Tom Hayden : Progressive Dems See Opening for New Politics

Elizabeth Warren and the populists say 'No way!' to 'Third Way.'

Conditions ripe for a new politics:
An opening for progressive Democrats

The Democratic progressive base is making clear that Hillary Clinton must make an adjustment from her hawkish centrism towards the new populism.

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / December 23, 2013

The sight of progressive Democrats shaming and exposing the Wall Street-funded "Third Way" Democrats is a sign of a powerful new opening for progressives on the American political spectrum.

The standing of Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Sherrod Brown, Bill de Blasio, and many others is on the rise. The Clinton Democrats are being challenged from the populist left; the AFL-CIO is supporting a new generation of organizers; the immigrant rights movement is reviving the tradition of the student civil rights movement; the LGBT movement is learning to win.

And as long as the economy is failing for the poor, working people, and the middle class, the conditions for a new politics are ripening rapidly.

These moments come and go like the tides, which makes leadership, vision, and strategy critically important. Where do social movements fit in? Or groups like PDA (Progressive Democrats of America)? Where is the new center of gravity?

Our eyes should be on 2016, achieving as much as possible from the Obama era, and defending against a right-wing rollback in that year’s presidential election. The centrist Democratic strategy thus far has been to paint the Republicans as dangerous extremists, which is working nicely with Republican cooperation.

Because of the disastrous stumbling on Obamacare, however, Democratic prospects in the 2014 low-turnout congressional elections have stalled for now. The best that can be hoped for at this point is Democratic control of the Senate and a narrowing of the gap in the Republican House. Meanwhile, given the deep partisan divisions, at least 45 percent of American voters live under entrenched right-wing rule.

Despite the stalemate, there are multiple fronts where weird coalitions might prevail:

• Immigration reform if the Republican establishment prevails over the Tea Party;
• Blocking of the secret pro-corporate trade agreements which will dismantle labor and environmental protections, assuming labor-liberal Democrats coalesce with the Republican libertarians; and
• Reform of the Big Brother/Big Data surveillance apparatus by the same liberal-libertarian coalition;
• Prevention of unwinnable, unaffordable military adventures. Diplomatic recognition of Cuba will be a heavy lift, but the president has shown he can overcome the Republican-led Cuban Right in the House and the unpopular Sen. Menendez in the Senate.

None of these achievements will be easy, but all are doable.


Keeping the White House in 2016 is vital in order to shift the balance on the U.S. Supreme Court and to retain regulatory power over social, economic, voting rights, and environmental policies. It is also imperative to keep the Senate majority Democratic for its appointment powers and to prevent the conservative cancer from spreading from the House. It is important for the progressive Democrats in the House to fight aggressively as if they are behind enemy lines as opposed to a rational debating society.

Any efforts to cobble together weird coalitions at the congressional level may fail or be resisted by the White House. Change is more likely to be delivered from social movements in progressive states and cities, however, not from the trench warfare in D.C. Call it a trickle-up populism. California, for example, already leads the way on conservation and renewables as well as immigration reform. Vermont is implementing its right to single-payer health care. Colorado and Washington are legalizing and regulating marijuana.

New York Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio with family, shown at July demonstration in support of New York health care workers. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

A major challenge for progressives is whether it is possible to forge consensus on vision and program (or as consultants call it, narrative). Obama is re-emphasizing economic inequality, framed as a choice between being on your own or all in this together. That’s a start for Democrats, and a welcome echo of Occupy Wall Street. The same theme accounts for the exceptional rise of Warren and de Blasio.

But it is a fuzzy and incomplete vision, a blended blur of the New Deal ("expand Social Security") and the New Economy ("Facebook and Google will set us free"). The faulty vision reflects fault lines in the underlying coalition. Balancing the contradictions is the key to building a winning majority coalition electorally; too far in either direction can result in splits which favor the Republican strategy of divide-to-rule.

The first contradiction for Democrats, and even some progressives, is whether to be “all in” in the fight against climate change, or to take a “balanced” approach for electoral reasons by flirting with “clean coal”. The return of John Podesta to the White House is encouraging news for environmentalists in this regard.

The equally problematic contradiction for Democrats, and even some human rights groups, is whether to embrace more military intervention, secret ops, and drone tactics, in order to satisfy the “liberal interventionists," including Samantha Power, Human Rights Watch, the Feminist Majority, and AIPAC, or whether to deepen policy of avoiding unwinnable and unaffordable wars at the risk of being labeled “isolationist.”

The reality is that there are not enough discretionary funds for health care and warfare.

A third contradiction is between labor, progressives and human rights groups on one side and the corporate-leaning Democrats on issues of international investment and trade, a rift which has continued since the Seattle uprisings of 1999, where Bill Clinton both sponsored the WTO Summit and distanced himself from the shambles that followed.

While every effort should be made to reconcile such contradictions, the predictable truth is that they will be fought out in the 2016 Democratic primaries.

There are problematic contradictions on these issues in the Democratic coalition. Liberals on domestic policy frequently avoid taking stands on national security or even endorse hawkish policies.

The Democratic progressive base is making clear that Hillary Clinton must make an adjustment from her hawkish centrism towards the new populism, or lose significant support either in the 2016 primaries or the general election.

One battle Democrats, labor, and progressives can agree on is the expansion and protection of the emerging political majority from the Republican effort to diminish their voting rights, turnout potential, and representation in the Electoral College. The seemingly-insane Republican overreaction to the recent modest change in Senate filibuster rules is an indication of how greatly Republican political power rests on guarding their minority status.

The fight over media reform is another struggle between the public versus the corporate interests where progressives must gain and hold their ground. A similar unity should prevail on chipping away against Citizens United, but the party is unable to end its overall addiction to a fund-raising frenzy which empowers many of the most unsavory elements in the political culture. They cannot agree even on eliminating the business tax deduction by which special interests use taxpayers’ money to pass legislation ripping off the same taxpayers.

Every local, state and federal reform of the campaign finance system is a vital gain for democracy, and a base for progressives winning electoral seats.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. Hayden is director of the Peace and Justice Resource center and editor of The Peace Exchange Bulletin. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Progress Texas' Glenn Smith Talks Wendy Davis, Rick Perry, and More

Democratic political consultant Glenn Smith in the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, June 28, 2013. Photo by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcast:
Talking politics with Glenn Smith,
director of Progress Texas PAC

Glenn Smith, who organized Ann Richards' successful campaign for governor of Texas, talks about Rick Perry, Wendy Davis, and the Texas Legislature, and the prospects for Texas turning blue.

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / July 2, 2013

Progressive writer and political consultant Glenn Smith, director of the Progress Texas PAC, was Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, June 28, 2013.

Rag Radio is a syndicated radio program produced at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download our interview with Glenn Smith here:


Glenn W. Smith managed Ann Richards' successful campaign for governor of Texas in 1990. A former reporter for the Houston Chronicle and Houston Post, Smith is the author of the highly regarded book, The Politics of Deceit: Saving Freedom and Democracy from Extinction. Smith, who served as a senior fellow at George Lakoff's Rockridge Institute in Berkeley, currently is director of Progress Texas PAC, “helping the Texas progressive movement develop and deliver disciplined, effective messages.”

On the show we talk politics -- with special focus on the phenomenal developments in the special session of the Texas Legislature, June 23-25, where Sen. Wendy Davis filibustered Rick Perry's draconian anti-abortion legislation. We also discuss the Supreme Court’s landmark decisions on voting rights and gay marriage, the status of immigration reform, and the prospects for Texas turning blue (or at least purple) in the reasonably near future.

We also discuss the efforts of Progress Texas, the progressive multi-issue organization with which Smith works -- and the under-the-radar work of Battleground Texas, the group that's busy applying the Obama campaign's grassroots organizing techniques to the state of Texas.

Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas called Glenn Smith a “legendary political consultant and all-around good guy.” Listen to Smith's earlier appearances on Rag Radio, at the Internet Archive.


Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement.

The show has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

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ELECTION 2012 / Jonah Raskin : A View from California

"California Dreaming." Art by Tom Horner / Dribble. Inset image below from San Francisco Sentinal.
A view from California:
Which way the wind blows

Obama’s reelection is only the beginning. The hard work of transforming the nation lies ahead

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / November 8, 2012

SANTA ROSA, California -- Watching national politics from the coast of California, where I live, and where nearly everyone votes for Democrats, feels weird. It felt especially weird on the evening of Election Day as I waited and watched to hear whether Obama would be reelected or Romney would waltz into the White House along with Paul Ryan and Karl Rove.

Whomever Californians chose for president didn’t seem to matter at all. It was all decided before the vote was counted in my own state, and almost all of the attention was focused on what the media calls “swing states.”

As it turned out, Obama won the swing states, including Ohio. He lost the South big, lost the heartland -- from North Dakota to Texas -- and lost the white male vote over the age of 50. But he won the rest: the urban vote, the black vote, the Latino vote, and the vote of the 47% that Romney abused in a campaign speech that came back to bite him big time.

