured working people of this country were in the media — front and center to the American people.
Working under this principle of health care as a “right” Obama should have taken the legislative lead with a call to extend Medicare to every citizen, and compromised from that position of principled strength. Instead Obama articulated no basic narrative or principle in the health care fight; there was no call-out to millions to rally behind a shared belief in this critical area of social justice. In lieu of this kind of real leadership he made a quick behind-closed-doors deal with the pharmaceutical companies and then left the entire legislative “sausage making” to five different Congressional committees, many of them dominated by representatives and senators whose votes had long been paid for by “big pharma” and the insurance companies. What’s worse, Obama in his haste for some kind of compromise prematurely threw the public option under the bus, alienating his base and significantly weakening the bill. The bill that emerged continued to support the reactionary paradigm of treating health care as a commodity albeit making buying this commodity mandatory. Its passage caused pharmaceutical and insurance stock to rise.
With the base discouraged and no progressive organizing having been done, the nascent Tea Party was able to seize the public space to violently attack the already weak bill and bizarrely label its supporters as “socialists.” During this late summer of tumult the White House remained inexplicably mum. Finally under unrelenting Tea Party pressure the White House decided to abandon even this weak bill, but Nancy Pelosi and the House leadership realized the very viability of the presidency was at stake and artfully passed the bill even though it was far weaker than the House version. The counter-narrative of health care as a “right” was never even given a chance by the Obama administration.
Healthcare Terrorism in America
3. Reactionary Narrative: Free market competition is the basis for our economic life — the benefits of the winners will trickle down to the losers.
Counter Progressive Narrative: The free market is a dangerous fiction (as is trickle-down economics) — not everything is a market commodity and even then those commodity markets have always been regulated. The question is how and for whom to regulate markets so as to create the most equitable distribution of wealth.
Here’s an economics quiz. Who said the following: “From our first days as a nation, we have put our faith in free markets and free enterprise as the engine of America’s wealth and prosperity. More than citizens of any other country, we are rugged individualists, a self-reliant people with a healthy skepticism of too much government..” Ronald Reagan, Milton Freidman? Newt Gingrich? Nope. That’s Barack Obama just a couple of weeks ago in his much awaited speech refuting the Paul Ryan Republican budget. This was reminiscent of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner explaining the Obama approach to dealing with the recession; “We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we’d like to do our best topreserve that system.” Well they sure did.
To be fair Obama’s recent budget speech did give some kudos to limited government control of the market. However, when economists look back at the Obama presidency I suspect what will puzzle them most is how free market fundamentalism still somehow survived to dominate our public policy yet again. This despite one of the most dramatic economic collapses in our history itself caused by badly regulated markets. What shows Obama’s market fundamentalist tendency most clearly is the Administration’s bended knee to Wall Street. Currently the financial sector (even excluding real estate) accounts for more than 40 percent of corporate profits in the United States and around 25-30 percent of our GNP. So to an alarming extent the United States is becoming a “casino” economy. In fact today more than $680 trillion is invested in various derivative investment “bets” worldwide. That’s ten times the entire world’s gross national product! Instead of warning about the growing power of this metastasizing, dangerous, and massively destabilizing financial “complex” (as Eisenhower did about the “military industrial complex”) Obama sees Wall Street as a manifestation of his belief in free markets (albeit with a glaze of regulation) and yet ironically believes that massive government investment in this sector will “trickle down” to the rest of the economy. Well it hasn’t happened and it won’t happen. The federal funding to Wall Street will be used by those receiving it to invest in yet more exotic financial products and bets; if the bubble bursts again at the old Wall Street casino they can count on the government again to provide “house” money so they can keep on playing.
