Commonweal Institute Blog

Boundless Opportunities for Election Season Stories

2008-08-25T22:07:07Z

Greg Gordon (McClatchy Washington Bureau) today had a story that actually made it into the front section of my local paper:

Texas-based Premier Elections Solutions last week alerted at least 1,750 jurisdictions across the country that special precautions are needed to address the problem in tabulation software affecting all 19 of its models dating back a decade.

Premier Elections Solutions is the new monicker for Diebold, the notorious manufacturer of flawed voting machines. Talk about putting lipstick on a pig! But the stink remains. Let’s consider the topic of this story, though. It’s new, but at the same time, it’s not new. A small cadre of technology experts, bloggers, and patriotic citizens has been trying for years to get the mainstream media to pay attention to the fundamental threats to American democracy that are posed by our flawed election system. All four of the most recent national elections, starting with 2000, have been marked by widespread problems with electronic voting machines, other equipment failures, disenfranchisement, missing votes, intimidation, names dropped from the voting rolls---the list is too long to recite. See the new documentary, Stealing America: Vote by Vote for a view of how pervasive and diverse the problems are. It’s about time to pay attention, guys and gals. At this point, mainstream media’s inattention has to be added to the list as one of the major threat to democracy. How many letters to the editors and editorial page commentaries will appear after this important McClatchy story? How many further articles will be written or broadcast in other media outlets to advance public understanding of what’s been going on in those 1,750 jurisdictions, and who may have benefited by having that flawed tabulation software in operation for the past decade? One of the big opportunities for journalists in this election season will be investigating which voters, in which states, will actually be able to rely having their November election votes counted correctly. What action is going on at the citizen level to fight for this fundamental element of democracy? Who’s trying to thwart the fight for election integrity? To what corporations are they outsourcing our democracy? Grassroots groups are doing what they can to make it easy for you: • Brad Blog is where Brad Friedman regularly posts new developments regarding election insecurity. • Verified Voting has lots of technical information, and also a map that shows which states do and do not require voter-verifiable paper ballots and audits. It shows that eleven states don’t require either a paper ballot record of the vote OR an audit of the alleged results: Texas, Kansas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, Indiana, Kentucky, Virginia, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. Why not? Who’s blocking public accountability and honest elections in those states? What’s in it for them? • Velvet Revolution is trying to bring attention to a story involving Ohio election attorneys who are using a federal civil lawsuit to investigate and seek depositions from Karl Rove, Michael Connell, Jack Abramoff, and others who they believe pursued a systematic effort to win elections through a strategy involving computers. • Black Box Voting carries out its own investigations of suspicious-looking election circumstances and pulls together items from other groups, as well. • VotersUnite.org is another outfit that does a lot of the digging for you—machine error rates by manufacturer, reported problems by state, etc. One of the main functions that the mainstream media serve in America is agenda setting. No matter how many problems there have been, no matter how loudly the bloggers scream, and apparently no matter how many elections are stolen, the American public is just not going to pay attention – because they wait until they see that that the mainstream media tell us that we HAVE to pay attention to how our elections are run if we want to have a democracy. Any readers here who are not members of the MSM may still be able to have an impact, though -- tell your local newspaper, TV channel, or radio station that you want them to run stories about the election system problems.

Stealing America, Right Under Our Eyes

2008-08-16T22:31:38Z

Almost everyone who’s been even half awake for the past eight years is aware that there are a number of problems with our voting system, ranging from disenfranchisement to harassment to allegations of vote fraud to widespread use of those electronic voting machines that just might not count votes properly. Stealing America, Vote by Vote, a newly released documentary by Emmy-winning filmmaker Dorothy Fadiman, is one of the best I’ve seen. I strongly encourage every patriotic American, every concerned American, every person who cares about our democracy, to get out and see this film as soon as possible. Click here to see the film trailer, clips, and the latest schedule and locations for upcoming public showings of Stealing America, Vote by Vote. As of today, upcoming cities include Irvine and Beverly Hills, CA; Denver; Royal Oak, MI (Detroit); Minneapolis; Philadelphia; Washington, DC; Cambridge, MA; Santa Fe; Portland; Berkeley and San Francisco, CA; Austin, TX; Seattle; and Columbus, OH. DVDs are not available yet, but you can let the film-maker know if you want to get one as soon as they are. And then don’t just roll over and play dead. Get out and DO SOMETHING to help protect the upcoming November election, one of the most critical in our nation’s history. Visit the film website to take action as well as check the latest schedule. Here are a couple of other sites with election protection facts and action possibilities: Verified Voting Black Box Voting Working for Democracy Election Defense Alliance Go on. Click here. Now.