It seems clear that the future of American politics belongs to the Democratic Party, which is now clearly the party of youth, Latinos, women, and the working class. (Hey and a few liberal millionaires, too.)

It’s also the party of students with loans, families who love Obamacare, same sex couples, both married and unmarried, and marijuana smokers who voted to legalize weed in Colorado and Washington.

If the Obama victory signals anything it signals the continuing wave of the cultural revolution that began in the 1960s, spread in the 1970s, took a beating under Reagan in the 1980s, and again with Bush I and Bush II, and that came back strong in 2008.

Obama’s reelection in 2012 is a victory for grassroots democracy of the kind that appeared in the streets and in the parks of Chicago in 1968 during the Democratic National Convention and that literally took a beating from Mayor Daley’s police. That old Democratic Party is gone.

The Occupy Wall Street Movement played a crucial role in the reelection of Obama because it made Americans aware of social, economic, and political inequalities and injustices. It helped us to see that Romney belonged to the party of the 1%, the party that would like to cut social security, go back to the greed feed of the Bush years, and let citizens fend for themselves without government help in the wake of unemployment, storms such as Sandy, and human-made disasters, too.

Watching it all unfold from California felt pretty good on Election Day. We may not tip the scales, or count in the political balance of things, but we know how to vote, whom to vote for, and we don’t swing back and forth. We want Obamacare; we want legal weed; we want same sex marriages to be lawful; we want the government to help the poor, the needy, the homeless and the hungry, just as Roosevelt’s government helped Americans in the Depression of the 1930s.

In fact, Californians voted for Governor Jerry Brown’s measure to increase the state sales tax and to levy higher taxes on people making over $250,000 a year. The funds are earmarked for education where they’re definitely needed.

I don’t know if California is the dog that wags the tail of the nation, or the rest of the country is the dog and California the tail it wags. Do we start trends or do we finish them? It’s not clear, though I hope that the rest of the country begins to like and to accept the idea of taxing the rich and the super-rich. It’s about time.

Obama’s reelection is only the beginning. The hard work of transforming the nation lies ahead. We’ve got to stop war, stop Wall Street greed, stop corporations from funding politicians, stop old conservative white men from bullying and beating up their own sons and daughters, nephews and nieces.

Hey, there’s as much of a generation gap now as there was in 1968, though today it’s clearer which way the winds are blowing, and clearer, too, that history is on the side of youth and change, not on the side of the Mitt Romney’s and the Karl Rove’s of the world.

[Jonah Raskin is the author of American Scream, The Radical Jack London and Rock ‘n’ Roll Women and a frequent contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : Richard Seymour's 'American Insurgents'

Opposing the eagle’s talons

"And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land." -- Mark Twain

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / September 4, 2012

[American Insurgents: A Brief History of American Anti-Imperialism, by Richard Seymour (2012: Haymarket Books); Paperback; 230 pp.;  $17.]

When my book The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground was published in 1997, at least one of its critics challenged my use of the terms imperialism and its opposite, anti-imperialism. These terms, he wrote, were specific to a time and no longer relevant.

My response was simple. These words would be irrelevant only when there were no more imperialist nations. Fifteen years and two wars and occupations later, these words are part of the general discourse and the concept of imperialism is considered by those who champion it and those who oppose it.

A book titled American Insurgents: A Brief History of American Anti-Imperialism, by Richard Seymour, is a recent and important addition to this discourse. Seymour, who also wrote The Liberal Defence of Murder wherein he discusses the currently popular humanitarian rationale for imperial intervention, provides the reader of American Insurgents with a historical survey of the antiwar and anti-imperialist efforts throughout U.S. history.

Within this discussion, Seymour includes religious and feminist opposition; leftist and conservative; and various coalitions of all of the aforementioned manifestations.

From the beginning of the book, it becomes clear how fundamental racism is to the U.S. mission of Empire. If it weren’t for the historical fact of African slavery in the U.S. this would not be a cause for special consideration, since most European empires utilize racism and racial superiority as reasoning for their empires.

However, the special history of men and women of African descent in the United States makes the fact of racism in the U.S. pursuit of empire especially heinous and unusual. In addition, the internalized racism of most U.S. whites, even in the anti-imperialist movement, often made alliances across the color line difficult. Consequently, this limited the effectiveness of these movements.

According to Seymour, it wasn’t until the movement against the U.S. war in Vietnam that white and black Americans worked together in a substantial way to oppose the U.S. Empire. Even though the links between the racism of slavery and U.S. Empire had been made earlier, it was not until the anti-Vietnam war movement acknowledged and learned from the civil rights and black liberation movements in the United States that the union of black and white made a difference.

While Seymour does discuss the libertarian and paleoconservative elements of the anti-imperialist movement in the U.S. -- even praising the role those elements have played in the past 20 years with the website Antiwar.com and other endeavors -- he focuses primarily on the left and pacifist elements. Given the predominance of groups with these sentiments in the movement throughout history, this makes sense. Although a longer discussion of the conservative side of the movement would have been useful, its absence does not detract from the book.

Addressing a discussion very familiar among those to the left of anybody in the Democratic Party, Seymour provides an ultimately tragic history of the role Democrats have played in diverting and destroying anti-imperialist sentiment.

It was during the Spanish-American War that the future Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan would oppose that adventure and align with the Anti-Imperialist League most famous for the membership of Mark Twain, John Dewey, Samuel Gompers, and Andrew Carnegie. In 1900, the League would hitch its star to Bryan’s candidacy. He lost to the empire-builder McKinley, rendering the League essentially moot.

A remarkably similar situation exists today, except that the candidate of the liberals in the Iraq and Afghanistan antiwar movement won the election. Of course, I mean Barack Obama. As Seymour points out (and as most everyone knows), the war in Afghanistan saw an escalation soon after Obama’s inauguration and the occupation of Iraq by the U.S. continues, albeit with considerably less bloodshed.

Efforts to build a movement against a possible war on Iran have failed to excite everyone but the most dedicated pacifists and anti-imperialists, while U.S./NATO military and intelligence operations against the regimes of Gaddafi in Libya and Assad in Syria have even been tacitly supported by some in the antiwar movement.

It is my belief that a good part of the reason for the disintegration of the movement against the war in Iraq has to do with that movement’s politics. Seymour agrees, pointing out that the millions willing to hit the streets to oppose the war when George Bush was president have not even called their Congressperson now that a Democrat is in the White House.

The presence of Democratic Party allies on the coordinating committee of the largest antiwar network combined with the acquiescence of former Communist Party members to the Democrats' agenda ensured this disintegration. There was never a genuine anti-imperialist politics that guided the majority of the movement. That fact explains not only the belated opposition to the Afghanistan occupation but also the seeming refusal to address the belligerent role played by Israel in the wars against Muslim and Arab nations and peoples.

Any future antiwar movement must keep the Democratic Party at an arm’s length. Organizing amongst those who vote Democrat makes sense. Taking money and leadership from donors and operatives dedicated to the party’s domination of left-leaning politics doesn’t. In fact, as Seymour makes clear in his history of U.S. anti-imperialist movements, doing so is suicide for the movement in question. The Democrats cannot be anti-imperialist because they are essential to the very empire anti-imperialists oppose.

In the weeks and months ahead, as the nations of the Middle East remain in turmoil and Washington, Tel Aviv, and various European capitals debate how they want to control the region, the need for an anti-imperialist movement will grow. If we are to avoid making mistakes already made in the past, American Insurgents becomes essential reading.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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Ronnie Dugger : LBJ, The Texas Observer & Me

Former Texas Observer editor Ronnie Dugger with President Lyndon Johnson. Photo by Yoichi Yokamoto / Courtesy LBJ Library / Texas Observer.
LBJ, The Texas Observer & Me

None of us knew it yet, but we Americans were about to be trapped in the history that Lyndon Johnson would make.

By Ronnie Dugger / The Texas Observer / June 6, 2012

Ronnie Dugger, founding editor of The Texas Observer, will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, June 8, from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the web. The show will be rebroadcast on WFTE in Scranton and Mt. Cobb, PA, Sunday, June 10, at 10 a.m. (EDT). After broadcast, all Rag Radio interviews are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

[This article was originally published by The Texas Observer on August 21, 2008, and was reposted at The Rag Blog the next day.]

The confrontation between Lyndon Johnson on one side and The Texas Observer and me on the other arrived on its own terms at his ranch in the Hill Country in 1955.

He was the senior United States senator from Texas and the new majority leader of the Democrats in the Senate. He had developed his concept of journalism as the editor of his college paper sucking up to the college president, and by 1955 he was hell-bent on the presidency.

A group of national liberal Democrats and I, chosen as editor, had launched the Observer the preceding December. I had been editor of my high school and college newspapers, a sportswriter, columnist, an occasional correspondent for the San Antonio Express-News, and a hanger-out with Edward R. Murrow’s boys at CBS News in London when I was studying in England. Johnson was 47; I was 25.

