Lamar W. Hankins : ALEC and the Right Wing Agenda

Graphic from alecwatch.org.
The ALEC agenda:
How the right-wing molds
legislators to shill for corporations

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / February 28, 2012

"[Any law proposed by businessmen] ought always to be listened to with great precaution... It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it." -- Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations

In 1973, a group of state legislators from around the country met with some right-wing ideologues to form the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to promote policies favorable to limited government, free markets, federalism, and individual liberty, as they understood these concepts.

These are the same concepts that underlie the neoconservative and libertarian agenda that has become well known recently in Wisconsin and Ohio, and which permeate the actions of legislators throughout the U.S., including in the Congress.

One of the key founders of ALEC was Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation, promoter of direct mail fundraising for right-wing causes, and the first right-winger to cultivate and recruit evangelical activists to support social conservative causes.

With Jerry Falwell, Weyrich founded the Moral Majority, a name he invented. Weyrich was one of the key right-wing leaders who worked to develop conservatism into the powerful force it is today after the defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and the disappointment with Richard Nixon's too-moderate presidency.

But Weyrich, who died in 2008, would not support Goldwater or Nixon were they alive today. They were too moderate for Weyrich's tastes.

In the late 1980's, ALEC saw an opportunity to move beyond policy and education by producing model legislation to promote its right-wing, pro-corporate agenda. ALEC organized itself into a number of task forces to write and promote legislation in many areas of public life. It describes itself this way:

For more than 35 years, ALEC has been the ideal means of creating and delivering public policy ideas aimed at protecting and expanding our free society. Thanks to ALEC’s membership, the duly elected leaders of their state legislatures, Jeffersonian principles advise and inform legislative action across the country.

Literally hundreds of dedicated ALEC members have worked together to create, develop, introduce and guide to enactment many of the cutting-edge, conservative policies that have now become the law in the states. The strategic knowledge and training ALEC members have received over the years has been integral to these victories.

This description is not an exaggeration. ALEC task forces have broad mandates in the areas of Civil Justice; Commerce, Insurance, and Economic Development; Communications and Technology; Education; Energy, Environment, and Agriculture; Health and Human Services; International Relations; Public Safety and Elections; and Tax and Fiscal Policy.

ALEC is funded largely by corporations and corporate leaders, so it should come as no surprise that its model legislation benefits corporate interests to the exclusion of the public interest. As Progress Texas, a membership organization focused on holding elected officials responsible to the people, explains:

ALEC is made of more than 300 corporate and 2,000 legislative members who work behind closed doors to approve "model" legislation designed to increase corporate profits at public expense. These corporate-approved bills are then introduced in states like Texas, where lobbyists of many of those same corporations also write checks donating to the political campaigns of lawmakers who advance their agenda in the Texas Legislature. The typical cycle is as follows:

1. Corporate lobbyists and conservative legislators approve 'model' legislation
2. Corporations donate money to receptive legislators to help them win their elections
3. Legislators file and pass the bills drafted by their corporate counterparts in ALEC
4. Repeat

More than 80% of the corporate representatives on ALEC's board are lobbyists for corporations, such as Altria/Phillip Morris USA, Bayer, Corrections Corporation of America, ExxonMobil, GlaxoSmithKline, Humana, Johnson & Johnson, Koch Industries, Reynolds, State Farm, United Healthcare, and Wal-Mart. Around 200 pieces of legislation initiated by ALEC are passed into law each year in legislatures around the country.

ALEC chart from Daily Kos.
At least one house of the Texas Legislature in 2011 approved ALEC-model bills that were vetted and endorsed by a small number of corporations, including the photo ID bill, the women’s sonogram bill, and the sanctuary cities bill (which would have denied state funds to local governments that prohibit peace officers and employees of special districts from inquiring into the status of a person arrested or detained for the investigation of crime).

Progress Texas reports that ALEC's

legislative leadership is comprised almost entirely of Republicans and also corporations, and ALEC receives 98% of its funding from corporations, foundations, and sources other than legislative (membership) dues. ALEC corporations and their corporate representatives will give money to state legislators, in one of three ways: directly to candidates, to statewide ballot campaigns, and/or directly to Republican committees. In the past 20 years, ALEC corporations or their employees have donated $228.3 million to campaigns, $202.1 million to candidates, and an additional $85.8 million to Republican Party committees, totaling $516.2 million.

To find out which legislators and corporations are involved with influencing and funding legislators in your state, go to the ALEC Exposed website. ALEC Exposed is a project of the Center for Media and Democracy, a non-profit investigative reporting group that focuses on "exposing corporate spin and government propaganda."

At the ALEC Exposed website, you can learn how ALEC plans to undermine public school systems throughout the U.S. by turning them over to corporations, to limit your legal right to seek damages for injuries caused by corporations, to turn government-run prisons into private prisons, to limit access to the ballot box by ordinary citizens, to dismiss the effects of second-hand smoke on non-smokers and block anti-tobacco laws, to limit the ability of states to raise or collect taxes, to limit the ability of public-sector workers to organize together to improve worker benefits, to create new give-aways to big business, to give tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans, to undermine environmental protections, to limit the ability of local governments to manage land use, to further distort the harshness of the criminal justice system by incarcerating more people for longer sentences, and a host of other legislation that will fatten corporate coffers and diminish the lives of ordinary citizens.

Although ALEC has built itself into a powerful tool of right-wing and corporate interests for nearly 40 years, its influence can be combated if people are aware of its largely hidden activities. ALEC Exposed helps ordinary citizens become aware of ALEC activities and provides the knowledge needed to combat its influence on our lives.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

Also see:

• "Naked ALEC and the Right Wing Conspiracy" by Paul Beckett / The Rag Blog / November 10, 2011

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Steve Benen : Some of Texas Republicans' Best Friends Are Jewish

Is Texas House Speaker Straus not Christian enough? Straus, on the right, is shown with Texas Gov. Rick Perry (center) and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst. Photo by Harry Cabluck / AP.
Christian conservatives trying to oust
Jewish speaker of Texas State House

By Steve Benen / December 7, 2010

[We would add that Joe Straus, though indeed a conservative Republican, isn't an ultra-conservative Republican. In addition to lacking "Christian" credentials, he was elected with the support of Democrats and exhibited a willingness -- heaven forbid -- to work with Democrats. -- Ed.]

Ordinarily, who gets elected Speaker of the Texas state House would only be of interest to those in Texas. But the current dispute in Austin has a larger significance.

The current state House Speaker is Joe Straus, a conservative Republican leading a conservative Republican majority. He's currently facing a challenge from state Rep. Ken Paxton, who appears to agree with Straus on nearly everything.

So what makes this noteworthy? Straus is Jewish, and some far-right activists in Texas have a problem with that.

A few weeks ago, a coalition of Tea Party and right-wing Republican groups began lobbying for Paxton to replace Straus, with coalition activists circulating anti-Semitic emails. The message from conservatives was that the GOP state House needed a "Christian conservative" leader.

This week, The Texas Observer reported on an email exchange between two members of the State Republican Executive Committee, which governs state GOP affairs. One of the two party leaders, John Cook, insisted in a message, "We elected a house with Christian, conservative values. We now want a true Christian, conservative running it."

The Observer's Abby Rapoport connected with Cook to ask about his efforts to replace the current state House Speaker.

"When I got involved in politics, I told people I wanted to put Christian conservatives in leadership positions," he told me, explaining that he only supports Christian conservative candidates in Republican primary races.

