Category: Progressive Infrastructure

Daily Caller: Fox News is the head of the GOP

Tucker Carlson’s online rag, The Daily Caller, is doing a series of hit pieces on Media Matters for America. Based on anonymous sources and conspiracy-minded dreck, the whole series is a hot mess. Today’s feature piece is an attempt to discredit Media Matter’s non-profit tax status, with the dramatic sounding headline of Media Matters tax-exempt status may face new scrutiny from Congress. They may face congressional scrutiny! Maybe!

My favorite line in the whole mess is notable in that The Daily Caller concedes that Media Matter’s criticism of Fox News as not just an arm, but a leadership element, of the Republican Party amounts to Media Matters engaging in partisan, political activities which are prohibited by their 501(c)3 status:

Because Brock has referred to Fox News as a political organization and the “de facto” leader of the GOP, Gray and other critics have argued that Media Matters is engaged in the kind of direct political activity forbidden by IRS regulations.

The Daily Caller is trying so hard to kick-start a Republican Congressional investigation into Media Matter’s tax status that they concede Media Matter’s core criticism of Fox News as a Republican propaganda outlet!

Politics is serious business and progressives should be concerned that a major piece of progressive infrastructure is under concerted attack from the right. But if this sort of nonsense from The Daily Caller doesn’t make you laugh out loud, you’re missing one hell of a comedic performance…

The Ideological Continuum

Over at ThinkProgress, Brad Johnson has a good post about the deficit reduction debate that’s been tied to the debt ceiling. He puts the political positions of progressives, President Obama, and the Tea Party side by side to draw out a continuum of recommended actions (or non-action). Johnson writes, “As of this moment, the president’s negotiating stance is a lot closer to the radical, destructive goals of the far right than to the climate hawks and progressives.”

Not included in Johnson’s analysis are the positions of the mainstream Democratic Party (arguably represented by Harry Reid) and the mainstream Republican Party (arguably represented by John Boehner and Mitch McConnell). I think the omission here is interesting in part because it would show the near-total capture of the mainstream Democratic Party by the President’s conservativism, which places them in the same place as most of the Republican Party. Yes it’s important that in Johnson’s chart, Obama is closer to the Tea Party than Progressives. But it’s probably more important that he’s where the non-Tea Party GOP is and he’s brought the non-progressive Democratic Party along with him. This is an incredibly important  dynamic as it signifies the functional end of the Democratic Party as a vehicle for liberalism (let alone populism or progressivism).

Network, 2011



Cenk Uygur of MSNBC does his best Howard Beale impersonation, explaining to his audience why he turned down an offer from MSNBC that would have paid him more money to have a smaller role that prevented him from being as hard on the Obama administration and other Democrats as he currently is. As Cenk puts it, he was asked by MSNBC’s President to stop being an outsider and start playing ball with the establishment.

I’m sorry to see Cenk leaving MSNBC, but very proud to see him taking a principled stand to defend his principles, his reputation, and his belief in questioning those in power.

Cannon Fodder

Digby responds to a long, interesting piece on the differences between how Republicans and Democrats maintain their political coalitions across time and legislative battles by Robert Cruickshank. Digby writes:

Cruikshank is making an appeal to progressives to apply the GOP coalition rules to themselves and stick together, even if the centrists continue to play their games.. And that’s certainly necessary advice. Warring amongst ourselves is about as destructive as it gets. But there needs to be an understanding of how progressives are being manipulated in the Party — and a plan to thwart it — or there is going to be some kind of crack-up eventually. You simply can’t have a working coalition in which a very large faction is constantly used as political cannon fodder. If the anger doesn’t kill you the disillusionment will. The old bipartisan way is dead for now and Democrats had better adjust to dealing fairly and equitably within its own coalition or they’re going to find that they don’t have one.

I think Digby is largely right, but I guess I would just question the extent to which there actually is a Democratic coalition any more. No doubt there is a party, run by neo-liberals and conservatives, and quite a large number of progressives and progressive groups associate with this party. But it’s hard to see the various non-establishment elements of the Democratic Party as anything other than cannon fodder and as a result, not really a part of the coalition in any sense than they are sometimes used as pawns by neo-liberals and conservatives in their quest to be Serious Adults. The question then becomes, does it make sense for the Democratic coalition to learn how to operate by taking turns or should the cannon fodder recognize that they don’t want to continue to be treated like political cannon fodder?