Netroots Nation 2008 Pictures

2008-08-03T02:12:00Z

Some more pictures from Netroots Nation, many featuring my friends from the Commonweal Institute.


Commonweal Institute: Dave Johnson, Barry Kendall, Katherine Forrest	Commonweal Institute Conversation: Patrick O'Heffernan, Kay Lee, Kate Forrest, Mustafa (Vic) Uzumeri

Bloggers and the Green Economy: Dave Johnson, Susana Almanza, Larry Joe Doherty, Jeff Sharp, Adam Siegel	Space Panel: Andrew Hoppin, Chris Bowers, Patti Grace Smith, Lori Garver, George Whitesides

Gina Cooper, Jeffrey Feldman	Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Gina Cooper

Ask the Speaker: Nancy Pelosi	Congressman Lloyd Doggett introducing Nancy Pelosi

Virginia & Kay Lee	Kay Lee

Katherine Forrest, Patrick O'Heffernan, Virginia Lee	Meta Panel: Chris Bowers, Cheryl Contee, David Waldman (Kagro), Raf Noboa, Amanda Marcotte

Nancy Pelosi	Al Gore, Rep. Doggett (D-TX), Nancy Pelosi

Media Panel: Digby, Rick Perlstein, Paul Krugman, Duncan Black	Recipe for Change: Natasha Chart and Margaret Krome

Why Conservative Policies Dominate

2008-08-02T21:20:32Z

Why does the public flock to conservative / corporate policies that generally run against their own interests? Take tax cuts for the rich, or the current offshore-drilling campaign as examples. Here is my opinion of the reason: Conservatives have a huge outside-the-party infrastructure devoted to persuading the public to support their policies and progressives do not. Conservatives recognize the value of movement-building and work steadily to create popular demand, which then gets their candidates elected. This is why so many terrible Republicans are able to get elected just by pointing their finger at their opponent and shouting, "Liberal, Liberal!" Progressives instead for decades have believed that a candidate will come along who will be so popular that he or she will lead them out of the wilderness, and convince the publi of the rightness of all of their ideas. Therefore almost all of their money and effort goes into short-term election efforts, candidates and the party instead of to ongoing outside-the-party organizations that work over the long term to build lasting demand for their ideas. Discuss.

Energy Prices

2008-07-20T16:46:02Z

I want to write about something Al Gore said yesterday about energy prices, at the Netroots Nation conference. Oil is limited. There is only so much, and the amount you can get it out of the ground and refine on any day is limited. That means that the more you depend on it and use it the more the more the price goes up. It just has to go up and eventually run out. Solar power, on the other hand, is a new technology, so it is expensive today. But the more demand there is, the more factories are built. That means that the more we depend on it and use it, the more the price goes down. Let me add that once you install solar your ongoing cost is very low.

Gore, Pelosi Call for Netroots Action

2008-07-19T19:49:13Z

Blogging from Netroots Nation (NN) in Austin, sitting at a table in the first row waiting for speakers Nancy Pelosi and Al Gore to show up. Gore is going to be the mystery, unannounced guest, . Looks like just about all the seats in this cavernous hall are occupied and there’s a big rack of media folks toward the back with their cameras. There are a handful of costumed demonstrators, but mostly the bloggers are looking like themselves, casually dressed, but intensely engaged mentally despite the early hour and more than a few hangovers following the parties last night.