"I want to make sure that a person I'm supporting is going to have my values. It's not anything about Jews and whether I think their religion is right or Muslims and whether I think their religion is right. ... I got into politics to put Christian conservatives into office. They're the people that do the best jobs over all."

Ah, I see. It's not "about Jews," it's just that Cook doesn't think Jews can do the job well because they're Jews.

He added that he prefers Christian candidates, but isn't anti-Semitic. "They're some of my best friends," he said of Jews, naming two friends of his.

Someday, folks will have to understand that "some of my best friends are [fill in the blank with a minority group]" is a cliche repeated by bigots. I would have hoped that was obvious by now.

As for the bigger picture, I'm inclined to consider this yet another setback in the Republican Party's minority outreach efforts

[Steve Benen is a contributor to the Washington Monthly and is "blogger-in-chief" of that publication's online Political Animal, where this article first appeared. It was distributed by AlterNet.]

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Glenn W. Smith : Attacks on Voting Rights in Houston

The top photo is the captured still from a video (see it here) put out by True the Vote that alleges "Democrats" manipulate elections. Digital Dupes then reported that it appeared that some of True the Vote's evidence might be manipulated, pointing out, as an example, that the type on the poster in the top photo was "perfectly flat," and that "the font is clearly Comic Sans with a slight compression along the x-axis, not hand lettered which would make this an unlikely meticulous stencil or expensive printed sign." Then the un-doctored original (lower photo) was found.

Contempt for democracy in Houston:
Attacks on voting rights

By Glenn W. Smith / The Rag Blog / September 6, 2010

In Harris County (Houston), Texas, a tea party group called King Street Patriots is engaged in a systematic attack on voting rights. They are working dirty hand in dirty hand with a Republican County voter registrar to suppress the votes of those they believe unworthy, that is, those who might disagree with their own political choices.

Of course, they say they just want fair and open elections. “It’s really about truth,” says King Street founder Catherine Engelbrecht in an eight-minute video that includes doctored images and phony charges of “fraud” against... well, you only see pictures of African-Americans when fraud is discussed, so the implication is clear.

Maybe it was just coincidence that the warehouse containing all -- all -- of Houston’s voting machines burned down mysteriously just as King Street Patriots and their ally, Tax Assessor-Collector Leo Vasquez, went public with their fraud allegations. Whatever the case, the voter intimidation and suppression campaign is clearly part of a well-funded national effort to put barriers in the way of voters suspected of disagreeing with the perpetrators’ right-wing agenda.

The contempt for democracy demonstrated by partisans who think nothing of violating the fellow citizens’ right to vote is staggering. Not only are election outcomes potentially altered, the health of civil society itself is altered.

I wrote that back in 2004 after surveying decades of GOP voter suppression campaigns for my book, The Politics of Deceit. Voter suppression is the most under-reported political scandal of my lifetime, and it pains me to admit that I under-reported it myself when I was a political writer for daily newspapers.

Journalists tend to shrug it off as a kind of prankish misdemeanor. But mail pieces like that one pictured above (read about it at Lone Star Project) are clearly intended to scare would-be voters into thinking any misstep will land them in jail. Mailers like the one below are now a common part of every election.


Groups like King Street Patriots hide behind rhetoric that they are the guardians of fair, open, and honest elections. If that is true, why do they lie? Why do they invent stories of fraud where none exist? Why do they doctor images in their video? If truth is what they want, why do they poison it?

Their lies betray their real goal: to limit the voting rights of their political opponents. Let me detail one of their lies. They claim repeatedly that in Houston, six people are registered to a vacant lot. The claim is the symbolic center of their phony accusations of voter fraud.

It didn’t take very many minutes of research to discover how ridiculous this charge was. Incidentally, the Liberty Institute has taken the image down from its website. LI is run by King Street Patriots lawyer, Kelly Shackleford, the guy who tried to suppress the Alaska Legislature’s Sarah Palin report. Anyway, it turns out that there was a rent house on that vacant lot until 2010. A demolition permit was issued in September 2009. Tax records indicate the house stood until 2010. The six registered voters mentioned in the attack were renters going back 10 years.

If any doubt remains, here’s a Google Earth photo of the house that once stood on King Streets’ allegedly vacant lot.


King Street Patriots doesn’t care, of course, because the truth of an allegation is irrelevant. Like all voter suppression and intimidation campaigns (Greg Mitchell’s account of the the 1934 California gubernatorial race tells a great story about how unfounded accusations of fraud can be used to suppress votes) racist allegations of widespread fraud are used to stir anger among (usually white) conservative voters and intimidate minority voters.

Here’s another example. In their video, King Street Patriots uses a doctored image of an African-American rally-goer holding a sign that reads, “I Only Got to Vote Once.” [See above.] The sign is lettered in the Comic Sans font and was clearly photoshopped. Once again we have to ask, if truth and fairness are what they want, why phony-up images? This one actually makes me chuckle for its sheer absurdity. Under what possible circumstances would anyone publicly complain that they only got to vote once?

By the way, there is a national effort to find the young female victim of this particular little fraud. Go to DigitalDupes.org to participate.

The Right wants its suckers to believe that scary people are out there undoing what would otherwise be the natural result of “fair” elections: the absolute hold on power by, well, them.

King Street Patriots appears to be connected to the national right-wing network funded by the notorious Koch brothers. Jane Mayer’s recent piece on them in the New Yorker should be mandatory reading. I think the voter intimidation and suppression campaigns in 2010 will be better funded and more organized than ever before. And I think the best way to discredit them is to expose their lies.

An argument over a lot at 2307 Jackson Street in Houston, Texas, may seem trivial. But it’s not. Caught in a lie, King Street Patriots betrays its true intentions, intentions shared by a national network of anti-democracy forces that will disrupt the 2010 elections any and every way they can.

[Austin's Glenn W. Smith, according to Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, is a “legendary political consultant and all-around good guy.” His excellent blog on politics and culture is DogCanyon, where this article also appears.]

• Also see Glenn W. Smith: It's Getting Hot in Houston / The Rag Blog / August 31, 2010

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Glenn W. Smith : It's Getting Hot in Houston

Image from Dog Canyon.
Likely Arson in Houston, and
Voter suppression from the Right

By Glenn W. Smith / The Rag Blog / August 31, 2010

A mysterious fire last Friday destroys all of the voting machines in Harris County (Houston), Texas. Arson investigators have not yet issued an opinion.

Meanwhile, a well-funded right-wing group emerges in Houston and begins raising unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud. A video on their website pictures only people of color when it talks of voter fraud. White people are shown talking patriotically about the need for a million vigilantes to suppress illegal votes.

In the video, an unidentified spokesman for “TrueTheVote” says, “If we lose Houston, we lose Texas. And guess what? If we lose Texas we lose the country.”

The former Mayor of Houston, Democrat Bill White, is running against secessionist Republican Gov. Rick Perry this year. White’s counting on a big turnout in his home town. The fire and the voter suppression campaign guarantee a greatly diminished turnout.

TrueTheVote’s video [see below] is well produced. Participants speak in calm and knowing tones, disguising the racist agenda behind their project. We don’t yet know where the group’s money comes from. But they have money.

As I’ve said before, right-wing voter suppression campaigns are the most under-reported political scandal of the last 50-100 years. But there’s never been anything like the criminal destruction of all the voting machines in the nation’s fourth largest city.

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to suspect the machines in Houston were destroyed by an arsonist. Warehouses don’t regularly and spontaneously combust at four in the morning, especially warehouses containing all the voting tools in a pivotal city in a pivotal election.

