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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ELECTION 2012 / Katherine Haenschen : Thank you, John Cornyn!

Graphic from Burnt Orange Report.
An open letter to Senator John Cornyn...

...in recognition of his great achievement in electing female Democratic senators.

By Katherine Haenschen / Burnt Orange Report / November 12, 2012

Dear Senator John Cornyn,

I want to personally thank you and congratulate you on your tremendous electoral successes for Democratic Senate candidates this year. Thanks to your feckless leadership as chair of the NRSC, Democrats not only retained our majority in the Senate, we actually picked up a seat and helped elect and re-elect several strong progressive women.

It's kind of remarkable. Democrats entered this cycle needing to defend 23 seats to the Republicans' 10, and yet we managed to make gains!

As a matter of fact, come January, 20% of the Senate will be women, the highest share in the history of the upper chamber. It's a good start, and it wouldn't have been possible without your efforts.

Now, to be fair, one of the newly elected female Senators is a Republican -- Deb Fischer of Nebraska. She'll join Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and Kelly Ayotte in the female Republican Senators club, where they can privately grind their teeth every time the male members of their delegation do stuff like try to block the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act.

Thank you, Big John, for recruiting and standing by candidates who hold ass-backwards attitudes towards women, rape, and pregnancy. You stood by Richard Mourdock when he said God intended rape pregnancies to happen and called them "a gift." Earlier this cycle, you failed to force Todd "Forcible Rape" Akin out of the Missouri Senate race, then succumbed to immense pressure to withdraw the NRSC's financial support from his campaign.

Now, in the election post-mortem some media outlets are blaming you for refusing to help Akin, as if it's your fault that Republicans didn't pick up the seat. I guess the Missouri body politic just had a way of shutting that whole race down.

Come January, you'll be joined in the Senate by Elizabeth Warren, who dispatched truck-drivin' Wall Street incubus Scott Brown -- the one who like you voted against the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which gives women equal pay for equal work. (Out of curiosity, do you think female Senators should be paid less than their male counterparts? Don't answer that. No wait, do. You're up for election in two years.)

Do you remember the tough-talkin' statement you released when President Barack Obama appointed Elizabeth Warren to serve as Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? Let me refresh your memory:

Another day, another unelected czar is added to the Obama Administration. The President's reliance on unelected czars to implement his radical agenda skirts the very checks and balances our nation was founded upon, and directly contradicts President Obama's pledge to be the most transparent Administration in history. What is transparent is that making Elizabeth Warren his "consumer czar" is an obvious political favor to special interest groups -- like labor unions and liberal grassroots organizations -- meant to invigorate them 50 days before an election.

"Unelected czar." Hey John, you know what you can call Elizabeth Warren now, when you yield to her on the floor of the US Senate? The Gentle Lady from Massachusetts.

The best news is that your spectacular failure will pay Democratic dividends for years. Four Supreme Court Justices are over 70 years old, and it's possible that President Barack Obama will be able to appoint the next four justices to the bench during his second term. So far he's appointed two women. His next four appointments will likely protect Roe v Wade, and possibly hear major cases pertaining to marriage equality.

I look forward to writing snide commentary about your efforts to block President Obama's appointees from their "upperdown" as a member of the judiciary committee. Maybe you can come up with something more original than "czar" this time?

All in all, it was a great night for Democrats in Tuesday, especially Democrats running for the U.S. Senate. So thank you, John, for all you did to make these historic gains for women and Democrats possible.

Keep it up. Make sure your party continues to be dominated by right-wing, misogynist, nativists who support dismantling the basic functions of government. It may work in Texas (see also: your new colleague Ted Cruz, who may start stealing all the headlines once he brings his special brand of crazy conservative sanctimony to D.C.) but increasingly that mode of thinking is working less and less.

Cheers,
Katherine

[Katherine Haenschen, an Austin-based activist, political organizer, and blogger, is editor in chief of the Burnt Orange Report.]

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Danny Schechter : The Obama Defection

Obama under fire. Image from PressTV.
The Obama defection:
Former supporters lambaste the President

Just this week he reportedly begged his supporters to send more money as donations fall off. He may be panicking.

By Danny Schechter / The Rag Blog / July 3, 2012

There were two American elections this past week that spoke to the power of incumbency. Despite corruption charges, the venerable Black Democrat Charles Rangel, now in his 80’s, was reelected to Congress by his Harlem constituency.

Orin Hatch, a cranky conservative Republican beat back a challenge to his Senate seat from harder right Tea Partiers in Utah.

It takes a lot to unseat an American politician with seniority.

Barack Obama is hoping that he too will be returned to office despite all the money and conservative fervor trying to topple him. Never in history has so much lucre and political animus been targeted at one politician.

The Supreme Court’s ratification of key provisions of his health care "reform” will buttress his appeal, giving him some new bragging rights at a time when the economy remains depressed. Yet, even his former Economic Advisor Larry Summers says the economy will not rally enough to help him.

So, to try to change the media focus, he has increased global war making to burnish his image as a patriotic hardliner. The tougher sanctions he backed against Iran are soon in effect but ironically; they may lead to a backlash if oil prices rise, as they are likely to.

This race is not just a right-left battleground. Obama is under fire from his own supporters for failures and perceived betrayals linked in large part to his foreign policy, not health care or advocacy for it, same sex marriage, or immigration reform.

In some ways, this year’s contest echoes the way the anti-Vietnam war movement rallied against the then pro-war “liberal” Democrat Hubert Humphrey in 1968.

1968 is remembered as a year of surging protests the world over just like today. Activism was at a high point in America too, so when the Democrats chose a candidate stuck in a cold-war pro war stance, there was a rebellion against the party by its own faithful. There were protests in the streets at the Democratic Convention in Chicago and growing support for an electoral challenge by Bobby Kennedy.

Democrats were at war with each other even as the Republican candidate Richard Nixon claimed to have a plan to end the war. As we know, Nixon’s plan was an escalation but he won, only to be driven from office two years later.

While liberal advocacy groups like MoveOn and some environmental coalitions rally to Obama largely because the alternative is considered much worse, criticisms of his hawkishness, caution, and centrism among progressives reaches a fever pitch. In fact, just this week he reportedly begged his supporters to send more money as donations fall off. He may be panicking.

Writes political scientist Michael Brenner,

Barack Obama received a blast last week from one of his former Harvard law professors who made the case that he "must be defeated.”

Roberto Unger’s argument boils down to a damning indictment spelling out charges that the President has betrayed the progressive cause and those who militated for his election. The alleged betrayal is all the more painful, Professor Unger says, because it reveals a man who never was what he claimed to be.

Deep down, he is a conventionally conservative person -- not just a politician who bowed to electoral expediency. Moreover, he claims that Obama has nailed the lid on the coffin of the Democratic Party that has veered sharply away from its historical constituency and principles.

Brenner, himself a hard-nosed pragmatist and analyst, seems personally persuaded, writing,

How can one approve what he has done? How can one express approval of the man himself? Can one do so with a clear conscience? This question cannot be cavalierly cast aside as an exercise in vanity, as a naïve indulgence of misplaced moral purity.

