Solutions: Combatting Corporate Dominance of American Politics

How do ordinary citizens counter the massive influence that large monied interests have over our democracy? What is possible after the Supreme Court's recent disastrous decision opening the floodgates to corporate money in elections. Fran Kortan, publisher of Yes! Magazine, explains "ten ways to stop corporate dominance of politics."

UPDATE: NPR's Ari Shapiro has an excellent interview with Lewis Maltby, author of Can They Do That? Retaking Our Fundamental Rights in the Workplace, about the widespread restrictions on individual liberties in the corporate workplace. Maltby says, "What most Americans generally don't know is that the Constitution doesn't apply to private corporations at all." The full interview can be listened to here. Another excerpt and review of the book can be found at Alternet.

UPDATE: Robert Borosage has a good essay about an amendment to the Constitution Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD) and Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) have introduced in Congress aimed at overturning the Supreme Court's decision in Citizen's United, which gave corporations the right to spend unlimited funds in election campaigns as a matter of free speech.

It's About Time!

This is the dude I voted for...

Click ahead to the 3:30 mark...


The crucial quote:

But what I have also said is - don't come to table with the same tired arguments and worn ideas that helped create this crisis.

We're not going to get relief by turning back to the very same policies that in eight short years doubled the national debt and threw our economy into a tailspin. We can't embrace the losing formula that offers more tax cuts as the only answer to every problem we face, while ignoring critical challenges like our addiction to foreign oil, the soaring cost of health care, failing schools and crumbling bridges, roads and levees. I don't care whether you're driving a hybrid or an SUV - if you're headed for a cliff, you have to change direction.

Amen!

Any thoughts?

Post-424: Minority Contracts Imperiled in Nebraska

Matthew Hansen of the Omaha World Herald has an article on the impact of the recently passed anti-affirmative action ballot initiative (Proposition 424) on state-level contracts for minority-owned and female-owned businesses in Nebraska.

Omaha city leaders hope - but can't guarantee - that minority-owned companies will get contracts to help build the new downtown ballpark this year.

That's a marked change from a decade ago, when the Omaha City Council mandated that at least $5.7 million in contracts go to women and minorities during the construction of the Qwest Center Omaha. The difference: Nebraska's new ban on affirmative action.

The ban, upheld in court last week, has halted the City of Omaha's protected business enterprise program, which for years shuttled a small part of giant public works contracts to minority- and female-owned businesses.

It also has sent the city and the University of Nebraska scrambling as they end programs that clearly violate the law, tweak scholarship requirements and strip from hiring policies newly banned language that mentions race, ethnicity or gender.

This seems to confirm what we feared, that the measure will make it harder for the state to develop mechanisms to address the historic inequalities faced by women and minorities when it comes to getting equal access to state resources/contracts.

Any thoughts?

Getting the Best Out of Obama

Here is a nice article from The Progressive about how progressives can push Obama progressive-way.

The bottom line:

It is reasonable for progressives to assume that Barack Obama agrees with them on many funda-mental issues. He has said as much. It is equally reasonable for progressives to assume that Barack Obama wants to do the right thing. But it is necessary for progressives to understand that, as with Roosevelt, they will have to make Obama do it.

Check it out. There are lots of good insights. What do you think?

Dr. King: Struggling Not to Lose Him

A passionate plea to reclaim the memory and legacy of Dr. King...

... and to put the challenging political strategist and activist that King was back into the story.

Take roughly 5 minutes and have a look:

What are your thoughts?

Has Obama Changed the Politics of Race?

According to a recent "News Analysis" piece in the L.A. Times by Peter Wallsten, Obama's election is "changing the politics of race." Wallsten contends: "Many black leaders are rejecting the old tactics of protest and the rhetoric of inequality. 'You can't use 50-year-old ideas in a new political era,' one pastor says."

I am ambivelent about these kinds of arguments. On one hand, it is true that 2008 is not 1958 or 1968, so we need to craft a political vision and political rhetoric that speaks to our own historical reality. No doubt about that. Yet, I'm not as comfortable "rejecting the rhetoric of inequality," when racial inequality is so readily apparent and persistent throughout American society. Heck, in my own city - Omaha - 60% of all African American children live in poverty. 60%!! If 60% of all white kids lived in poverty, the city and state would literally stop and make herculean efforts to deal with it, including pouring zillions of dollars into various programs to help white kids and their families out. Or, recently the Omaha World Herald ran two articles in the same week, one on an affluent white school in West Omaha where the public school is buying each kid a laptop (talk about the rich getting richer!) and the other on a school in the poorer and blacker North Side where parents are being charged an extra $5 just to provide basic materials to their kids, like paper. The inequalities are glaring and shameful. And we just went through an election, right? So surely the various political candidates all blustered on about the massive inequality in North Omaha (the third poorest black community in the United States)? Wrong. Not one candidate said a peep about black children or North Omaha, or economic or racial inequality. Nothing. Nada.