In other details, the suppression campaigns follow a familiar pattern: raise suspicions of widespread voter fraud. Accuse “others” of stealing elections from us (read: white people). Threaten would-be voters with criminal charges. Limit polling locations in poor and minority precincts. Distribute spurious “felon lists” that disenfranchise legal voters who happen to share a name with a felon. Staff phone banks that make election calls to minority and poor voters giving incorrect polling locations and dates. Dress up vigilantes in cop clothes to intimidate would-be voters.

Huffington Post contributor Greg Mitchell wrote one of the best accounts of such a suppression and intimidation campaign in his book about the 1934 California governor’s race, The Campaign of the Century. At least since then, voter suppression has been a part of nearly every election cycle.

Voting machines go up in smoke in Houston. Photo from KRIV-TV.
There are simply no machines available to replace the loss of Houston’s machines. That means either a return to paper ballots (there may be very few scanners to count them) or a greatly reduced number of polling locations. The latter would require the emergency suspension of state law and run afoul of the Voting Rights Act. In any case, confusion will reign, and confusion reduces turnout.

What about that TrueTheVote statement, “If we lose Houston, we lose Texas. And guess what? If we lose Texas we lose the country.”? That may be the only true thing TrueTheVote has said.

For much of the country, Texas is a vast right-wing breeding ground. Actually, Democrats have nearly reached parity in the state House of Representatives. All the elected officials in Dallas are Democrats. Austin, too. Most of the judges and many of the officials in Houston are Democrats.

With a strong turnout in Houston, White could very well beat Perry. Without a national effort to counter the largest voter suppression effort in my memory, that turnout won’t happen. Even if the fire is ruled accidental, its consequences remain the same. If a great number of Houston voters are disenfranchised as a consequence of the fire and the right’s election vigilante effort, democracy loses, and so does the country.

Keep in mind that population shifts will hand Texas several new congressional seats lost in the Democratic rustbelt. This election will decide the players who will draw new lines in redistricting. The stakes are high. The question is, do Democrats have the will to do battle with right-wing forces who believe they can choose who votes and who doesn’t?

[Austin's Glenn W. Smith, according toDaily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, is a “legendary political consultant and all-around good guy.” His excellent blog on politics and culture is DogCanyon, where this article also appears.]


UPDATE: Tuesday, August 31, 2010, 7:30 p.m.

The Houston Chronicle reported today:

Despite a fire that destroyed Harris County's voting machines last week, County Clerk Beverly Kaufman said Monday that she intends to keep all polling places open with replacement machines on Nov. 2.

Commissioners Court approved Kaufman's emergency plan Monday to spend $13.6 million to buy 2,325 electronic voting machines and supporting equipment.
[....]
Kaufman's plan includes 1.4 million paper ballots, which will be distributed to polling stations as a backup in case a shortage of machines leads to long lines.
[....]
Despite Kaufman's confident predictions of a timely and fair election, 16 Democratic state senators and representatives have asked the U.S. Department of Justice to oversee the development of an emergency plan for voting that begins in 48 days. Their letter asks for the department's involvement to "protect the voting rights of racial and language minorities" against any plans to close some of the 739 scheduled polling places due to a lack of equipment.

"Removing neighborhood voting locations and fostering conditions for longer lines must be avoided to prevent suppression of minority voters," the legislators wrote...

Despite her apparent confidence, Kaufman urged residents to vote early to avoid long lines and said she would seek "loaner machines" from other counties.

The Chronicle reported no new information about the cause of the fire, but said that an arson investigation is under way.

'TrueTheVote' Video



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Harry Targ : Ethics Charges and the Natural Order of Things

Congresswoman Maxine Waters. Photo from Getty Images.
The natural order of things:
Ethics and Congresswomen Waters and Harman

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / August 9, 2010

The stories about ethics violations by Congressman Charles Rangel (NY) have been making the rounds of the media and wire service reports have indicated that the House Ethics Committee will be charging Congresswoman Maxine Waters (California’s 35th Congressional District) with financial and influence improprieties as well. Of course, the leaked information in both cases is complicated and presumes guilt while the targets’ denials seem like desperate gestures to save themselves.

These stories have been contextualized in two ways. First, the charges against Rangel and Waters have been framed as part of concern about the seeming rise in corruption in public life and reminders that candidate Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have promised greater political transparency. So the upcoming Rangel/Waters hearings seem a natural byproduct of a changing political atmosphere in Washington and the country.

Second, virtually all the analyses of the announcement of the charges, the responses from those charged, and estimates of when panel hearings will take place, highlight the impacts of these cases on the November 2010 elections. Pundits speculate on what effect these political troubles will have for Democrats and reinforce media conclusions that the Democrats will be even more hurt from these revelations than everyone already expects.

What are these charges really about?

I have not read all the stories on Rangel or Waters but none I have seen have mentioned three other variables that just might relate to the attacks on the Congresspersons in question. First, both, but particularly Maxine Waters, have been visible progressives on war/peace and economic issues. Second, both Congresspersons are African-American and have been articulate spokespersons for the Congressional Black Caucus. Third, and not unconnected to the other two, these charges follow a two-year trajectory of assaults on progressive African-Americans, including the grassroots organization ACORN, green jobs activist Van Jones, and most recently, agricultural specialist, Shirley Sherrod.

Congresswoman Jane Harman.
On Waters and Harman

On Tuesday August 3, 2010, The New York Times published a front-page story titled “A Capital Abuzz With Ethics,” reflecting the standard frame suggested above. “The charges reflect, in part, a heightened sensitivity in Washington to indiscretions by members of Congress.”

On page one of the business section in the same issue of the paper a story appears with the title “An Audio Pioneer Buys Beleaguered Newsweek.” It describes Sidney Harman’s purchase of the faltering but still visible news magazine, Newsweek. Curiously, paragraph 17, on page two of the section, opens with the following: “He is married to Jane Harman, a Democratic Congresswoman who represents Southern California. Asked whether being married to a Congresswoman might represent a conflict of interest, he replied: ‘We’ve been married for over 30 years. I’ve never told her how to run the government and she’s never told me how to run the business. That’s absolutely fundamental to us.’”

(Last fall, in the midst of the health care debate it was disclosed in Indiana that the wife of retiring Senator Evan Bayh was a board member of the health insurance giant Wellpoint and that she made over $200,000 in fees and stock options for her work. Bayh’s legislative aide said that the Senator and Susan Bayh never spoke about the health care issue at home.)

Just a superficial comparison of the political agendas of the two Southern California legislators, Maxine Waters and Jane Harman, indicate that the former has been a leader in opposition to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Harman has been more tied to homeland security advocacy and support for Israel.

On economic issues, Waters has been an advocate for expanding economic stimulus policies, increasing housing and community development support, empowering women and youth, and promoting green jobs and other policies of relevance to the poor and minorities. Harman has identified with the “Blue Dog Blueprint for Fiscal Reform” a plan that prioritizes budget balancing and deficit reduction over human needs. She also identifies with the New Democrats call for “a robust market-based approach to address our nation’s energy needs.”

We must respond

The right wing and their allies in both political parties are engaging in a campaign at all levels of society to destroy the prospects of building a progressive agenda. Most of the media -- print, electronic, and internet -- for whatever reasons, are co-conspirators. AND this campaign clearly is targeting the interests of workers, African-Americans, people of color in general, and women. Progressives must join the struggle to save the progressive agenda wherever political activity takes place.