It is true that the morality of individual action and ultimate ends always co-exists uneasily with standards of political ethics. But the two cannot always be reconciled. Is it unreasonable for someone to feel in his heart that he cannot tolerate pulling the Obama lever -- that the act itself sullies and degrades who he is? That it could even hamper his future ability to carry on as a public person with a sense of integrity unimpaired? I personally do not find it unreasonable.

Maybe not unreasonable but is it realistic? Some on the left think so, believing that a conservative Romney Administration will make a clearer target than a waffling Obama one.

Others say, no, we must hold our nose and vote for him and hold on to the White House as a brake against what will certainly be worse.

Blacks and Latinos are rallying behind Obama for cultural reasons a well as political ones. At the same time, some more traditional Democrats are furious with what they see as his elitism, conservatism, and wrong-headedness.

Jimmy Carter has attacked the White House on human rights lapses for violating 10 of the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as he wrote in a New York Times op-ed. He sees the Obama Administration as abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights. Instead of making the world safer, America’s violation of international human rights abets our enemies and alienates our friends, Carter argues.

Many of his former supporters are disillusioned. He has done little to even try to sustain their loyalty, having downsized and downplayed his “Organizing for America” initiative that was supposed to build grass roots support for his reform agenda.

He abandoned the outreach effort to build an outside force to focus on the compromise-ridden “inside game” of beltway politics.

The reservations by intellectuals are felt across the activist spectrum, among the Wall Street occupiers and anti-war activists. The anti-war groups and their supporters fear that because of setbacks on the economic front at home, he will escalate his role as “warrior in chief” and perhaps provoke a war with Iran to rally Americans to back his Administration because it is defending them against danger.

Do the majority of Americans care about these issues that are treated mostly uncritically in our media? No, says Daniel Drezner in Foreign Policy magazine,

The overwhelming majority of Americans do not give a flying ---- about the rest of the world. Really, they don’t. Take a look at poll numbers about priorities for the 2012 presidential campaign, and try to find anything to do with international relations. There ain't much. It's almost all about the domestic economy.

So far, it’s mostly the hard right that hates Obama, but some on the left now have come to believe the worst as well. Like those who want to deny Obama’s legitimacy by questioning his claims to being an American citizen, left-leaning investigative reporter Wayne Madsen argues that Obama was a long term CIA agent, an Indonesian, not a Kenyan, and deeply immeshed in covert activities and cover-ups starting with his own identity.

He spells out his theory in a book called The Manufacturing of a President. contending,

Obama's birth certificate has never been the issue. The real issue, which affects his eligibility to serve as President of the United States, is his past and likely current Indonesian citizenship. The reader will be taken through the labyrinth of covert CIA operations in Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and other regions. The real history of President Obama, his family, and the CIA quickly emerges as the reader wades into the murky waters of America's covert foreign operation.

I am not sure we need such a complex plot when a much simpler one will do. Washington is run by unelected forces -- in the financial system, the corporate world, and the Military-Industrial-Media Complex.

That’s who Rules America. Politicians know it, and are increasingly dependent on their largesse.

Whoever wins, they will remain in power.

[News Dissector Danny Schechter blogs at Newsdissector.net. His recent books are Occupy: Dissecting Occupy Wall Street and Blogothon (Cosimo Books). He hosts News Dissector Radio on PRN.fm Fridays at 1 p.m.  Email Danny at dissector@mediachannel.org. Read more articles by Danny Schechter on The Rag Blog.]

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Webb Dreyer : Texas Observer Founding Editor Ronnie Dugger

Pioneering Texas journalist Ronnie Dugger in the KOOP studios in Austin, Texas, Friday, June 8, 2012, during broadcast of Rag Radio. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.
Rag Radio:
Crusading journalist Ronnie Dugger,
founding editor of The Texas Observer

By Thorne Webb Dreyer / The Rag Blog / June 15, 2012

Legendary Texas journalist Ronnie Dugger, the founding editor of The Texas Observer, was our guest on Rag Radio, Friday, June 8, 2012, on KOOP-FM, Austin's cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station; Rag Radio is also streamed live to a worldwide Internet audience and is rebroadcast Sunday mornings on WFTE-FM in Scranton and Mt. Cobb, PA.

You can listen to the show here:


Brad Buchholz of the Austin American-Statesman called Ronnie Dugger “the godfather of progressive journalism in Texas.” Dugger was the founding editor of The Texas Observer from 1954 to 1961, and later served as the Observer’s publisher, spending more than 40 years with the crusading Texas tabloid.

The Texas Observer is a muckraking journal that has broken stories on major scandals and played an influential role in Texas politics. Based in Austin, the Observer, in its own words, “specializes in investigative, political and social-justice reporting from the strangest state in the Union.” The New York Review of Books referred to the Observer as an "outpost of reason in the Southwest."

In 1966, Dugger also proposed and co-founded the Alliance for Democracy, a national grassroots anti-big-corporate organization.

Ronnie Dugger, who won the 2011 George Polk Award for his career in journalism, has influenced and mentored such progressive Texas journalists as Willie Morris, Molly Ivins, Billy Lee Brammer, Lawrence Goodwyn, Kaye Northcott, and Jim Hightower. He recently moved back to Austin from Cambridge, Mass.

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 edited Three Men in Texas: Bedichek, Webb, and Dobie for UT Press. He has also written for Harper's, Atlantic, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The Progressive.

Dugger has taught at the University of Virginia, Hampshire College, and the University of Illinois, and has held fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School, Harvard.

Dugger shared with host Thorne Dreyer some of the rich history of the Observer and of Texas progressive politics and journalism, marked by such seminal -- and colorful -- figures as Frankie Carter Randolph, U.S. Rep. Bob Eckhardt, John Henry Faulk, Willie Morris, and Molly Ivins.

Once, when Molly Ivins -- who would become widely recognized as a national treasure for her special brand of populist Texas wit -- was editing the Observer, Dugger asked her, “Molly, when are you gonna get serious?” Ivins replied ("quick as a whip"): "When we have a chance to win."

On the show, Dugger discussed the legacy of the McCarthy era, the looming (both then and now) threat of nuclear war -- an issue that he has always considered preeminent -- and the Johnson presidency, which, he points out, made history with its courageous progressive domestic agenda. “Of course," Dugger says, "the Vietnam War not only ruined that, but killed two million people."

We discussed the way Lyndon’s unique saga was variously treated by the erudite Willie Morris in his heralded memoir North Toward Home and by Billy Lee Brammer, whose pre-gonzo novel, The Gay Place, Dugger called “one of the best novels written by anybody in Texas.” Brammer was Dugger’s first associate editor at the Observer, and Morris would later edit the Observer and then gain more fame as the editor of Harper’s.

And Dugger recounted a remarkable incident in 1955 that he later wrote about in an article titled, “LBJ, The Texas Observer & Me.” Then-Senator Lyndon Johnson summoned Ronnie to the LBJ Ranch with an offer -- “something of a quid pro quo.” After inquiring about the Observer's circulation (“Oh, about 6,000,” Dugger told him), Johnson made his proposal: “Stick with me and we’ll make it 60,000.”

