Congress could vote to legalize the estimated 12 million undocumented aliens tomorrow but unless it addresses the economic gap between the US and Mexico it will only start the next chapter in the illegal immigration problem.
Congress won't pass an immigration bill tomorrow, of course, but under a deal a bipartisan group of senators reached with the White House, undocumented workers who were in the US before Jan. 1 would be eligible for a new "Z Visa" that would let them live here indefinitely if they pass a background check and pay a $1,000 fine. Those who want to get on track for citizenship would have to return to their home countries, pay an additional $4,000, show proficiency in English and wait up to eight years for a green card.
The deal-breaker for organized labor is a separate, temporary-worker program that would import 400,000 migrants a year. Each temporary work visa would be good for two years and could be renewed up to three times, as long as the worker leaves the country for a year between renewals.
It has been nearly two years since Hurricane Katrina showed what conservative "every-man-for-himself" government means for ordinary working people.
New Orleans survived Hurricane Katrina only to nearly drown when the storm surge broke the levees on Aug. 29, 2005. While Louisiana's National Guard served in Iraq, US military resources in the Gulf of Mexico were placed on standby. Local and state authorities and civilians were left for three days to rescue those who were stranded in the flood.
Now the White House is blaming Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius for not following procedure to document gaps in disaster coverage when Kansas National Guard troops were sent to Iraq and then expecting the federal government to fill in after a giant tornado leveled Greensburg, Kan., on May 5.
House Democrats are drafting a plan to provide tax relief for the upper middle class, the Washington Post reports. The Alternative Minimum Tax was created in 1969 to nab 155 super-rich tax filers who made more than $200,000 a year but were using loopholes and deductions to wipe out their tax bills. Because the exemption was not indexed for the inflation, which has reduced purchasing power by 500% in the past 38 years, the AMT's reach expanded. It caught 3% of households this year -- fewer than four million taxpayers.
President Bush has submitted "free trade" deals with Peru, Colombia and Panama to Congress, hoping to put some life back into the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. He also is submitting a deal with South Korea, just under the deadline to get "fast track" consideration by this summer.
Democratic Congressional leaders have demanded changes to some of the worst aspects of the trade deals the Bush adminstration has negotiated. For example the Democrats would require that trading partners adopt and enforce International Labor Organization standards. The Bush deals only require countries to enforce their own labor laws, which may or may not meet ILO standards. On the environment, the Dems insist that nations implement and enforce common environmental agreements.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi won a major victory on March 23 when the House of Representatives narrowly passed a special funding bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with a provision that requires the president to withdraw US combat troops from Iraq by August 2008. The bill passed 218-212, with only two Republicans joining the Democratic majority. Of the 14 Democrats who voted with the GOP in opposition to the bill, several were anti-war Dems who didn't think the bill withdraws troops quick enough.
George W. Bush appears determined to place his legacy prominently in the annals of political corruption and incompetence. The past few weeks have been filled with stories of "lies, damn lies and the White House." A federal court jury found Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff for the vice president, guilty on four felony counts of lying and obstruction of justice. The FBI was been caught misusing special powers unwisely granted by Congress under the Patriot Act. Now it appears that Department of Justice officials have been lying about politicization of federal prosecutors.
Mike Gravel, who opposed the Vietnam war as a senator from Alaska in the late 1960s and '70s, is running a populist campaign for president. Now he's calling for Congress to end another ill-conceived war. "Iraq's oil is not worth the life of one more American," he said recently.
John Edwards got the discussion of health-care reform moving in Democratic circles. His proposal to set up government-run "health markets" to compete with private insurers might move the US toward a more efficient national health program. But his talking point for next year's presidential campaign is no reason progressive populists should stop promoting expansion of Medicare for all Americans in the current Congress. ...
First Republicans crowed about their success in shutting down the Senate debate about the escalation of the Iraq war. Then they complained that they were being blamed for stifling the debate. ... All this fuss, mind you, is over a non-binding resolution, but as far as we're concerned the filibuster vote accomplished the same thing: It put senators on record opposing the "surge" by a 49-47 margin. (Now 56-34 with the vote on Feb. 17) Both the House and Senate, in effect, have voted no confidence in the president. It won't stop Bush from continuing the surge; he and Cheney have contempt for Congress and the rule of law and it appears that nothing shot of impeachment of the pair of them will do the trick. But that will not happen until Republican voters turn on their senators.
Somebody must be getting the message that the people want a national health-care fix. Just don't expect any meaningful reforms from the Bush administration.
Perhaps to head off the possibility of Medicare expansion, the insurance industry has put together a coalition to promote more government subsidies for private health insurance. Certainly congressional Dems would rather proceed with a bill that does not make enemies of the insurance racket as well as the doctors. That is, unless you, the people, can persuade them to expand Medicare. Now. ...
Bush showed up in the House Chamber Jan. 23 for his State of the Union Address. He went through his wish list for the 110th Congress, but he missed a few issues. New Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., went over some of these points in a populist Democratic response that was strong as an acre of garlic. Among other things, he called on Bush to address domestic priorities such as restoring New Orleans as well as the endangered American middle class, which "is losing its place at the table. Our workers know this, through painful experience. Our white-collar professionals are beginning to understand it, as their jobs start disappearing also. And they expect, rightly, that in this age of globalization, their government has a duty to insist that their concerns be dealt with fairly in the international marketplace." ...
Nancy Pelosi has settled into the Speaker's Office. With richly deserved congratulations to the first female speaker, the clock has started on the 110th Congress. Democrats plan to increase the minimum wage, adopt 9/11 Commission recommendations and remove the ban on Medicare negotiating lower prices with drug companies. They also plan to cut interest rates on student loans, cut oil industry subsides and broaden federal aid for stem cell research, among other things. But that's only the agenda for the first 100 hours.
After that it's up to the Dems to get us out of the hole Republicans spent the past six years digging us into. Of course, the first rule of getting out of a hole is to stop digging. So one of the Dems' first acts was to restore the "pay as you go" budget rule, which means that any future tax cuts or spending increases must be paid for by other tax increases or spending cuts.
But Congress must also look for ways to expand health coverage for all Americans. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has proposed the Healthy Americans Act of 2007, which would provide health coverage to all Americans through a pool of private insurance plans. We prefer a simpler Medicare for All proposal by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., which would to expand Medicare to cover all Americans.
Any health initiative will cost big money to implement, so Congress should not reduce any tax revenues, including the Alternative Minimum Tax that threatens an increasing number of middle-class Americans this year, or extend the Bush tax breaks that expire in 2010 unless every American is guaranteed quality health care. ...
Those who wanted Nancy Pelosi to include bills of impeachment in her 100-hour plan were bound to be disappointed, but Congressional leaders should proceed with hearings to document what exactly the Bush/Cheney administration has been up to for the past six years. They should be prepared for stonewalling by White House officials who know what they have done and have no intention of sharing those details with Congressional Democrats, much less the general public. And Congress should be prepared to follow up with appropriate legislative remedies, including impeachment, if that proves necessary.
The Iraq Study Group has spoken. The Washington elders, led by Bush family fixer Jim Baker III, were brought in to give Dubya a reality check. But while the eminences pointed out that Iraq is a bad situation that is getting worse, Bush is unconvinced and is seeking more input. ...
It won't do the Democratic Party any good to try to impeach the president until the Republican Party decides it can no longer afford to defend George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
The election is over, but the battle continues over What It All Means. As far as we're concerned, the election of Democratic majorities in the House and Senate is a mandate for economic populism and a call for the Democrats to protect the interests of working- and middle-class Americans against the depredations of Big Corporations. ...