None of us knew it yet, but we Americans were about to be trapped in the history that Lyndon Johnson would make, and I was about to be trapped in his persona and career. He was not an idealist, but he served ideals when it suited and expressed him. He was not a reactionary, but he fanned reaction when it helped him advance himself.

As I wrote in my 1982 book about him, “Lyndon Johnson was rude, intelligent, shrewd, charming, compassionate, vindictive, maudlin, selfish, passionate, volcanic and cold, vicious and generous. He played every part, he left out no emotion; in him one saw one’s self and all the others. I think he was everything that is human. The pulsing within him, his energy, will, daring, guile, and greed for power and money, were altogether phenomenal, a continuous astonishment.”

Ahead of us lay his ascension to the presidency after the assassination of John Kennedy and his calamitous Vietnam presidency, but also his presidency of Medicare, Medicaid, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, Head Start, federal aid for the education of the poor, bilingual education, affirmative action, and the establishment of public radio and television.


Lyndon was the driven son of an ambitious, all-empowering mother and a failed liberal politician who made it no higher than elected membership in the Texas House of Representatives. After a lot of hell-raising, Lyndon, following his mother’s lead, took $100 from his folks and enrolled at Southwest Texas State Teachers’ College in San Marcos. The 700 students there came from the farms and towns in the area. They were almost all white, only a few Mexican-American.

Already aiming to be president, Lyndon was set on getting power even in school, and having watched his father, he knew how to try and how not to try for it. Since he got not another nickel from his parents, he had to work his way through Southwest Texas, but after a stint janitoring around the campus, he simply strode into the office of Cecil Evans, the president of the school, and talked his way into a slightly better job.

Walking on campus with his cousin Ava, Lyndon divulged to her his theory of how to get ahead. “The first thing you want to do,” he told her, “is to know people -- and don’t play sandlot ball; play in the big leagues ...get to know the first team.”

“Why, Lyndon,” she exclaimed, “I wouldn’t dare to go up to President Evans’ office.”

“That’s where you want to start,” he told her.

“I knew there was only one way to get to know him, and that was to work for him directly,” Johnson told me later in the White House. For most of his time at Southwest Texas, he was special assistant to the president’s secretary, with his desk next to the secretary’s. This paid him $37.50 a month, but he wanted to be editor of the student paper because that would pay him another $30.

In his first signed editorial in the student paper, the College Star, Lyndon rebuked fellow students-- “celebrities,” he called them -- who were using the college bulletin board for personal messages. The board “must be kept free for school matters,” he wrote, of course thereby pleasing Cecil Evans. Lyndon “knew how to ingratiate himself,” as one of the English teachers there said, and when the student council made him editor of the Star, he demonstrated further that he would use the paper as a tool for personal advancement. Profiling his own boss, Lyndon wrote: “Dr. Evans is greatest as a man,” what with “his depth of human sympathy... unfailing cheerfulness, geniality, kind firmness,” and so on.

Throughout his career on the make, Johnson cottoned up to selected powerful political leaders, both accommodating and abetting them, and thus predictably becoming a favored protégé. He did this, for example, with House Speaker Sam Rayburn, President Roosevelt, and Sen. Richard Russell, as well as with business leaders such as contractors George and Herman Brown. In flattering Dr. Evans in the college paper that he edited, he was just warming up his game of protegeship through the opportunities provided him by his temporary status as a journalist.



In 1955, Rayburn and Johnson, the Democratic Party’s bosses over the two branches of the distant Congress, were gigantic figures in one-party Texas politics. The Democrats in Texas were venomously divided between the “loyal Democrats” -- also called national Democrats, who generally favored the policies advanced by Roosevelt and Truman -- and the reactionary governor, Allan Shivers, and his fellow segregationists and conservatives, who had total control of the state Democratic Party.

The previous October, a group of about 100 “loyal,” that is, national, Democrats in Texas, sensing that Shivers and his followers would go for Eisenhower for president in 1956 (as they did), gathered in Austin to found a liberal journal and asked me to edit it.

They knew, of course, that my views were liberal. They had some knowledge of my years of reporting on the thoroughly corrupt Texas Legislature in The Daily Texan, the student paper at the University of Texas in Austin, and my year as editor there championing racial integration, repeal of the oil depletion allowance, and other liberal causes. For a year my columns from abroad, laced with some of my policy opinions, had run in the San Antonio daily. A speech I had given to the Houston Rotary Club advocating, among other things, national health insurance, had provoked the physicians in the club to issue an outraged written objection.

Most of the liberals who had assembled in the hotel downtown, however, appeared to want a party organ, its editorial voice subordinated to the calculations of the national Democrats in Texas. My models for reporting were: the great muckrakers; Ed Murrow; James Reston. My idea of journalism included standing enough apart from government and political parties to report independently of them and to criticize any institution when that was called for. Although party organs have their place, I did not want to work on one.

Acting through Jack Strong, a lawyer in East Texas, the liberals offered me the editorship on the Friday before the Monday when I was leaving for Corpus Christi to work on a shrimp boat and jump ship in Mexico, eventually to write a novel about the Mexicans who (then as now) were wading, swimming, and drowning in the Rio Grande in search of work.

That night I batted out a long letter to the group addressed to Mrs. R.D. Randolph, one of the group’s leaders who was an heiress to the Kirby lumber fortune in East Texas, outlining what sorts of stories I would want the Observer to investigate and what sorts of editorial crusades we likely would launch, but also my position on a party organ. Addressing the group in the hotel downtown, I told them I was not interested in editing a party organ, but I would stay and edit the new journal, provided I had exclusive control of all the editorial content. The paper’s publisher could fire me at any time for any reason, but as long as I was the editor, I would determine the editorial content.

This arrangement, which protects the journalists and the journalism from politics or the business of publishing, I later, as Observer publisher until 1994, explicitly ceded to every editor who succeeded me.

Bob Eckhardt, the great legislator of my generation in Texas and soon to become one of my closest friends, told me later that a fierce debate occurred after I left the hotel. He said that Mark Adams, a New Dealer and a yeoman printer, said that “if ever a rattlesnake rattled before he struck, Dugger has.” Mark, who became my first printer at the Observer, denied saying it.

But they accepted my terms, and as we prepared to begin, I settled on a motto for the front-page masthead, Thoreau’s “The one great rule of composition is to speak the truth,” and wrote a policy credo that contained the sentence, “We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it.”


I had no sting out for Johnson, far from it. While a student at UT, I had worked downtown in Austin as a reporter and news announcer for his and Lady Bird’s radio station, KTBC. His senatorial office, that is, he, had helped me get a job in Washington one summer in the division of international organizations at the Department of State. Returning from abroad, I had applied unsuccessfully for a job on his Senate staff. I learned that Horace Busby, one of his top advisers, had said to him something like, “Ronnie’s not our kind of guy,” but I didn’t know that for many years.

The first year or so at the Observer, I was the only reporter and editor, and we had one subscription person. The founding group watched quietly as I did my best to begin to wreak havoc on racism, corruption, poverty, discrimination, and the rancidness of the plutocratic ideals blatted forth by the allegedly Democratic Gov. Allan Shivers.

When I reported the racial murders of two black children in Mayflower, Texas, near Tyler, I was told that one of the Observer founders, Franklin Jones Sr., a very successful plaintiff’s lawyer in Marshall, exploded profanely on seeing my photograph of the body of one of the dead children on the front page: “Here I am working my ass off getting subscriptions for the Observer, and Dugger sends us pictures of dead Negroes all over the front page.” But if Franklin did say that, or something like it, he said nothing to me.

A new Democratic National Committee member from Texas had to be chosen, and it became known that Sen. Johnson had exerted his power to achieve the selection for that honor of the reactionary and racist Lt. Gov. Ben Ramsey, who presided as the dictator over the Texas Senate to the purring pleasure, protection, and profit of every corporate fat cat in the state, the oilmen most of all. In editorials, I damned Johnson to hell and back for it.

Johnson had been opposing the Texas liberals -- on Ben Ramsey, by effectively favoring conservative Price Daniel over the liberal Ralph Yarborough for governor, and in other ways -- to get Texas reactionaries behind him, or at least to quiet them down, for his candidacy for president, which Rayburn and he would soon make public.

Nearly all of us at the Observer and all our readers were in agreement on a new drive to build a grassroots uprising of the liberal and populist Democrats to throw Ramsey and his ilk -- Shivers, Sen. Daniel, the lot of them -- into the Republican Party where they belonged. Obviously a Democratic Party answering to well-organized Democrats in the cities directly challenged and would at least diminish the boss-rule powers that Rayburn and Johnson exercised and enjoyed, and Johnson went to calling all of us involved in this organizing effort “the redhots.”