“Johnson was trying to bribe me, basically,” Dugger remembers. “Sing my praises, and we’ll make the Observer a whamdinger.” Of course Dugger, who according to Willie Morris became “one of Johnson’s main public antagonists,” chose to decline the deal. According to Morris, Ronnie Dugger “distrusted the compromises of political power and saw his own role in Texas as that of the social critic, the journalistic conscience, the polemicist.”

Ronnie Dugger also shared with the Rag Radio audience his not-so-optimistic take on the current political scene. “I think both political parties have descended pretty low,” he said. And the Supreme Court “has opened huge corporate money vaults,” with “the scandalous idea that corporations have the same rights as persons.” Dugger fears that “we’re now an imitation democracy governed by a corporate oligarchy… and a bought Congress.”

“Congress, with honorable exceptions, is now a whorehouse,” he said.

Above (and in inset photo): Thorne Dreyer, left, and Ronnie Dugger at the KOOP studios. Behind Dugger is Grace Alfar of ZGraphix. Photos by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio, which has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history.

Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP and streamed live on the web. Rag Radio is also rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. After broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in the KOOP studios, 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.


Coming up on Rag Radio:

THIS FRIDAY, June 15, 2012: American Botanical Council Director Mark Blumenthal on Herbal and Alternative Medicine.
June 22, 2012: Gay Marriage in America with Gail Leondar-Wright and Betsy Leondar-Wright.

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David Bacon : How the Anti-Immigrant Tide Was Turned in Mississippi

Members of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance at a rally at the Capitol in Jackson, Miss., Jan. 12, 2011. Photo by Rogelio V. Solis / AP.
How Mississippi's black/brown strategy
beat the South's anti-immigrant wave

By David Bacon / The Rag Blog / April 24, 2012

"We worked on the conscience of people night and day, and built coalition after coalition. Over time, people have come around. The way people think about immigration in Mississippi today is nothing like the way they thought when we started." -- Mississippi State Rep. Jim Evans

JACKSON, Mississippi -- In early April, an anti-immigrant bill like those that swept through legislatures in Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina was stopped cold in Mississippi. That wasn't supposed to happen.
Tea Party Republicans were confident they'd roll over any opposition. They'd brought Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State who co-authored Arizona's SB 1070, into Jackson, to push for the Mississippi bill. He was seen huddled with the state representative from Brookhaven, Becky Currie, who introduced it.

The American Legislative Exchange Council, which designs and introduces similar bills into legislatures across the country, had its agents on the scene.

Their timing seemed unbeatable. Last November Republicans took control of the state House of Representatives for the first time since Reconstruction. Mississippi was one of the last Southern states in which Democrats controlled the legislature, and the turnover was a final triumph for Reagan and Nixon's Southern Strategy.

And the Republicans who took power weren't just any Republicans. Haley Barbour, now ironically considered a "moderate Republican," had stepped down as governor. Voters replaced him with an anti-immigrant successor, Phil Bryant, whose venom toward the foreign-born rivals Lou Dobbs.

Yet the seemingly inevitable didn't happen.

Instead, from the opening of the legislative session just after New Years, the state's Legislative Black Caucus fought a dogged rearguard war in the House. Over the last decade the caucus acquired a hard-won expertise on immigration, defeating over 200 anti-immigrant measures. After New Year's, though, they lost the crucial committee chairmanships that made it possible for them to kill those earlier bills. But they did not lose their voice.

"We forced a great debate in the House, until 1:30 in the morning," says State Representative Jim Evans, caucus leader and AFL-CIO staff member in Mississippi. "When you have a prolonged debate like that, it shows the widespread concern and disagreement. People began to see the ugliness in this measure."

Like all of Kobach's and ALEC's bills, HB 488 stated its intent in its first section: "to make attrition through enforcement the public policy of all state agencies and local governments." In other words, to make life so difficult and unpleasant for undocumented people that they'd leave the state.

And to that end, it said people without papers wouldn't be able to get as much as a bicycle license or library card, and that schools had to inform on the immigration status of their students. It mandated that police verify the immigration status of anyone they arrest, an open invitation to racial profiling.

"The night HB 488 came to the floor, many black legislators spoke against it," reports Bill Chandler, director of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, "including some who'd never spoken out on immigration before. One objected to the use of the term 'illegal alien' in its language, while others said it justified breaking up families and ethnic cleansing." Even many white legislators were inspired to speak against it.

Nevertheless, the bill was rammed through the House. Then it reached the Senate, controlled by Republicans for some years, and presided over by a more moderate Republican, Lieutenant Governor Tate Reeves. Reeves could see the widespread opposition to the bill, even among employers, and was less in lock step with the Tea Party's anti-immigrant agenda than other Republicans.

Although Democrats had just lost all their committee chairmanships in the house, Reeves appointed a rural Democrat to chair one of the Senate's two judiciary committees. He then sent that bill to that committee, chaired by Hob Bryan. And Bryan killed it.

On the surface, it appears that fissures inside the Republican Party facilitated the bill's defeat. But they were not that defeat's cause. As the debate and maneuvering played out in the capitol building, its halls were filled with angry protests, while noisy demonstrations went on for days until the bill's final hour.

That grassroots upsurge produced political alliances that cut deeply into the bill's support, including calls for rejection by the state's sheriffs' and county supervisors associations, the Mississippi Economic Council (its chamber of commerce), and employer groups from farms to poultry packers.

That upsurge was not spontaneous, nor the last minute product of emergency mobilizations. "We wouldn't have had a chance against this without 12 years of organizing work," Evans explains.

"We worked on the conscience of people night and day, and built coalition after coalition. Over time, people have come around. The way people think about immigration in Mississippi today is nothing like the way they thought when we started."

Evans, Chandler, attorney Patricia Ice, Father Jerry Tobin, activist Kathy Sykes, union organizer Frank Curiel, and other veterans of Mississippi's social movements came together at the end of the 1990s not to stop a bill 12 years later but to build political power. Their vehicle was the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, and a partnership with the Legislative Black Caucus and other coalitions fighting on most of the progressive issues facing the state.

Their strategy has been based on the state's changing demographics. Over the last two decades, the percentage of African-Americans in Mississippi's population has been rising. Black families driven from jobs by factory closings and unemployment in the north have been moving back south, reversing the movement of the decades of the Great Migration. Today at least 37 percent of Mississippi's people are African-Americans, the highest percentage of any state in the country.

Then, starting with the boom in casino construction in the early 1990s, immigrants from Mexico and Central America, displaced by NAFTA and CAFTA, began migrating into the state as well. Poultry plants, farms, and factories hired them. Guest workers were brought to work in Gulf Coast reconstruction and shipyards. "Today we have established Latino communities," Chandler explains. "The children of the first immigrants are now arriving at voting age."