[Harry Tarq is a professor in American Studies who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical.]

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Republicans on Health Care : The Gift That Keeps on Giving

Tweet from Roger Ebert. Image from Daily Kos.
Ain't gonna happen:
Republican efforts to repeal reform

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / March 24, 2010

Health care reform is now law, and in a few more days the reconciliation bill will pass and be signed into law to make that reform even better (although not perfect). There is more to be done, but I don't want to minimize what has been accomplished. Many millions will be helped by this new law, and those who fought for it have good reason to celebrate.

But there are those who spent all their political capital to try and stop health care reform, and today their hopes are in shambles -- mainly Republicans, especially those on the far right like the teabaggers. They are pinning their fading hopes on the hollow assumption that the American public will be so outraged by the new law that they will once again return the defeated Republicans to power.

Many on the far right are now saying they will repeal the new health care reform law, and they are counting on the November elections to give them the power to do that. In fact, the queen of right-wing insanity in the House of Representatives, Michele Bachmann, has already filed a bill to repeal the new law. And soon, Senator Jim DeMint will introduce similar legislation in the Senate.

Both of them know they have no chance to pass this legislation. What they are really trying to do is keep their teabagging followers engaged in the politics of denial until November, in the hopes they will go to the polls in droves and elect right-wing Republicans. And I don't doubt they will re-elect some and elect a few new ones. It is a peculiarity of American politics that the party out of power will pick up seats in an off-year election, and that will probably happen.

But I seriously doubt they will pick up enough to challenge Democratic power in either the House or the Senate. One reason is that as the public learns more about the health care reform, they will like it (or at least most of it). They will realize that the new law changes things for the better. And the more that people understand the intricacies of the new law, the more unhappy they will be with those who tried to stop it -- the Republicans.

Of course this is the great fear of the Republicans. It is why they cannot drop their efforts to overturn the new law. And it is why they will continue to lie and demagogue about the law until the November elections. But can they overturn the new law? No.

Let us assume the worst case scenario -- that the Republicans somehow take control of both the House and Senate. I don't think that can happen, but if it did, can they then repeal health care reform? Again, no. They will still have a Democrat in the White House who will not sign any kind of repeal legislation. That means they would need not just a majority, but a two-thirds majority to repeal. Even the Republicans don't expect to do that good in November.

But there is another much better reason not to repeal the law. And all but the nuts on the right-wing fringe are very aware of this. What politician of either party is going to tell the American public the following:

• Pre-existing conditions are a good thing and the insurance companies should once again be allowed to deny insurance coverage on this basis.
• Government subsidies to help low and middle income families buy health insurance is a bad thing and should be stopped.
• Recission is a good thing and insurance companies should be allowed to drop the policies of people who become seriously ill.

If the Republicans repeal the new law, that is what they would be saying to the American people. I think most politicians, even Republicans, know it would be political suicide to take back these things. A huge majority, even of those generally opposed to some aspects of the reform, knew these things needed to happen, and they are not about to let any politician take them away now.

Although there were many people who didn't think the new law was exactly what was needed, there was never a majority of the people opposed to health care reform. That was just the teabaggers, and according to a recent poll, they only make up about 16% of the population. The other 84% knew that some kind of health care reform was needed. Now that it has been passed, they will not be willing to go backwards and give it up.

The river has been crossed, and there's no going back now. The health care law can, and probably will, be amended and improved, but it will not be repealed. And if the Republicans don't climb on board pretty soon, they will find themselves even further marginalized.

I hope the Republicans do campaign on repealing the health care reform law in 2012, because that would be disastrous for them. By then, the American public will understand the reform much better, especially the parts that apply to them -- and most Americans will be positively affected by the new law.

So bring on the repeal efforts Republicans. It would be a gift for Democrats.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

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Text and Subtext : The Media's Tea Party

Framing the Tea Party movement: New Left redux? Photo from RaceWire.
'Wal-Mart Hippies?'
Framing the Tea Party movement

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / March 10, 2010

Friday morning I was listening to my pseudo “fair and balanced” National Public Radio station, sipping my fair-trade coffee, and crunching on my organic granola while listening to two reports on American politics.

The first addressed the rising threat of the Tea Party movement to the “traditional” Republican Party. Of course, the victory of Rick Perry over Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison figured in the analysis as did the significant showing of a third, Tea Party, candidate in the Republican gubernatorial primary.

The second report was on the upcoming primaries in Arkansas where incumbent but very conservative Democratic candidate Blanche Lincoln is being challenged by a much more liberal challenger, Bill Halter, who wants to be the party’s choice to run for the U.S. Senate. Lurking in the wings of this story, of course, is the Tea Party movement on the right which will run against either the conservative or liberal Democrat.

The subtext of these stories, that is texts that are partially hidden but still visible, is the rise of the new right which if the media is to be believed constitutes a major grassroots movement in the political life of the country.

Robert Borosage, announcing a June conference of progressives, captured my sense of frustration when he wrote:

Apparently, any time more than two right-wingers get together, the media gets the vapors, showers the teabaggers with fluff coverage, and heralds the beginning of a transformational movement.

Then I read David Brooks’ March 5 New York Times column, “The Wal-Mart Hippies.” Now I am not a Brooks naysayer. Sometimes he has interesting things to say even though I usually disagree with him. But this column was too much. For Brooks, the similarities between the New Left of the 1960s and the Tea Party of today are much greater than their differences. He said that the two movements have used the same shock and awe tactics. In fact, he said, the Tea Partiers are adopting the tactics of Saul Alinsky.

Most important, Brooks suggests that both movements had this simplistic notion that “the people are pure and virtuous.” Both movements “go in big for conspiracy theories.” The 60s theorists had these silly ideas about “shadowy corporatist/imperialist networks-theories that live on in the works of Noam Chomsky.” The Tea Party folks also have silly ideas about how the Federal Reserve Bank, the F.B.I, big banks, and corporations have caused our problems.

And both movements “have a problem with authority.” Brooks says both New Leftists and Tea Party activists oppose any systems of authority, reject the idea of original sin, assume the perfectibility of human kind, and believe in mass spontaneous action. The last straw was when he referred to a pundit’s comparison of Glenn Beck to Abbie Hoffman.

Brooks, while paying brief lip service to differences in the two movements, ignores the theory and political perspectives that animated the two movements. As a result he elevated the theory as well as practice of the Tea Party followers. In this way Brooks gave legitimacy to mainstream media political discourse that has made the Tea Party story a significant one. As with the New Left failures of the 1960s, “the Tea Partiers will not take over the G.O.P., but it seems as though the 60s political style will always be with us-first on the left, now the right.”

Perhaps David Brooks should have suggested that the “60s political style” will always be with us as long as the monopoly media choose to create, distort, and use various political currents as part of common and enticing frames.

As Robert Borosage suggested, the main stream media has created for its own purposes, and perhaps the purposes of political reaction, the imagery of an angry, grassroots movement that bravely confronts authority figures, both liberal and conservative, Democratic and Republican. They are framed as well-informed, though impetuous citizens, who are suffering from the downside of big moneyed interests.

The media presents Tea Party claims that the problem with America is government with little or no reflection on the bases of their claims. The media instill in public consciousness Tea Party claims about the dishonesty of science, the heartlessness of all politicians, inhumanity of “bureaucrats,” and the distance the United States has come from the framers of the Constitution.

