Author: Matt Browner Hamlin

http://holdfastblog.com

Krugman on the Republican hatred of workers

Paul Krugman gets seriously shrill in his dissection of Mitt Romney’s revealing 47% comments and how they reflect what the contemporary Republican party thinks about workers. The whole thing is worth reading, but this passage stands out:

For the fact is that the modern Republican Party just doesn’t have much respect for people who work for other people, no matter how faithfully and well they do their jobs. All the party’s affection is reserved for “job creators,” a k a employers and investors. Leading figures in the party find it hard even to pretend to have any regard for ordinary working families — who, it goes without saying, make up the vast majority of Americans.

Am I exaggerating? Consider the Twitter message sent out by Eric Cantor, the Republican House majority leader, on Labor Day — a holiday that specifically celebrates America’s workers. Here’s what it said, in its entirety: “Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.” Yes, on a day set aside to honor workers, all Mr. Cantor could bring himself to do was praise their bosses.

I’d missed that Cantor tweet, which is pretty damned outrageous. How hard is it to just say we appreciate who work, be it in a skilled trade or a service industry job or behind a desk in businesses owned by other people?

Krugman goes on:

Where does this disdain for workers come from? Some of it, obviously, reflects the influence of money in politics: big-money donors, like the ones Mr. Romney was speaking to when he went off on half the nation, don’t live paycheck to paycheck. But it also reflects the extent to which the G.O.P. has been taken over by an Ayn Rand-type vision of society, in which a handful of heroic businessmen are responsible for all economic good, while the rest of us are just along for the ride.

It’s also worth noting that Romney is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and most politicians either enter Congress millionaires or have easy pathways to become millionaires through lobbying or high level jobs in industries like finance or defense. Promoting policies which help the super rich now will lead to opportunities to become super rich for these Republicans.

I’m not convinced that as an institution the Democratic Party is particularly good on helping workers out. No progress on workers rights has been made under the Obama administration. But at least the Democrats pay lip service to workers.

Occupy Our Homes on HuffPost Live

Home occupiers Deborah Harris of Occupy Our Homes DC and Bobby Hull of Occupy Homes Minnesota appear on Huff Post Live to talk about foreclosures and foreclosure resistance. Also in the discussion are David Dayen, Richard Zombeck and Anthony Randazzo. They get at a real discussion of the foreclosure crisis and the failures of the mortgage settlement to do anything approaching what was needed to hold banks accountable. It’s a long segment, but definitely worth watching in my book.

Duncan Black on Social Security

Writing in the USA Today, Duncan Black addresses our national problems with saving for retirement and making sure people have what they need to get by once they’ve retired:

We already have an excellent, if not especially generous, program in place. Workers contribute during their working lives in exchange for a promised benefit level during their retirement years. This program is called Social Security.

Instead of considering some exciting new program to try to encourage workers into saving more, another Rube Goldberg incentive contraption designed to nudge individual behavior in the right direction, we should increase the level of retirement benefits in the existing Social Security program.
…
The goal of a retirement system should be to ensure that retired people have sufficient income to live out the remainder of their lives without a radical reduction in quality of life after they stop working. Our current system, a modest mandatory government retirement program combined with individual savings, is failing to do that. Strengthen Social Security now, not by cutting benefits, but by increasing them.

Amen.

Ezra Klein’s Honesty

In an interesting piece about how Paul Ryan convinced people in Washington that he is a Serious and Deep Thinker, Alec MacGillis of The New Republic reports an incredible development in the self-identity of young Beltway pundit and reporter Ezra Klein. Klein has moved from ostensibly progressive blogger to a gig at The American Prospect to a column and blog at The Washington Post. He also is a regular guest on MSNBC and even occasionally fills in for progressive MSNBC hosts.

While Klein is considered an expert on healthcare policy and has proven himself a reliable mouthpiece for the Obama administration, there have been plenty of people (myself included) who have questioned whether he was actually liberal or someone seeking to climb the ladder of the Beltway centrist press elite. MacGillis finds and answer to that:

I talked to Klein shortly after the convention and asked whether he thought Ryan had used wonkery to cloak a rigid ideological agenda, partly by engaging with fellow policy geeks like himself. Klein demurred, saying that it should have been clear to everyone for some time now that Ryan is a “very, very ambitious politician who is also a very fluent policy wonk.” He disputed the premise that he had given Ryan bipartisan cover at a crucial point in the congressman’s career: “I don’t think of the blog as making an argument for liberalism. At this point in my life, I don’t really think of myself as a liberal. That’s not the project I’m part of, which is to let the facts take me where they do. That’s why I gave him better coverage when the numbers added up and less so when they didn’t.”