Obama should have embraced the progressive narrative that free markets cannot and have not protected workers, our environment, or even the stability of our financial systems. Over the last two centuries the purported “free market” oppressed generations of workers, utilized child labor, caused exponential destruction of natural resources, and created huge booms and busts in the financial system. This is because the free market was based in the fiction that labor, land and its resources, and money were actually commodities subject to the laws of supply and demand. Well labor is really human beings, not a commodity. Land and many resources are not commodities that can be endlessly produced but rather non-renewable natural “capital” that we destroy at our peril. And money is an exchange medium that is not a commodity and that should not be subject to the ups and downs, inflations and depressions, of investment betting.
Starting with Teddy Roosevelt and the Progressive Era it was understood that the free market was thus a fiction. It was also correctly seen that these contradictions were creating large scale worker unrest and even revolution, destruction of the resource base of the country, and unsustainable inflation and depressions in the financial markets. So for the last century virtually the entireregulatory system of the United States was established to protect themarket system from itself. Labor as a commodity was taken off the free market with the establishment of the Department of Labor in 1917 and the promulgation of, among other reforms, workers protection, workplace safety, social security, a minimum wage, and unemployment insurance. A flood of laws and regulation from zoning to the major environmental laws of the 1960s and ’70s were put in place to protect our resources fromthe undiluted market. The FDIC and laws restricting and controlling by whom and in what manner investments could be made were put in place to protect the financial system from the market.
The Republicans under the sway of free market fundamentalism have forgotten this entire history. They now openly seek to tear down the very protections that keep the market system they profess to believe in functioning. Instead of busting the free market, trickle-down economics myth, Obama with his free market rhetoric and Wall Street-friendly policies has opened the door to a return, after a century of dormancy, of these “zombie” economic ideas. Of Obama’s capitulation to the Bush tax cuts and embracing of free market and trickle down ideology Paul Krugman wrote, “…it’s one thing to make deals to advance your goals; it’s another to open the door to zombie ideas. When you do that, the zombies end up eating your brain — and quite possibly your economy too.” And that is just what has happened.
Republican ‘Voodoo’ Economics | Tax-Cut Delusion
Republican War on The ‘New Deal’
Republican War on The Poor
Republican War on Women / Single Mothers
4. Reactionary Narrative: You counter terrorism by fighting land wars and overthrowing dictators (especially when oil is involved).
Counter Progressive Narrative: The Best Way to Fight Terrorism is through Cooperative International Police Action and Foreign Policy Changes — Not Land Wars.
It was probably the most important, lost moment in the last presidential election. On July 31, 2008 the Rand Corporation, a conservative think tank started by the U.S. Air Force, produced a new report entitled — “How Terrorist Groups End — Lessons for Countering Al Qa’ida.” The report studied 648 terrorist groups between 1988 and 2006 and found that military operations against such groups was by a wide margin the least effective means of success. The evidence was unmistakable: terrorist groups very rarely cease to exist as a result of winning or losing a war-type military campaign. Therefore the study concludes that the so-called “war on terrorism” simply would not be successful as it was currently being implemented and that the efforts against terrorist networks should not be characterized as a “war” at all. The study demonstrated that terrorism was best defeated by treating it as an international criminal matter not as a “war.” The report summarized, “Al Qa’ida consists of a network of individuals who need to be tracked and arrested. This requires careful involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as their cooperation with foreign police and intelligence agencies.”
Of course you don’t need to be the Rand Corporation to see that this “war on terror” narrative is anomalous to dealing with any international terrorist network. Terrorist networks almost by definition are not bound by any country and can operate anywhere from Frankfurt to Jakarta or Elizabeth, New Jersey. Invade one country and they simply go to another. Moreover they can have “cells” anywhere and communicate via the Internet. Obviously international intelligence and police work is what’s required to deal with these networks, not WWII style military operations. Case closed.
Moreover, progressives know that many of the real foundations for terror lie in misguided oil-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, including decades of support for brutal dictators and also an overweening obeisance to the Israel Lobby. Obama missed his historic opportunity to clarify this during the campaign, to “bust” the misleading “war on terror” narrative. Instead, he kept saying that Iraq was the “wrong war” and then stating with misguided enthusiasm that the “real war” was in Afghanistan. He made the same fateful error as president. He spent many months reexamining the U.S. Afghan policy, reportedly receiving counsel from all sides. But, locked into the prism and prison of the “war on terror” narrative, he decided to increase our presence there by tens of thousands of troops. A position he still forcefully adheres to.