In MIRA's political calculation, blacks and immigrants, plus unions, are the potential pillars of a powerful political coalition. HB 488's intent to drive immigrants from Mississippi is an effort to make that coalition impossible.

MIRA is not just focused on defeating bad bills, however. It built a grassroots base by fighting immigration raids at the Howard Industries plant in Laurel in 2008, and in other worksites as well. Its activist staff helped families survive sweeps in apartment houses and trailer parks. They brought together black workers suspicious of the Latino influx, and immigrant families worried about settling in a hostile community. Political unity, based in neighborhoods, protects both groups, they said.

For unions organizing poultry plants, factories, and casinos MIRA became a resource helping to win over immigrant workers. It brought labor violation cases against Gulf employers in the wake of Katrina. Yet despite being on opposing sides, employers and MIRA recognized they had a mutual interest in fighting HB 488. Both opposed workplace immigration raids and enforcement, which are based on the same "attrition through enforcement" idea.

Since 1986 U.S. immigration law has forbidden undocumented people from working by making it illegal for employers to hire them. Called "employer sanctions," the enforcement of this law (part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986), especially under the Bush and Obama administrations, has caused the firing of thousands of workers.

Yet over the last decade, Congressional proposals for comprehensive immigration reform have called for strengthening sanctions, and increasing raids and firings. "That's why we didn't support those bills," Chandler says.

"They violate the human rights of working people to feed their families. For employers, that opposition was a meeting point. They didn't like workplace enforcement either. All their associations claimed they didn't hire undocumented workers, but we all know who's working in the plants. We want people to stay as much as the employers do. Forcing people from their jobs forces them to leave -- an ethnic cleansing tactic."

During the protests Ice, Sykes, and others underlined the point by handing legislators sweet potatoes with labels saying, "I was picked by immigrant workers who together contribute $82 million to the state's economy."

MIRA, however, also fought guest worker programs used by Mississippi casinos and shipyards to recruit workers with few labor rights. "When it came to HB 488 employers were tactical allies," Chandler cautions. Unions, on the other hand, are members of the MIRA coalition.

While MIRA and employers saw a mutual interest in opposing the bill, MIRA helps unions when they try to organize the workers of those same employers, and helps workers defend themselves when employers violate their rights. MIRA, in fact, was started by activists like Chandler, Evans, and Curiel, who all have a long history of labor activity in Mississippi.

When HB 488 hit, busses brought in members of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1529 from poultry plants in Scott County, Laborers from Laurel, Retail, Wholesale union members from Carthage. Black catfish workers from Indianola, and electrical union members from Crystal Spring. The black labor mobilization was largely organized by new pro-immigrant leadership of the state chapter of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, the AFL-CIO constituency group for black union members.

Catholic congregations, Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Evangelical Lutherans, Muslims, and Jews also brought people to protest HB 488, as did the Mississippi Human Services Coalition -- a result of a long history working on immigrant issues.

And groups around MIRA and the Black Caucus not only fought that bill, but others introduced by Tea Party Republicans as well. One would ban abortions if a fetal heartbeat is detected. Another promotes charter schools. A third would restrict access to workers compensation benefits, while another would strip civil service protection from state employees.

Dr. Ivory Phillips, a MIRA director and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Jackson Public Schools, explains that charter school proposals, voter ID bills, and anti-immigrant measures are all linked. "Because white supremacists fear losing their status as the dominant group in this country, there is a war against brown people today, just as there has long been a war against black people," he says.

"In all three cases -- charter schools, 'immigration reform' and voter ID -- what we are witnessing is an anti-democratic surge, a rise in overt racism, and a refusal to provide opportunities to all."

Tea Party supporters also saw these issues linked together. In the wake of the charter school debate during the same period the immigration bill was defeated, a crowd gathered around Representative Reecy Dickson, a leading Black Caucus member, in which she was shoved and called racist epithets.

"Because of our history we had a relationship with our allies," Chandler concludes. "We need political alliances that mean something in the long term -- permanent alliances, and a strategy for winning political power. That includes targeted voter registration that focuses on specific towns, neighborhoods, and precincts."

Despite the national importance of stopping the Southern march of the anti-immigrant bills, however, the resources for the effort were almost all local. MIRA emptied its bank account fighting HB 488. Additional money came mostly from local units of organizations like the UAW, UNITE HERE, and the Muslim Association.

"The resources of the national immigrant rights movement should prioritize preventing bills from passing as much as fighting them after the fact," Chandler warns.

On the surface, the fight in Jackson was a defensive battle waged in the wake of the Republican legislative takeover of the legislature. And the Tea Party still threatens to bring HB 488 back until it passes.

Yet Evans, who also chairs MIRA's board, believes that time is on the side of social change. "These Republicans still have tricks up their sleeves," he cautions. "We're worried about redistricting, and a Texas-style stacking of the deck. But in the end, we still believe our same strategy will build power in Mississippi. We don't see last November as a defeat but as the last stand of the Confederacy."

[David Bacon is a California-based writer and photographer. His latest book, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, was published by Beacon Press. His photographs and stories can be found at dbacon.igc.org. This article was published at web edition of The Nation and was crossposted to The Rag Blog. Read more of David Bacon's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Webb Dreyer : Jim Hightower and the 'Populist Moment'

Jim Hightower in the KOOP studios in Austin, Friday, April 6, 2012. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.
Rag Radio:
Jim Hightower and the 'populist moment'

By Thorne Webb Dreyer / The Rag Blog / April 11, 2012

Jim Hightower will headline a "Spring Song Fiesta" at Scholz Beer Garten in Austin on Sunday, April 15, from 1-9 p.m. Hightower will speak at 7, following a live KOOP-sponsored debate among Austin mayoral candidates starting at 6. Bands will include the Therapy Sisters, Paper Moon Shiners, Bill Oliver, Son y No Son, Barbara K, Floyd Domino, and Ted Roddy and the Hit Kickers. It all benefits community radio KOOP-FM.

According to Jim Hightower, “even the smallest dog can lift its leg on the tallest building.”

Progressive Texas populist author, commentator, and orator Hightower -- perhaps our country's most celebrated champion of the common folk -- was our guest on Rag Radio, Friday, April 6, on Austin’s community radio station, KOOP 91.7-FM, and streamed live on the Internet.

You can listen to the show here:


We discussed populism as a political movement -- and what Jim Hightower sees as a “populist moment” existing in this country today.

“Populism is about confronting money and power in our society and realizing that too few people control too much money,” Hightower told the Rag Radio audience. “The few are doing extremely well, but they seem to think that they can separate their well-being from the good fortunes of the many.”

Hightower, who served two terms as Texas Agriculture Commissioner, is a New York Times bestselling author. His weekly newsletter, the Hightower Lowdown, goes out to 135,000 subscribers, he writes a weekly newspaper column for Creators Syndicate, and his radio commentaries air on stations around the country, including Austin’s KOOP.

A former editor of the Texas Observer, Hightower has been involved in progressive politics for decades and has established himself as one of the country’s most influential consumer advocates, especially focusing on corporate power in the food economy.