At some point that fall, with the Ramsey controversy smoking, I received a phone call that Sen. Johnson would like to see me, and would I call on him at the ranch at a certain hour on a certain afternoon. I had never been out there. After wheeling my family’s 1948 Chevrolet, which we called the Green Hornet, through the Pedernales River muscling itself shallowly over Johnson’s low-water bridge, I pulled up in front of his grand spread and saw that he was swimming in the pool, off to the right there. We greeted, nodding, and for some time I shifted from one foot to the other by the pool, feeling rather high in the air, as he continued his swim and, desultorily, we talked.


Toweling off and sitting us down on the pool furniture, cocking his long face toward me, Sen. Johnson asked me:

“Ronnie, what’s the circulation of your paper?”

“Oh, about 6,000.”

“Stick with me and we’ll make it 60,000,” Johnson said.

I knew at once what he meant. “Stick with me” meant support his policies and decisions, about Ben Ramsey and anything else, celebrate his sagacity and wisdom in all that I wrote about him, and support his presidential ambitions; “and we’ll make it 60,000” meant that in return, he would employ his standing, power, and connections to build up the Observer. The one great rule of composition would be to promote Lyndon Johnson. The Observer would be not a party organ, but a Johnson pipe organ that his nod could cause to bellow forth with Wagnerian splendor

The senior senator from Texas and the Democratic majority leader of the U.S. Senate had called me out here to propose straightforwardly that the Observer and I replace journalistic integrity with loyalty to him. He was trying to bribe me and The Texas Observer, or, if this was not to be a bribe, the deal -- the secret understanding -- the quid pro quo, obedient loyalty and feigned adulation in return for the other’s use of his power on your behalf, would have been not different from a bribe by a dime.

Johnson’s problem was, he would soon make public his campaign for the presidency. He knew the Observer was a novelty, conspicuous in reactionary Texas, reporting long-covered-up events and expressing unpredictable opinions; he knew that national newspeople, traipsing to and from his ranch from Austin, would often drop by the Observer offices for inside dope or just for the devilment of it, as in fact they were to do for the rest of the decade; and he knew that if his sellouts to the Texas yahoos and rednecks on the way to the White House became clear to the national Democrats, they might not nominate him for president.

My problem was how to get out of there. I could have just said, “I’m sorry, senator, no deal,” but this was not my style while practicing rebellious journalism in Texas. I extended myself and taxed my fellow Observer reporters to be fair and accurate, both in order to be fair and accurate and in self-defense, although, that done, in editorials I let miscreants and villains have it straight on.

In person, in my life day after day, I was carefully polite and civil with all parties. If I was formally polite to a fault, well, it was a kind of protective coloration. On this afternoon with Johnson, I realized that the Observer and I had been misgauged and underestimated, but that for the rest of the occasion my part was to avoid any accusative remarks or implications, any incautious, offensive, or popinjay responses, and to graciously take my leave as soon as that might appear mannerly.

Sitting there side by side on plastic chaise lounges -- someone brought us cold drinks, I believe lemonades -- we talked along gingerly for maybe an hour. Well, senator, it’s an honor to have met you, and I appreciate your having me out -- don’t want to overstay, I’d better be getting back to town -- I said something like this, starting to rise to head back to my Green Hornet.

No, he said, why don’t you stay to dinner. No trouble, Bird’ll have plenty.

Although I had nothing more to say to him, I had not said no, and he had something more to say to me.

After an interim during which nothing happened, I sat down to dinner in a half-dark chamber at the center of the Johnsons’ well-staged home with Lady Bird Johnson and Johnson’s personal secretary, Mary Margaret Wiley, who had been my managing editor in high school in San Antonio when I had edited the Brackenridge Times. Mary Margaret is a beautiful person. While I had perceived no romantic flash in our friendship and work together in high school, we admired and respected each other; I was glad she was there.

As Johnson sat down at my left at the head of his table, though, I realized, silently appalled, “My God, the subject is at hand, all I can do is explain journalism to him as if he actually doesn’t know what it is.” If the situation had not been unbelievable, it would have been incredible.

I struck forth uncertainly, as if we were dining on a pitching log, addressing only Johnson to describe, as best I could, the role of journalism, the Fourth Estate, separation from government, providing facts and explanations, democracy’s inexpendable need for an independently informed electorate. I may even have quoted Jefferson.&

I might as well have been talking to the log I was riding. Johnson said to me, No, the thing a smart young reporter does, and should do, is survey the field of candidates, pick the best one, and enter into a deal to help that one win whatever office and prevail in whatever controversy, subordinating his reporting and comment to the interests of the candidate.

Johnson was far too smart to really think that is what journalism is or should be. He was feigning adherence to a theory of journalism, a blend of his own practice on his college paper and his political strategy of protegeship upended for the advance of his juniors, that might work somewhat, with me and others, as a disguise for his use of journalists to serve his will to power.

Later it became embarrassingly clear that he had induced some of the leading reporters and columnists in Texas and the nation to make some such a deal with him or assent to some such understanding: Leslie Carpenter, William S. White, Joseph Alsop, some of the authors of those surprising articles in the big magazines in the late 1950s promoting the lanky Lyndon Johnson of Texas for president of the United States.

I remember (I am not referring, for this essay, to my notes on all of this) that neither Lady Bird nor Mary Margaret said one word all evening. Oh, perhaps one or two, but I don’t remember even one. They sat silent and still as good women of old were supposed to during an argument among the men. Yet both Bird and Mary Margaret were highly intelligent.

How strange the evening must have seemed to them, their guy trying to turn a journalist into his secretly bought public promoter, their senator and this younger guy battling over irreconcilable opinions, completely missing each other, reaching no agreement.

Many’s the time since that evening there has replayed on the stage in my mind a vivid re-seeing of what happened upon my departure that evening. I am five or six feet away from Lyndon and me, watching the two of us illuminated by the ranch-house lighting locked in animated argument in front of his house at his low wire fence, he inside the fence, I outside, our knees braced against it and each other, intensely disputing directly into each other’s faces a few inches apart, he leaning first a little into my face, and then a little more, and then so much my head is bent back, and I shift my heels backward to be able to stand up straight to him again.


My first associate editor at the Observer, Billy Lee Brammer, a reporter on the Austin daily (and later the author of the classic Texas novel The Gay Place), started showing up unbidden evenings and helping me clip the 3-foot-high mounds of the rotgut Texas daily newspapers of that era, then quit downtown and came on staff. He flourished in reporting Texas politics for us, most memorably “the Port Arthur story” and the Austin lobby’s junket for Texas legislators to the Kentucky Derby, until Johnson hired him onto his Washington staff.

The liberal Democratic organizing of the ’50s caught hold in the cities, especially in Houston and San Antonio. In the 1956 Democratic state convention, over the furious objections of Johnson and his operatives there, the delegates elected Mrs. Randolph, who had become the de facto publisher of the Observer, to the Democratic National Committee.

Four years later, favorite son Johnson trounced his opponents in Texas and swept into that year’s state convention, where he had Mrs. Randolph replaced. In one of these conventions, Mrs. Randolph told me, Johnson sent her word asking her to call on him, and when she did he asked expansively, “Well, Mrs. Randolph, what can I do for you?” She replied: “Nothing.”

Texas labor leaders Fred Schmidt and Hank Brown told me that, when they lobbied the Democrats’ Senate leader in Washington, he railed against the Observer and me, on some specified occasion with a copy of the journal on his desk. Mrs. Randolph said that when he asked her to get me to do something or other she replied, “Talk to him.” At least I could think, when for example I wrote a series of columns on the horrors of nuclear weapons, or during the Vietnam war when I ran a headline across the front page, “Will Johnson Bomb China?” that the man himself might be reading it.

During one state Democratic convention, I was running tandem some with Mark Sullivan, the Southwest bureau chief for Time-Life, for which I was a stringer. Mark and I approached Johnson on the convention floor for an interview. Johnson barked out that he wouldn’t talk to us with me there because “that boy prints lies about me.” We left him -- or at least I did; I am not sure what Mark did.

That was the first and has been the only time in my life when I have directly experienced from another person the will to ruin me. The Time-Life connection was enabling me to hold up my financial end with my wife and children despite my annual Observer salary of $6,500. With this one ferocious remark to my boss at Time-Life, Johnson surely meant to kill me professionally. Deep in my convention story in the Observer, I reported the scene and what Johnson had said about me. I was deeply offended, and a year or two had to pass before my anger about it subsided. But Time-Life stood by me (in fact in 1961, after a lunch with Henry Luce, I was invited to join the staff of Time, which I did not).

In 1959, preparing a special focus for the Observer on Johnson’s candidacy for president, I asked him for an interview in Washington, and he granted it. I remember that on my way into his regal office as majority leader, I saw Mary Margaret at her desk, and we exchanged cautious smiles and slight nods when my eyes briefly met hers as I passed. The interview went well enough. This time I got the full Johnson treatment of persuasion, charm, raillery, and menace -- stories, brags, ridicules of his colleagues, jokes, hands on my knees -- again and again the leaning into my face.