This has doomed Obama into a Rube Goldberg type policy in Afghanistan which goes something like this: even though al-Qaida is no longer in Afghanistan we have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars, and the lives of our soldiers and innocent Afghanis, to take sides in a civil war against our former allies the Taliban. And we are committed to support the dictatorial warlords and their opium industry just in case al-Qaida might someday come back to Afghanistan even though they are not there now and we have no evidence they would ever come back. Moreover this bizarre policy has left Obama in the embarrassing position of trying to defend sacrificing our soldiers and treasure to uphold the hopelessly corrupt Karzai government. It is projected that in 2011 the Afghan War will cost more than $117 billion and probably more than that in 2012. So Obama’s folly in Afghanistan means that these funds, much of which will probably end up in the bank accounts of the Karzai clan and their cronies, will not be used to create jobs, repair infrastructure, pay teachers, or clean the environment.
American Imperialist Empire — Neo Colonialism & Hypocrisy
5. Reactionary Narrative: Global warming and other environmental problems are either vastly exaggerated or don’t really exist — and if they do exist, the solution is market and technology based.
Progressive Narrative: It’s the ecology stupid — global warming is the greatest threat to the survival of civilization. The solution to global warming and other major environmental crises is governments at all levels cooperating to change our economic and technological systems to better comport with the principles of ecology. In April 2009, Carol Browner, the White House coordinator for energy and climate policy, convened a meeting with advocates who were working on the climate change bill. The administration had a clear message. Given their polling data, the administration told advocates that they should avoid talking about climate change and focus on green jobs and energy independence instead.
Environmentalist Lee Wasserman commented on this meeting: “Had Lyndon Johnson likewise relied on polling he would have told the Rev. Martin Luther King to talk only about the expanded industry and jobs that Southerners would realize after passage of a federal civil rights act. I could imagine Dr. King’s response.” Obama has stayed true to the polling. In his 2011 State of the Union Address there was not a single mention of global warming. (I actually prefer the term climate destabilization to climate change.) It is one thing to fail to mount the pulpit and warn Americans of the dire crisis we and future generations are in, it is altogether another to order advocates to stop using the term altogether. Given his timidity about even using the term, it is not surprising that Obama also failed to push a meaningful climate destabilization bill. Advocates constantly complained that the administration was a “no show” as they attempted to get a bill passed. There has not only been complete failure to pass a climate bill but instead the environmental community is now fighting off a last ditch effort by Republicans to remove the authority of the EPA to regulate climate destabilization gases, an authority upheld by the Supreme Court in 2007. Additionally with no bully pulpit defending the science of climate destabilization, the global warming deniers have had a field day in the media and we have seen a marked increase in the number of Americans who now doubt the existence of global warming.
Climate destablization has not been Obama’s only blind spot when it comes to the progressive environmental agenda. In his book “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (Vintage),” Obama does not mention the environment once. As for policy, it was Obama’s Department of Interior that gave the final permit for Deepwater Horizon. The administration then was very slow to recognize the dimension of the disaster. What’s worse, the Obama EPA allowed for the massive use of potential toxic dispersants despite claims that they were controlling the use of these little researched and understood chemicals. Finally the administration was actively complicit in prematurely claiming an end to the harms of the spill as this stance became politically expedient due to the upcoming election.
Obama’s focus on jobs over the environment is especially harmful as the progressive narrative is that whether we like it or not our human economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of ecology. Wall Street investments and indeed the whole gamut of market economics and employment, if based on non-ecological principles, are not only not sustainable, but actively speed the exhaustion of the remaining stores of the earth’s resources. Appropriately, there has been much talk about peak oil. But we also face peak water, peak topsoil, pollinator collapse, and a myriad of other crises all exacerbated by climate destabilization. Obama’s unwillingness to take a leadership role in redefining our societal relationship to the natural world at this critical time may be his most lasting failure as a leader.