Jim Hightower’s latest book is Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow.

Rag Radio, hosted by longtime alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, editor of The Rag Blog and a pioneer of the Sixties underground press, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about progressive politics, history, and culture.

The show is broadcast on Austin’s KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run community radio station, on Fridays, 2-3 p.m. (CST) and is rebroadcast on WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA, on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST). It also has a widespread internet audience and podcasts of all shows can be downloaded at the Internet Archive.


Populist moment

Jim Hightower said on Rag Radio that he thinks “we have a strong populist moment, a strong populist possibility, to make fundamental change.”

He says that the Wall Street bailout “was the initial spark for the Tea Party movement,” but that it got captured by former Texas Congressman and Koch-funded Washington lobbyist Dick Armey, and was turned into a “right-wing hugging organization.”

But Hightower believes that the Occupy movement could connect with the Tea Party rank and file, and “turn into something real, something that does try to decentralize power down to the grassroots level for ordinary working people.”

He sees lots of things going on in the country that make him hopeful.

He believes that all the Republican anti-union activity has reinvigorated the labor movement. AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka “declared that he was going to make [Wisconsin Gov.] Scott Walker the ‘organizer of the year.’” All the anti-union rhetoric “has given them their own sense of history back, and their own spirit back, and the recognition that the public is with them.”

Hightower spoke before 150,000 people in 20-degree weather last February in Madison, at a rally opposing the Wisconsin anti-union legislation. There were people “just as far as you could see.”

“It was just a beautiful, spirited moment.”

And he sees more positive signs.

People are working on a grassroots level for a “bevy of new and good candidates running for office all across the country” -- like Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, Norman Solomon in Northern California, and Eric Griego in Albuquerque -- and to overturn Citizens United (“the grotesque absurdity that a corporation is a person”).

“As we say here,” Hightower reminds us, “a corporation is not a person until Texas executes one.”

Jim Hightower supports a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling.

“We don’t have to convince people that Citizens United's unleashing unlimited amounts of secret corporate money into our elections is a bad idea.”

“If we get that to a vote, we win.”

“There’s a movement, and the Occupy people are involved in this, to confront every candidate for every office in the country, at their public forums… at their political rallies… or just go to their office, and say, ‘Do you think a corporation is a person? We want you on record.”

From left, Rag Radio host Thorne Dreyer, Jeff Zavala and Grace Alfar of ZGrafix, and guest Jim Hightower during Rag Radio broadcast, Friday, April 6, 2012, at KOOP-FM in Austin. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.

Coops and food economy

Hightower also believes that the fast-growing coop movement “is extraordinary in this country [and] there’s very little coverage of it.”

“[It gives us] models that we can go to… and say, here’s another way to organize it. It doesn’t have to be the CEO getting $50 million a year and workers having their wages knocked down and their health care and other benefits taken away.”

Another -- and related -- area of encouraging activity, Hightower said, is in the food economy. “We’ve had a revolution in food in America… It came from farmers saying, there’s gotta be a better way than all these pesticides… and making bad food and poisoning our animals and genetically manipulating our animals.”

And the consumers are saying, “We don’t like industrialized, conglomeratized, globalized, capitalized food. We want real food.”

“And the two found each other.”

“It began with ex-hippies selling bad tomatoes out of broken-down VW buses in the 70’s.” But then came the food coops and the farmers’ markets. “We helped to establish more than 100 of them [in Texas], just by putting the tools in the hands of local people.”

“It’s a tremendous movement,” he says. In Austin, “we have a dozen farms… linking up with chefs and linking up directly with restaurants and directly with government institutions to buy food.”


Privatization and the commons

An issue that Jim Hightower is especially concerned about is the alarming spread of privatization and the resulting impact on the public sector, on the commons.

He has recently written in his Hightower Lowdown about the move to privatize the post office, about the “corporate foreign legion” that "has taken over America’s intelligence and military functions,” and about the closing of state parks around the country. (“By axing parks, politicos are stealing the people’s property,” he wrote.)

“It’s dangerous. It’s dangerous for our democracy, it’s dangerous for our health, it’s dangerous for our economy,” he said on Rag Radio. “Because it allows a few profit-seeking organizations to take charge.”

They’re saying that the post office is “wasteful, they’re broke, they’re bankrupt… and that they can’t compete with the internet and Fedex, etc… Well, as we say out in Lubbock, that’s bovine excrement. The post office last year had… an operating profit of 700 million dollars.”

“This is about the common good… The post office is in every community in America… They deliver by pack mule. They deliver by planes, they deliver by boats.”

“They get the job done.”

“And it is the most popular federal agency in all of government. People feel an attachment to their post office… because it is a community center.”

Hightower says that the move to privatize parks is happening all over the country.

“The workaday people… don’t fly to Aspen when they need a weekend. They don’t summer in France. They go to their parks.”

“These parks are jewels. And yet, we’re abandoning them. [Gov. Rick] Perry and the legislature just whacked the hell out of them” in Texas. The state parks director has been forced to make public appeals for support of the park system. “We’re out there with a tin cup on the side of the street saying, anybody got a nickel for a state park?”

“It’s a complete abdication of long-term responsibility to the people of this state and future generations.”

And now, Hightower says, privatization has moved, with almost no public notice or discussion by lawmakers, into the military and into the military intelligence agencies.

He says he was “stunned” when he researched the issue for the Hightower Lowdown. “I had no idea it was this big, this extensive.”

“We have roughly 80,000 troops in Afghanistan. And now we’ve got 113,00 contractors… And they’re not there just to do administrative chores. They’re doing war planning, they are targeting the enemy, they are killing.”

Hightower says we are giving up “the government’s most sensitive activities to corporations” whose “loyalty is not to the United States of America. It is to the bottom line, to the profit of the shareholders.”


Texas and the populist movement

Jim Hightower reminded Rag Radio listeners that the populist movement actually started in Texas -- in Lampasas -- “with four farmers sitting around a kitchen table over there in 1868, saying, this is killing us -- [with] the railroad monopolies, and the bankers putting the squeeze on them.”

“They had to find some other way.”

“So they established what became the Farmers Alliance.” It failed at first but eventually, it “spread through Texas, all up through the Plains states, went through the South, went all the way to New York State, all the way out to California.”

“They created cooperatives, the financing mechanisms so farmers could get capital without being gouged by the banks, and then a holding mechanism for their crops, storage facilities, so that they could be in charge. And then a market mechanism.”

“And all of it was cooperatively-run.”

"And it was also a cultural movement," Hightower added. "Because rural people were illiterate. They didn’t know how to write. They hadn’t read history. So they had educational courses, they had cultural programs, they created choirs, and concerts, and they had parades, and fun.

“Everybody could join it. And 'everybody' included African-Americns. Back in that day, in the 1870s.”

“It was a huge people’s movement.”

“In fact, Thorne, the original Texas constitution outlawed banks… They hated ‘em. Because we were settled by debtors, people fleeing out of Tennessee and Alabama and Mississippi.”


We concluded by asking Jim Hightower if he plans to ever run for office again.