A Recipe for Change at Netroots Nation

2008-07-19T05:09:28Z

Natasha and Jill (OrangeClouds115) moderated a wonderful panel today called A Recipe for Change. The topic was how do we find a way to have healthier food and what are the obstacles from getting that. The panelists were great and covered a broad range of interests and knowledge. Mark Winne, author of Closing the Food Gap talked about the connection to hunger and poverty and the problem of how terrible, cheap food is undermining the health of our country. One of the real problems for so many poor communities are food deserts, communities where the closest grocery store is up to 20 miles away while KFC is on the neighborhood corner. One other issue he talked about was how often policies that are handed down by the bureaucrats are too heavy-handed. A few years ago there was an E Coli scare that arose around apple cider. The proposal from the bureaucrats would have put most of the small farmers that produced apple cider out of business so in his state they worked with the state agricultural council and came up with a much better solution: providing education for cider makers so they could manufacture cider with better and cleaner practices. Working with the agriculture councils can be a good way to influence farming policies in the state. Michele Simon is a public health attorney and author of Appetite for Profit. She explained how food corporations have been controlling the message about food and are trying to convince the public and government that they should not be regulated. However, voluntary self-regulation doesn't work and it is essential that our politicians do not believe that they can ignore this problem. And she says that we need to realize the problem is not that people aren't making the right choices because of some "personal failure." Instead of blaming people for bad decisions we need to make clear how the corporatization of food has created the systemic problems that have created our current problems. Finally, she noted that people today have access to much better and healthier food, but it isn't available for many people and it is a moral obligation to make sure everyone has the same good access to nutritious and healthy food. Judith McGeary is an organic farmer outside of Austin and someone who has proven that you can make a living as an organic farmer. She debunked the lie that organic farming practices cannot feed the world. In fact, organic farming practices actually is more productive and more nutritious than the current petroleum based agriculture. She encouraged people to learn about and use CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) to find better locally grown food and to encourage local farming. Margaret Krome who leads the Michael Fields Agriculture Institute talked about food policy and how we need to use the farm bill to support better food policy. Natasha had met Margaret last year when she was working as an intern with the Institute and was blogging about her experience in the Congressional Farm Committee meetings. Margaret talked about how they were able to get some long needed policy changes and money in the last farm bill. And she noted that we need to continue to be involved in what's happening in Congress and let our representatives know what we need them to do. She told us that we need to know in regards to farm policy many of the programs hit all states, but when contacting someone about farm policy in the government, it often is much better to have the contact be local, but because it is local you can influence the outcome. Finally, she asks us to provide feedback about what are the critical focus areas they should prioritize first - because they can't cover everything and they would like to make sure they cover the right things. It was a very informative and educational session which left me with much food for thought. BTW: Natasha and Jill announced that they have launched a new blog called LaVidaLocavore to talk about food issues. Check it out here.

At The Netroots Nation Convention

2008-07-18T19:09:02Z

I am writing from the Netroots Nation convention in Austin. I saw this view of the capital building while crossing a street on the way to dinner the other night. I ran back to get the picture but you can figure out why it looks like it was taken in a hurry while running: It is a very busy convention with multiple hour-long panel sessions -- up to thirteen -- on at the same time. I always want to be at three of the panels, of course. Commonweal Institute has a "booth" in the exhibit hall. Here is a picture of the booth: Left to right: Senior Fellow Patrick O'Heffernan, Executive Director Barry Kendall and Board member Andrew Byrnes. What's with the dark suits?

Strength of the Religious Right Oversold?

2008-07-17T20:29:09Z

Recently OnTheMedia had an interview with Christine Wicker, author of The Fall of the Evangelical Nation. As a former religious reporter for the Dallas Morning News as well as being raised as an evangelical she was seen as an ideal person to investigate what was going on with the evangelical movement. What she found was that rather than being the powerhouse movement the media and Rove say, it is actually a religious movement that was shrinking and losing clout year by year as followers fall away. As a matter of fact, Evangelical churches are experiencing the same thing other traditional religions are: people are leaving their religions and seeking new spiritual homes. However, even more surprising for the Evangelicals, she found that they never could have been the force that they claimed as they never did have the numbers reported. Here's a gist of her thesis from a sermon she quoted by Pastor Davidson Loehr, pastor at the First Unitarian/Universalist Church of Austin:

Evangelical Christianity in America is dying. The idea that evangelicals are taking over America is one of the greatest publicity scams in history, a perfect coup accomplished by savvy politicos and religious leaders, who understand media weaknesses and exploit them brilliantly. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. ix) The facts are that about a thousand evangelicals walk away from their churches every day and most don’t come back (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. xiii). As a whole, American Christians lose six thousand members a day – more than two million a year. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 123) The real figures are that fewer than seven percent of the country are really evangelicals – only about one in fourteen, not one out of four. The fastest growing faith groups in the country are atheists and nonbelievers. In just the eleven years from 1990 to 2001, they more than doubled, from 14 million to 29 million, from 8% of the country to 14 percent. There are more than twice as many nonbelievers and atheists as there are evangelicals. And since it’s hard to believe everyone would have the nerve to tell a pollster they were an atheist or nonbeliever, I suspect the real figures are higher. You don’t read this in the media because there are no powerful groups pushing the story.