If "net neutrality" sounds arcane, that's what the telecoms are hoping you will think as they work on their long-term plans of putting toll-booths on the Information Highway. But net neutrality is about ensuring a free press for the next generation.
The mid-term elections showed that voters finally had their fill of Republican arrogance, incompetence and corruption. Now the Democrats have two years to show that they can do better for the middle class.
President Bush admitted he got a thumping and, like a good sport, invited presumptive House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to the White House for lunch on successive days to try to establish a working relationship he never needed before. In their public remarks they were polite, and voters want them to get along, but it will be hard for the White House to rebuild trust after the president and his people have lied repeatedly to Democratic leaders as well as voters.
Victory certainly was sweet. In the days before the election, when polls showed Democrats with enough support to win a House majority and within striking distance of a Senate majority, some Dems started sounding like Chicago Cubs fans, thinking up reasons they couldn't win. Misleading ads run by the Republican National Committee and dirty tricks such as harassing and intimidating robocalls leading up to the election reinforced the suspicion that, once again, the fix was in.
But this time it was Republicans as well as Democrats who fell afoul of complicated voter registration rules and cantankerous electronic voting machines and Democratic wedge issues such as stem cell research and a higher minimum wage were used to bring working people to the polls. Even in the days after the election, when the returns from Montana and Virginia sent Jon Tester and Jim Webb to the Senate and gave Reid the Senate majority, some wondered if the Dems had been suckered into taking over Congress so that Karl Rove could blame them for the bad things that are bound to happen in the next two years as the bad decisions of the Bush years come home to roost. ...
If Democrats take over Congress, they plan quick action to hike the minimum wage, reform the Medicare drug plan, make it easier to finance college and call the Bush administration to account for the debacle in Iraq.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, who would become the next speaker, has promised to pass within the first 100 hours of a new Congress an increase in the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour, from the current hourly pay of $5.15. Pelosi also would enact the recommendations made by the 9/11 commission, which the GOP Congress has ignored.
On health care, Democrats would remove the Republican ban on the government negotiating lower prices with pharmaceutical companies. Bush said recently he would resist changes despite the potential for great cost savings. Dems also would dare Bush to cast a second veto against one of the most popular bills passed by Congress last year, to allow federal funding for new embryonic stem cell research.
On education, Democrats also hope to revamp the No Child Left Behind bill, which comes up for renewal next year. Bush worked with Democrats to pass the bill in 2001, but reneged on a promise to fully fund it. Dems also will try to restore the Head Start program as well as money Republicans cut from college aid programs. ...
Pelosi's "First 100 Hours" plan is good as far as it goes, but Democrats should go further in taking the fight to the Bush administration. Dems should pass the National Health Insurance Act, a bill sponsored by Conyers to expand Medicare to cover all Americans. Nothing would help working-class Americans and small businesses more than the federal government assuming responsibility for health coverage. ...
The Bush administration has its problems confronting foreign enemies. Dubya's invasion of Iraq turned that country into a magnet for anti-American jihadists and has ignited a civil war with US troops in the middle. In the face of Bush's bluster, North Korea just tested a nuclear weapon and Iran is working on its own nuke. But Bush has been much more effective in waging war against US workers.
Wall Street is doing well, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached a new record in October, but it's done little good for Main Street. The New York Times' Paul Krugman noted that economic growth since early 2000, when the Dow reached its previous peak, hasn't been exceptional. But after-tax corporate profits have more than doubled, as US industries are squeezing more productivity out of workers while keeping wages low and cutting back on other costs, such as health insurance.
The GOP has conducted a two-pronged attack on American labor: "free-trade" agreements allow industries to move factories overseas to take advantage of lower costs and less regulation. Then, as workers scramble for the service-sector jobs remaining in the US, regulatory officials have hamstrung the ability of unions to organize them. ...
The US House of Representatives, on a near-party-line vote on Sept. 20, passed a bill to require every voter to present a government-issued ID card to cast a ballot. The bill's sponsors claimed the law was needed to protect election integrity, although they have been unable to produce any actual evidence of widespread fraud. Opponents suggested that the bill was an attempt to suppress poor, minority and elderly voters, who are least likely to have a driver's license and most likely to be intimidated by an election official.
With House Republicans' professed interest in standing up for the integrity of the ballot, we wonder why they continue to block a bill by Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., that would require a paper audit trail in all federal elections so that we can be assured that our vote will be counted. H.R. 550 was originally introduced in 2003 and Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Administration Committee, has been sitting on it ever since. (It's uncertain what effect Ney's pending departure from Congress as a result of his guilty plea on federal corruption might have.) ...
Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Chris Dodd, D-Conn., on Sept. 26 introduced emergency legislation to amend the Help America Vote Act to offer funding to states and counties that make contingency paper ballots available to voters as an option instead of electronic voting systems. Similar legislation is expected to be filed in the House, Bradblog.com reported, but no action is expected before Nov. 7.
Urge your Congress member and senators to support these bills but demand that your local election officials uphold the right for every voter's ballot to be verifiably counted.
Ann Richards was the most progressive Texas governor since World War II. Admittedly, she had a pretty low bar to clear for that distinction, but she opened the gates of the Governor's Mansion to the people, including blacks, Latinos and women, who were appointed to state boards and commissions in unprecedented numbers. ...
Nearly lost in the runup to the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Sept. 8 finally reported that US intelligence analysts were disputing alleged links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda while Bush administration officials were claiming those links justified invading Iraq. A 400-page report made it out of the intel committee despite the opposition of Republican leaders who blocked the report from appearing before the 2004 election -- and continue to block even more damaging revelations of what the administration knew before the Iraq invasion. ...
But Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who as national security adviser in 2003 also hyped the Iraq threat, couldn't let go of a good lie as she brushed aside the official reports that there was no evidence Saddam's regime was helping al Qaeda obtain arms. "There were ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda," she insisted on Fox News Sunday, Sept. 10. ...
ABC should be ashamed of its $40 million mockumentary, Path to 9/11 -- but stockholders and customers should demand accountability from The Walt Disney Co., which owns ABC. ...
Corporations are not required to have consciences. But the rest of us are not required to patronize Disney products or ABC programming. And a Democratic Congress should make restoration of the Fairness Doctrine one of its priorities.
Five years after the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Bush administration has failed miserably in its mission to protect Americans at home and abroad. From New Orleans to Baghdad to Kabul there is ample evidence that the Bush administration is ill-equipped to defend against threats both foreign and domestic and disasters both natural and man-made. In the shock waves of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Democratic and Republican officials pledged to work in a bipartisan manner to fight terrorism and bring the attackers to justice. Then the Bush White House saw political opportunity in the rubble of the attacks....
The Republican credo is that a rising tide lifts all boats. But in New Orleans, a rising tide a year ago drowned the poor, the infirm and the helpless while federal officials stood by. While the slack-jawed president dodged war protesters in Texas and strummed a guitar in California, Gulf Coast residents were left to fend for themselves when the backwash from Katrina breached the levees of New Orleans. ...
Republicans must pay at the polls for the incompetence and corruption of the past five years. Democrats must demand a return to the rule of law that checks Bush's grab for war powers. They also must not only rebuild New Orleans but demand a responsible plan to deal with global warming.
Any Congress member who tells you he or she is in favor of restricting immigration and securing our borders but then votes to expand "free trade" and put foreign corporations in charge of our ports is either a fool or a liar. But they sure seem to think voters are fools.