Climate Change Deniers
Conclusion: There is no immediate panacea to the “empty pulpit” problem we now face with the Obama administration. However, as we approach the next presidential election it is important, at a minimum, for several progressive candidates to challenge the president in the primaries. Not because there is a serious chance of having these progressive candidates defeat Obama. But rather so that progressive narratives and voices so critical at this time can mount the pulpit and speak to an America that I believe is truly hungry for this vision.
Andrew is one of the country’s leading environmental attorneys and the author of books on the environment, technology and society, and food issues; his most recent is “Your Right to Know: Genetic Engineering and the Secret Changes in Your FoodFood Science Books)” (2006). Kimbrell’s articles on law, technology, social and psychological issues have also appeared in numerous law reviews, technology journals, popular magazines and newspapers across the country.
Mr. Kimbrell’s current work emphasizes policy and grass roots work on food issues including promoting organic and sustainable food, and opposing destructive technologies and practices such as genetic engineering, factory farming, irradiation, sewage sludge and the patenting of seeds and other life forms.
He has been featured in numerous documentaries including the recent film “The Future of Food” and has appeared on numerous radio and television programs across the country. He has testified before numerous congressional and regulatory hearings. In 1994, the Utne Reader named Kimbrell as one of the world’s leading 100 visionaries. [ MORE ABOUT ANDREW KIMBRELL ]
Fund was at it again this afternoon on Fox News’ America Live, claiming that the stench of “voter fraud” hangs over the April 5 Wisconsin Supreme Court election, in which incumbent conservative Justice David Prosser trails challenger Joanne Kloppenburg by about 200 votes with a recount pending. Fund suspects there might be fraud because of “scattered examples of people being asked to fill out their ballots in pencil, which is not supposed to happen because you can erase a pencil.” [ READ MORE ]
UPDATE: Republicans Attempt To StealWisconsin Elections — It seems like the goon party has miraculously “found” 17,000 votes — just enough to take Prosser out of the mandated state recount that would have ensued with Kloppenburg’s victory. It is also interesting that this person (Waukesha County Clerk, Kathy Nickolaus) has a history of defrauding the people of Wisconsin!!! [ READ MORE ] [ READ MORE ] [ READ MORE ]
Justice David Prosser & Challenger Joanne Kloppenburg
Republicans have a long history of stealing votes, either by direct intimidation or by use of supression tactics — like voter caging — or simply de-registering potential Democratic voters from the rolls for dubious reasons, like they did in Ohio (2004) [ Bush v. Kerry ] and the big theft of Florida [ Bush v. Gore ] in 2000.
Other ‘Fox-GOP’ Lies/Fraud On — Govt. Shutdown, Immigration, Planned Parenthood & ‘Trumped’ Up Bitherism
“Toe-Sucker” DickMorris: GOP Will Exhibit “Cowardice” If They Compromise To Avoid Shutdown
“Mambuto” Cavuto Tells Americans Worried About Shutdown To “Shut Up“
Georgia’s proportion of unionized workers is four percent, tied for forty-eighth and close to the bottom of the heap in the U.S., which is close to the bottom among nations that consider themselves “advanced” in living standards, technology, and social conditions generally.
As a result, Georgia’s wage earners make less money, have fewer benefits, and generally confront lower living standards. Few places on the continent would benefit more than the Peach State from a strong drive to increase trade-union representation.