In another sermon, he notes that the reason evangelical children leave the church is because the modern world is winning the culture war:

Who’s to blame for all this? Not the bible, not God, and not the churches. Modern life, changed circumstances, the new realities that we live among are to blame (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 4). Evangelicals tried to fight the modern world and the world won. What’s eroding Christianity is the rise and victory of the more scientific and humane worldview we’re a part of: a worldview that incorporates almost all the basic assumptions of liberalism. It affects all religions, but in different ways. I’ve heard for 25 years that 95% of Unitarian kids leave the church after high school. I don’t think anyone has actually done a methodical study that could produce reliable numbers like that, but I suspect that it’s probably in the ballpark. Why? Because evangelical youth are leaving at about the same rate. Josh McDowell, who has worked for Campus Crusade for Christ since 1964, says that 94% of high school graduates leave the faith within two years. The Southern Baptists estimate that 88% of their kids leave the church after high school. So this is not an indictment of liberal religion; it’s a description of American 18-to-20-year-olds. On the surface, it looks like we’re all in the same situation. But when you look at why evangelicals or religious liberals leave their church, it gets more interesting, and suddenly we’re not all in the same situation. The world evangelical kids enter when they leave the control of the church isn’t much like the world the church has offered them. There’s more freedom to question, no subjects declared off-limits, less self-righteousness, more science, more independence. And nineteen out of twenty of them find the real world more appealing than the world the church had given them. Evangelicals lose their kids to the modern world. But we don’t lose our kids to the modern world, because we’ve worked to prepare them for it. It’s the worldview they learn in churches like this. We just want them to find more depth of fulfilling meaning and purpose within it than the soul-killing “market value” idols offer.

This thesis conforms with what I had found in some of the articles I had read as well. So what's been going on? Wicker explains that the aggrandizement of the religious right has been a concerted effort which gave evangelicals an outsized platform in the news. How did it happen? As Digby writes, it started because the Religious Right decided to take up abortion as their cause. And as Digby says, this was not from any deep theological commitment, but it was a political decision to pick up a cudgel that could be used to gain power. This was one of the key strategies for the Radical Right to take over our country. Don't forget that the incestuous relationship with between the Republicans and the Religious Right came out of the machinations of Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed. Today, it is not surprising to see that making common cause with the criminal conspiracy instigated by the Rove, Norquist, et. al, has come to naught for the Evangelicals. Now can we make the media realize the truth about the religious right and that it is not the main voice for religion in America? Naw. That might be expecting too much thoughtfulness on the part of the pundits. x-posted at PacificViews

Computer Voting Machine Security -- Prove It

2008-07-10T17:36:26Z

This post originally appeared at Speak Out California. I have been looking at the issue of computerized voting machine security for several years, and want to write about it today. Many people have pointed out that there are a number of problems with the new touch-screen voting machines. They fear that these machines can be used to rig an election. Others feel more confident about the machines because they are "hi-tech" and computerized and make voting easier. Computer experts warn that the machines cannot be trusted. Meanwhile, I have a relative who believes that computers can't make mistakes, so these machines will guarantee accurate vote counting. I can give you my position on these machines in just a few words: "Prove it." Here is what I mean: The standard for trusting the results of an election should be based on what an average citizen can believe about the election results. If the election system that you set up is able to prove to an average citizen that the election results are accurate, then you have the right system in place. Elections are about average citizens making decisions and trusting the results, not about being told by people in positions of authority what has been decided and who our leaders will be. The whole "trust me" thing hasn't worked out so well in the past so people came up with "prove it" systems so everyone could see for themselves how the elections turned out. Yes, I have an election system in mind that meets the "prove it" requirement. It's simple. I say that it simply doesn't matter what kind of machine (or no machine at all) is used in the voting booth or to count the votes later, as long as the voter can put a printed ballot in a ballot box. (The voter, of course, is expected to look over the printed ballot to be sure it has the right candidates and ballot measures marked. Just like with the old pen or punch card systems.) Everyone understands printed ballots with marks on them, and putting the ballot into a ballot box. Time-honored methods for holding secure "prove it" elections with ballots have been worked out. At the start of the election day you check the ballot box to be sure it is empty. Each voter gets one ballot, marks it, and puts it in the box. At the end of the day the ballots are counted and the total is reported. Etc. I work in elections and I know the system well. It can be trusted. If we use touch-screen computers as input devices to help the voter mark the ballot, all the better. This helps prevent mistakes like those in Florida in 2000. When the voter is ready the machine prints out a ballot with clear markings of the voter's choices. After the machine prints that ballot it doesn't matter if the machine has been hacked or is just making mistakes because you look at the ballot before putting it into the ballot box. And it doesn't matter how the count is reported because once you have a printed record of each voter's intentions, you can count them by hand if necessary. The voters or a trusted representative can watch the counting. There is one safeguard that I think is very important. You must randomly test the reported vote counts against the paper ballots they are said to represent. And I am very strict about this part. If the count is off by even a single vote it means something is wrong with the counting system and the entire election needs to be counted by hand! The controversy about touch-screen voting machines started because they do not use printed ballots that can prove the election's results to the average person! The machines come from private companies. Some of these prohibit anyone - even election officials - from knowing how they count the votes. There is no way at all to check whether the machines are reporting correct results. It is a matter of trusting these companies and not of proving to the average voter that the results can be trusted. We are just supposed to trust that the companies are telling us who won the elections! Remember what I said about being told by people in positions of authority what has been decided and who our leaders will be? If these machines make mistakes or just break down, there is no way to figure out who really won the election. And if someone is able to rig the machines to change the vote counts, there is no way to know that, either. History tells us that this is a concern. People have gone to great lengths to rig even local elections. So with the huge stakes in today's election -- trillions of dollars and wars -- we certainly should understand that highly-skilled and well-funded attempts to dictate election results are likely to occur. There are a number of ideas for making voting machines more reliable and harder to hack into and change results. One idea is that the public should be able to examine -- and experts allowed to repair and improve -- the source code for the programs used in the machines. This is called "open source" and the Open Voting Consortium has done a lot of great work in this area. (Send them some a few $$ to help their effort.) Open-source systems will help make the machines more reliable and easier to use and will reduce the chances that someone can try to rig an election. This is a great approach, but in the end it fails the "prove it" test. The average person doesn't understand the complicated programming involved. And there is no way to prove that the open-source code is the code that is actually running in every single voting machine on election day. Other ideas involve elaborate security to test and guard the machines. This again fails the "prove it" test. Unless average people can see for themselves that the results are accurate, no security is sufficient. I say that the system I describe above -- involving a paper ballot that the voter can check and put in a ballot box -- makes the reliability and security of any voting machines themselves less important because you can "prove it" by counting those paper ballots. You can test a sample of ballots against the reported counts, making it useless to try to hack the voting or counting machines themselves. California's Secretary of State Debra Bowen understands these issues and is working hard to make sure that our state's elections are safe, fair and provable. Let's hope that the rest of the states can catch up to California.