His firm "No" came with a satisfied smile. He's having too much fun just being Jim Hightower.


Rag Radio is produced in the KOOP studios, 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.

After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive.

[Thorne Dreyer, a pioneering Sixties underground journalist, edits The Rag Blog, hosts Rag Radio, and is a director of the New Journalism Project. He can be contacted at editor@theragblog.com. Read more articles by and about Thorne Dreyer on The Rag Blog.]

Coming up on Rag Radio:

THIS FRIDAY, April 13, 2012: Sustainability activist Bill Neiman of Native American Seeds.
April 20, 2012: David P. Hamilton on the upcoming French elections, and Philip Russell on the coming elections in Mexico.


VIDEO: Jim Hightower on Rag Radio

Video of Thorne Dreyer's Rag Radio interview with Jim Hightower, produced by Jeff Zavala of ZGrafix.org. The video can also be seen on Jeff's Blip TV channel.
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Robert Jensen : Occupy Congress

Norman Solomon. Image from Nation of Change.
Occupy Congress:
Norman Solomon sees a
role for progressive legislators

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / November 30, 2011

Conventional politics in the United States focuses on elections, while left activists typically argue that political change comes not from electing better politicians but building movements strong enough to force politicians to accept progressive change.

Norman Solomon has concluded it isn’t either/or. A prominent writer and leader in left movements for decades, Solomon is running for Congress in the hopes of being practical and remaining principled.

“Since I first went to a protest at age 14 in 1966 -- a picket line to desegregate an apartment complex -- my outlook on electoral politics has gone through a lot of changes,” Solomon said. “First I thought politics was largely about elections, later I thought politics had very little to do with elections, and now I believe that elections are an important part of the mix.

Solomon argues that when the left has treated elections as irrelevant, the result has been self-marginalization that helps empower the military-industrial complex.

“The view that genuine progressives should leave the electoral field to corporate Democrats and right-wing Republicans no longer makes sense to me. I used to say that having a strong progressive movement was much more important than who was in office, but now I’d say that what we really need is a strong progressive movement AND much better people in office,” he said.

“Having John Conyers, Barbara Lee, Dennis Kucinich, Jim McGovern, Raul Grijalva, Lynn Woolsey in Congress is important. We need more of those sorts of legislators as part of the political landscape.”

The 60-year-old Solomon had been considering such a strategy, and when Woolsey announced she was not running for re-election in her northern California district, he entered the race with the goal of staying true to his left political views, and winning.

“I’m skeptical about election campaigns that abandon principles, but I’m also skeptical about campaigns that have no hope of winning and that are only for protest or public education,” he said. “There are more effective ways to protest and to educate.”

Solomon said that if elected he would strive to change the relationship between social movements and members of Congress.

“Progressive movements and leaders in Congress should be working in tandem,” he said. “I want to strengthen the Congressional Progressive Caucus and help make it more of a force to be reckoned with.”

Solomon said that a reinvigorated Progressive Caucus could be more effective in fighting for the human right of quality healthcare for all; ending the perpetual war of the warfare state, what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism”; pushing back against the power of Wall Street; replacing corporate power with people power

Solomon is most widely known for his media criticism and activism, through his “Media Beat” weekly column that was nationally syndicated and his work with Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. In 1997 he founded the Institute for Public Accuracy, a national consortium of policy researchers and analysts for which he served as executive director for 13 years.

Solomon became more visible in mainstream media through his trip to Iraq with actor Sean Penn on the eve of the U.S. invasion, part of anti-war efforts to prevent that coming catastrophe. Solomon’s 2005 book, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, and a companion film drew on his media and political expertise to analyze the war machine. (Full disclosure: I found the book and film so compelling that I brought Solomon to my campus to speak.

Polls indicate that Solomon is competitive in a Democratic primary that includes a state assemblyman, a county supervisor, and two businesspeople. Penn is supporting Solomon’s campaign, which has also received endorsement from U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers. Fundraising is always a struggle, especially since he committed to “corporate-free fundraising.”

“By raising more than $250,000 from more than 2,000 different people, we’ve shown that we can raise the needed funds without a single dollar from corporate PACs,” Solomon said. “But we need to raise a lot more, and the month of December will be crucial -- end-of-year totals will be seen by many as a self-fulfilling gauge of our capacity to gain enough support to win.”

Solomon believes that citizen frustration with concentrated wealth, and the political dominance that big money buys, is opening up new possibilities for progressive candidates.

“Our campaign is very much in sync with Occupy Wall Street,” he said. “Issues that I’ve been talking about from the outset of this campaign last January, and for many years before that, are part of the OWS focus -- Wall Street’s undemocratic power, the widening disparities between the rich and the rest of us, the need to eject corporate money from politics.”

Solomon has described his politics as “green New Deal,” arguing for a vigorous government role in providing quality education, adequate health care, consumer protection, civil liberties, and environmental safeguards.

For leftists, two questions hover: Can a candidate go beyond liberal positions and articulate anti-capitalist and anti-empire politics during a campaign? If elected, can a member of Congress stay true to those principles? Movement activists are wary of left/liberal politicians who push their rhetoric toward the center to get elected and then end up advocating centrist policies.

Solomon said he identifies with a phrase Penn used at a campaign rally: “principle as strategy.”

“I intend to stick with principles, what I believe and what I’m willing to fight for,” Solomon said. “The quest is not for heightened rhetoric, it’s for deeper meaning, with insistence on policies to match -- economic populism, human rights, civil liberties, ending wars, and working for social equity.”

Though that agenda suggests radical change, Solomon said he doesn’t use the term “radical,” opting instead for terms such as “genuine progressive,” “progressive populism,” and “independent progressive” to describe himself and his campaign.

“The term radical can be understood as ‘to the root,’ but what it conveys to most of the public is that we are extreme and the status quo isn’t,” he said. “But look at the huge disparities between rich and poor, catastrophic climate change and destruction of ecology, inflicting massive suffering, extreme violence of war, and on and on. I would say the status quo is extreme.”

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches courses in media law, ethics, and politics -- and a board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. His books include All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, and Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. His writing is published extensively in mainstream and alternative media. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. Read more articles by Robert Jensen on The Rag Blog.]

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Rag Radio : Progressive Texas State Legislator Elliott Naishtat

Texas State. Rep. Elliott Naishtat (D-Austin) on Rag Radio at the KOOP studios in Austin, Friday, Sept. 30, 2011. Photos by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.
Progressive Texas legislator Elliott Naishtat on Rag Radio
with Thorne Dreyer. Listen to it here:

Progressive Democratic State Rep. Elliott Naishtat of Austin was Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, September 30, 2011.

Naishtat, who is Jewish and a native New Yorker, was elected to the District 49 seat in the Texas House of Representatives in 1990 and has been reelected 10 times. Naishtat, who has lived in Texas for 39 years, served as a VISTA volunteer in Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty in Queens, New York, and then in Eagle Pass, Texas, before moving to Austin and earning a Masters in Social Work and a law degree from The University of Texas.