Perhaps I should also record that, in the early 1960s when Johnson was vice president, I became a correspondent in Texas for the then-liberal Washington Post, and I intuitively suspect on the basis of the facts and context of what happened, but I have no evidence, that Johnson used his extremely close ties to that newspaper’s executives to have them eventually drop me.

The Observer never endorsed Johnson for president except in his contest with Barry Goldwater in 1964. In columns, I was for Estes Kefauver in 1956, Averell Harriman in 1960.

Except for an oblique column in the Observer full of obscurities after the confrontation at the ranch, this is the first report I have written about these events since they occurred half a century ago. Initially there was the off-the-record problem, but that’s gone now. I have not wanted to write about it, too, because how could I without being perceived as possibly self-serving? I relate them here now because the Observer editor asked me to.


In November 1965, I was one of the eight speakers who addressed the first massive demonstration against Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam war, and afterward I typed out a copy of my speech and sent it to President Johnson (the Observer ran the text of it). Johnson had George Reedy, then his press secretary, send me a note that “the President asked me to tell you he seeks no wider war,” the first time I saw or heard him hide behind that lying bromide.

In 1967, having signed a contract with W.W. Norton for a book on Johnson, I wrote him asking him for biographical interviews and telling him that I intended a fair and accurate book worthy of the attention of serious people, and he gave me extensive interviews in the White House in late 1967 and 1968. He introduced me around the White House as “the leading liberal in the Southwest.” Discounting that as the Texas blarney it was, he had given off accusing me, or the Observer, of printing lies about him.

He tried to bring you into his field of overmastering personal power; that failing, he tried to ruin you; that failing, well, OK, he would deal with you again. In my last interview with him in the White House, on March 23, 1968, we were carrying along merrily. He was telling me a story when he suddenly interrupted himself and said, “Now, Ronnie, I’m giving you all these great stories, I want a friendly book!” I leaned forward and began, “Well, now, Mr. President -- ” but he shut me off and continued with the story.

He was so charming, engaging, such an engrossing person, funny, fun to be with, such a good raconteur, I did not remember that he had said that until I was outside the White House that night. I went on back in and spoke with his press secretary then, my old friend George Christian, whom I had reported alongside years earlier in the offices of the International News Service in the Texas Capitol.

I reminded George I had told Johnson I intended to write a fair and accurate book worthy of the interest of serious people, but that during our interview that evening he had said he wanted “a friendly book.” Oh, hell, George said, you know Lyndon, he didn’t mean anything by it. Maybe George was right, but “Yes, he did,” I said, “and please tell him from me, on that point, no deal.”

The next day, I suspected pro forma in light of what had occurred, I asked that my next interview with the president be scheduled, and then I waited some days in the Hay-Adams Hotel across Lafayette Park from the White House, where I was staying. No call came. A week later Johnson quit the presidency. Another week later, he began his interviews with Doris Kearns.


The Observer maintained its integrity and its independence of Lyndon Johnson before and during his presidency. He was who and what he was, the Observer and I were what and who we were and are, and this is the story of Lyndon Johnson, The Texas Observer, and me.


[Ronnie Dugger, founding editor of the Texas Observer and, later its publisher, was also co-founder of the Alliance for Democracy. Dugger is the author of Dark Star, Hiroshima Reconsidered (World, 1967), Our Invaded Universities (W.W. Norton, 1973), The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson (W.W. Norton, 1982), and On Reagan (McGraw Hill, 1983), and has written for Harper's Magazine, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Progressive, and other periodicals.]

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Ted McLaughlin : Dems are Better for the Stock Market

Chart from Bloomberg Businessweek.
Against conventional wisdom:
Stock market does
better under Democrats

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / February 27, 2012

The Republicans claim to be the party that best benefits Big Business and Wall Street. And Wall Street (along with the corporate moguls of Big Business) seems to have bought into that idea -- so much so that they are donating millions of dollars to super PACs supporting Republican candidates.

In January, the Republican super PACs revealed they had received about $47 million -- much of it from the finance and investment industry (Wall Street). From these numbers, it is quite obvious that Wall Street believes it would be best served by returning a Republican to the White House.

But this conventional wisdom that says the stock market is best served by having a Republican in the White House is simply not true. And it's not just a little bit untrue, it's a whole lot untrue. Bloomberg News took a look at how the stock market has performed under both Republican and Democratic presidents. What they found was that the stock market performed much better under Democratic presidents. They looked at the last 50 years, since the presidency of John Kennedy -- and this is what they found:

• The sum of $1,000 "invested in a hypothetical fund that tracks the Standard & Poor's 500 index only when Democrats are in the White House would have been worth $10,920" just a few days ago. That's a gain of about 992% in 23 years.
• That same $1,000 "invested in a fund that followed the S&P 500 under Republican presidents... would have grown to $2,087 on the day George W. Bush left office." That's a gain of about 109% in 28 years.
• Even adding in the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower doesn't bring the Republicans near the gain experienced under Democrats. That would increase the return under Republicans to $4,796. That's a gain of about 380% in 36 years -- far less than half of the gain under Democrats in only 23 years
• The annualized return for the 23 years under Democratic presidents is about 11%.
• If that $1,000 were invested in a fund following the Dow Jones Industrial Average (instead of the S&P 500), the return under Democratic presidents would be $7,550. That's a gain of about 655% over the 23 years.
• If that $1,000 were invested in a fund following the Dow Jones Industrial Average under Republican presidents, the return would be $2,716. That's a gain of about 172% over the 28 years.

This blows conventional thinking out of the water. We have always been told that the Democrats were better for the poor and working classes, while the Republicans were better for the investor class. But these figures show that Democratic administrations are better for everyone -- including the rich.

So why do the Wall Street bankers favor the Republicans? Because they aren't as bright as many think they are. They are only thinking about tax policy -- not in what is better for them in the long run. They think the lower taxes for the rich touted by Republicans would result in them having more money than under Democratic presidents with the current tax rate. But is that true?

Let's examine the figures using the current 35% top tax rate for Democratic administrations and a 28% tax rate (proposed by Romney) for Republican administrations, and see which would be best:

• The S&P 500 figure under Democrats had a gain of $9,920. Taxed at a maximum rate of 35%, this would leave the investor with $6448 after taxes.
• The S&P 500 figure under Republicans had a gain of $1,087. Taxed at the smaller rate of 28% this would leave the investor with $783 after taxes.
• The DJIA figure under Democrats had a gain of $6,550. Taxed at a rate of 35% this would leave the investor with $4,257.50 after taxes.
• The DJIA figure under Republicans had a gain of $1,716. Taxed at the smaller rate of 28% this would leave the investor with $1,235.52 after taxes.

As is easily apparent, Wall Street investors would be much better off with a Democrat in the White House -- even if they had to pay a higher tax rate. They would still have more money in their bank accounts. And this would be true even if the Democrats eliminated the 15% capital gains tax rate (the rate that current stock gains would be taxed at).

The fact is that all classes in our society would be better off financially with Democrats in the White House -- whether poor, rich, or somewhere in between. That leads me to wonder -- why would anyone vote Republican?

[Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger. Read more articles by Ted McLaughlin on The Rag Blog.]

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Jack A. Smith : Are Labor and the Democrats in an Abusive Relationship?

President Obama and the AFL-CIO's Trumka: Putting on a happy face? Photo from AP.
An abusive relationship?
The labor movement and the Democrats

A union movement that has tethered itself to the Democratic Party since the mid-1930s won't be directly critical because it doesn't know where else to go.

By Jack A. Smith / The Rag Blog / February 15, 2012

New anti-union legislation was passed by Congress earlier this month despite a Democratic majority in the Senate and Barack Obama in the White House.

It's one more indication that America's unions are over a barrel. The leadership of the Democratic Party -- which is dependent on union support and money, especially this presidential election year -- knows of labor's plight, says it sympathizes, and goes off whistling an idle tune.

President Obama and the Democratic House and Senate leadership nod with compassion but do virtually nothing when the unions seek support for the removal of decades of anti-union legislation.

This has been going on for a long time. It is the main reason why the rich United States has the weakest protections for working people of all the wealthy democracies in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and of many developing countries as well.

It is bad enough when the party known as "labor's friend" ignores past injustices, or even refuses to act on a labor priority (such as the Employee Free Choice Act). It's another matter when Democratic votes make it possible to perpetrate new anti-labor injuries, as took place February 6, 2012, when the Senate passed the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reauthorization bill over union objections.

The worst part of the new legislation weakened bargaining rights for workers in the aviation and rail industries by increasing from 35% to 50% the number of worker signatures required to allow an election for union recognition. It was strongly backed by the airline industry.

Senate Democrats called the final version of the bill the best "compromise" possible with the reactionary House measure. "That’s a step back, not a compromise,” commented International Association of Machinists president Tom Buffenbarger, a sentiment shared by many unions.