Anti-Democracy Conservatives

2008-07-08T23:21:11Z

This post originally appeared at Speak Out California This column by Newt Gingrich is really bothering me: Bobby Jindal, America's Most Transformational Governor - HUMAN EVENTS. Near the beginning of the column,

The principles that motivate his Louisiana Revolution are the same pro-innovation, pro-competition, anti-bureaucracy and anti- big government principles that I urge each week in this newsletter - the same principles that are so desperately needed in Washington, D.C.

Let's take a look at what these words mean. Pro-innovation. Fine. Pro-competition. Fine. But let's look at what "anti-bureaucracy" and "anti-big government" actually mean. In a democracy we have openness and transparency. The use of our money and resources is accountable to the people. And how do we make sure that government is open and accountable? We have careful procedures and oversight in place to ensure that the money and resources are used as they should be used. This means you have to make sure that every i is dotted and every t is crossed before you approve something. Otherwise you get politicians giving contracts to their brothers-in-law, department heads taking trips to luxury resorts, and other corruption that history has taught will always occur. Conservatives like to complain about "bureaucracy" and claim that corporations are more 'efficient" than government, but what they are really complaining about is openness and democracy. Yes, it is more efficient to have one executive making decisions and telling us how it is going to be. And yes, it is less bureaucratic to just ram projects through and award them to your friends. But let's take a look at the results of the conservative revolution in government of the last few years. We have seen so many "no-bid contracts" awarded to well-connected companies, with no oversight and no accountability at all. Reporters who can get past the secrecy have discovered that literally billions upon billions of our tax dolalrs have been stolen, can't be accounted for at all! This is what the conservatives meant when they said they wanted to get rid of bureaucracy -- they meant they wanted to take off with the money! And what about "anti-big-government?" Just what do they think government IS? The first three words of our Constitution are "We, the People." THAT is what government is. We, the People make decisions about how we will invest our resources and how we will distribute the return on that investment. Those resources include our minerals, oil, coal, water, as well as our people, companies, laws and intellectual property. We, the People making the decisions. So when they complain about government they are really complaining that We, the People are in charge. And "big government" means We, the People in charge of more of our own destiny. If they don't want We, the People in charge -- what DO they want? Think about that. The alternative to big government is big corporations making the decisions about our resources, people, oil, coal, laws, etc. That is what this really means. And this has proven itself out, hasn't it? As we have lived through the conservative revolution, we have seen more and more of the control of our resources and our desitiny shifted away from QWe, the People and into the hands of the few who control the big corporations. So don't be fooled by shiny words. When you realize what these conservatives really want you see that it is about taking control away from you and me and giving it to a wealthy few.