Thus, the rally at Georgia’s state Capitol this past Wednesday night, called by the State’s AFL-CIO, the Atlanta Labor Council, and other organizations, was a heartening sign. On the steps of Georgia’s capitol in Atlanta, in the shadow of Tom Watson’s commanding presence, five hundred or more union members, community activists, students, and various other citizens–a widely representative sample that split fifty-fifty between men and women, was roughly equally White as Black, with a smattering of Hispanic and Native American advocates–stood up and shouted “Stop the War on Workers.” Present were peace groups, revolutionary proponents, and folks just generally angry at a system that rewards greed and privilege with money and perquisites while it squeezes everyone else out of any semblance of rights and benefits that groups like unions have fought hard to attain.
Throughout the United States, the courage and strength of thousands of workers in Wisconsin has given inspiration and leadership to wage-earners elsewhere. At times, the messages of these stalwart souls, braving frigid conditions and, as often as not, a media blackout, or at least a diminution of their struggle and a distortion of their perspective in the press, is exactly what working people need to hear.
“This Land Is Your Land” rings true with class-conscious solidarity and an uncompromising sense of democracy that must guide those who want decent lives.
Those who attended this gathering articulated these and other points powerfully. “Don’t let this be a one time rally,” said one preacher near the end. “The people inside that building(the capitol) need to know that we’ll be back, we won’t leave, we’re not going away.”
Steve Henson, a progressive-Democratic State Senator, asked, “Why is it that all sorts of associations are OK to come and lobby us in the legislature, but lobbying for working people is not OK?”
Another legislator spoke of her five year old grandson “leading the way.’ He wanted to pack up to go and join the fight in Wisconsin. She continued, factually, “If you can take a vacation; if you can take a sick day with pay; if you have a right to overtime pay; you have the labor movement to thank.”
In addition to the speakers at the front–a mix of union leaders, Democratic politicians, and religious and community activists–lively outbursts from the vociferous and boisterous crowd were constant, as if a massive labor beast, wild and fierce, were roaming the street. “The people, united, will never be defeated!” “Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Union busters got to go!!”
These and other chants and catcalls were directed across the intersection of Washington Street and Martin Luther King Drive to the at most one hundred Tea Party counter-protesters whose sole coherent message seemed to be “Leave Poor Governor Walker alone.’
One of the savviest local politicians in America, Billy Mitchell, capsulized the meaning of the gathering when he said, “You always get exactly the government that you deserve,” a take-off on Frederick Douglass’ famous take on power. He continued, wry smile breaking out, “I promise you that the people inside this building are paying attention to you out here, and it will make a difference.”
A teacher’s representative, speaking of the 100,000+ American Association of Educators and American Federation of Teachers members in Wisconsin, was fierce in his call for action in Georgia. “The time has come to take back America and democracy from the billionaire’s boy club.” He was referring to the now incontrovertible behind-the-scenes manipulation of the Koch brothers, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, and a working class boycott of Koch Enterprises that is coming.
A militant Black woman’s voice rang out from the podium. “A threat to justice in Ohio is a threat to justice in Georgia, and we have to remember that this is not about us, it’s about our children and our grandchildren, and if we want them to live decent lives, we have to stand up now.”
Another speaker vowed to follow through on this call. “We have to stand up on the capitol steps of every state in the union; we’re gonna stand up and we’re gonna fight, and we’re gonna win. Yes, we can! Yes, we can!” And the crowd roared its approval as it took up the chant in an electrifying shout into the sun-dappled Capitol building.
Karla Drenner, another Democrat who considers herself progressive, spoke of her own family union roots. She continued, “Instead of sending jobs to China, we need to helping out the working people here.” Her voice rising in shrill indignation, she vowed that nothing would stop the persistence of a united people. “You will hear us in the governor’s mansion; you will hear us in the legislature; and you will hear us on the street, because we are not going to go away.”
From the sidewalk, one fired-up protester rallied his misguided cohorts across the street. “Worker power is democratic power! Worker power is democracy.”
Another young teacher from the Northern Atlanta suburbs where many of the “Tea-Partiers’ keep their cupboards stocked with loot, lamented the implications of their message. “Let’s go back to workin’ 80 hours a week; let’s go back to child labor, your ten year old can get a job. That’s what they’re saying if they say get rid of unions. They’re just completely misguided.”