Even as they set up hearings around the country to whip up anti-immigrant feelings, House Republicans on July 20 narrowly approved a "free trade" deal with Oman 221-205 in a largely party-line vote. All but 28 of 232 Republicans voted against the deal, while only 22 out of 202 Dems supported it.
The Oman deal goes even further than NAFTA and CAFTA in giving foreign investers the right to challenge many US government decisions about federal contracts, leases or concession agreements affecting a covered foreign invester.
US trade negotiators inserted language in the deal that would grant any company incorporated in Oman the right to acquire and operate port facilities in the US. Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., noted that it would allow companies to "drag the US before a UN or World Bank tribunal" to demand compensation if Washington blocked it from acquiring and operating US ports, as Dubai Ports World, based in the United Arab Emirates, was forced to abandon its planned purchase of terminal operation rights at major US ports earlier this year because of security concerns.
The United States should lead the world back to the drawing board to create a trading system that will improve the lives of workers and farmers and protect the environment around the world. A fair trade system can be devised, but multinational corporations cannot call all the shots, as they have so far.
The Supreme Court has made its decision: The president of the United States is not a dictator. Now it is up to the voters of the United States to enforce it.
Our current Congress, to which the Constitution assigns the responsibility of calling the executive to account, is plainly not up to the task. The Republican majority has stood by and averted its eyes from the Bush/Cheney power grab for five years now.
Thank goodness there are still five justices on the Supreme Court who have read the Constitution and are willing to affirm its principles. But the addition of John Roberts and Samuel Alito leaves a hard-right bank of four on the high court. They are as rigid supporters of right-wing presidential prerogative as had been feared. (Roberts did not participate in the Supreme Court's 5-3 decision, but he sided with the Bush administration on the same case as a member of the D.C. Court of Appeals before he was promoted.)
The balance now is held by conservative Anthony Kennedy and justices on the moderate wing are aging or ailing. It is vital that Democrats regain the Senate majority this fall, with determination to hold the line on any more Bush judicial appointees that do not pass bipartisan muster.
The Bush administration would rather distract us with the "war on terror," gay marriage, flag burning or an invasion of Spanish-speaking immigrants than address real crises like the climate changes that threaten our future.
A green industry initiative could create 3 million new, clean-energy jobs to free America from foreign oil dependence in 10 years, the alliance says. While $300 billion is a little more than what we've spent on the invasion and occupation of Iraq so far -- and what the Republican Congress proposes to spend on tax breaks for the rich in the next decade -- we really have no choice. But first, we must face the truth.
Democrats had high hopes that voter disgust with corruption of Republican leaders in Congress would help them win a June 6 special election in San Diego, but the GOP wrote the checks, brought in the troops and deployed the wedge issue of immigration invasion to show they won't give up control of Congress without a fight.
The spin was fast and furious after the election in California's 50th Congessional District in San Diego to fill the seat vacated when Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R) left for federal prison after pleading guilty in a bribery scandal. Republicans managed to eke out a narrow victory for Brian Bilbray, a former congressman turned lobbyist who got 49% of the vote to beat Democrat Francine Busby's 45%.
Matt Stoller noted at MyDD.com that Bilbray actually ran on a progressive platform and his record of environmental protection, economic development and immigration control while Busby ran a "D.C." campaign, downplaying ideology and party. Instead she made the campaign about GOP corruption and Democratic competence in delivery of government services.
One way to get working people's attention is to address one of their biggest concerns -- the threat that catastrophic health problems might drive their families into catastrophic debt or put them at the mercy of charity care. With more than 45 million uninsured Americans and another 50 million who are underinsured, it is long past time to reform our inefficient $2 trillion health-care system that costs more than other industrialized nations but offers fewer benefits to fewer people.
Democratic Reps. John Conyers, Dennis Kucinich, Jim McDermott and Donna Christensen have filed HR 676, the US National Health Insurance Act, which would expand the Medicare program to cover all residents of the US and its territories.
Unfortunately, the D.C. Democratic establishment doesn't want to touch single-payer health care. Insurance companies spent $36 million on federal candidates in 2004 and have favored Republicans by a 2 to 1 ratio since the Democrats lost Congress in 1994, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. If the Dems get anywhere near expanding Medicare, you'll find out how much cash the insurance companies and HMOs can shovel at the GOP. But if Democrats actually promised to improve the lives of working people, they'd draw those neglected voters back to the polls.
Some of our readers take us to task for our sympathy for immigrants in the immigration reform debate. "True Populists would never advocate or defend policies that resulted in depressing the wages of working men and women in the United States," Gilbert Fite writes. We share his frustration with the economic forces that have drawn as many as 12 million immigrants to stay in this country illegally. But we don't think immigrants are the enemy. Blame those who take advantage of the immigrants.
It is no accident that an estimated 11 to 12 million people have come into the US in search of a better life in the 20 years since the last immigration reform, during the Reagan administration. That migration accelerated with the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994.
Ross Perot predicted in 1993 that as manufacturing in northern Mexico expanded, hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers would be drawn north. "They will quickly find that wages in the Mexican maquiladora plants cannot compete with wages anywhere in the US. Out of economic necessity, many of these mobile workers will consider illegally immigrating into the US," Perot wrote.
If anything, Perot underestimated the threat. But this year Republicans were looking for an issue that could excite working-class whites, since it was apparent that tax cuts for the rich weren't doing anything for them. It looks like they decided that they could stir up the rednecks by ginning up an immigration "crisis." Never mind that Republicans in Congress voted overwhelmingly last year to expand NAFTA to Central America and the Dominican Republic. That trade bill will further increase the economic squeeze on US workers as well as their Latin American counterparts.
But the threat of a brown horde of illegal aliens was thought to be an excellent distraction. House Republicans, working with the White House, produced a bill that not only made undocumented aliens criminals; it made everyone who dealt with illegal immigrants felons as well. The House bill offers no path to citizenship, which nativists say amounts to amnesty for lawbreakers.
A compromise bill emerged in the Senate that would give some immigrants a path to citizenship but would force others to return to their native countries or go back underground. But in the hyper-partisan atmosphere in the House, what passes for GOP leadership refuses to advance a bill that Democrats might be able to support. Speaker Dennis Hastert insists that major legislation reach the House floor only if it appears to be backed by a "majority of the majority."
The reason Republicans don't want Latino immigrants to become citizens -- and it's the Latinos that they object to -- is because two-thirds to three-quarters of them who show up to vote will vote Democratic.
Even if Republicans keep a third of Hispanic voters, Democrats win because Latinos are growing as a share of the electorate. The Hispanic Voter Project at Johns Hopkins University conducted a study that showed, if past voting patterns hold, Democrats will increase their 2004 vote totals by nearly half a million votes in 2008. Hispanic vote growth would move two Southwestern battleground states -- Nevada and New Mexico -- into the Democratic column by 2016 and add Iowa and Ohio by 2020. Democrats also hope the Latino vote could put Texas back into play and push Arizona and Florida into the solidly blue column.
Border security is important, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said, but it will not fix our broken immigration system. "Immigration reform must include the protection of rights and standards for all workers including permanent relief to the millions of undocumented workers currently living and working in this country; it is long past time to put this struggling underground community above ground and recognize their enormous contributions. To do otherwise guarantees a secondary class of workers easily subject to exploitation," he said.