And the Tea Party phenomenon is presented as an authentic grassroots movement with little or no analysis of its support, encouragement, and financing by inside the beltway big capital (the very folks they presumably are railing against). Hardly a word is printed, for example, about Tea Party funding from former Congressman Dick Armey’s Freedom Works or funding by the Koch Family Foundations of Americans for Prosperity. And the media fail to discuss the racism embedded in many of their claims such as, “They are taking our country away.”

And interestingly enough, the media portrait of Republicans is of a beleaguered middle-of-the road political faction that just might have supported health care reform, climate change legislation, and other Obama proposals if it were not for the pressure from the grassroots.

While reflecting upon the Tea Party phenomenon, how it has been framed, and the Brooks comparison, I was reminded of Todd Gitlin’s book, The Whole World is Watching, which showed the radical shift of the media frame on the New Left before and after 1965. After the first major protest rally against the escalating war in Vietnam, Gitlin suggested, the media frame of the New Leftists as sweet caring young people shifted to the bomb throwing monsters that the media argued they had become.

While the Tea Party phenomenon is only a year old, according to Borosage, they are still showered with “fluff coverage.” If the media had continued its positive coverage of New Left activism after 1965, the way they seem to be covering the Tea Party today, perhaps the war in Vietnam would have been stopped sooner.

In the end, it may be that the Tea Party movement is far less pervasive than has been presented. Its level of popularity probably varies enormously from place to place. And the pain and suffering of many people identified with the Tea Party -- alienation, powerlessness, economic marginalization, inequality, and hopelessness -- is buried in stories, such as the one by Brooks, of political style.

[Harry Tarq is a professor in American Studies who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical.]

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Health Care Blues : Citizens Suffer While Insurance Profits Soar

Photo from Public Option Health Care Now.
Health care blues:
Insurance profits soar, Congress fiddles,
Teabaggers rail against 'socialist' Obama

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / February 21, 2010

As I write, we await the President's open discussion about health care on CSPAN. How illuminating it will be to have an open forum to which the American people will have access, unlike the previous behind-closed-door consultations with the health care insurance executives and the lobbyists for PhARMA.

What a rare privilege for the physicians, nurses, and public health workers to finally have some real understanding of the politicians' plans, since they have been kept on the periphery of any substantive discussions and have been denied constructive input regarding the issues that involve them and their patients.

In the meantime we who are interested in genuine health care for the nation watch hopefully as the roll of senators signing on to a bill containing a public option, to be passed through the “reconciliation” process, continues to grow. Perhaps, just perhaps, our elected representatives will actually turn their backs on their corporate donors and look, just this once, to the welfare of their constituents.

It should certainly be noted that the five largest U.S. health insurance companies sailed through the worst economic turndown since the Great Depression by setting new profit records in 2009, while leaving behind 2.7 million Americans who had been in private health plans. For customers who kept their benefits, the insurers raised rates and cost sharing, and cut the share of premiums spent on medical care.

According to Insurance and Security Exchange Commission filings the executives and shareholders of the five biggest for-profit health insurers, UnitedHealth Group, Inc, Well Point Inc, Aetna Inc, Humana, Inc. and the Cigna Corp, enjoyed a combined profit of $12.2 billion in 2009, up 56% from the previous year. It was the best year ever for Big Insurance.

The proportion of premium dollars spent on health care expenses went down for three of the five firms, with higher proportions going to administrative expenses and profits. The shedding of 2.7 million members from private health plans is part of the industry’s long-term shifting of responsibility for millions of sick, older, or low-income customers to tax-payer-supported government health programs such as Medicaid and the states' children's health insurance plans.

The Center For Responsive Politics reports that WellPoint spent $4.7 million last year to lobby in Washington against comprehensive national health reform proposals while United Health spent $4.5 million; Cigna, $1.6 million; Aetna, $2.8 million; and Humana, $3.2 million.

The President should join with the Progressive Caucus in the House in demanding that the health insurance industry be brought under the anti-trust laws, as well as finally supporting Medicare for All as proposed by the Physicians for a National Health Program, and their hundreds of co-endorsing organizations. At the very least Obama could support an unencumbered public option. It is time to stand up for the American people rather than the large corporations that were complicit in the current financial meltdown.

I saw in the morning paper that the recession is causing the states to cut back on Medicaid payments, thus decreasing the amount of medical care funding for our poorest citizens. According to Steven Hill's outstanding book Europe's Promise, the national health plan in Germany has also had to reduce services due to the recession.

Viagra and certain other medications are no longer covered, as well as fertility-related treatments, breast implants, artificial insemination, sterilization procedures, and certain eyeglasses and dentures. A $12 co-payment has been introduced on doctor’s visits. These are the horrors of a government supervised health system!

Incidentally, Hill points out that Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Japan have programs in which universal coverage is provided by private, non-profit insurance companies at 50% of the cost, or less, that we pay here in the United States. This is not to say that their care is better, or worse, than in the U.K., Sweden, Denmark, or Canada, where health care is directly supervised by the government. Europe's Promise contains a wealth of information about planning and methodology within the E.U. and it also discusses in detail energy, environment, governance via social-capitalism, national security, immigration, and social welfare.

According to Bloomberg News, the average income reported by the 400 highest-earning households grew to almost $345 million in 2007, up 31% from a year earlier. These figures, for the last year of economic expansion, show the average income reported by the top 400 earners more than doubled from $131.1 million in 2001. Each household in the top 400 paid an average tax rate of 16.6%, the lowest figure since the IRA began tracking data in 1992. The average tax rate in 1993 was 29.4%.

I find it a mystery why the Republicans and their right wing followers hate President Obama so much. I am particularly baffled by these folks calling him a “socialist,” when he seems to me to be just the opposite. He appointed to his treasury department the top rung folks from Wall Street and the big banks, and has pursued a very non-socialist agenda, not pushing hard for strict financial controls on Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, or the big banks. And he has continued the Bush policies of surveillance and detention. He has expanded the Bush war policies and has increased our military bases (we now have more than 700 worldwide) with no apparent concern about cost.

Jim Hightower provides a useful breakdown of how these mobs that rant against reform are financed, much of the support coming from the brothers Charles and David Koch, both billionaires and sons of Fred Koch, who was a founder of the John Birch Society in 1958. Other family foundations contributing to the Cato Institute, Americans for Prosperity, and others cited by the New York Times (the Friends of Liberty, the Oath Keepers, the Freedom Works), are the Bradley Foundation, the Coors Foundation, the Olin Foundation, and the Scaife Foundation -- as well as Glenn Beck of Fox News.

The ironic thing is that the majority of these white middle class and working class people are demonstrating against their own best interests, demanding an end to Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid. The New York Times tells us that leaders of the movement -- like former Arizona Sheriff Richard Mack -- rail against a “despotic government,” Interpol (!), the council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, the Brady gun control law, the major TV networks (excluding Fox News), immigrants, and secularists.

A February 2, 2010, CBS News poll indicates that a majority of Americans do not know that they got a tax cut. The survey showed that 24% of respondents said that they recently have had taxes increased, 53% said taxes were the same, 12% said taxes were decreased. Of those identifying with the Tea Party movement, only 2% think taxes have been decreased, 46% say taxes are the same, 44% say taxes have been increased.

In reality the Obama administration has passed 25 different tax cuts. Taxes have been cut for 95% of working families, for first-time home buyers, for 8 million Americans paying for college. And the administration wants to end the Bush era tax cuts for the wealthiest families, set to expire next year. Maybe the teabaggers somehow see this as a tax increase that will affect them. Or, perhaps, they still believe in the discredited "trickle-down" hypothesis.