In a way, this effort to move away from the politics of grievance seems, in part, to reflect the class position of some leaders who themselves have made it to the middle-class or above, but more significantly, it appears to me to be an accommodation to the fact that most Americans are clueless about the reality not only of our racial past, but also of our racial present. Most have no clue what race is, how it works and persists, what is different from the civil rights era and what remains to be done. And, I fear this kind of political positioning, while strategically smart on some levels, might also reinforce the idea among many white folks that we are "beyond race" and that black people and other aggrieved groups simply play the "victim card" all the time in some unjustified way. A HUGE part of the remaining solution to racial inequality is a new consciousness among enough white people, a consciousness that is not mired in white guilt, but looks honestly at racial inequality in America, that places that inequality in its proper historical context and which owns up to the fact that we ALL are responsible for this mess and for cleaning it up!

What do you think?

Kuttner on the Economy

(click any image to enlarge)

For a long time, Robert Kuttner has been one of my favorite progressive economists. He appeared on NPR's excellent news show, NOW, this weekend and suggested a controversial plan for economic recovery that emphasizes massive public investment over fiscal restraint, at least until the economy gets rolling again. Kuttner argues that staving off another Great Depression is more important than balancing budgets. Check it out here.

What do you think? If you could craft public policy to address the economic collapse, what would your plan look like? What would you do?

Here is what Nobel-winning economist and NYTimes columnist, Paul Krugman, thinks should be done about the economic crisis.

Here are some other economy-related political cartoons by Keith Tucker: (click any image to enlarge)

The Three Trillion Dollar War (It's Cost in Ten Steps)

In 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld estimated that a war with Iraq would cost $60 billion. Five years later, the cost of Iraq War operations is more than 10 times that figure. By the time the United States leaves Iraq, the estimated total cost of war will be more than $3 trillion.
(click image to enlarge)

A Post-Racial Society?

Over at The Progressive, Fred McKissick reminds us, in this post-election Obama-glow, "We still aren’t in a post-racial society." He asks,

Exactly how can we be in post-racial America when nearly 40 percent of black children under the age of 5 live at or below the poverty line?

How are we in post-racial America when the level of school segregation for Hispanics is the highest in the forty years and segregation of blacks is back to levels not seen since the late 1960s?

How are we in post-racial America when the gaps in wealth, income, education and health care have widened over the last eight years?

Yes, how, indeed?

Barack Obama's victory was something, but not everything, and we need to be clear about the serious and daunting task that lays ahead in terms of racial justice. The challenge before us is to put substance to the symbol. We must not get so lost in our self-congratulation over the election of our first black president that we forget the persistent chasm of caste and class in our society today, a yawning gap that will require sustained attention, organized political action and significant resources if it is to be bridged.

Childhood Poverty Up 50% in 2007...

... and those numbers came in BEFORE the economic meltdown of recent months!

Good Sheet: National Service

President Kennedy famously declared during his inauguration speech that we should ask ourselves what we can do for our country. National service takes many forms—from Americans deployed overseas to senior citizens teaching a new generation how to read. Now that the election is over, let’s continue the spirit of civic engagement. Find out what you can do for your country...
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The First 100 Days

Another interesting "Good Sheet":

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“I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people,” Franklin D. Roosevelt told supporters in 1932 while accepting the presidential nomination. When he took office the following year, he spent his first 100 days enacting a dizzying number of reforms designed to stabilize an economically depressed nation. Since then, a president’s first 100 days have been an indicator of what he is able to accomplish. In January 2009, the clock starts again.

UPDATE: The editor of The Nation magazine, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, suggests a "center-left" agenda for the first 100 days of the Obama administration.

Election Over, Bill Ayers Speaks

Now that the election has concluded, Bill Ayers has penned an essay - "What a Long Strange Trip It's Been" - for In These Times ruminating on the way his life became "a prop, a cartoon character created to be pummeled" by the McCain/Palin campaign. It is an interesting and more complex inside look at the mind and experience of the man who might have upset Obama's run for the White House, but didn't. Ayers discusses the campaign, but also the significance of the 1960s today. Check it out.

What do you think?

"Obama's Win Has Roots in Mississippi"

The Sun-Herald, which serves the Biloxi, Gulfport and southern Mississippi area, published two interesting articles about Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) veterans and their role, 40+ years ago paving the way for an Obama presidency. The first article focuses on 1963, when Aaron Henry, a black civil rights activist, teamed up with Rev. Ed King, a white Methodist minister, to run for Governor and Lt. Governor in Mississippi. The second brief article focuses on Unita Blackwell and Hollis Watkins, both Movement vets. Check 'em out...