Elliott -- who was a protégé of liberal Texas State Representative and Senator Gonzalo Barrientos -- was a founding board member of the House Progressive Caucus and now serves on the House Services Committee and as Vice Chair of the Public Health Committee. Naishtat, who has focused his legislative work in the areas of health and human services, has passed more than 200 bills and has been recognized for his service by numerous citizens groups.

On the program, we discuss Naishtat's unique journey from Queens, New York, to the Texas Legislature. VISTA told Elliott they were sending him to San Francisco, but instead he ended up in Eagle Pass (“You know the government. They lied.”) where he worked as a grassroots community organizer in a Mexican-American barrio, helping to set up a Head Start program.

Later, in Austin, when Naishtat first ran for the Texas legislature, his opponent, a three-time Republican incumbent, ran a television ad that was a takeoff on the famed Pace Picante Sauce commercial. A group of cowboys are sitting around a campfire and a voice asks, “Do you want a liberal social worker from New York City? Get a rope!” Naishtat won by 10 percentage points.

Elliott also shares with us the tale of the Texas House "Killer D's" -- 51 Democrats who in 2003 hid out in Ardmore, Oklahoma, in an attempt to halt the Tom Delay-engineered Republican redistricting putsch -- with the Texas Rangers and Homeland Security trying to track them down (a tactic that was repeated by Wisconsin Democrats in 2011 when they tried to block legislation limiting collective bargaining for public workers).

We also discuss the 82nd Legislature’s slash-and-burn session and the sad state of health and human services in Texas, and Rick Perry (“Governor Goodhair”) and his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. And we learn about the late Molly Ivins’ cherished stuffed armadillo, which now resides on a perch in Elliott’s legislative office, “always looking down at me to make sure that I never forget anything I learned from Molly Ivins.”

From left, Rag Radio's Tracey Schulz and Thorne Dreyer, and Texas State Rep. Elliott Naishtat. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.
Rag Radio -- hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer -- is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the web. KOOP is a cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin.

Rag Radio, which has been aired since September 2009, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history. After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio is also rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (Eastern) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is produced in the KOOP studios, in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

The running time for this interview, with music and underwriting announcements removed, is 54:23.

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John Nichols : The Debt Deal and Democratic Conscience

Members of Congressional Progressive Caucus express disapproval of debt ceiling deal Monday on Capitol Hill. From left, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. (speaking), and Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz. Photo from the AP.
The debt deal:
Dems split on issue of conscience

By John Nichols / The Nation / August 2, 2011

“I will have no part of a deal that cuts Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to appease the farthest reaches of the right wing of the Republican Party." -- Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi reportedly told members of the House Democratic Caucus to vote their "individual consciences" when they were asked to approve the debt-celing deal cobbled together by the Obama White House and congressional Republicans.

Consciences divided evenly, with 95 Democrats opposed to the compromise agreement while 95 supported it in a Monday evening vote that saw the measure pass primarily on the basis of Republican backing -- despite the fact that this was a deal promoted aggressively by a Democratic White House.

The final tally was 269 in favor, 161 opposed [1].

Republicans generally backed the deal, with 174 voting "yes" while 66 voted "no."

Democrats were far more closely divided, with widespread opposition to what Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Keith Ellison, D-Minnesota, described as a violation of "core Democratic ideals."

While Pelosi cast her own vote in favor of the agreement, she did not "whip" her fellow Democrats to back the deal during a marathon caucus meeting Monday. The former speaker outlined the consequences of a default by the federal government if an agreement to raise the debt ceiling is not reached.

But North Carolina Congressman G.K. Butterfield, who attended the caucus session said Pelosi avoided pressuring House Democrats to fall in line with the Democrats in the White House. "She told us to leave it to our individual consciences," Butterfield told reporters.

With the House vote done, the Senate will be vote Tuesday on the deal, which proposes radical cuts in federal programs -- cuts that some fear will ultimately threaten Medicare and other Democratic “legacy” programs -- in return for raising the nation’s debt ceiling.

The Senate is likely to back the deal that was cut between the Obama White House and Republican leaders; Senate majority leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, is already on board, as are key Republicans.

The general sense from the start was that the real test would come in the House, where Republican leaders had to scramble to keep Tea Party conservatives on board, and the White House faced a revolt by progressives.

Even as Pelosi and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer indicated personal support for the measure, a striking number of Democrats spoke out in opposition to Obama's position before the hastily-scheduled Monday evening vote.

Congressman Pete DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat who frequently breaks with the White House when he feels the president is not doing enough to address unemployment, went to the House floor Monday to declare that this is a “no jobs” deal.

Ohio Congressman Marcy Kaptur was opposed. Veteran New York Congressmen Jerry Nadler and Eliot Engle indicated early on that they are firmly opposed, as did former House Ways and Means Committee chair Charles Rangel, D-New York. Illinois Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. was another “no.”

California Congresswoman Maxine Waters announced her "no" vote with a declaration that the deal was "one of the worst pieces of public policy" she had ever seen.

The progressive opposition to the deal grew, as grassroots groups stepped up their lobbying against the package. Progressive Change Campaign Committee [2] co-founder Adam Green said:

This deal will kill our economy and is an attack on middle-class families. It asks nothing of the rich, will reduce middle-class jobs, and lines up Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for cuts. Today, we’re putting in thousands of calls to Congress urging Democrats to keep their promise and oppose this awful bill. The 14th Amendment is unambiguous, and President Obama should invoke it to pay our nation’s debt. Then Democrats should focus on jobs -- not cuts -- in order to grow our economy.

Progressive Democrats of America launched a national “No Deal!” push. “The corporatists in Congress recognize that the United States cannot go into default for the first time in its 235-year history,” said PDA director Tim Carpenter.

Yet, they are claiming that we can only increase the debt ceiling by cutting vital social programs designed to protect working class and poor people across this country. Don’t drink the Kool-Aid! [3] We can block this “deal” and demand a clean debt ceiling increase.

At least 20 members of National People's Action, a group that seeks to hold banks and financial institutions to account for the damage their speculation has done to the U.S. economy, were arrested when they disrupted debate in the Capitol. Decrying the debt-ceiling agreement as "a raw deal," the NPA members chanted: "Hey, Boehner, get a clue, it's about revenue!"

Congressional Progressive Caucus and Congressional Black Caucus members expressed the most serious skepticism regarding the measure.

That skepticism was rooted in a sense that this was a bad deal for both the economy and a Democratic Party that has historically positioned itself as the defender of working families.

Harry Truman used to say: “Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time.”

If the 33rd president was right, then Barack Obama did himself and his party a world of hurt by cutting the deal with the GOP leadership.

Faced with the threat that Tea Party-pressured Republicans in the House really would steer the United States toward default, and in so doing steer the U.S. economy over the cliff, Obama had to do something. But instead of bold action -- borrowing a page from Ronald Reagan to demand a straight up-or-down vote on raising the debt ceiling; borrowing a page from Franklin Roosevelt to pledge to use the authority afforded him by the Constitution to defend the full faith and credit of the United States -- the president engaged in inside-the-Beltway bargaining of the most dysfunctional sort.