We are surely at a crossroads, with the direction of social policy in this country up for grabs -- challenging whether we can continue with a true democracy in the kind of America conceived and established by our founders who were products of the Age of Reason. It was, for instance, their intention to create a secularist society where all are free to choose a religious affiliation of choice, or no religion at all. We should recall the words of Eric Hoffer:

It is easy to see the faultfinding man of words, by persistent ridicule and denunciation, shakes prevailing beliefs and loyalties, and familiarizes the masses with the idea of change. What is not so obvious is the process by which the discrediting of existing beliefs and institutions makes possible the rise of a new fanatical faith. For it is a remarkable fact that the militant man of words who ‘sounds the established order to its source to mark its want of authority and justice’ often prepares the ground not for a society of freethinking individuals but for a corporate society that cherishes utmost unity and blind faith.

[Dr. Stephen R. Keister, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, lives in Erie, PA. He is a retired physician who is active in health care reform.]

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Primal Scream : White Racism and the Tea Party Movement

Sign at Tea Party in Madison, WI, April 14, 2009. Photo by cometstarmoon / Wikimedia Commons.
Bubbling under the surface:
Racial resentment in the Tea Party movement

By Rich Benjamin / February 9, 2010

[Rich Benjamin's commentary on the underlying "white grievance" currents in the Tea Party movement were buttressed Thursday, February 4, by the statements of Republican Tom Tancredo, the opening speaker at the Tea Party convention. (See Rachel Maddow video below.) Tancredo told attendees that President Barack Obama was elected because "we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country," an allusion to how Southern states used literacy tests as part of an effort to deny suffrage to African American voters before the civil rights era.]

The Tea Party movement is angling to be the most revolutionary force in American politics in name and in deed, since at least the 1960s counterculture. Only this time, the political insurgents command a party of Flour Power, not flower power.

The simmering movement is the whitest phenomenon on the national scene, evident not just in the millions of Caucasians committed to its cause, but in the bedrock beliefs stirring its anti-government contempt.

How fitting, therefore, that Sarah Palin keynote the movement's first organized confab. Neglected in all the fevered conversation around the movement's meteoric rise, and Palin's selection, is any useful reflection on what the cause and this figurehead stand for: white racial resentment. Packed beneath her beehive is a spitfire brew of optimistic, yet aggrieved, whiteness. Palin embodies a bizarre, sometimes alluring, combination of triumph and complaint that many Caucasian Tea Partiers identify with through and through.

Deciphering the racial codes on the movement's ubiquitous placards does not require a doctorate in semiotics. One popular sign shows the president's face and a caption: "Undocumented worker." Another combines Obama's image with this caption: "The Zoo Has an African Lion and the White House Has a Lyin' African!"

Aside from the festive, ad hominem attacks against President Obama, the Tea Party's leaders and its rank-and-file rarely mention race in debate, instead tucking it just under the surface of "nonracial" issues like health care reform, public spending, immigration, and pointedly, taxes.

Palin voices the right-wing drumbeat warning Americans that "government is on your back" and "you should keep your own money." Alongside other avid Tea Party supporters like Tom Tancredo and Glenn Beck, Palin gins-up conservative whites' existing resentment over race, carping over the "high taxes" for public services assumed to be wasted on "illegals" and minorities.

Denouncing government assistance and free school lunches at a town hall meeting in late January, South Carolina Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer, a Tea Party supporter, said: "My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that."

At a Tea Party rally in Boone County, Kentucky (roughly 92 percent non-Hispanic white), Congressman Geoff Davis called cap-and-trade legislation "economic colonization of the hardworking states that produce the energy, the food, and the manufactured goods of the heartland, to take that and pay for social programs in the large coastal states." In Tea Party-speak, "heartland" often means "white" -- what Palin calls "the real America" -- while "coastal state" means the urbanized communities that teem with racial minorities, doubling as "gateway states" for Latino immigrants.

"Immigrants are 21 percent of the uninsured, but only 7 percent of the population. This means white folks on Medicare or headed there will see benefits curtailed, while new arrivals from the Third World, whence almost all immigrants come, get taxpayer-subsidized health insurance," gripes Patrick Buchanan on his blog. "Any wonder why all those Tea Party and town-hall protests seem to be made up of angry white folks?"

The Tea Party movement ventures a nasty turn from classic economic liberalism to white-hot anger.

The bar-stool version of the Tea Party canard goes like this: Why should we, self-sufficient small-town whites, pay taxes to support all those welfare queens, food stamp cheats and Medicaid layabouts in the big cities and coastal states? The media's version, parroted by Palin and other Fox talking heads, commiserates with Americans in the heartland, christened "the average taxpayer," for unjustly having to subsidize ethnic enclaves that mooch off the national treasury.

Well, not so fast. A disproportionately high share of our federal government's tax income comes from racially diverse, immigrant-rich, urbanized states, including California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts; not from extremely homogeneous, conservative, anti-tax strongholds like Idaho, Montana, Utah, the Dakotas and Wyoming.

All of this is not to say that any given rank-and-file member of the movement personally despises racial minorities. Rather, the Tea Party ethos is a direct descendant of the anti-tax segregationist politics that swept the South in the 1950s and '60s.

Before the Tea Party's debut, a whole generation of powerful southern Republicans propelled their careers through a conservative tax-cutting, privatizing, "free-enterprise" politics that remains wildly popular in America's white outer suburbs and exurbs: Lee Atwater (GA), Newt Gingrich (GA), Dick Armey (GA), Tom DeLay (TX), Karl Rove (AL, TX), and George W. Bush.

These suburban and exurban Republicans intimately understood their constituents' disdain for court-ordered desegregation. They fueled the rising mania for "individual freedom," "privatization," "states' rights" and social homogeneity that once defined their Southern home turf and now defines the Tea Party.

To pernicious effect, white Tea Partiers cloak themselves in the anachronistic rights-based outlook fine-tuned by '60s-era women and minorities. What's the difference between Sarah Palin and Al Sharpton? Lipstick. Pay closer attention: Palin is quite like the Baptist preacher from Harlem, only paler. Sharpton's exurb-lovin', carpoolin', straight-talkin' doppleganger has her hands tied fightin' for an aggrieved "silent majority" -- or is it a vocal soon-to-be racial minority? By 2050, non-Hispanic whites will be less than half the population.

"Tea Party Nation is a user-driven group of like-minded people who desire our God given Individual Freedoms which were written out by the Founding Fathers," according to the convention's Web site. Tea Partiers will bend your ear about "freedom from government" or their "Hunters' and Fishers' Bill of Rights."

This white-inflected rights-based outlook champions individual and neighborhood "freedoms," withdrawn from the common nation, preoccupied by private interest, poised to behave according to private caprice. Tea Partiers contrive the right to live, make money, own property, zone neighborhoods, or protest taxes at will, without regard to the common good, a troublesome offshoot of rights-based agitprop.

Race is the subtext of now-potent populist appeals to whites, who feel battered from a tsunami of economic and cultural change. The Tea Party counterculture is waging a proxy war over race during America's rapidly shifting economy and demographic makeup.

The Tea Party is sounding a siren call of aspiration and a primal scream of resentment -- a whoop to Flour Power.

[Rich Benjamin is the author of Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America. He is senior fellow at the nonpartisan think tank Demos and sits on the board of the Roosevelt Institution. His commentary is featured on NPR and Fox Radio, and in newspapers nationwide. This article first appeared on AlterNet.]