The Senate vote was 70-20. Only 15 Democrats voted against the measure, as did five republicans. Three of the Democrats voting "no" were from the Northeast: Blumenthal (CT), Gillibrand (NY), and Leahy (VT).

The bill allocates $63.3 billion to the agency through September 2015, but it wasn't even necessary to pass the present measure at all. FAA reauthorization has been extended for the last four years by temporary funding, and this could have been continued until the labor restrictions were excised.

The "do-nothing" Tea Party-infused House passed the bill February 3, 248-169. A respectable 157 Democrats voted against the anti-labor law, joined by 12 Republicans. Some two dozen Blue Dog (conservative) Democrats voted in favor.

After the Senate vote, the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA declared: "We will not forget, and we will continue to build a movement of the 99% to stand up and fight back." The union praised the Democrats who stood up for collective bargaining, saying they "should be lauded as heroes." But they said nothing about the majority of Senate Democrats who made the legislation possible.

The labor movement was either quiet or moderately critical of the bill after the vote, even though the expectation was that President Obama would sign the measure into law.

The reason? This is an election year, and a union movement that has tethered itself to the Democratic Party since the mid-1930s won't be directly critical because it doesn't know where else to go. So it will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a party that does all the taking and hardly any giving.

Labor sees it the way most liberals, progressives, Latinos, African Americans, and average Democratic voters see it: The Republicans are much worse in terms of the interests of all working families. There are only two plausible parties, both entirely devoted to the ruling elite, but one is the relatively lesser "evil" to the other. That's how the American political system is rigged by the 1%.

What this means is that the Democrats need be only half-heartedly supportive of the union movement at best, in between periods of indifference, to enjoy labor's abundant campaign contributions and other forms of electoral support. Here's an example:

The draconian anti-labor Taft-Hartley law, passed by Congress 65 years ago, gravely weakened union rights by eviscerating aspects of the New Deal's National Labor Relations Act. There were several occasions over the decades when the Democrats enjoyed control of the White House, Senate and House (such as in the first two years of the Obama government, 2009-10), but the law remains on the books. The unions no longer bring up the issue, knowing that a substantial number of Democratic politicians would rather handle snakes than take on Taft-Hartley.

Given the history of the U.S. labor movement, it's remarkable that it finds itself in this situation, and doesn't at least demand adequate compensation for its generous, unstinting support.

American unions heroically led intensive struggles against oppressive corporate and government policies for many decades starting in the 1880s. They managed to obtain important rights for the workers, from the eight-hour day and paid vacations, to healthcare, pensions, and much more.

Often socialists and communists were in the front ranks of the union struggles and were the most reliable fighters, even as the top leadership of the labor movement gravitated to the right. Left participation was virtually crushed in the late 1940s when the internal purges began, and in the 1950s when the government-backed red hunts erupted throughout the country.

All the left militants were kicked out, except in a few progressive independent unions, and the commanding leadership of the union movement consisted of Cold Warriors and supporters of the Vietnam War who performed services abroad on behalf of Washington's anti-communist crusade.

The leaders discouraged any talk of class struggle and even seemed to ban the use of the term "working class." Even today it's usually "working families" at best, and that all-inclusive egalitarian community known as the "middle class," which seems to include everyone earning between $25 thousand and $250 thousand a year. (Brother can you spare a hundred grand?)

For many decades the labor movement was controlled at the very top by leaders who seemed to work more closely with big business and the government than with the rank and file. The labor movement finally began to break with the flagrant "business unionism" symbolized by the successive leaderships of Samuel Gompers, George Meany and Lane Kirkland when the AFL-CIO elected decent John Sweeney as president of the largest labor federation in 1995. He brought about a few reforms.

Sweeney was succeeded by current president John Trumka -- a Democratic loyalist, of course, but one who from time to time seems interested in a certain degree of "union independence."

The AFL-CIO, Change to Win, and independent unions worked hard for Obama in 2008, and were ecstatic when he was elected. But by 2011 -- following Obama's repeated failures to stick up for working people and the unions -- Trumka began mentioning "independence" more frequently, even hinting that future support might be based on the Democratic Party's actual performance, not its mere lesser "evil" existence.

This year it probably only means withholding funds from a few of the worst Blue Dogs seeking reelection, and perhaps opposing a couple of conservative Democrats in primaries.

But at least it's a limited start, although unions are expected to be entirely silent about Obama's abundant shortcomings toward the workers and oppressed during the campaign. One example among many are the large teacher unions, who oppose the White House education plan but will work hard to get him reelected, as will the entire labor movement.

So far, for all their hundreds of millions of dollars and at least a memory of labor's brave militancy, dramatic strikes and sit-downs, and the righteousness of class struggle, there's not a peep out of the unions about ever launching a serious labor party to represent the interests of the working class, middle class, oppressed minorities, and the poorest sector.

Until something much better comes along -- and if it's not a labor party what is it? -- the union movement seems ready to stick with the middling Democrats for fear of the greater "evil," thus indefinitely prolonging the uncompromised domination of American society by the top 1% and its minions.

This also means that in addition to the long-time wrongs done to the workers' movement that will not be righted, and the pro-worker legislation that will not be fought for by the Democrats, the union movement will be the occasional object of anti-labor shenanigans by its "friends" in Washington as happened this month in the FAA fiasco.

The labor movement is weak these days compared to some earlier periods. But who's to say this will always be the case?

The great labor leader Eugene V. Debs thoroughly understood the extreme problems and serious shortcomings of the union movement, perhaps better than anyone else, and elaborated them all in a 1894 declaration that ends with these words: "Not withstanding all of this, it is today the most vital and potential power this planet has ever known, and its historic mission of emancipating the workers of the world from the thralldom of the ages is as certain of ultimate realization as the setting of the sun."

[Jack A. Smith was editor of the Guardian -- for decades the nation's preeminent leftist newsweekly -- that closed shop in 1992. Smith now edits the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter, where this article was also posted. Read more articles by Jack A. Smith on The Rag Blog.

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Dr. Stephen R. Keister : Democrats, Medicare, and the 'Jaws of Victory'

Jaws: Leaving an opening for the Republicans.
From the jaws of victory...
The Democrats, Medicare and
the 'winning message'

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / June 1, 2011

"In a country well governed poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed wealth is something to be ashamed of." -- Confucius, Analects VIII, c.500 B.C.

I share the great joy of the progressive community at the Democratic victory in the New York 26th District. All of the pundits appearing on TV news, amid the pharmaceutical commercials ad nauseam, inform us that the Democrats have a "winning message" relative to Medicare come 2012. Pause for a moment, please, and consider how in recent years the Democrats have shown an aptitude for grabbing defeat out of the jaws of victory.”

Yes, maintaining Medicare, and Social Security in their present forms is a very inspiring message. But we have some 17 months ahead for the message to be distorted and overwhelmed by the Republican smear machine. We must recall that we are not dealing with a terribly well informed, cognitively alert population.

I have worked in the area of educating the public about single payer health care for some years. At many a seminar I have been approached by a senior citizen who heatedly informs me, "I don't need government health insurance; I have Medicare! " A similar situation exists among many of the elderly who have Medicare Advantage plans and feel that they are on Medicare.

They do not realize that they were conned by slick salesmanship into giving up their Medicare and signing up for a private insurance plan underwritten by the government at 17% more per year cost to the Medicare Trust Fund.

They are unaware that their "benefits" are set by a profit-making insurance company (why have an insurance industry except to profit the owners and stockholders?) who have by slight-of-hand modified their "benefits" in a manner that appears on superficial examination to provide something better than Medicare per se.

They overlook the deductions, the exclusions, the co-pays, that are not inherent in regular Medicare. I wonder how many Medicare Advantage members will have their way paid to the Mayo Clinic or Johns Hopkins should they wish? My regular Medicare does not restrict my choices. Many Medicare Advantage plans do limit choice save within a specified area or to specified doctors or institutions.

In any event, the current health care legislation progressively reduces the payout from the Medicare Trust Fund to private insurance companies for underwriting the Medicare Advantage plans. Rest assured that the Republican spin machine will play on the naive Medicare Advantage customers with the slogan "the Democrats are going to cut your Medicare."

I would hope that the Democrats will immediately take up this discussion and explain in very simple terms that Medicare Advantage is not Medicare and, indeed, in the long run Medicare Advantage plans will worsen the fluidity of the Medicare Trust.

Granted Medicare expenses, when compared to income from the current wage tax, have become excessive, especially in view of the high unemployment. Medicare costs must be reduced. There are many factors involved, but let us begin with a paragraph from Maggie Mahar's book, Money Driven Medicine:

All too often, hospitals employ some of their most sophisticated tools crudely, even callously, in futile end-of-life care. While roughly 80 percent of Americans hope to die at home, 75 percent end their lives in hospitals or nursing homes. Of these, a third die after 10 days in an ICU. This helps explain why roughly one-quarter of all Medicare dollars are spent during the final year of a patient’s life, thanks in part to the cost of drugs and devices that prolong not just life but pain and suffering.