Communicating With the Public

2008-06-24T17:25:31Z

Many progressive think the public already understands a lot of what progressives stand for. But this is not the case. This thinking comes from already being a progressive, and talking to lots of other progressives. But we need to understand that the public in general is not well educated about progressives, and that communicating needs to start with basics. I learned this in business, when I was doing direct mail marketing: It's a core mistake to think that the audience you want to reach thinks the way you and I do as we spend time on blogs like this one. You have to learn NOT to trust your instincts and instead trust market testing and other scientific methods to get a read on what the target audience is thinking - and what they hear when you talk to them. The mass market out there is very different from the people who want to reach them, both in products and political ideas. If you think about it for a minute, this has to be the case or you wouldn't be trying to reach them in the first place - they would already know what you want them to know. The people who make a product already know what it does, how it is used, etc... So they just can't relate to people who don't yet. There are things they take for granted, but the target audience has not yet been exposed to. So in products you wouldn't need to market your product if the customers out there already understood what it is and what it does for them. In our case here we wouldn't need to explain progressive ideas and policies if the public already understood why they want them. But they don't. If we want to persuade the public to share our values and support our ideas we have to explain to them the benefits THEY will get out of doing so. To do that we have to learn what THEY hear, and how they hear things, before we can reach them. We have to realize that the people who already understand these concepts today are fundamentally different from the rest of the public. (Try to write a product manual telling an elderly person how to use your software and you will see what I mean.) We seek out the blogs, and read lots of news. Much of the public is almost the opposite of this. They don't read newspapers, they don't watch the NewsHour, and they are not scouring the internet and critically evaluating what they find. (NO ONE but us knows about the billions in cash that were shipped to Iraq and disappeared, for example, but it is part of the foundation of our understanding of what is happening to our country.) But the right does reach them. They have figured out how to trigger the word-of-mouth channels through which people come to know what they "know." How many people STILL believe that Iraq attacked us on 9/11? In direct mail I learned that the stuff that makes me and probably you retch is the stuff that sells the most product. I have to tell you I learned it the very hardest way because I would not expose my customers to that crap. And then a third party company did a test mailing and the sales tripled. So I learned from that. I don't mean to sound like I am lecturing. I'm trying to share some lessons I learned in some very hard ways - that you just have to trust scientific methods to learn what your target audience thinks, and understand the we are often unable to know that ourselves.

Speak for Yourself and Others

2008-06-19T14:49:48Z

As we envision a more progressive future, how are the voices of We the People going to be heard as we try to reclaim American democracy from the inner circles of political power, corporate domination, and profit-focused mass media infotainment? Everyone reading this has figured out the value of looking to the Internet for alternatives to the mainstream media and the punditocracy. But how many of us writing on blogs and posting our videos think of ourselves not only as individuals, with our own opinions, but also as representatives of others like ourselves? Harry Kelber, editor of The Labor Educator. Kelber clearly knows he’s speaking for large numbers of working men and women in his communications. He says to Obama:

In past presidential elections, unions never received proper recognition for the money, volunteers and their tremendous voter turnouts. Their leaders rarely appeared at public functions with their candidates, either during the campaign or its aftermath. They were not invited to speak at major press conferences or political forums. They were not called upon to participate in high-level meetings where the key decisions about candidates, issues and strategy were made. Unions have been reduced to political vassals of the Democratic Party on the assumption they will not switch to the anti-labor Republican Party or build a party of their own. Senator, you now have a golden opportunity to draw millions of blue-collar workers and union members into the battle for democratic change, since they are among the ones who need change the most and they will be its chief beneficiaries. But you must find ways to involve them locally, as well as nationally, in every aspect of the campaign. The prize is enormous. Organized labor, with its 16 million members, who live and work in virtually every city and county in the United States, has millions of dollars and an army of volunteers for the candidates its supports. Within the labor movement, you’ll find all the experts the campaign needs, both for the election campaign and after (as we hope) you’ve won the presidency.

Kelber speaks of the unions’ exclusion in the passive voice: “never received”, “were not invited”, “were not called upon”. He’s asking Obama to take action: “…to draw millions.into the battle”, “you must find ways to involve them locally…”, “…you’ll find all the experts the campaign needs…” These statements may be true, but they also convey a frame of passivity, of unawareness of the power that union members themselves potentially have. While many union members may be unaware of their own personal power, SEIU’s new Accountability Project shows that organized labor is flexing its muscles to affect elections. Commonweal Institute fellow Dave Johnson on Huffington Post calls attention to the need to make this progressive movement action a continuous process:

My view here of movements creating demand says that a lot of the work of getting things done has to be outside of the election cycle and long-term year-round, because it is about building broad, popular support for ideas, not just for candidates.