We agree. Instead of joining Senate Republicans in a flawed immigration bill, Democrats should let intra-GOP divisions prevent a bad bill from passing this year. Matthew Yglesias recently wrote, "Nobody knows exactly how the midterms will play out, but Dems are all-but-certain to pick up some seats and be able to pass a bill in 2007 that's better than any possible compromise in the current Congress."
See the whole editorial.
Democratic leaders plan to push for an increase in the minimum wage, reform the Republican prescription drug law, shore up homeland security measures and reinstate lapsed budet deficit controls if they regain control of the House of Representatives this fall.
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told the Washington Post a Democratic House would launch investigations of the Bush administration, starting with its first-term energy task force that has been cloaked in secrecy. They would look into the use and abuse of intelligence in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Pelosi denied the House would move quickly to impeach Bush, but she said of the probes, "You never know where it leads to."
It's a good start, but if Democrats really want to get something moving, and show that the party is concerned about improving the lives of working people, they should promise a bill expanding Medicare to cover all Americans.
Also, Bush offers little more than lip service on immigration reform and the D.C. pundits' reaction to Steven Colbert's satire illustrates why no journalist should aspire to become a White House correspondent.
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were supposed to be energy pros, so when Laurence Lindsey -- Bush's senior economic advisor at the time -- claimed in 2002 that the Iraq war would increase oil supplies and lower prices, people tended to believe it, even as pundits derided the idea that the invasion had anything to do with oil. Now Bush's energy plan has resulted in $3 gas, which is generating record profits for the oil companies and further riches for the Arab sheiks who bankrolled Osama bin Laden.
The Iraq war, which cut oil production in that nation to a trickle and unsettled other Mideastern producers, has contributed in no small part to the 68% increase in US gas prices since January 2005. As economic expansion in Asia increases the demand for gasoline, prices will continue to rise. No amount of drilling in arctic wilderness will change that. But even with oil prices at record highs, the Energy Department predicts that US motorists will consume 1.5% more gasoline than they did last summer.
Democrats should promote biofuels and embrace the Apollo Alliance's plan to make America independent from foreign energy in 10 years. The Alliance, (apolloalliance.org) a broad-based progressive coalition that estimates that a crash program for clean energy will create three million new jobs and rid America's dependence on Middle-Eastern oil. It would make American industry competitive, rebuild our cities, create good jobs for working families and enable good stewardship of the economy and our natural environment.
Also, citizens should be alarmed at a bill moving through Congress that would give telecom corporations more control over the Internet.
Republicans saw their chance to bash immigrants and, sure enough, they took it. Senate leaders appeared to have a bipartisan compromise that would toughen border security, create a new "guest-worker" program and give 12 million undocumented immigrants a path to a green card and eventual citizenship. But Democratic leader Harry Reid wanted assurance from Majority Leader Bill Frist that the bill would not be hijacked with amendments into a punitive measure similar to the one already passed by House Republicans. That version would build a wall the length of the US-Mexico border and make it a felony to enter the country illegally or to aid an undocumented alien.
Why did Reid distrust Frist and his minions? As Ron Brownstein noted in the Los Angeles Times, "Repeatedly in recent years, the Senate has forged bipartisan agreements on issues such as energy policy, the Medicare prescription drug plan and renewal of the PATRIOT Act, only to see much more conservative approaches emerge from conference committees with the House." Reid has been burned enough times that he smelled another double-cross coming.
For months President Bush stayed out of the congressional negotiations except to call for a "guest worker" provision to provide a cheap-labor valve. Then he had the gall to claim that Democrats were standing in the way of immigration reform.
The sudden crisis over immigration is suspicious. Republicans played the race card to great success in the South in the 1970s and '80s. They apparently hope immigration will be a new wedge issue in the Southwest and Midwest. Not only does the influx of millions of Mexican and Central American workers and their families raise fears among white citizens; GOP strategists hope the debate drives a wedge between black and Latino voters who increasingly form the Democratic base. ...
Thank goodness for Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., one of the good guys, who is willing to stand up in Washington and fight for liberty, justice and other attributes listed in the Declaration of Independence, defense of which used to be a no-brainer for politicians of both major parties.
ALSO: When Republicans last November put forth a resolution to immediately withdraw troops from Iraq, fraudulently representing it as the position of Rep. Jack Murtha, D-Pa., House Democrats should have refused to vote on it. Instead, they took the bait and joined the GOP in voting against the straw-man resolution. When on March 1 the Senate Rules Committee considered two different reform proposals, it rejected the Democrats' lobbying reform bill with a 10-8 party-line vote. Then Sen. Trent Lott's watered-down version was passed unanimously, with support of the Democrats. ... Democrats should not settle for a feel-good bill that probably will end up sticking it to progressive interest groups.
Bush administration defenders of the deal to let a Dubai-based company operate six major US ports have cast critics of the deal as racists and xenophobes. This from an administration that ordered wholesale roundups of Arabs in the US after 9/11, arbitrarily deported thousands of them and continues to hold hundreds of Arabs and other Muslims without charges or documentation in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo, Cuba. You won't find any billionaires in that crowd. Rich Arabs are the sort who were allowed to leave the country on Sept. 13, 2001, without suffering the indignity of an FBI interview. So when George W. Bush heard that Dubai Ports World (DP World) was buying the British company that operates ports in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia, he saw no problem. The Bush family has business dealings with the United Arab Emirates (Dubai is one of seven emirates) and Dubya's trade representative is finishing up a trade agreement with them. He viewed questions about the Dubai ports deal as a threat not only to his authority, but also to globalized commerce that free-trade fundamentalists revere.
We don't think it's racist to note that the chairman of DP World is a sultan who works for the crown prince of Dubai. The UAE was one of the few governments that recognized the Taliban government in Afghanistan, which harbored al Qaeda. Some of the UAE's sheiks reportedly went hunting with Osama bin Laden in the late 1990s. It's notable that Dubai was a major transit and money transfer center for al-Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks and Qaeda operatives are still believed to use Dubai as a logistical base, even though the UAE has made high-profile arrests, passed an anti-money laundering law, and imposed monitoring procedures on charity organizations within its borders. ...
Also: The supposedly liberal media are playing down Democrats' chances of regaining control of Congress this year. The New York Times on March 6 front-paged "For Democrats, Many Voices, but No Theme Song," airing complaints that Democratic candidates from Congress are reading from their own scripts, frustrating the D.C. Democrats' efforts to forge a national message. ... Democrats should run against the crooks and incompetents that are in charge of Congress and the White House. They should run against the Medicare drug debacle and the arrogance and cronyism of the GOP congressional leadership that has reversed the Clinton-era budget surpluses and failed to exert oversight of the Bush administration.
If they really want something to stand for, Democrats should promise to pass a bill that expands Medicare to cover every resident of the US, or at least know the reason why such a bill cannot go forward.
When Dick Cheney shot his buddy while hunting quail, then ducked from public view for three days while he let the victim take the blame, it was a perfect illustration of the incompetence and arrogance of the Bush-Cheney administration. As we all know by now, the vice president sprayed 78-year-old Harry Whittington with birdshot at a canned hunt on a South Texas ranch, then withheld word on the shooting for 18 hours, giving his buddies time to get their stories straight. Local law enforcement authorities were not allowed to question Cheney until the following day, when he could present a sober appearance. When word finally leaked out, the Kool-Aid Republicans, who are trained to parrot the party line from Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, blamed the victim and excused Cheney. ...