Why Movements Matter

This piece in the American Prospect by Vivien Labaton and Gara Lamarche, titled “Why Movements Matter,” is definitely worth reading. On the one hand, I strongly agree with the identification of pro-worker, pro-fair taxation, and pro-immigrant rights movements as pointing in the direction of a meaningful broader progressive movement (though if you were to look at these three, all based around economic fairness, it might be more accurate to describe it as a populist movement). There is real anger in America at the class warfare being waged by elites on the rest of us. That anger is manifesting itself around different issues – the assault on workers, austerity for workers, tax cuts for the rich, and stigmatization and regulation of immigration to the point of denying immigrants human dignity and pushing them into indentured servitude for the rich and businesses. The campaigns in response to these issues are symptoms of class warfare being waged against working Americans.

However I don’t think contemporaneous outpourings of anger against the attacks on workers, austerity, tax cuts for the rich, and demonization of immigrants is sufficient to say there actually is a resurgent progressive movement. These responses are signs that there is an untapped potential. Yes, there can be organizing around populist economic issues that amount to opposing the transfer of wealth from working Americans to wealthy elites. Yes, some of that organizing is taking place. But it’s too disparate and disjointed. I don’t know what is necessary to pull these separate threads together. Obviously citizen-driven movements like UK Uncut and US Uncut have had success organizing in leaderless models. But I do think leaders matter and so far I don’t see any elected officials, religious leaders, activists, or union leaders stepping up to make this case in a way that is penetrating national consciousness or even the different populist movement threads that need to be woven together. We have a long way to go. The only thing that gives me hope about us getting where we need to be and a populist/progressive movement coming together in America is that the pace of the assault on working Americans is so great that it is giving birth to anger and outrage, which in turn fuels the opposition to it. In short, the general public is ahead of leaders of the public. Interesting things could come from this, but a movement won’t grow itself.

Understanding the Right’s Attacks

My friend Ilyse Hogue, formerly of MoveOn, Rainforest Action Network, and Greenpeace and now of Media Matters for America, has a very important article in The Nation, titled “Why the Right Attacked Unions, ACORN and Planned Parenthood.” Hogue makes the convincing case that the American right has attacked institutions which not only fight for progressive political outcomes, but provide meaningful services in peoples’ daily lives. Serving peoples’ needs creates a strong bond between a person and an organization. A woman who gets contraception from Planned Parenthood or a person getting advice on buying an affordable mortgage from ACORN or a worker who gets a 20% raise from joining a union will all have a strong desire to continue to see these institutions successful, both at the services they provide and in the political mission they take on to better achieve their service goals. As Ilyse points out, the recent attacks on these institutions by rightwing ideologues and conservative activists aims to destroy key pieces of progressive infrastructure  not merely at their roots, but because they have roots in working American communities.

There are two key takeaways from Hogue’s piece. First, the importance of institutions like Planned Parenthood, organized labor, and community groups (ACORN’s spinoffs, PICO, NPA, and NACA, to name a few) cannot be underestimated. Unlike local Democratic Party outlets or national progressive online activist groups, the institutions which actually serve their members’ economic, health and educational interests and without them potential progressive activists will be taken out of the fight. Second, with the destruction of ACORN, the assault on Planned Parenthood and labor, there’s a real need for more progressive institutions to provide actual services for their members. Obviously many of the great folks at ACORN have found other outlets to do their work, with varying degrees of success. But part of organizing for a more progressive future includes finding ways to help people in their daily lives – through concrete actions and services, not merely the promise of some help down the road once a legislative solution exists. Frankly one of my greatest joys in working in the labor movement is that when we win, we help someone immediately get higher pay, health benefits, and job security. Compare that to working in electoral politics, where you’re asking someone to support at candidate who maybe will win and maybe will get to vote in favor of legislation which will maybe pass and maybe end up helping the people the candidate courted in the first place.

Organizations which find the way to both provide real services and push a legislative and political agenda which makes it easier for more people to attain those services are the life blood of progressive change. While facing attacks from the right, these groups must not only be defended, but nurtured in their own right and even created anew to attend to the needs of working people and potential activists, needs that may not currently be met due to either attacks from the right or a lack of adaptation by existing organizations to identify what they are leaving on the table. This stuff isn’t easy, but Hogue’s diagnosis of the problem will hopefully be a reminder to movement operatives that the attacks from the right are well-targeted and if allowed to continue unchecked, could be devastating to the chances for a progressive society in the United States.

Gene Sharp Profile in NYT

The New York Times has a profile on Gene Sharp, arguably one of the most important advocates for freedom of the last hundred years. Sharp’s writing on non-violent strategic campaigning, specifically on the overthrow of dictatorships, has been instrumental to the thinking of activists in places like Serbia and Egypt, and remains instructive for countless other freedom movements. From the Times article:

Dalia Ziada, an Egyptian blogger and activist who attended the workshop and later organized similar sessions on her own, said trainees were active in both the Tunisia and Egypt revolts. She said that some activists translated excerpts of Mr. Sharp’s work into Arabic, and that his message of “attacking weaknesses of dictators” stuck with them.