BREAKING: Obama Gets NE District 2 (Omaha-land) Electoral Vote!

Great news! It has just been announced here in Nebraska that Obama earned the District 2 electoral college vote in Nebraska. District 2 is made up of Omaha-land, essentially. This is the first time in 40-odd years that a Democrat has won an electoral vote in the state and the first time ever that the electoral votes of Nebraska have been split. It is a HUGE victory for us locally and a nice thank-you for all the hard-work so many local people did around here to make this a reality.

Selma, Lord, Selma!

(Ms. Bland is to the right of Barack Obama as you look at the above photo!)

Selma, AL, is sacred ground in the civil rights movement. It was there, in '65, during the historic voting right campaign, at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, that thousands of people made a stand for racial justice that reverberated across the country and around the world. Those activists and local people took their lumps, but their efforts resulted in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Ms. Joanne Bland was there, as a little girl, and has spent the rest of her life in Selma, carrying on the struggle for full equality. I've had the great fortune to get to know Ms. Bland, first as a grad student at the U. of Wisconsin, and more recently when I brought her to Lincoln as a part of "From Selma to Washington: A 40th Anniversary Celebration of the 1965 Voting Rights Act," a conference I organized in 2005.

This New York Times video features Ms. Bland and other local people in Selma, as they vote and await the results of election '08 on Tuesday. In case you are unclear about the deep meaning of Barack Obama's historic victory, please watch this moving video... but be prepared to shed some tears.

I love you Ms. Bland! Thank you for everything you and all the other local people in Selma have done for our nation, for our democracy! This one is for you and for all the other foot-soldiers of the Movement. We are a better nation because of your sacrifices...

Ralph Nader's Political Career, R.I.P.

Good lord has Ralph Nader become an annoying jack-ass... and I say that as someone who supported him in 1996 and 2000 and who has long admired his work on behalf of consumer rights and democratic reform.

Check this out: Here he is making a complete fool of himself on election night, asking whether Obama will be "an Uncle Tom" for corporate interests at the very moment our nation elected its first black president. What a putz. Hell, even Shep Smith of Faux News understands how lame-ass Nader's comments were...

Tim Goodman, over at The San Francisco Chronicle website, skewers Nader's performance on election night. In part, he writes, Nader is "A character without a filter between his head and his mouth and the willingness to say just about anything while being completely oblivious to the fallout." Goodman continues, "As to Nader supporters parsing what he said and what he meant with the 'Uncle Tom' comment, let's not waste a lot of time and ranting comments on whether that's an offensive term or not. Why not field test it yourself? Go to a bar (around midnight, shall we say?) filled only with African Americans. Use the term 'Uncle Tom' any way you'd like and see how that works out for you." Finally, he reminds us, too, that this is not the first dumb racial thing Nader has said about Obama. Recall that earlier in the campaign he accused Obama of "talking white." Again, what a dumb-ass.

No wonder most progressive/lefties abandoned Nader after 2000. His campaign had no meaningful grassroots support this year and achieved only .5% of the vote. Because Nader's presidential runs are now about him, personally, and not attached to a viable third party, they play no role in building alternative progressive institutions, let alone a "movement." Sad.

Moreover, any viable progressive/left movement in the U.S. must be multi-racial. Do you think the guy in the above video could possibly form or lead such a multi-racial movement? Of course not.

It is sad to see Nader tarnish his legacy these last few years... but that is what happens when you allow yourself to confuse your own ego with "the movement."

Ralph, your electoral career has now officially ended...

The Onion: "Nation Finally Shitty Enough to Make Social Progress"

Very Oniony...

Obama's victory is being called the most significant change in politics since the 1992 election, when a full-scale economic recession led voters to momentarily ignore the fact that candidate Bill Clinton had once smoked marijuana. While many believed things had once again reached an all-time low in 2004, the successful reelection of President George W. Bush-despite historically low approval ratings nationwide-proved that things were not quite shitty enough to challenge the already pretty shitty status quo.

"If Obama learned one thing from his predecessors, it's that timing means everything," said Dr. James Pung, a professor of political science at Princeton University. "Less than a decade ago, Al Gore made the crucial mistake of suggesting we should care about preserving the environment before it became unavoidably clear that global warming would kill us all, and in 2004, John Kerry cost himself the presidency by criticizing Bush's disastrous Iraq policy before everyone realized our invasion had become a complete and total quagmire."

Progress, Hope, Unity, Change

... glory, hallelujah!