Everywhere, in solidarity with the specifics of the fight in Wisconsin, the message was insistent. “Kill that bill! Kill that bill! Kill that bill!” an unending litany of “we’ve had enough, we’re not going to take any more, we’re drawing a line in the sand.’
Across the street, meanwhile, the so-called “Tea-Party’ counter-protesters sang Sha-na-na. Their message continues to back the reactionary idea that, at exactly the same time that working-class tax dollars give trillions to the hyper-rich, working people who are barely making ends meet should have even less of a livelihood available. They sometimes also support the explicitly fascist notion that unions should not be legal, that labor should have few or no rights compared to money and property.
Matt Stoller wrote in a similar vein in his article, “The Liquidation of Society Versus the Global Labor Revival.” His insightscommand attention) from anyone who has a sense of self-preservation or hope for the future.
This humble correspondent and his partner wore signs that vocalized this point of view at the rally. One pair, modest sandwich board draped over THC’s shoulders, said, “The Problem Is Not Democrats Versus Republicans–Corporate Masters Own Them Both,” & “The Problem Is Organizing a Working-People’s-Power Party.” The second duo offered these lines. “The Current Crisis Affects Not Just Union Workers or Government Workers, but ALL Workers,” & “Big Business Disempowers All the World’s Working People by Dividing Them From Each Other—Solidarity is the Only Answer.”
This humble correspondent insists that only through worker empowerment, involvement, and leadership can the faintest prayer of social equality come to pass. Thus, the events in Wisconsin, and this past Wednesday in Atlanta, like the recent outpouring of activism in the Middle East, are first steps only. Without a more completely defined agenda, one that is both resolutely local and irrepressibly internationalist, one that puts working peoples’ rights and power at the forefront, one that sets aside all jingoistic nationalism and false patriotism, all of the rallies and songs and hopes of solidarity won’t amount to much that working people can take to the bank or put on the stove.
Given such a paradigm, the time has come for a grassroots sociopolitical movement that honestly contends for power. The fake “two-party system” doesn’t come close to achieving this possibility. Working people not only deserve better, but they also will gain little or nothing unless they organize and strive to gain, for themselves, of themselves, and by themselves, a conscious leadership role in the manifestation of a transformed society, a society in which property and wealth cannot overturn the social and economic rights and needs of working people.
Like Poe’s purloined letter, the Republican plan to heist the 2012 presidential election sits before us in plain view. And going Poe one better, it is perfectly legal. Rigging the already anti-democratic electoral college should not become the way to win the White House, says Harold Meyerson
Recently a new ploy has emerged, focused on the electoral college. In Pennsylvania, Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R) has proposed changing the way the state’s electoral votes are tallied in presidential elections. (A state’s electoral votes reflect the number of its U.S. congressional districts, plus two more for its Senate seats.) Instead of having all of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes go to the candidate who carries the state’s popular vote, as is the long-standing practice in Pennsylvania and 47 other states, Pileggi wants to apportion those votes by congressional district.
. Visit her website at: 
It was Teddy Roosevelt who with characteristic aplomb dubbed the presidency a “bully pulpit.” T.R. used the nation’s highest office as the perfect platform to rally the American people around a vigorous and, in his case, often controversial agenda. With Obama, we have, for the most part, an empty pulpit. 
,” Obama does not mention the environment once. As for policy, it was Obama’s Department of Interior that gave the final permit for Deepwater Horizon. The administration then was very slow to recognize the dimension of the disaster. What’s worse, the Obama EPA allowed for the massive use of potential toxic dispersants despite claims that they were controlling the use of these little researched and understood chemicals. Finally the administration was actively complicit in prematurely claiming an end to the harms of the spill as this stance became politically expedient due to the upcoming election.
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” (2006). Kimbrell’s articles on law, technology, social and psychological issues have also appeared in numerous law reviews, technology journals, popular magazines and newspapers across the country. 