Peter Ackerman, a onetime student of Mr. Sharp who founded the nonviolence center and ran the Cairo workshop, cites his former mentor as proof that “ideas have power.”

Mr. Sharp, hard-nosed yet exceedingly shy, is careful not to take credit. He is more thinker than revolutionary, though as a young man he participated in lunch-counter sit-ins and spent nine months in a federal prison in Danbury, Conn., as a conscientious objector during the Korean War. He has had no contact with the Egyptian protesters, he said, although he recently learned that the Muslim Brotherhood had “From Dictatorship to Democracy” posted on its Web site.

While seeing the revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak as a sign of “encouragement,” Mr. Sharp said, “The people of Egypt did that — not me.”

A line from the preface of From Dictatorship to Democracy is worth highlighting following the recent revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia and ongoing uprisings in Bahrain, Algeria, and Iran.

The fall of one regime does not bring in a utopia. Rather, it opens the way for hard work and long efforts to build more just social, economic, and political relationships and the eradication of other forms of injustices and oppression.

UK Uncut’s Bank Bail-in

UK Uncut is doing what is probably the most inspiring and savvy economic organizing in the English-speaking world. The video above is just brilliant, not only for how powerful it is but for how simple they make the act of standing up for economic just in the face of austerity measures. The accompanying blog post by Molly Solomons explains why she’s taking action:

I didn’t do politics at University and admittedly I would struggle to explain the details of macro-economics and how it relates to the financial crisis (who can!). But what I might lack in detailed knowledge of political and economic theory, I compensate with the feelings inside that what this government is doing is just wrong. It’s wrong to cut disability living allowance to those that need it to survive. It’s wrong to make people with disabilities feel like they are criminals and cheats. And it’s wrong to smash our society into a million pieces, whilst the bankers’ pockets are filled with fat bonuses and companies are allowed to evade taxes in off-shore accounts.

Sometimes I feel disheartened to the extent I just don’t know what to do. This is what I’ve done so far: I’ve written to my MP, I’ve moaned in pubs, I’ve cried, I’ve signed petitions and I’ve thought about running away from it all. But after despair, all that is left is action. And there is loads of action out there. So see you on the streets, I’ll be there this weekend, and the next, and the next, standing up for what’s right for my family and yours.

The good news for us Americans is that there is now a US Uncut and people are organizing the first actions for February 26th. It’s small for now, but this is clearly gaining momentum, both in the UK and now in the USA.

Stoller on Egypt

Matt Stoller has a post up at Naked Capitalism where he looks at the revolution in Egypt’s strong labor base and the extent to which it is a rejection of a Rubinite economic view. Stoller writes:

What is going in Egypt represents a remarkable new political coalition striking deep at the heart of the Washington consensus. Social media mattered, in that it was the language by which the youth expressed themselves and their hatred of the torture inflicted upon them to extract maximal profit. This alliances, of a domestic business-military community, women’s groups, and a youth-driven labor movement, has parallels in the 1930s New Deal coalition and the 1850s anti-slavery coalition. It is also interesting that the pre-Facebook blogosphere of 2004-2005 played an important role in unmasking torture and delegitimizing the authority of the state, including the justice system and the media.

Seen in this context, Egypt is part of a global conflict of financial oligarchs fighting with leftist human rights activists, unions, and domestic industries. Egypt’s going to need the money stashed away and stolen by the Mubarak family; getting to that money requires an international crackdown on superrich tax havens. Furthermore, the links between Mubarak corruption and various Rubinites are probably as extensive as the torture trade between the CIA and Egypt. The extent of the cover-up of the Mubarak regime’s behavior will be the way to judge what happens going forward. Obama’s mild-mannered and largely irrelevant statecraft simply reflects the paralysis of the foreign policy establishment as the extent of its complicity in the overall economic and political strategy of this repressive regime is revealed.

Of course, it’s quite possible that the Mubarak-style repressive franchise isn’t done. Already, the Egyptian military is trying to ban the labor and professional organizing at the heart of the uprising. Like Obama’s promises of hope and change in 2008, Egypt in 2011 is full of promise, with ambiguous tidings.

It’s deeply troubling that among the first acts by the military of their hopefully interim regime is to ban labor unions and worker organizing. Why is the military trying to break the back of a movement that just handed them power? Obviously they are scared – as Mubarak was scared – of the people uniting across class lines to support revolutionary means of achieving economic improvement. The question will be, how will this coalition of youth, women, and workers respond to the crackdown by the military? Will they ride it out patiently until this fall’s elections in the hopes of democratic change through the ballot box? Or will there be resistance to military rule straight away? It was clear last week and even more so now, but Egypt is not out of the woods yet.