We realize that accidents can happen and we are glad Whittington, who suffered a "minor" heart attack from birdshot that lodged near his heart, apparently made a full recovery. Rich Republican lawyers don't deserve to be killed by Cheney's mistakes any more than Iraqi kids deserve to be killed by them. But Cheney, like his putative "boss," appears to be congenitally unable to admit to mistakes. So they keep on happening. Maybe not so much to rich Republican lawyers, but we'll see who gets invited to Dick's next hunting trip....
While Bush administration functionaries were dissembling about the reasons the president's counselors felt they were above the law when it came to eavesdropping on US citizens, participants at the Independent Press Association conference in San Francisco recently got to hear two intrepid reporters, Amy Goodman and Greg Palast, talk to the choir about the need for an independent press that calls the government to account.
"It's important to state the facts and let the people draw their own conclusions," she said. "People absolutely care -- they care if they know."
Americans have a special role in making sure their government does the right thing, Goodman added. She witnessed the massacre of 270 Timorese by Indonesian forces in 1992 and was injured along with colleague Allan Nairn. She believes the reason she and Nairn weren't killed was that she made it clear to the Indonesian troops that she was an American, not an Australian, whom the Indonesians treated with contempt.
"We represent two things to the world -- the sword and the shield," Goodman said of the United States' reputation around the world. "They see the American people as a shield and every little thing we do has a tremendous effect, a ripple effect all over the world. ... We have a decision to make every day, whether to represent the sword or the shield."
While Republicans and Democratic leaders propose to tinker with lobbying and ethics rules, Democratic Reps. David Obey (Wis.) and Barney Frank (Mass.) have taken the lead in offering legislation for public financing of campaigns for Congress. "You can talk all you want about nibbling at the margins about ethics and House rules and all the rest," said Obey, the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, "but unless we deal with the nexus between politics and money, damned little is actually going to change over time."
Taxpayers must recognize that they end up with the tab for the billions of dollars of tax breaks that politically-connected industries don't pay. They're also stuck with bad public policies that lobbyists buy with the current "pay to play" system.
We propose that Clean Elections -- publicly financed elections for Congress -- be financed with a tax on broadcast advertising. TV and radio stations, which do not pay for their use of public airwaves, are the main beneficiary of campaign spending. A tax of 10% on commercials would generate $5 billion. Those revenues could pay for public financing of congressional and presidential campaigns and also fund expansion of public broadcasting services.
In the past decade, Republicans have taken Congress to new lows of corruption. Democrats may not have been choirboys when they controlled Congress for most of 40 years before the 1994 election, but at least they allowed the money to flow on a bipartisan basis, as long as they got the majority share.
When the GOP took over they decided to shut off the spigots to the Democrats. Grover Norquist, Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., and Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, came up with the "K Street Project," which made "pay to play" explicit for lobbyists while Democratic lobbyists became persona non grata. The warning went out that lobbying firms that employed Democrats in positions of authority would not get a hearing in the Republican Congress. And the GOP leaders would keep an eye on lobbyists' campaign finance flows.
DeLay, who was then the majority whip, provided the muscle for the project. ...
Democrats need to pick up 15 seats to regain control of the House and six seats to regain the Senate majority. Gerrymandering in the House and the powers of incumbency in the Senate make such a turnover extremely unlikely. To pull such an upset, Democrats need to regain the solid support of working people. They can do that by promising that the first orders of business under a Democratic Congress next year would be to expand Medicare to cover everybody and to increase the minimum wage to a level at which a full-time job would raise a family out of poverty. ...
If Republicans can run against Big Government, Democrats should run against Big Insurance Companies. And if the US can commit more than a trillion dollars to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, we can commit to spend what is necessary to provide quality health care for every American.
Expansion of Medicare to cover every American would help workers and their families, it would help small businesses who can't afford health insurance for their employees and level the playing field with stingy corporations such as Wal-Mart, it would help state and local governments that are wrestling with ways to pay for health care for the uninsured, and it would hurt major Republican funders. What's not to like?
And if the Republican president and Congress won't get off the dime, unions and small-business groups should take the initiative in getting Democrats at the state level to promote universal health coverage. Health care could be financed by a modest payroll tax that in most cases would cost less than what responsible businesses now pay to insure their employees. Progressive states would have an advantage in economic development.
The Senate Judiciary Committee has started what is expected to be a weeklong encounter with Samuel Alito in which the right-wing judge appears to back off some of the most extreme positions he has taken as a Reagan administration lawyer and appeals court judge without precluding a return to those views if he gets onto the Supreme Court. Although most of the attention has been paid to his prejudice against abortion rights, Alito also could swing the Supreme Court to the right on issues such as affirmative action; the role of money and corporations in politics; voting rights; family and medical leave; civil liberties; labor and consumer regulations; and presidential powers. Democrats should be prepared to filibuster Alito's nomination and call Bill Frist's bluff on the threatened "nuclear option" of doing away with judicial filibusters.
There are many reasons why the state should not execute people. One of the most compelling reasons for me is that courts and juries, much less prosecutors and governors, cannot be trusted to sort the innocent from the guilty.Stanley "Tookie" Williams was dispatched by the state of California early Tuesday morning, Dec. 13, after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger denied clemency. I can't say that the state didn't prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the co-founder of the Crips gang at least participated in the killings of four innocent people during two robberies, even if he reformed himself in prison. But California still should not have taken his life.For those who are unpersuaded by arguments about the morality of the death penalty, Cory Maye, on death row in Mississippi, offers a better case for why the state can't afford to risk capital punishment.
Also, when we started The Progressive Populist, we were looking for troublemakers and Eugene McCarthy's name came up. He contributed "The Caesarian Solution" to our premiere edition, and he continued providing monthly essays for the first two years of our publication, and occasional columns thereafter from his home in Woodville, Va. I never got to meet him again, but talked with him a few times by phone and he was very gracious, good-humored and supportive of our enterprise.
As a young man, McCarthy was a semipro baseball player who reportedly was a pretty fair hitter in the minor leagues. He tried the seminary but stuck with poetry, philosophy and politics. He probably wouldn't have made a very good president, truth to tell, but he was a hero and a contrarian who followed his conscience and never bowed to convention. As the classic campaign poster said, "He stood up alone and something happened." Corporate media and political consultants nearly have wiped out senators such as McCarthy but some of his stripe may still occasionally be found. We must restore their habitat so that politicians such as Eugene McCarthy can thrive again.
After Rep. Jack Murtha, D-Pa., a decorated Marine veteran of Korea and Vietnam and a renowned advocate of military veterans, came out in favor of an orderly withdrawal from Iraq, Republicans hit the roof. House GOP leaders replaced his thoughtful resolution with a one-sentence call for an immediate withdrawal. It was designed to split Democrats, so the GOP sent it to the floor for a vote. Democrats refused to take the bait, as all but three Dems rejected the GOP resolution, but not before first-year Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio, scolded Murtha that "cowards cut and run, Marines never do."
But the cowards are not the Congress members who are having second thoughts about trusting the president when he said Saddam Hussein presented a threat to the US. The cowards are those in power who "fixed" intelligence to support the case for a war that they thought would benefit the oil companies and help them regain control of the Senate.
Also: Public opinion polls show that Republicans are vulnerable heading into next year's elections but people don't have much confidence that Dems would do much better. Murtha's resolution on withdrawing US troops from Iraq is a good start toward ending the debacle in Iraq, but if Democrats want to establish their bona fides with the working class once again, they should promise to expand Medicare to everyone, so that health insurance is no longer dependent on your employer. One of the reasons GM is laying off 30,000 workers in the US is the $1,500 it spends on each vehicle to provide health insurance for the workers that built it. Carmakers in other countries don't have to pay those costs because they have national health coverage.