Perhaps this is a place that rational, fearless, public servants can begin cutting expenses. Here are some suggestions:

1. A presidential panel consisting of medical ethicists, perhaps from Georgetown, Princeton, and The New School, joined by specialists in geriatric medicine and internists or family doctors with university connections (pray not Liberty or Pat Roberts universities) to study a rational end of life program to be incorporated into the Medicare law. Of course the Republicans, who turn away from the 45,000 Americans who die each year sans health care insurance, will shout "death panels!" There are situations, however, where we must turn to rational planning and ignore the cries of the idiots.


2. The wage tax must be extended to all income levels and not be arbitrarily cut off for those with an income of $100,000 or thereabouts.


3. A reasonable additional fee must be enacted for Medicare coverage for those with a joint retirement income over $150,000.


4. There must be subsidized medical school tuition for those candidates who contract to do general practice, internal medicine, or pediatrics for a period of 10 years after graduation, while at the same time fees paid by Medicare for physicians in these specialities must be increased, and the disproportionate fees for those in the "invasive specialities" must be reduced to reasonable levels.


5. The payouts of billions in Medicare funds to the pharmaceutical and insurance industries under Medicare Part D must be curtailed.


6. Medicare fraud must be curtailed and we must take a close look at medical equipment companies that advertise extensively on TV. Are all these gadgets necessary?


7. A rational plan for prescription medicine costs, like they have in Canada and Europe, must be enacted as a part of the Medicare law.


8. The cost of procedures must be reviewed. For instance, a CT Scan in the United States costs more than twice what it would cost in most developed nations, and the same can be said for MRI scans. Of course the reason our scans cost more is that every hospital that possibly can has invested in the equipment in the hopes of increasing their profits.
   

In the meantime another player has appeared on the scene. The hospice industry is now being commercialized. Some 40 years ago the hospice movement began to provide humane end-of-life care to those facing death. This was a movement started by compassionate, dedicated volunteers. Happily, we in Erie, Pennsylvania, have one of the outstanding programs in the country.

Now big business has entered the scene and once again will profit from the dying and their grieving families. Read more about this at the Physicians for a National Health Program website. This article is based on a more detailed study in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics. I felt for many years that the predatory burial industry had stretched the limits of decency in the United States but the advance of corporatism into the realm of dying is beyond my ethical comprehension.

Once again ProPublica is at the forefront in exposing the collusion between the pharmaceutical industry and sections of the medical establishment. We never see generic medications advertised on television -- only brand name products, many of which are remakes of older products. Some we see advertised have had limited clinical trials, like the anti-inflammatory medication that was widely marketed several years ago, but was -- after prolonged clinical testing -- found to be a cause of heart disease and is no longer on the market.

Again quoting Money Driven Medicine:

In 2002, when Families USA, a non-profit health care consumer advocacy group, reviewed the financial reports submitted to the SEC by nine of the largest U.S. based pharmaceutical companies, the group's analysis showed drugmakers investing only $19 billion in R & D, while shelling out some $45 billion for marketing, advertising, and administration. Meanwhile the industry pocketed $31 billion in profits.

Finally, our elderly population must be informed -- and then informed once again -- that the Ryan Plan will do away with Medicare as we know it, with its "vouchers" for buying health insurance from private companies. We must remember that no private insurance company is required to insure any specific individual, and that currently private insurance companies do all in their power not to insure the elderly.

So, if an older person is even able to obtain insurance, in all probability with a large deductible, the voucher will be sent directly to the insurance company. Some estimates suggest that, on the average, the individual will be required to spend $6,000 out-of-pocket to supplement the voucher.

I close with a sobering quote from Mahatma Gandhi: " You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees." Let us encourage the average citizen not to fall for the blather of the politicians who are in the pay of the corporations.

[Dr. Stephen R. Keister lives in Erie, Pennsylvania. He is a retired physician who is active in health care reform and is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Dr. Stephen R. Keister on The Rag Blog]

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Larry Ray : Democrats 'On a Wing and a Prayer'

Battered Monarch Butterfly resting in Texas on trip home. Photos from Larry Ray / The Rag Blog.
Getting it on:
Monarchs have a tough lesson
for flighty Democrats

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / November 16, 2010

These photos were taken in Texas recently. They show a battered migrating Monarch butterfly feeding on milkweed nectar and resting after clearly flying in very windy conditions.

Someone suggested that the beaten up butterfly, merely resting on its 5,000 mile migration flight from Canada back to Central Mexico, literally "on a wing and a prayer," could be symbolic of "The Democratic Party after their recent election mauling."

Nice idea, wonderful photos, suggesting strength and determination. But given the Democratic party's recent implosion, if they were scheduled to all move in one direction, like a mass migration, they would argue, delay, fight, and piddle around, and those who actually got airborne would fly an erratic path probably at the wrong time of year to procreate. Which is why the Monarchs do it.

And speaking of procreation, when today's Democrats aren't getting screwed by Republicans they wind up screwing themselves. Even Monarch butterflies are smarter than that.

[Retired journalist Larry Ray is a Texas native and former Austin television news anchor. He also posts at The iHandbill.]

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Sherman DeBrosse : The Puzzle of 2010

Image from StudentHacks.
The puzzle of 2010:
What’s going on with the electorate?

By Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / October 5, 2010

This year's election is marked by a great deal of puzzling behavior. Media people report on the peculiar and shocking things that occur, but they can neither judge nor explain them. Here are some questions that this writer has.

1. Only two years after an economic Pearl Harbor, the majority of voters seem determined to restore the economic and financial policies that wiped out jobs and trillions in savings. The financial system almost melted down; now they want to restore the conditions that made this possible.

2. Most of those who say they will vote Republican insist that the Republicans will not go back to the George W. Bush playbook. They insist on this even after the Republicans tell them this is what they will do and the House Republicans issue a 46-page statement pledging to dismantle financial regulations, extend the tax cuts for the rich, and re-enact other Bush policies.

3. Once the party of “law n’ order,” the Republicans now support Sharron Angle and some others who threaten to take up arms against the federal government if they do not get their way. Not only is sedition ok, but the party of Lincoln also supports nullification efforts in seventeen states. These notions are a threat to the federal union itself, but they seem to arouse little alarm.

4. Many Tea Bag candidates join Sharron Angle in saying it is “hard to justify Social Security” and that Medicare should be phased out. Tea Baggers must think that threats to these benefits will effect people younger than them, but not themselves.

5. Tea Baggers and other Republicans have been demonizing public employees and demanding deep cuts in public employee pensions. Three states have cut the benefits of people already employed, Republicans in other states are talking about big cuts. Yet, public employees and retirees do not seem to be up in arms.

6. In 2008, many independent voters voted for Barack Obama. Now many of them join Republicans in believing he is a Muslim and were born in Kenya. Some of the same people were troubled by the comments of his United Church of Christ pastor, Dr. Jeremiah Wright.

7. The Congressional Budget Office reported that the stimulus plan created 3,300,000 jobs, but a vast number of Americans believe the Republican claim that the stimulus actually destroyed jobs. A common commercial used by House Republican candidates is that the stimulus package actually increased unemployment by 36%.

No facts are presented to back this dishonest and absurd claim, but it is believed. In the third district of Pennsylvania, a car salesman named Mike Kelley seems to be winning the race for Congress with this claim. Maybe this is because we have all learned from experience that car salesmen can be trusted almost all the time.

8. Women plan a major role as Tea Bagger candidates and activists and even claim the title of “feminist” even though their party tried to block legislation assuring equal pay for women and is committed to ending the reproductive rights of women.

All of this defies rational analysis. This is a year of craziness and irrational politics, and not all of these questions can be subjected to rational analysis. Self interest explains some Tea Bagger behavior, but other factors are involved.


Tea Baggers don’t want to help others

By any account, the Tea Baggers make a lot of irrational claims, but at root most of them are operating out of self-interest. Most of them are older than 45 and are more prosperous than the average American. A disproportionate number seem to have Medicare Advantage, and they thought that health care reform would threaten Medicare and Medicare Advantage.

As it turned out, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the reform package extended the life of Medicare. It also made Medicare Advantage more affordable, and this year the average premium goes up only 1%.

The Tea Baggers want to hold on to what they have and fear that Medicare reform and the stimulus will mean higher taxes down the road and that inflation might diminish their savings. This is at least understandable; they’ve got theirs and object to government helping the unemployed and the poor.

To the extent that they are motivated by deep seeded racism and Social Darwinism, we can understand where some of the absurd claims come from.

What is harder to explain is why so many of the unemployed, partially employed, and people threatened with unemployment are so determined to vote Republican? They saw the Republicans block the extension of unemployment benefits. Everyone knows there will not be another stimulus package under a Republican House, and though the GOP now talks about $20 billion credit for small business, it would have been hard not to observe that the Republicans blocked this seven times -- the latest occasion being this past month.