In cutting a deal with Congressional Republicans [4] that places Democratic legacy programs -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- at risk while cutting essential programs for working families and the poor, Obama has positioned himself and his administration to the right of where mainstream Republicans such as Howard Baker, Bob Dole, and George H.W. Bush used to stand in fights with the fringe elements of their party.

Now, the fringe is in charge of the GOP. And Obama is agreeing to policies that are designed to satisfy Republicans that Britain’s banking minister describes as “right-wing nutters [5].’”

Obama and Democratic Congressional leaders claimed they have done everything in their power to avert deep cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. And it is true that they have given the Republicans (and their paymasters) less than House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan was demanding with a budget proposal that turned Medicare into a voucher program and began the process of privatizing Social Security.

But a compromise with total destruction can still do a lot of damage.

The president’s bow to the political extremism -- and the economic irrationality [6] -- of a tiny circle of “right-wing nutters” in Congress and their dwindling Tea Party “base” will, according to reports based on briefings by White House and GOP aides,

...raise the debt limit by about $2.7 trillion and reduce the deficit by the same amount in two steps. It would cut about $1 trillion in spending up front and set up a select bicameral committee to put together a future deficit-reduction package worth $1.7 trillion to $1.8 trillion. Failure of Congress to pass the future deficit-reduction package would automatically trigger cuts to defense spending and Medicare.

An aide familiar with the deal told The Hill newspaper that the Medicare cut would not affect beneficiaries. “Instead,” the aide indicated, “healthcare providers and insurance companies would see lower payments.”

But that’s still a squeezing of Medicare in order to meet the demands of Congressional Republicans who have spent the past six months trying to put the program on the chopping block.

Congressional Black Caucus chairman Emanuel Cleaver, D-Missouri, responded to initial reports regarding the deal by describing it as “a sugar-coated Satan sandwich [7].”

Congressional Progressive Caucus [8] co-chair Raul Grijalva said Obama and his negotiators bent too far to the extremists. Like many progressives, Grijalva favored the straight up-or-down vote on debt ceiling. “Had that vote failed,” he argued, “the president should have exercised his Fourteenth Amendment responsibilities and ended this manufactured crisis.”

Grijalva joined members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus at a Monday press conference, where they called on Obama to sidestep Congress and raise the debt limit by invoking the Fourteenth Amendment [9].

Obama rejected this option.

Instead of taking a tough stance, the president blinked in the face of Republican recalcitrance. And in so doing Obama agreed to what the Progressive Caucus co-chair described as “a cure as bad as the disease.”

“This deal trades people’s livelihoods for the votes of a few unappeasable right-wing radicals, and I will not support it,” Grijalva declared Sunday afternoon. [10]

Progressives have been organizing for months to oppose any scheme that cuts Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security, and it now seems clear that even these bedrock pillars of the American success story are on the chopping block. Even if this deal were not as bad as it is, this would be enough for me to fight against its passage.

Grijalva expressed immediate opposition to the deal. And he was not alone.

Congresswoman Donna Edwards, D-Maryland, slammed the deal. [11]

“Nada from million/billionaires; corp tax loopholes aplenty; only sacrifice from the poor/middle class? Shared sacrifice, balance? Really?” she complained, via Twitter, on Sunday.

Congresswoman Barbara Lee, D-California, complained that she was “not sure how Social Security and Medicare” will be preserved by the bargain the president has cut with the Republicans. “We have to make sure that within this deal... Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security and the most vulnerable are protected,” she said, while withholding an endorsement of the measure. “I worry about these triggers [for more cuts],” Lee concluded.

Grijalva objected, in particular, to the lack of shared sacrifice in the deal.

“This deal does not even attempt to strike a balance between more cuts for the working people of America and a fairer contribution from millionaires and corporations. The very wealthy will continue to receive taxpayer handouts, and corporations will keep their expensive federal giveaways. Meanwhile, millions of families unfairly lose more in this deal than they have already lost. I will not be a part of it,” the Arizona congressman explained.

Republicans have succeeded in imposing their vision of a country without real economic hope. Their message has no public appeal, and Democrats have had every opportunity to stand firm in the face of their irrational demands. Progressives have been rallying support for the successful government programs that have meant health and economic security to generations of our people.

Today we, and everyone we have worked to speak for and fight for, were thrown under the bus. We have made our bottom line clear for months: a final deal must strike a balance between cuts and revenue, and must not put all the burden on the working people of this country. This deal fails those tests and many more.

But Grijalva’s gripe was not merely a moral or economic one.

It was political, as well.

"The Democratic Party, no less than the Republican Party, is at a very serious crossroads at this moment. For decades Democrats have stood for a capable, meaningful government—a government that works for the people, not just the powerful, and that represents everyone fairly and equally. This deal weakens the Democratic Party as badly as it weakens the country,” explained Grijalva.

“We have given much and received nothing in return. The lesson today is that Republicans can hold their breath long enough to get what they want. While I believe the country will not reward them for this in the long run, the damage has already been done."

The question that remains is: How much damage? How much damage to vulnerable Americans? How much damage to the global reputation of the United States as a functional state? How much damage to a U.S. economy that is threatened by rising unemployment? How much damage to the image of the Democratic Party as a defender of working families?

This deal cannot be defended as a sound or necessary response to a manufactured debt-ceiling debate and the mess that House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, has made of it.

That is why the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus said: “I will not support the emerging debt deal.”

“I will have no part of a deal that cuts Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to appease the farthest reaches of the right wing of the Republican Party,” argued Grijalva. “It is unconscionable to put these programs on the chopping block and ignore the voices and beliefs of the millions of Americans who trust us to lead while continuing to give handouts to the ultra wealthy and the largest corporations. There is no human decency in that.”

Links:
[1] http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/60443.html
[2] http://www.boldprogressives.org
[3] http://www.pdamerica.org/
[4] http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/174595-reid-signs-off-on-bipartisan-debt-deal
[5] http://www.thenation.com/../../../../../../blog/162258/right-wing-nutters-threaten-global-economy-imf-warns-disastrous-consequences
[6] http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/174571-compromise-deal-could-include-broad-spending-cuts-as-a-trigger
[7] http://www.rollcall.com/issues/57_17/Debt-Deal-Emerging-With-Rightward-Tilt-207893-1.html
[8] http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/
[9] http://thehill.com/homenews/house/174601-house-liberals-urge-14th-amendment-fix-in-lieu-of-bipartisan-debt-deal
[10] http://grijalva.house.gov /index.cfm?sectionid=13&sectiontree=5,13&itemid=1063
[11] http://thehill.com/homenews/house/174599-pelosi-dem-leaders-withholding-judgment
[12] http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/nationnow/id399704758?mt=8

[John Nichols writes about politics for The Nation magazine as its Washington correspondent. He is a contributing writer for The Progressive and In These Times and the associate editor of the Capital Times, the daily newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. This article was first published at The Nation and was distributed by Progressive America Rising.]

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