First, anyone who’s followed Paul Ryan’s career from the left has been pretty clear throughout: the numbers he uses don’t add up to the positions he takes. Paul Krugman and Dean Baker are two easy examples.

But more importantly, Klein is saying he’s not a liberal. Without making any normative judgment about what it means for someone who emerged from the progressive blogosphere to declare themselves no longer a liberal, I would hope that this means that liberal groups and liberal media outlets take Klein at his word and stop treating him like a liberal reporter. If MSNBC needs a substitute for one of their liberal news show hosts, they should turn to a self-identified liberal, not Klein. If a progressive advocacy group wants positive coverage from a sympathetic reporter, they should not count on Klein as a good liberal reporter. There are plenty of good, liberal reporters and opinion journalists out there – they should be supported by being given stories by liberal groups.

Hopefully Klein’s honesty leads to changes in how groups relate to him and how MSNBC views him on their roster of commentators.

Michael Lewis on Obama on Wall Street

From Politico’s Ben White:

Michael Lewis at a PEN@Bloomberg event: “It’s a very odd Presidency. It’s odd that the stock market has doubled and [Obama is] regarded as a socialist. It’s odd that given what [Obama] could have done to big Wall Street interests, and what he actually did, that he’s as reviled on Wall Street. … Obama has been in some ways their best friend – he could have really thrown the institutions to the wolves and he didn’t do it. And it cost him a lot of good will to the left.’

‘I was surprised how calm and moderate President Obama was [about the financial crisis]. And it was one of the first things we talked about … It didn’t end up in the piece, but [President Obama] basically said, as much as one would like some Old Testament vengeance, it’s not very useful in public policy. He wasn’t angry. He didn’t have an anger about the whole thing. He was just trying to figure out the best solution to how to handle this whole mess.’

I had assumed that after the Obama administration shepherded a 49 state robosigning settlement that cost the banks as close to nothing as realistically imaginable, the Wall Street cash would have gone rushing into his campaign coffers. The crimes and misdeeds connected to fraudulent mortgage origination, fraudulent securities sales, fraudulent foreclosure, forgery, perjury, and everything associated with robosigning could have, in a just world, put every one of these banks out of business. But Obama saved them from facing real consequences for their action, just as he pivoted Congressionally funded homeowner aid programs to function to “foam the runway” for banks to prevent them from going bust.

Given that Wall Street’s gambling and excesses and illegality could have (and likely should have) derailed his presidency before it even started, it’s shocking that President Obama was incapable of being angry about it. Anger may not be the best vehicle for crafting and maintaining public policy, but anger is what should compel public policy responses in situations like these. No, I can’t help but conclude that the President wasn’t angry because (as he’s said in the past) he doesn’t believe Wall Street did anything wrong. Thus he has been their friend and protector at a time when we needed a President to rail against their gambling and hold them to account for the damage they inflicted on our country.

Teachers are underpaid in Chicago, the US

A lot of the contrived outrage around the Chicago Teachers Union strike is around the critics’ false belief that the teachers are overpaid and greedy. You’ve probably heard that CTU teachers are paid an average of $70,000 and the union rejected a 16% pay raise.

Zaid Jilani has reported that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average pay for a Chicago teacher is only $56,720. And about rejecting that big raise, in fact “The district offered a cost-of-living raise of 2 percent a year for four years, which the union said was unacceptable — especially after Mayor Rahm Emanuel last year canceled a previously negotiated 4 percent raise.”

Jilani also reports that the teachers are fighting against generally bad conditions, including huge class size, crumbling schools with no libraries, no air conditioning, and limited access to the arts and music for students.

So in the midst of a lot of conservative misinformation about Chicago’s overpaid teachers, it’s worth noting, as Dean Baker does, that until very recently, we’d been lead to believe that salaries of $250,000 or even up to a million dollars a year were considered working class.

Since the Chicago school teachers went out on strike Monday, many political figures have tried to convince the public that their $70,000 average annual pay [sic] is excessive. This is peculiar, since many of the same people had been arguing that the families earning over $250,000, who would be subject to higher tax rates under President Obama’s tax proposal, are actually part of the struggling middle class. They now want to convince us that a household with two Chicago public school teachers, who together earn less than 60 percent of President Obama’s cutoff, have more money than they should.