Winning the Future

It’s hard to imagine a scenario where the future is won, but no model for organizing against income inequality, cuts to public services, and tax evasion by the wealthy is used.

Juan Cole on Google exec Wael Ghonim’s organizing model in Egypt:

He wants an end to Egypt’s crony capitalist state, which allowed Hosni Mubarak to accumulate a fortune of $70 billion while 40 percent of Egyptians live on $2 a day or a little over that. Ghonim told CNN, “The plan was to get everyone on the street. The plan was number one we’re going to start from poor areas. Our demands are going to be all about what touches people’s daily life. And by the way we honestly meant it. One of the very famous videos we used all the time to promote this was a guy eating from the trash.”

He added, ‘we truly believe in these demands. Like the minimum wage. Like talking about the end of, the end of unemployment…reducing unemployment or at least giving people some sort of compensation to make living.’

Ghonim’s emphasis on labor demands came about because the uprising in Egypt is largely a labor uprising. It is an alliance of blue collar workers with white collar workers, all of them supported by a progressive youth movement and college students. It is therefore not actually a surprise that some 200,000 working class people joined in the protests on Wednesday, striking, encouraging strikes, and demanding a proper minimum wage.

“Muhit” reports that as the revolutionary movement entered its third week, thousands of workers in a number of factories and establishments launched sit-ins, strikes demanding better pay and better working conditions.

In the United Kingdom, a free form group called UK Uncut has been doing non-violent direct actions against tax dodgers to draw attention to public service cuts. The Nation has a long, must-read profile of UK Uncut this week. Here’s an excerpt:

Amid all these figures, this group of friends made some startling observations. Here’s one. All the cuts in housing subsidies, driving all those people out of their homes, are part of a package of cuts to the poor, adding up to £7 billion. Yet the magazine Private Eye reported that one company alone—Vodafone, one of Britain’s leading cellphone firms—owed an outstanding bill of £6 billion to the British taxpayers. According to Private Eye, Vodaphone had been refusing to pay for years, claiming that a crucial part of its business ran through a post office box in ultra-low-tax Luxembourg. The last Labour government, for all its many flaws, had insisted it pay up.

But when the Conservatives came to power, David Hartnett, head of the British equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service, apologized to rich people for being “too black and white about the law.” Soon after, Vodafone’s bill was reported to be largely canceled, with just over £1 billion paid in the end. Days later George Osborne, the finance minister, was urging people to invest in Vodafone by taking representatives of the company with him on a taxpayer-funded trip to India—a country where that company is also being pursued for unpaid taxes. Vodafone and Hartnett deny this account, claiming it was simply a longstanding “dispute” over fees that ended with the company paying the correct amount. The government has been forced under pressure to order the independent National Audit Office to investigate the affair and to pore over every detail of the corporation’s tax deal.

“It was clear to us that if this one company had been made to pay its taxes, almost all these people could have been kept from being forced out of their homes,” says Sam Greene, another of the protesters. “We keep being told there’s no alternative to cutting services. This just showed it was rubbish. So we decided we had to do something.”

They resolved to set up an initial protest that would prick people’s attention. They called themselves UK Uncut and asked several liberal-left journalists, on Twitter (full disclosure: I was one of them), to announce a time and place where people could meet “to take direct action protest against the cuts and show there’s an alternative.” People were urged to gather at 9:30 am on a Wednesday morning outside the Ritz hotel in central London and look for an orange umbrella. More than sixty people arrived, and they went to one of the busiest Vodafone stores—on Oxford Street, the city’s biggest shopping area—and sat down in front of it so nobody could get in.

“What really struck me is that when we explained our reasons, ordinary people walking down Oxford Street were incredibly supportive,” says Alex Miller, a 31-year-old nurse. “People would stop and tell us how they were terrified of losing their homes and their jobs—and when they heard that virtually none of it had to happen if only these massive companies paid their taxes, they were furious. Several people stopped what they were doing, sat down and joined us. I guess it’s at that point that I realized this was going to really take off.”

These are just two examples of how people are taking initiative to organize popularly outside of the US. Conditions are ripe to do so here. Republicans are pushing austerity measures. Attacks are being made on public workers and public worker pensions. State budgets are brutally slashing services. The social safety net is at risk. Simultaneously, corporate profits are at all time highs, as are Wall Street bonuses. If anyone other than the richest Americans wants to win the future, it’s going to take organizing. Now.