Lying has been standard operating procedure of the Bush administration for so long that some Republican operatives may not have gotten the memo that lying to the FBI and/or grand jury is where they draw the line. Now that US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, in his investigation of the administration's role in "outing" undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame, has traced the lies and liars to the White House, those who supported the election and re-election of George W. Bush owe the rest of us an apology. ... Democratic Congress members finally are admitting that they voted to support the war in Iraq because Bush and other administration figures lied to them about the threat. They should not take anything the administration tells them at face value anymore.
Also: After Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid took the Senate into a closed session on Nov. 1 to demand action by foot-dragging Republicans on an overdue report from the Senate Intelligence Committee, Majority Leader Bill Frist complained that Reid's move was "a slap in the face." In fact Frist deserved a kick somewhere lower on the body after his high-handed attempts to railroad the Senate to conform with right-wing ideology.
United Auto Workers is one of the strongest unions in the United States. In the past century it humbled the nation's largest corporations with hard bargaining and strikes to carve out the wages and benefits that made American auto workers the envy of the world. But now Wal-Mart is the world's largest corporation and US automakers can build their cars in Shanghai if they run into labor trouble in Detroit. So UAW leaders had little leverage when GM executives called them in and said the union could either give up some of the wages and health coverage they had negotiated in the current contract, or the corporation would go to bankruptcy court to get a judge to extract more onerous terms. The union agreed to submit the concessions to the rank and file. Ford and DaimlerChrysler are expected to demand similar concessions, as more corporations adopt the scam of extorting wage and benefit givebacks to get their profits back in line. Democratic candidates for Congress should not let a public event pass without concluding that "Medicare must be expanded to provide health care for every American!"
Also: Progressive organizations have formed the Emergency Campaign for America's Priorities (ECAP) to fight the resurgent Republican push for more tax cuts for the rich and cutbacks in domestic programs for the poor.
Trying to divert the narrative from GOP ethics problems, Republicans are using the Gulf Coast hurricane disasters to promote the right-wing agenda that had stalled in Congress. Bush suspended requirements that federal contractors pay locally prevailing wages and comply with affirmative action requirements. To pay for the estimated $200 billion costs of rebuilding the Gulf Coast, Bush and congressional Republicans are rejecting tax increases. Instead they are pushing for cuts in domestic spending programs, such as Medicaid, food stamps and soil conservation programs. Republicans proposed to cut agriculture spending by $3 billion, including cuts in the dairy price support program as well as other commodity supports and closing farm service offices. Democrats should stand up for farmers, working poor and small businesses.
Any Democrats who fail to tie Social Security privatization to their Republican opponents' tails are making a mistake that Republicans would not make if the issue turned their way. Bush's plan for health care, meanwhile, is to call out the Army to enforce quarantines in case of a pandemic, so that Republicans in gated communities are not infected. With health care costs rising for businesses and workers, Democrats should put the expansion of Medicare to cover all Americans at the top of their agenda.
Also: When George W. Bush announced the appointment of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, many fundamentalist Christians and other right-wing activists wondered if Bush lied to them in his proclaimed devotion to life and the war against liberal culture. The National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce have no such qualms.
When the water spilled over the broken flood walls in New Orleans and filled the Crescent City with the backwash from Hurricane Katrina, it was a perfect metaphor for what the Republican Party has done to the federal government. After all, George Bush's mentor, Grover Norquist, famously said the party's goal was to reduce the size of government by half so that they could drown it in a bathtub. We just didn't realize he meant it literally.
New Orleans was a disaster waiting to happen. The city knew it, the state knew it and the feds certainly knew it as they embarked 40 years ago on a project to strengthen levees and flood walls around the city. On Aug. 29, the Big One finally hit with Hurricane Katrina. The city at first appeared to dodge the Category 4 storm, but the backwash from Lake Pontchartrain broke through flood control walls and the Lower 9th Ward began filling up with brackish water, a scenario that had long been feared. But the Federal Emergency Management Administration sat on the sidelines and watched while city and state officials struggled to save 100,000 unfortunates who had been unable to evacuate as the megastorm approached. Democrats should also use the experience of this debacle to remind Americans that the federal government is supposed to protect people who cannot protect themselves.
Cindy Sheehan exposed George W. Bush for the coward he is. Bush showed his colors when he ran like a scared rabbit in the hours after the planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11. Now he can't face up to a grieving mother who wants to know why her son had to die.
We believe that Bush and his aides lied to Congress and the American people about the reasons for going to war with Iraq. But Republican leaders in Congress have no intention of investigating the conduct of the war or other discrepancies in the Bush administration. With 14 months until the mid-term election, progressives must recruit candidates for the House and Senate now. Otherwise the right-wingers in charge of the GOP will continue to run roughshod over the US and the world for two more years. Progressive candidates need to do more than demand that Bush bring the troops home from Iraq. But we believe progressive populist campaigns can win. We propose a dozen issues Democrats can win on.
When the Republican leadership held the vote open for 47 extra minutes to twist arms of House members to pass the Central American Free Trade Agreement on July 27, the result put American farmers, textile workers and manufacturers at risk. Multinational corporations got the green light to move factories into Central American countries with poor records on human rights and few protections for poor families or workers. The House GOP virtually guaranteed that more Central Americans who are displaced from farms in their native lands will be moving north in the next few years to compete with Mexicans and American citizens for minimum-wage jobs in the USA.
Democrats held together most of their members, as the bill passed by a razor-thin margin of 217-215. But as David Sirota of WorkingForChange.com noted, the switch of one vote from yes to no would have forced a tie and killed the bill, so each of those 15 Dems who voted for CAFTA can be blamed for its passage. For the record, they are Melissa Bean (Ill.), Jim Cooper (Tenn.), Henry Cuellar (Texas), Norm Dicks (Wash.), Ruben Hinojosa (Texas), William Jefferson (La.), Jim Matheson (Utah), Greg Meeks (N.Y.), Dennis Moore (Kan.), Jim Moran (Va.), Solomon Ortiz (Texas), Ike Skelton (Mo.), Vic Snyder (Ark.), John Tanner (Tenn.) and Ed Towns (N.Y.)
Next up is the Free Trade Area of the Americas to further the globalist agenda through South America. Bush already has run up against formidable opposition from leftist leaders in Brazil, Venezuela and Argentina. Conventional wisdom seems to be that CAFTA is a Pyrrhic victory that gives the administration no momentum to pick up that fight again, but multinational corporations won't give up. Neither should populists.
When Karl Rove called the Democrats wimps in the face of 9/11 and the Democrats replied, "we're not wimps," linguist George Lakoff scored it as a victory for the GOP machine. It was as if Democrats took the bait and Rove reeled them in, changing the discourse from the ongoing disaster in Iraq to support for Bush after 9/11. When Democrats defended themselves from Rove's attack, they wound up expressing support for Bush's going to war, with implicit support for the conduct of the war.
Lakoff, who wrote the bestseller Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values, Frame the Debate, said progressives can learn a lesson from Rove, not in how to distort and exploit tragedy but in how to voice clear values. But you also need to know where conservatives are coming from. As a linguist Lakoff examined the metaphors used by conservatives and progressives and found that they have two different understandings of the nation. He found that conservatives identify with the "strict father" while progressives identify with the nurturing parent.