“Movement consciousness” is not just a historic phenomenon, limited to blacks in South Africa or American women in the 1960s. It is what we as progressives need now – an awareness of all the ways in which we are indeed all in this together. How can we build that movement consciousness? What can we do as individuals? Reclaiming the power of the voice of We the People means that each of us, individually, should consider all the groups that our voices represent. For example, I am a taxpayer, an American, and know what hard work is like. My grandfather and my husband were union men. And, among other things, I am also a woman, a doctor, a mother, white, from immigrant peasant stock two generations ago. I can speak personally to the realities of life for all of these groups. The diversity of backgrounds of bloggers suggests that bloggers as individuals have the potential to speak for many others, if we think about it – if we are conscious of all the others who are like us in our various aspects. As each of us writes and speaks about the changes we feel are important for coping with the environmental, economic, political, and demographic challenges of our time and the future, our voices will be stronger if we recognize that we speak not just in abstract terms, not just for ourselves, but also for the many others with whom we have much in common. We speak with and for our communities and constituencies, not just to them. Between us, we can give voice to the hopes, fears, and aspirations of We the People. ]]>

Another Corporate Gimmick - Arbitration

2008-06-14T16:13:56Z

This post originally appeared at Speak Out California. Does your credit card or bank loan agreement have an "arbitration clause?" More and more consumer-oriented contracts and "agreements" have clauses specifying that disputes must go to arbitration rather than our civil justice system. The justification for this is that arbitration saves the time and expense of working within our legal system. But here's the thing: the corporations choose the arbitrators and every arbitrator knows they will never, ever, ever, ever (ever) get another job if they rule against the corporations. Never. And guess what: 98.8% of arbitrations end up in favor of the corporations. This is not a surprise. The Progressive States Network's newsletter has a story about this today, Arbitration: "Set up to squeeze small sums of money out of desperately poor people",

The headline above is a quote from former West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Richard Neely, describing what his role was as an arbitrator at the National Arbitration Forum (NAF), a for-profit company hired to enforce mandatory arbitration clauses for credit card consumer loans. "NAF is nothing more than an arm of the collection industry hiding behind a veneer of impartiality," says Richard Neely. In a devastating expose by BusinessWeek, Neely and other former arbitrators describe an arbitration system stacked completely against consumers-- a system where creditors win 99.8% of all disputes involving companies ranging from Bank of America to Sears to Citgroup. Arbitration clauses buried in the fine print of credit card offers means consumers lose the right to have disputes decided in an independent court and instead are forced into corporation-selected arbitration firms.

The BusinessWeek story mentioned in the Progressive States Network story is titled, Banks vs. Consumers (Guess Who Wins) This story about credit card companies taking unfair advantage of consumers is one more attack on citizen rights to access our own legal system (one more of so many attacks). Think about what is happening here. First the big corporations fought against "regulations" which are the rules that We, the People set up requiring safe workplaces or environmental standards, or products that do not injure people, etc. Then when fewer regulations of course resulted in worker or consumer injuries or toxic spills or other harms the inured parties filed more lawsuits asking the companies to make good. So in response to these lawsuits the corporate-financed "tort reform" movement came along, working to limit the ability of citizens to be compensated for the results of corporate bad behavior. The result has been fewer regulations preventing harms and more restrictions on citizen access to courts where we can seek damages after we are harmed. I didn't even bring up the corporate-conservative movement efforts to install their own business-friendly judges in the courts. But even those erosions of our access to justice has not been enough for the greedy corporations. Now there is arbitration: clauses that show up in contracts and agreements that remove your ability to take a dispute to the courts at all! And the judges in these courts are dependent on the corporations for their livelihood! Deregulation, tort reform and now arbitration that is rigged against the consumer. Drip, drip, drip. One after another the big corporations are eroding the rights of citizens.