© 2010 Independent Media Institute

Rachel Maddow blasts Tom Tancredo
Who calls for a 'literacy test' for voters



Source / AlterNet / truthout

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Jim Hightower : Republican Hypocrites Rag on the Poor

Image from Grub Street.
Madcap schtick of Bauer and Linder:
Republicans out of touch as middle class sinks

By Jim Hightower / February 4, 2010

American politics is a hoot! Where else can raw ignorance rise to such high places -- and then flaunt itself shamelessly for all to see?

For example, who needs Jay Leno or Conan O'Brien for comic relief, when we've got Andre Bauer? He's the Lieutenant governor of South Carolina (a state, by the way, that really is a comer on the political comedy circuit -- especially after Gov. Mark Sanford's madcap schtick last year involving his disappearance, the Appalachian Trail and an Argentine mistress.

But Sanford is leaving office, and Bauer, who is now a Republican contender for governor, is the state's new star joker. He had 'em rolling in the aisles recently when he did a wild, slapstick routine on food stamps at a town hall meeting. Andre proclaimed that much of his political thinking was shaped by his grandmother and that he had learned a valuable lesson from her.

"She told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why?" he asked, pausing for comedic effect. "Because they breed! You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce."

I tell you, Andre Bauer is an absolute scream!

But here's the real punch line: The need for food stamps has been soaring as more and more Americans are falling out of the middle class into poverty. From 2000 to 2008, 5 million more were added to the poverty rolls, and that was before the economic collapse of the last two years. In fact, check this out Andre, and laugh if you feel like it: About 6 million Americans today are living entirely on food stamps -- they've lost their jobs and have no other income. That's one out of every 50 of us, and their numbers are growing rapidly. Now, isn't that a hoot?

Georgia Congressman John Linder: irked about food stamps.
Well, one who's not laughing is Republican member of Congress John Linder. This far-out Georgia right-winger is irked that America's food stamp program will grow to more than $60 billion this year. "This is craziness," Linder barked to a New York Times reporter. "We're at risk of creating an entire class, a subset of people, just comfortable getting by living off the government."

Comfortable? When was the last time this pampered lawmaker experienced the "comforts" of the food stamp life? Linder himself has been "living off the government" for 18 years, but at the high end -- drawing $174,000 a year in pay, plus subsidized health care, a fat pension and generous perks of office.

Hypocrisy aside, Linder is an anti-government, laissez-faire extremist who buys into Bauer's fantasies about lazy, good-for-nothing strays getting food stamps.

"You don't improve the economy by paying people to sit around and not work," he grumps, adding, "You improve the economy by lowering taxes."

Really? Perhaps the gentleman from Georgia has forgotten that he and the whole Washington insider crowd tried that scam again and again throughout the past decade, slashing all sorts of taxes for corporations and the wealthy. Since Linder is a multimillionaire, that economic "plan" undoubtedly worked out splendidly for him.

For the middle class, however, the 10 years since January 2000 are known as "the lost decade." In that period, the U.S. economy lost more jobs than it created -- zero job growth. That's the first decade since the end of the Depression that our country has had less than a 20 percent rise in job creation.

Also, after the 10-year frenzy of tax-cutting, middle-class families are earning less today, in real dollars, than they did in 1999. Add in skyrocketing health care costs and the plummeting value of people's homes, and we get the harsh reality of mushrooming poverty.

So that "subset of people" on food stamps whom Linder so callously denigrates are his own spawn! The food stamp program has had to grow because the tinkle-down economy that he pushed has wrecked America's middle class.

Does knocking poor people make these guys feel better about themselves? How pathetic. Bauer and Linder are living proof that when it comes to leadership, America has too many 5-watt bulbs screwed into 150-watt sockets.

Copyright 2010 Creators.com.

Source / truthout

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Rumble on the Right : Teabagging for Fun and Profit

Teabaggin' dodo bird. Image from Voice of Arizona.
Trouble in paradise:
Tea-bagger convention is for-profit scam

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / January 28, 2010

Even though they've had their efforts publicized by Fox News and funded by large right-wing organizations like FreedomWorks, the teabaggers are still not a very organized group of people. They can't even agree on the best way to proceed now that they've made a name for themselves.

Some of them want to start a new teabagger third party. Others want to take over the Republican Party (which they rightly believe is owned by Wall Street). This has already happened in Florida, where establishment party leaders have been ousted and replaced by teabagger leaders.

Then there was word of a teabagger convention to be held in Nashville in February of this year. The organizer of the convention, attorney Judson Phillips, tried to pass off the convention as an effort to unify the teabaggers and provide direction for their future efforts. The fly in the ointment is that he has set his organization, Tea Party Nation, up as a for-profit organization.

In other words, if a profit is made off the convention, he's under no obligation to use those funds toward future teabagger efforts or campaigns. It would be perfectly legal (and very probable) for Phillips to just put the money in his own bank account, and congratulate himself on a successful money-making venture.

Consider the following. He is selling about 500 tickets to the convention for $560 each (and this does NOT include the cost of hotel rooms). That's a cool $280,000 right there. And don't forget that he's booked Sarah Palin for a speech, and he's selling tickets to an additional 600 people for several hundred dollars each. That pushes the take up to around half a million dollars. And that doesn't count the sponsors Phillips has lined up for the event.

He does have to pay for a convention room, but not a very large one -- it only has to have room for 500 participants (and he can easily squeeze another 600 in for just one speech). This space probably doesn't even cost as much as he's paying Sarah Palin to make her speech. And I imagine details like sound system, security, etc. are probably included in the money he'll pay for the convention space.

That leaves him with the cost of Sarah Palin. Rumor has it that she will receive $100,000 for her (probably incoherent) speech. Neither Phillips nor Palin will confirm or deny that this is what she'll be paid, but that in itself confirms the amount. As sensitive as Palin is to bad publicity, I'm sure she would make it known if she was receiving less than that.

I'm betting that Phillips will clear at least $200,000 profit off the convention (probably more). And it looks like some of the teabaggers are finally waking up to the fact that they are being scammed by an unscrupulous lawyer.

Knoxville teabagger Antonio Hinton says, "I don't begrudge people making money, but that's not what the tea party is about. That convention has nothing to do with the tea party movement, as far as I'm concerned." A Nashville-based teabagger called Tea Party Nation "dishonest" and said it is "hijacking the tea party movement."

Conservative and RedState blogger Erick Erickson thinks it "smells scammy" and says, "I think it is a great con of people making money off the passions of others... A $500+ per person fee to a for-profit organization run by people most people have never heard of is neither populist nor accessible for many tea party activists."

At least three sponsors have also withdrawn their support after learning the event is a profit-making venture for Phillips. American Majority, a training group for teabagger organizations, withdrew and said, "Who is this guy? What are his motivations? And what gives him the credibility to try to step in and insert himself as a leader of the movement?"

And now it looks like the convention may suffer the greatest insult of all. Some teabagger organizations are saying they may actually picket the convention. Can you imagine teabaggers picketing outside of a teabagger convention?

Most readers of this blog will know that I have very little respect for the teabagger movement, but I also hate to see people being taken advantage of. I'm glad they are finally waking up and realizing that this convention is nothing more than a scam to separate them from their hard-earned money.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

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Rabbi Arthur Waskow : Jobs Now or President Palin?

President Sarah Palin. Photo by Jeff Schultz / Kris Kros / The Washington Independent.
Pick One:

• A sharp turn towards progressive populism
• The election of Sarah Palin

What our country needs now is a huge job-creation program made possible by great investment of federal money in meeting public needs.