Baker also gets specific, noting that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel made over $274,000 at an apparent no show job at Freddie Mac after he left the White House, while noted austerian Erskine Bowles made $335,000 at Morgan Stanley the year his investment bank had to be bailed out to prevent its failure.

While Chicago’s teachers are obviously underpaid in comparison to Freddie Mac’s Emanuel and Morgan Stanley’s Bowles, a new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shows American teachers are also very underpaid compared to their peers in the developed world.

The average primary-school teacher in the United States earns about 67 percent of the salary of a average college-educated worker in the United States. The comparable figure is 82 percent across the overall O.E.C.D. For teachers in lower secondary school (roughly the years Americans would call middle school), the ratio in the United States is 69 percent, compared to 85 percent across the O.E.C.D. The average upper secondary teacher earns 72 percent of the salary for the average college-educated worker in the United States, compared to 90 percent for the overall O.E.C.D.

American teachers, by the way, spend a lot more time teaching than do their counterparts in most other developed countries

One would think that if we wanted the US to be competitive with other countries in the developed world, we would want to have the best teachers, paid competitively with other countries’ teachers.

The experience for Chicago’s school children is not a good one, given the poor conditions they are asked to attempt to learn in. The Chicago Teachers Union is on strike to try to get guarantees from the school system to address these concerns and to make sure teachers have pay worthy of the important job of securing the future generations of American leaders.

Compared to the destructive economic actions of highly paid individuals like Rahm Emanuel and Erskine Bowles, it hardly seems controversial for Chicago’s teachers to be paid a fair wage, under a fair contract.

Contact Information vs. Commitment: Building Power Through Membership

Originally posted at the Web of Change blog.

 This past April, there was a primary election in Illinois that featured a former MoveOn staffer, Ilya Sheyman, running against a conservative Democrat. MoveOn had 15,000 members in the district out of a total of 30,000 Democratic primary voters. And Ilya lost, badly. As the discussion emerged following this loss, I wrote a piece, “Membership & Support in the Online Left.” My post focused around a comment from Matt Stoller, who wrote, “If you can’t turn out your members to vote, then they aren’t really your members.”

In online organizing, most organizations tend to represent the possession of an email address as the threshold to call someone a member. The email may have been acquired through a long forgotten petition, a long past event RSVP, or even a modest donation to a timely campaign. But once we have that email address, we have ourselves a member. 

It becomes fundamentally challenging to the concept of building power through the size of our memberships if it turns out the people we think of as members do not think of themselves as belonging to our organizations. I wrote in April:

[P]art of the urgency for figuring out how advocacy groups can build meaningful relationships with activists unto them considering themselves members is that there are always fights being waged. If a major corporation does something destructive or if an elected official introduces legislation that would cause major harm, are groups going to be able to stop them with their email lists? Or are large and always growing lists the Maginot Line of modern progressive advocacy, built to look impressive, but not effective at achieving their purpose?

This is not a small question, but one which has the potential to speak to movement-wide efficacy (or, as the case may be, inefficacy)…

There are many forms of power, but one most common to progressive organizations is power that’s derived from large numbers of people working together. An organization with a small budget may not be able to achieve their goals through the power of money, but if they have hundreds of thousands of people standing behind them, they can affect change. Groups with larger memberships tend to be considered as more powerful than groups with small memberships- they are viewed as speaking for large constituencies of people. Their leaders have the membership as a source of validation in public discourse. Indeed, the difference between an organization or a leader having a voice in public debate and being marginalized from participation in serious public policy discussions is often tied to the perceived power of an organization’s membership. Grassroots power is so attractive that corporate front groups set up AstroTurf campaigns, meant to look like the product of member-driven activism, but without any base beyond the industry which funds it. 

It’s not shocking, then, that we seek to speak for as large a membership as possible. 

An organization having an individual’s email address is not a benchmark seen with  how many offline organizations think about their membership. One common way community-based groups I work with seek to build leaders out of a larger community of constituents think about their membership is through concentric circles of engagement. The outermost is Constituents – the group of total people who could care about their work. The next is the Base – people who are engaged with the organization in some way, but aren’t really activists. The third smallest circle is Members – people who regularly do work with the group and think about it as part of their identity. The final, smallest circle is Leaders – people who have demonstrated a commitment to and responsibility for the stewardship of the organization. 