The Rockridge Institute (rockridgeinstitute.org), which Lakoff co-founded, did a study that found that people still believe in the use of the commonwealth for common good so that all of us can pursue our individual goals, an idea that goes back to the Pilgrims and has nothing to do with Moscow communists. People use roads, the Internet, drugs that are developed with government support, banks that are regulated by the federal government and courts to enforce contracts. "Nobody makes it on their own in this country," he said. "No businessman has ever succeeded on his own."
Progressives no longer can let the right wing define values, such as making opposition to abortion "pro-life" while cutting health care for poor people that results in the highest infant mortality rate in the industrialized world. We just have to figure out how to explain it to them in terms they can relate to. We all know there is no reason for working people to vote for a GOP that consistently promotes the interests of the wealthy, corporate class. But Dems need to re-learn how to, as the late Sen. Ralph Yarborough said, "put the jam on the lower shelf where the little man can reach it."
Democrats should let George W. Bush's Social Security "Fix" crash and burn. Bush blames the Dems for being obstructionists, but the truth is that GOPers have been unable to come up with their own Social Security plan. Democrats want no part of the foolishness, and the public is increasingly skeptical of the GOP scam to chip away at the guaranteed benefits of the retirement and disability system. The Washington Post on June 16 reported that the Finance Committee does not have Republican votes to approve Bush's plan that would divert payroll taxes to private investment accounts. But the committee also lacks the votes to address GOP alarms about Social Security's long-term solvency without personal accounts, because too many right-wingers insist on them.
Democrats shouldn't be shy about advertising the fact that the GOP's plan to privatize Social Security requires massive benefit cuts that would devastate rural America. Bush's assurances that current retirees won't see any benefit cuts are as worthless as his assurances that the war in Iraq could be fought without cost to US taxpayers.
One of the most popular canards about illegal immigrants is that they don't pay taxes but put a stress on health and social services. Immigrants might hold down wages for manual labor and are useful to union-busters, which contributes to resentment among working-class citizens, but immigrants have no way of avoiding sales taxes on the goods they buy. They also pay property taxes indirectly through their rents. And although many employers choose to hire illegal aliens in the "underground" economy that is not reported to the IRS, reputable companies deduct payroll taxes from their employees. Undocumented aliens just don't get credit for it. But the New York Times reported April 5 that an estimated seven million or so illegal immigrant workers in the US are providing Social Security with a $7-billion-a-year subsidy.
The influx of illegal aliens also has serious medical consequences, wrote Madeline Pelner Cosman, author of a report in Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. She wrote that "many illegal aliens harbor fatal diseases that American medicine fought and vanquished long ago, such as drug-resistant tuberculosis." All the more reason to implement a single-payer health insurance program that gives every resident -- whether citizen or alien -- access to primary-care physicians, so they don't have to show up at the emergency room when their condition becomes acute. After all, 45 million Americans -- mainly the working poor -- also are uninsured because their employers cannot or will not pay for health care. Hospitals don't fare much better collecting from citizens who have exceeded their insurance coverage, which is why illness and medical debts are the cause for 50% of bankruptcies in the US.
We've been spending the last two months fighting to save democracy and all we get is a lousy compromise and three hacks as federal judges? Democrats are touting it as a win -- and in the power politics calculus of Washington, D.C., it probably is -- but Senate Dems gave up a lot in their agreement to let three right-wingers onto the federal bench in return for "moderate" Republicans agreeing not to let their more rabid colleagues dismantle the filibuster of judicial nominees. Seven Democrats and seven Republicans signed onto the deal on the eve of Majority Leader Bill Frist's planned power play. Compromisers include Democrats Robert Byrd (W.V.), Joe Lieberman (Conn.), Ben Nelson (Neb.), Mark Pryor (Ark.), Mary Landrieu (La.), Ken Salazar (Colo.) and Daniel K. Inouye (Hawaii) and Republicans Susan Collins (Maine), Olympia J. Snowe (Maine), Mike DeWine (Ohio), Lincoln D. Chafee (R.I.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.), John McCain (Ariz.) and John Warner (Va.). They are enough to derail both Democratic filibusters and Frist's attempts to employ the "nuclear option" to change Senate rules in mid-session. So the show will go on. Still ...
George W. Bush has made it as clear as he can: He wants the Republican Congress to pass a bill that dismantles the egalitarian guaranteed benefits of Social Security -- the most successful government retirement system in the world -- and replaces it with a complicated multi-tiered, needs-based program that ultimately reduces the incentives for middle-class taxpayers to support the program. Establishment pundits have called upon Democrats to come up with their own plan to rescue Social Security. But Democrats and honest Republicans should not feel any obligation to participate in this charade -- in fact they would be foolish to cooperate with these charlatans who have trumped up a possible Social Security shortfall in 35 years if the economy tanks to record lows. Instead they should pay attention to the health care crisis. The Center for American Progress has developed a blueprint for affordable, quality health coverage, made available and affordable for all Americans, through either employee-sponsored insurance, Medicaid or a new group insurance pool modeled on the system used by federal employees and members of Congress. The pool, based on the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, would assist all those who lack access to job-based insurance -- a problem for about 80% of all uninsured people. Almost two-thirds (63%) of US adults cite lowering health care costs and health insurance. They deserve better from the president and Congress.
Bush struck another low blow May 7 in Riga, Latvia, when he accused the US of appeasement in agreeing to the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe after World War II. Bush said the February 1945 agreement at Yalta among President Franklin Roosevelt, Soviet leader Josef Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill "followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact."
Republicans appear dead set to throw out two centuries of Senate rules in order to seat some of George Bush's most right-wing nominees on federal appeals courts.If the Republican majority goes ahead with the "nuclear option" to change the rules to stop the minority's ability to filibuster judicial appointments, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said Democrats will not shut the Senate down, but they will "stop giving deference" to the majority's agenda. They will move forward with a Democratic agenda that addresses the concerns of regular Americans. Invoking the little-known Senate Rule XIV, the Democrats put nine bills on the Senate calendar. They plan to bypass committee hearings and move the bills directly to the Senate floor.
It's about time Senate Dems got some backbone. They got rolled by the financial industry when they let the bankruptcy bill through but they're standing up to Bush's Social Security privatization scam, the public is behind them and they're finding that when they stick together they can beat the bastards.
We have mixed emotions about the filibuster. It has prevented a lot of bad bills from being enacted, but it also has been the bane of a lot of good reform bills. However, if requiring a supermajority has any value, it is when it comes to reviewing court nominees. The Democrats have approved 205 Bush nominees and have drawn the line at 10. Bush picked a fight when he resubmitted those partisan hacks. If the GOP can't get five Democrats to break a filibuster, it's a pretty clear signal that the nominees don't represent the qualities that deserve a lifetime appointment to the bench. But if Republicans corral the votes and do away with the filibuster for judicial nominations, Democrats should make it clear that they will do away with the filibuster on all legislation.
Also, Pope Benedict XVI, formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, is a conservative in church doctrinal matters; possibly less so on social and economic issues. At 78 years of age, expect him to continue and consolidate John Paul II's policies, which he played a large role in formulating.
Republican leaders made a choice in the 1980s and '90s to appeal to fundamentalist Christians and Catholics with opposition to abortion and promotion of government payments to church-related social welfare organizations. That appeal apparently paid off as evangelicals mobilized for Bush's 2004 re-election. Now it's the GOP's turn to affirm its belief in the separation of church and state.