By Rabbi Arthur Waskow / The Rag Blog / January 20, 2010

On November 23 and 24, 2009, The Shalom Center sent out two alternative future histories of American politics and policy: one ending in the election of Sarah Palin as President in 2012, the other in the reelection of Barack Obama.

In the wake of the Massachusetts election, we are well on the way to Alternative 1 -- the election of Sarah Palin and the triumph of a right-wing populism rooted in rage at lost jobs, boosted bankers, and all who shaped that result.

Sarah Palin's victory, in our scenario, resulted from the Obama Administration continuing on the path it had taken from even before January 20, when it committed itself to two policies aimed at Domination, not Community:

At home, it named the leading bank robbers of the Great Recession to key posts defining an Obama economics committed to saving banks, not homes and jobs.

Abroad, it committed itself to send more Americans to die trying to dominate Afghanistan by smashing the Pashtun passion for local tribal self-government that had defeated every invader from Alexander the Great to the Soviet Empire.

Domination at home, domination abroad. Both unethical, both impractical. Bound to fail.

The second scenario, Obama's reelection, resulted from his taking a sharp turn early in 2010 toward a progressive-populist policy focused on full employment at home and grass-roots economic and social development , especially working with grass-roots women's groups, abroad.

The American people and the world deeply desire a turn away from top-down domineering policies -- a turn toward grass-roots community-building. Even the world-wide success of the film Avatar is an example of that hunger.

Even in the outpouring of support for stricken Haiti, we witnessed the crystalline moment of Domination triumphing over Community when the U.S. military refused to let a fully-equipped, easily portable field hospital and experienced field physicians from Medecins sans Frontieres, Doctors Without Borders, land in Port-au-Prince.

The deep public hunger for Community will turn to a sour taste in the public mouth, is already turning sour, when those who give brilliant speeches about Community take brutal action that favors Domination.

To read the two scenarios,

• click here for "President Palin Inaugurated, Alternate Future History 1,"
• and click here for "President Obama Reelected, Alternate Future History 2."

Please read them -- and please realize that reading is not enough, healing the world is not a spectator sport. You can act to change this country's and this government's direction.

Crucial at this point is public outcry for change. So we urge you to

1. forward this Shalom Letter to your friends, and
2. write your local metropolitan daily, your neighborhood or community weekly, your congregational listserve or bulletin, your business or union newsletter, with a clear and simple message:

What our country needs now is a huge job-creation program made possible by great investment of federal money in meeting public needs. If such a program faces a filibuster in the Senate, then tens of thousands of us need to insist that the Senate bust the filibuster.

But before we can do that, we must reawaken on our terms, not the President's, the demand for grass-roots community.

To send a letter to the editor of a paper near you, click here.

You will find a text that you can modify with your own words, and use to send a Letter to the Editor and many other public forums as well.

Please start now to change the public possibilities.

With blessings of shalom, salaam, shantih, peace!

-- Arthur

[Rabbi Arthur Waskow, director, The Shalom Center; co-author, The Tent of Abraham; author of Godwrestling — Round 2, Down-to-Earth Judaism, and a dozen other books on Jewish thought and practice, as well as books on U.S. public policy. The Shalom Center voices a new prophetic agenda in Jewish, multireligious, and American life.]

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The Tea Party Parade: Shouting at Phantoms

Mark Williams speaking during a Tea Party Express rally at the Cape Buffalo Grille in Dallas, Texas, on Sept, 4, before heading to Washington, D.C. Photo: Matt Nager.
Working Class Zero
By Timothy Egan / September 16, 2009

The first nine years of the new century have yet to find a defining label, something as catchy as Tom Wolfe’s “Me Decade” of the 1970s or the “Silent Generation” of 1950s men in gray flannel suits. Bookmarked by the horror of 9/11 and the history of a black president, the aughts certainly don’t lack for drama.

But last week, lost in the commotion over the brat’s cry of Joe Wilson and the shotgun blast of rage in the Washington protest, something definitive was released just as this decade nears its curtain call.

For average Americans, the last 10 years were a lost decade. At the end of President George W. Bush’s eight years in office, American households had less money and less economic security, and fewer of them were covered by health care than 10 years earlier, the Census Bureau reported in its annual survey.

The poverty rate in 2008 rose to 13.2 percent, the highest in 11 years, while median household income fell to $50,303. Ten years earlier, adjusted for inflation, it was $51,295.

Of course this reflects the ravages of a horrid recession. But the decline started before the collapse in the housing and financial sectors — and it was calculated, in the eyes of some.

Harvard economist Lawrence Katz called it “a plutocratic boom.” If anything comes close to defining the era, that would be my nomination. President Bush cut $1.3 trillion in taxes — and the biggest beneficiaries by far were the top 1 percent of earners. At the same time, Wall Street was inflated by the helium of a regulation-free economy that eventually gave us Bernie Madoff and banks begging for bailouts.

Now consider the people who showed up in a state of generalized rage in Washington over the weekend. They have no leaders, save a self-described rodeo clown — Glenn Beck of Fox News — and some well-funded Astroturf outfits from the permanent lobbying class inside the Beltway. They are loosely organized under a Tea Party movement, but these people are closer to British Tories than 18th century patriots with a love of equality.

And they have the wrong target.

Mark Williams, a Sacramento talk radio host, was speaking to CNN on behalf of the demonstrators — many of whom carried signs comparing Obama to a witch doctor, an undocumented worker or a Nazi — when he played the blue collar card.

Who is Williams? A garden variety demagogue who calls Obama “an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug” and the Democratic party “a domestic enemy” of America. He also refers to the president as “racist in chief.” That says all you need to know about leaders of the Tea Party movement.

Williams repeatedly invoked the “working stiffs” who feel left out. Working people are always the last to get aboard the gravy train, and the first to be used in campaigns that will not advance their cause. And with these demonstrators, and the hucksters trying to distract them from real issues, history repeats itself.

Where was the Tea Party movement when the tax burden was shifted from the high end to the middle? Where were the patriots when Wall Street, backed in Congress by Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, rewrote securities laws so that the wonder boys of Lehman and A.I.G. could reduce home mortgages to poker chips at a trillion-dollar table?

Where were the angry “stiffs” when the banking industry rolled the 2005 Congress into rewriting bankruptcy law, making it easier to keep people in permanent credit card hock?

Where were they when President Bush started the bailouts, with $700 billion that had to be paid on a few days’ notice — with no debate — to save global capitalism?

They were nowhere, because they were clueless, just as most journalists were.

But now, at a time when a new president wants to reform health care to fix the largest single cause of middle-class economic collapse, he’s called a Nazi by these self-described friends of the working stiff.

“A working class hero is something to be,” John Lennon, that product of ragged Liverpool, sang just after leaving the Beatles. “Keep you doped with religion and sex and T.V.”

As someone who had a union card in my wallet before I owned a Mastercard, I don’t share Lennon’s dark view of blue collar workers. But as long as they can be distracted by people who say all government is bad, while turning a blind eye to manipulation at corporate levels, they’re doomed to shouting at phantoms.

One more detail caught my eye in these new economic reports on the lost decade. People in their prime earning years — age 45 to 54 — took the biggest hit in the last years of the Bush Administration, their median income falling by $5,000. And the region that suffered most — the South.

Older southern whites — that’s who got hit hardest by the freewheeling decade now fading. They should be angry. But they’re five years too late.

Source / New York Times

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