SEIU's Accountability Project - Making Politicians Do The Right Thing

2008-06-03T01:04:57Z

I am at the SEIU 2008 convention in Puerto Rico. Todd Beeton posted earlier today over at MyDD about the SEIU’s Accountability Project and I’d like to add to this discussion. This is a big, big deal for progressives! As Andy Stern said in his address to the convention today we are tired of, "Politicians who want your vote but after the election are at your throat." In his post Todd explained,

. . . In a nutshell, after November, the SEIU intends to hold our Democratic representatives to their promises and let them know that there is the money, the organization and the will not only to fund primary challenges but to recruit and even train qualified candidates around the country if they don't do what they said they'd do. What makes this threat real, of course, is that SEIU was instrumental in the defeat of Al Wynn by Donna Edwards in Maryland's February 12th primary. The SEIU spent $1 million on that race alone. Next year and all during the ensuing cycle, they're prepared to spend $10 million to target Democrats who don't follow through on their promises. Think about what the SEIU got for their money in MD-04: Congresswoman Donna Edwards who will champion progressive legislation on issue after issue affecting not only those in her district but impacting people's lives for the better all over the country, as every new and better Democrat added to congress by definition does.

The primary race between Al Wynn and Donna Edwards was a very big victory for progressives. Prior to this race Democrats in Congress only saw one effective power bloc on the playing field which meant going against those big corporate interests could cost them their jobs. Whatever they might want to do, politics is about what you make them do. Wherever their hearts might have been, elected Democrats could see that only one side was able to rally the only real support or punishment that counted: enough votes. Yes, Ned Lamont caused some problems for Joe Lieberman but it's still Senator Lieberman. ]]> do what the people want them to do. I think it was LBJ who said about civil rights, "I'm completely with you on this, now go out and make me do it." That's how it has to work -- you have to make them do it or else why should they? Votes is how you measure that. If you like what they're doing you keep them in office and if you don't you boot them. In my view it takes long-term movements to change the public's thinking and create the demand that politicians respond to. Movements persuade and educate the people and then they look for politicians who say they will do what the people want. The conservative movement has been engaged in traditional marketing demand creation activities for 30 years and our side has not. And so it got to the point where all a conservative politician had to do was point and shout "liberal!" to win an election. As I see it American history is a series of movements working to persuade people that they have the best plan for the future. Over time, after the public absorbs and comes to agree with ideas, then they elect candidates who promise to follow through on those ideas. Lincoln came out of a long period of public wrangling over ideas, including slavery. FDR didn't just show up and tell people how it was going to be, his New Deal was the result of the earlier progressive movement that followed the Guilded Age. My view here of movements creating demand says that a lot of the work of getting things done has to be outside of the election cycle and long-term year-round, because it is about building broad, popular support for ideas, not just for candidates. But here we are with the very progressive organizations needed to accomplish that dying on the vine for lack of funding. George Lakoff's Rockridge Institute just closed. The Center for Policy Alternatives just closed. These were two movement-building organizations. I know that many others are desperately struggling to keep their doors open, at a time when Obama and Clinton are raising hundreds of millions of dollars for short-term election activity. And, of course, progressive bloggers remain largely unfunded even though they are the primary channel for spreading progressive ideas and information. So to sum that up, it takes a movement to change minds and create demand and make politicians do the right thing. SEIU is in a position to help all progressives make this happen. They are in a position to get some real things done here. They have people, funding and commitment. And they are working very hard to make this a bottom-up, diverse grassroots effort. As Todd wrote about the Accountability project,

The details of the program include:
$10 million fund to take on elected officials who fail to live up to their promises.
Calls for SEIU members to make at least 10 million phone calls to members of Congress after the election to hold them accountable.
At least 50 percent of the union's organizing budget and 50 percent of its non-organizing staff at the national and local levels will be devoted to the effort
A commitment to jump start a much broader, permanent grassroots movement of working people by actively involving at least one million SEIU members in the "justice for all" effort by 2012, and creating leadership roles for at least 200,000 (or about 10 percent of the union's membership).

So SEIU will step up to the plate with serious resources that does two things. First, it finally gives politicians whose hearts are with us a reason to vote with us. Second, it tells politicians who don't agree with a progressive agenda (of reducing corporate power over our lives and restoring democracy to the people) that their time is past, that we will run candidates against them in the primaries and these candidates will have strong support. While this is election activity, it begins to put an enforcement component onto our progressive movement's policy agenda. But SEIU is also beginning to engage in broader movement-building activite with the upcoming Justice For All campaign, Tim Tagaris writes about at Open Left, and which I will expand on in another post. As Todd writes, SEIU will focus on an agenda broader than the direct needs of only SEIU members:

The issues the SEIU is particularly interested in pursuing accountability on are
Affordable, quality health care for all.
The freedom for all workers to form a union without employer interference.
Quality services in our communities with fair, reliable funding.
An economy that rewards all workers, not just a few at the top.
Citizenship for hard-working, taxpaying immigrants.

I will write about the Justice For All campaign in a later post.