Back to the Gipper. Image from LA Times.

Why voters have repaired to Reaganite orthodoxy

Cultural considerations explain the depth of Tea Bagger hatred for Obama, and they also explain why so many people, whose self interest would best be served by Democrats, have joined the crusade to restore Republican control of Congress. When people are in deep fear and threatened with serious loss, some must find emotionally satisfying solutions to their problems by resorting to the default ideas presented by the culture.

Hence, many people support going back to George W. Bush economics because they embody the main tenets of the market culture that dominated the United States for the last three decades. Americans found the market capitalism ideology of the Ronald Reagan period to be reassuring a guarantee that the American Dream was still open to them. It is an optimistic ideology that is hard to abandon; and it requires total faith.

It is no wonder people shocked by plummeting housing process, unemployment, lost savings would rush back to economic orthodoxy. It alone still held out the certainty of better times, prosperity, and above all emotional security and stasis.


Republicans must deny the depth of the crises of 2007-2008

To cling to Reagan era orthodoxy after 2007-2008, one has to minimize the financial and economic crash of 2007-2008. Republicans cannot say this directly, but they must behave as though the problems of 2007 and 2008 were mere flukes. To admit how deep the financial economic crises really were is to admit that market capitalism failed. Any reality-based outlook promises far less emotional security and fails to offer the certainty many people need. .

Republican arguments depend upon maintaining that the recession was not deep and the financial crisis could have been easily repaired or even was self-correcting. With the premise that little happened in 2007 and 2008, it is possible to claim that the stimulus brought about the unemployment. The argument is, “They spent all that money, and unemployment is even greater.”

Now we are hearing Republicans lump together TARP and stimulus as “TARP/stimulus” and blame both on Obama, even though George W. Bush signed the TARP. On the September 26 Sunday talk shows, the frequently repeated Republican talking point was that TARP was not necessary to save the banks, and not one Republican said it was a Republican measure backed by Mitch McConnell and Speaker-to-Be John Boehner Now they denounce the TARP and blame the Democrats for it.

It may well be that some sort of cognitive dissonance is responsible for the House Republicans saying they want to repeal the entire financial reform bill. Their ideology is based on the idea that only unregulated capitalism will establish prosperity. If they admit that the financial system almost self-destructed, Republicans would be admitting that something was very wrong with the heart of their ideology.

Unregulated capitalism is even more sacred to them than tax breaks for the rich. They may sincerely believe the banks did not need help in 2007-2008, and that the TARP and financial reform are unnecessary.

But one cannot help wondering if a few Republican leaders understand that the continued prosperity of the financial sector requires no restraints on financial gambling and the unspoken guarantee that the federal government will continue to prop up failing banks, a strategy that began with Ronald Reagan.

Stripping away financial reform serves the needs of the blind ideologues as well as the cynical fellows who understand what their masters on Wall Street need.


Ideas have consequences

Even bad ideas have consequences. Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels said that people will believe anything that is repeated often enough. That is true, and it explains why voters believe so many big lies these days. But the belief is even deeper and widespread when the lie fits a mindset that has been dominant for decades.

Republican propaganda neatly fits the market capitalism ideology that has been dominant since the Eighties. Democrats, on the other hand, have not offered a consistent narrative since the New Deal Coalition fell apart in the late 1960s. Moreover, they seem clueless when it comes to message control and the impact of cognitive science on politics. Political narratives are not built over night, and the Democrats now seem almost defenseless.

For two decades after World War II, Americans believed in regulated capitalism and using state power to help others and improve community. Equality was a goal, and taking responsibility for others was thought to be a worthy value. Writing about this time in the UK and the U.S., Terry Eagleton said, “Unrestrained market forces were as frowned upon as unrestrained whiskey drinking in a convent school.”


The eviscerated society

By the Eighties, this mindset was in disrepute. The state was now seen as the creator of many problems, and it was believed that market forces should not be restrained. Instead, the economy should only be regulated by self-interest. There was a move away from the public toward the private and the privatization of public functions. Even some National Parks are now run by private interests, and their book stores carry literature saying the world was created less than 5,000 years ago.

Government, Edmund Burke thought, needed to engage the sympathies and loyalties of the people. In the so-called “conservative” market ideology, government was to be suspected. No wonder we now find that it has a lawless dimension, with some ranting about nullification and taking up arms against government -- the so-called “second Amendment option.“ Similarly, the drive to slash public pensions is lawless to the extent that it destroys people’s contractual rights.

Rants about taking up arms against government and nullifying federal laws are attacks on the concept of a national community. They were once confined to what has been called the lunatic fringe, but they are now commonplace. This is no accident.

Market ideology devalues community; it is the individual against the state and others. No wonder people are not alarmed by all this noise. Similarly, talk about putting land mines along the New Mexico border or about the laziness of the unemployed are offenses against the public marketplace of ideas, upon which democracy depends. But there is no room for the marketplace of ideas in the market ideology.

There has been very little fallout about 21 months of Republican obstructionism, blocking judicial and other appointments with holds, and the remorseless use of filibuster threats. Now, Eric Cantor and others are threatening to shut down Congress if they cannot end Health Care reform by defunding it.

Fifteen years ago, Republicans offended voters by shutting down government. The obstruction and threatened shut-down are assaults on the concept of community, something beyond the scope of the dominant market ideology. Today the attitude is that it is acceptable to do whatever is necessary to get what you want, regardless to the damage it does to our political system.

In 2011, respect for community might be so lacking that a shut-down of government might be applauded. Newt Gingrich and Dick Morris are betting that this will be the case as they urge the Republicans to confront President Barack Obama with a shutdown.

Now, we have what the late Tony Judt called an “eviscerated society.” Mutual respect and obligations are gone. Ugly sentiments that we thought had been overcome are on the rise with hatred of Hispanics, Islamophobia, and all the wild claims about Obama’s religion and place of birth -- scarcely disguised racist arguments.

There is an obsession with greed, materialism, and self-interest. Anyone who thinks in terms of collective responsibility is called a communist or socialist by people who could not define those terms. Symptoms of the new world view are a decline in social mobility, greater poverty, broken infrastructure, and many more broken people as seen in rising alcoholism, mental illness, and homelessness.

This materialistic, market ideology requires Social Darwinism, the belief that the rich deserve all good things because they are the best product of social evolution. Of course, people at the bottom of their societies deserve their grim circumstances. Now, Social Darwinism underpins economic globalism. Sometimes. as now, Social Darwinism feeds on and fuels racism and xenophobia.

We need a humanistic culture to produce responsible citizens and a society that seeks a measure of equality and justice. The problem is within the individual psyche, where there is a clash between narcissism and greed battling against love, respect, and compassion. We want to think that the former qualities are there, and studies of primates produce enough evidence to help us hope that this is so.

The schools cannot be relied upon to inculcate humanistic values because they are busy teaching students to master enough skills to pass tests and become useful cogs in the capitalist structure. Most colleges and universities have downgraded the subjects that traditionally promoted humane values, and many younger faculties have accepted postmodern outlooks that deny that there are universal humane values.

People have traditionally looked to religion for language to express moral concerns, but the United States is now seeing a decline in religious outlooks that value community, peace, and economic justice. On the rise are religious groups that seem to limit their moral concerns to rigid stances on reproductive issues and sexual orientation; on the other hand they repeatedly support the dominant market ideology and its companion foreign policy outlook that is built on faith in American exceptionalism.

The Democrats need a new narrative. Image from Right Democrat.

Democrats must find a new narrative

Democrats have no time to waste in explaining to voters that they must select between different visions of society -- one based on greed and benefits for the few, and one that aspires to create opportunities and well-being for everyone. If we elect Republicans, we are gambling on another banking system failure and another deep recession.

Things might get better despite the Republicans. Copper sales are rising quickly; tool and die shops are doing business; and inventories are very low. There is an outside chance that the Obama stimulus, health care, and approach to the banking crisis will begin to produce more results soon.

The banks are sitting on $ 1.2 trillion they might begin to spend, and the industrial firms have $1.8 to begin spending. It would be ironic but not totally unexpected that Obama’s policies will produce a recovery for which Republicans will promptly claim credit.

In the longer run, however, the Republican approach is bound to bring about another Wall Street collapse and deep recession. If they are in power when that happens, they will find it necessary to slash Social Security and Medicare in order to preserve benefits for the rich and continue to follow an aggressive foreign policy.

Democrats need to begin by defending what they have accomplished. The Democrats cannot run away from what the laws they havepassed. They should show voters the good points, which are many, and blame the flaws on the need to water down legislation to attract conservative votes. If they refuse to defend their work, they will help the Republicans make this election a referendum on their undefended policies.

Even more important, the Democrats must continually point out how conservative policies brought about the twin crises of 2007-2008 and how current Republican program will fail to help the jobless and will set the scene for future financial and economic disasters.

[Sherman DeBrosse is a retired history professor. He also blogs at Sherm Says and on DailyKos.]

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