Implicit in this model of thinking is the recognition that only a small part of the universe an organization interacts with is a member they can count on. Membership has to be developed; the possession of contact information is not the same as organizational membership.

One powerful example of the promotion of an individual up through these circles comes from Occupy Our Homes Atlanta. Brigitte Walker came to Occupy Our Homes Atlanta after seeing a newspaper ad they’d put out seeking homeowners facing foreclosure. Brigitte, an Iraq War veteran, was on the verge of losing her home. She started working with Occupy Our Homes Atlanta as the center of a community organizing campaign against Chase Bank. After she won a permanent modification, Brigitte stayed involved with OOH ATL. She began canvassing her neighborhood for other people in foreclosure, hosting meetings of homeowners, and eventually taking a leading role as a member-activist with OOH ATL. 

Online organizers are certainly familiar with the idea that there are ever-shrinking circles of people  who will do what an organization asks them to do. Out of the universe of email addresses, a subset opens an email. A smaller subset will click on any particular link, but generally speaking more people will sign a petition than will refer a friend than will write a letter than will make a donation than will attend an event than will hold an event than will do a form of civil disobedience. 

Isn’t it odd that we would take the most insignificant and high-volume form of relationship – the possession of someone’s contact information – as sufficient for membership? And aren’t we missing the obvious when we conflate email list size for membership size? Worst of all, as we see with the MoveOn primary example, when individuals are talked to and talked about by an organization with the presupposition that they are in fact members, does that organization risk failing to achieve important goals based on these assumptions?

As we explore this problem of how to think about our membership, more questions arise. If possessing an email address isn’t sufficient for membership, what relationships between organizations and individuals is sufficient to deploy the power we need for organizing? How can organizations build up these relationships to increase the size of their committed membership over time? More importantly, how do organizations deliver value to people such that the people will feel compelled to lend these organizations the power of their membership? 

At a time when the right wing is advancing destructive policies of austerity, climate denial, union busting and bigotry, it’s more important than ever that progressives find ways to effectively build power and win. 

All of these questions are areas I’m hoping to explore at Web of Change 2012. Marianne Manilov and I are hosting a  session, “Membership & Building Power,” that will seek to address them, as well as look at organizing models which have proven successful for building relationships and power through grassroots membership. As much as these are questions connected to our systems of organizing, they are also problems that challenge how we think about the people whose power we seek to deploy to change the world. In other words, the perfect sort of fodder for Web of Change’s community of practitioners.

NYT on Obama’s housing vulnerability

Binyamin Applebaum of the New York Times has a long piece looking at how the failure of the Obama administration to adequately confront and stop the foreclosure crisis could be a drag on him politically.

Reaction to the piece from people who have been following the foreclosure crisis since its inception has been fairly negative. Yves Smith sees it as a defense of Obama’s failures to take action to help homeowners. David Dayen sees some value in it, while noting that it misses some things pretty dramatically. I tend to agree with David – while this isn’t a strong piece and it offers far more cover than Obama deserves, putting the idea that the administration left hundreds of billions of dollars on the table that could have helped home owners is really important. It’s not something that has shown up in the mainstream media much at all.

Smith and Dayen both note – and again I agree – that it’s odd for Applebaum to totally ignore recent reports from Neil Barofsky’s book that Tim Geithner made clear that the whole plan for the administration was to “foam the runway” to make it possible for banks to survive the massive wave of foreclosures we are now experiencing. The goal was not to help homeowners, but to make sure the banks could make it through the mess without another round of massive bailouts.

Dayen writes:

All of these [excuses for Obama] fall short, and by the end of the article – and this has been confirmed to me – the President is telling his economic team that they screwed up housing. But the excuses really are an insult, and they are ripped from the context, the real context, that the Administration trod slowly on housing to avoid putting the banks in any jeopardy. The fact that they had all this leverage from the fraudulent use of false and forged documents in state courts, and managed to sew it up in a slap-on-the-wrist settlement, tells you all you need to know. The White House didn’t want to go there because they were afraid they would find something that would force them to act against the banks. So they didn’t, and here we are.

Millions of people are losing their homes because the Obama administration – notably Tim Geithner and the President – did not think it was important to help them stay in their homes. I don’t think stopping this crisis is suddenly going to be a major issue in the presidential election, but it would be nice to know how both candidates plan on stopping the five to seven million foreclosures we’re likely to get in the next few years from happening.