We take some comfort that public support for Bush and the GOP dropped sharply after the Terri Schiavo debacle. A Gallup poll showed Congress' approval rating sank to 37%, lower than any time since Republicans impeached President Bill Clinton in 1998. A March 23 CBS News poll found 66% thought Schiavo's feeding tube should be removed. And Bush's approval rating dropped to 44% in early April, the lowest of any president at this point in his second term. That hasn't stopped many pundits from insisting that Bush is still a popular president. But Americans are getting a good look at today's GOP and they don't like what they see.
Also: How low will George W. Bush go in his attempt to undermine public confidence in Social Security? After Bush went to the Bureau of Public Debt in Parkersburg, W.V., on 4/5/05 and said the Social Security Trust Fund didn't exist and Treasury notes that make up the trust fund won't be paid back, economist Max Sawicky worked up the numbers and reported at MaxSpeak.org that Bush has passed $639 billion in "worthless IOUs" to the Social Security Trust Fund since 2002. "Over the next five years, our president proposes to add another $1,061 billion to this crime spree," Sawicky noted. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the projected 10-year total Trust Fund swindle (2006-2015) is $2.5 trillion.
The cruel, cynical grandstanding in the Terri Schiavo case is breathtaking in its hypocrisy. While Republicans in Congress plotted how they could intervene to stop the highly-publicized removal of Schiavo's feeding tube -- first with a subpoena to force the vegetative invalid to appear at a congressional hearing and later with a special bill to invalidate previous Florida state court rulings in Schiavo's case -- Wanda Hudson of Houston watched her 6-month-old baby, Sunny, die in her arms after doctors, against her wishes, removed the breathing tube that kept the infant alive. As Jon Stewart said on Comedy Central's Daily Show: "If you want to know just how sick you have to get before Congress is willing to do something about it, well, now you know."
Expansion of Medicare to cover all Americans without regard to their wealth or employment status is the only "pro-life" health care plan that makes sense for the US. If Congress has to take over the health insurance business and rescind tax breaks for the wealthy to pay for it, so be it.
Also, a caller objected to the headline on the cover of our Feb. 15 issue: "Fog of phony war." The war in Iraq, which marked the start of its third year March 19, is not a phony war, she noted; it is a real war with tragic consequences for American and Iraqi casualties and their families. In addition it drains the US treasury and diverts resources that could be used to address pressing domestic problems.
It took eight years, but the credit card industry finally gots its bill establishing bankruptcy peonage. In two days' work, March 7-8, the Senate rejected Democrats' amendments to S. 256, the Bankruptcy Peonage Act. The bill would make it harder for middle-class families to discharge overwhelming debts through bankruptcy. Rejected amendments would have closed loopholes for the rich as well as violent abortion protesters, cracked down on predatory lending practices, protected the homes of those who were facing bankruptcy from medical bills and given the working poor an increase in the minimum wage.
The Center for American Progress noted that the credit card industry put together a bipartisan coalition to protect the $30 billion in profits the industry took in last year under the old bankruptcy rules. Not a single Republican voted against cloture and 14 Democrats sided with the bankers and the GOP. They should be ashamed. Democrats who had been voting with the Republicans on this bill include Sens. Tom Carper and Joe Biden, both of Delaware, Sen. Ben Nelson (Neb.) and Sen. Tim Johnson (S.D.). Other Democrats who voted for cloture included Robert Byrd (W.V.), Kent Conrad (N.D.), Herb Kohl (Wis.), Mary Landrieu (La.), Joe Lieberman (Conn.), Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), Bill Nelson (Fla.), Mark Pryor (Ark.), Ken Salazar (Colo.) and Debbie Stabenow (Mich.). They sold out their working-class constituents for credit-card cash. Courtney Mabeus reportes on page 13 that during the 2004 election cycle the finance, insurance and real estate interests donated $306 million to federal candidates, with 59% going to Republicans. At least 14 Dems couldn't say no to Big Money. Let them know you care.
Also, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney on March 2 won a showdown with dissident union leaders who wanted to divert more of the labor federation's money to organizing. Andrew Stern of the Service Employees International Union and James Hoffa of the Teamsters wanted to return $35 million of labor federation dues to unions for organizing efforts. They also had the support of the UNITE HERE (textile, apparel, hotel, restaurant and retail workers), United Food and Commercial Workers, Laborers and Auto Workers, representing 40% of the AFL-CIO's members. But the AFL-CIO's executive committee rejected the organizing emphasis on a 15-7 vote. Instead on a 14-8 vote the committee approved Sweeney's plan to rebate $15 million for organizing, but to increase spending on political and legislative activity by one-third, to $45 million a year.
Working people must organize politically and at the workplace. They no longer can afford the illusion that politics is not a vital part of their lives. A corporate president, a corporate Congress and a corporate judiciary can cause problems for working people for a generation or longer.
George Bush and his Social Security privatizers are still trying to put pressure on Democrats to sign onto a bill that the White House hasn't even unveiled yet. Democrats should keep up their resistance. Let the House GOP leadership come up with a privatization bill they can bull through the House, preferably with a minimum of Democratic votes.
Howard Dean has his work cut out for him as he takes on the challenge of rebuilding the Democratic Party. Dean's grassroots organization, left over from the presidential campaign, overwhelmed the Washington pros who tried to install a centrist insider such as former Rep. Tim Roemer as chair of the Democratic National Committee.
Dean plans to make the Democrats a party of reform. In that he nominally agrees with the pro-business Democratic Leadership Council, which advises the party to take away the reform mantle from the GOP, and Carville, who also has been pushing a reform agenda. But there is a difference between reform and revolution, and the pros fear that revolutionary rhetoric will reinforce the stereotype of Democrats as radicals.
A friend confessed that he was not looking forward to more replays of Dean's infamous Scream on right-wing talk shows. But the right-wingers and their media allies will ridicule anyone who speaks truth to power, so don't expect an even break from them. Also remember that, the caricatures notwithstanding, the Scream after the Iowa caucuses was one of defiance. The Democratic Party needs that kind of passion today. We think Dean is the right man for the job.
Also, some "pro-choice" Democrats were nervous when Sen. Hillary Clinton called on family planning advocates to try to find "common ground" with pro-life groups on issues such as emergency contraception, more funding for prenatal care and other ways to prevent unwanted pregnancies. What's up? Democrats must regain their appeal to mainstream churchgoers -- particularly Catholics, whose hierarchy pursues a hard line against abortion.
Officials of the National Right to Life Committee, which is practically an adjunct of the Republican Party, have rebuffed Democratic initiatives. This sort of reaction marks NRLC as the pro-birth wing of the pro-life movement, interested in a fetus only until it is born. The pro-birthers hope this year to make it a federal crime to transport a minor across state lines to seek an abortion. Another measure would require abortion clinics to inform women seeking late-turn abortions that the fetus will feel pain during the procedure.
NRLC has not, to our knowledge, mounted an outcry against Republican budget cuts to programs that helped low-income parents and their children find adequate food, housing, education and health care. So it is hard to take seriously NRLC's claim as defenders of the "right to life."
At least the Catholic bishops -- much maligned on the Left -- are consistent in their support for social welfare programs.
If the battle is over abortion, Catholics will side with the bishops and Democrats will lose. If the battle is over the right to a full and decent life, some bishops will still pitch in with the GOP but the priests, sisters and the rank and file might be persuaded to come home to the Democrats
As Republicans dig in for the fight to privatize Social Security, Democrats have to wonder if the best they can do in government these days is defend the 69-year-old centerpiece of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Republicans usually do an expert job framing the debate and putting Dems on defense. In the public mind, the GOP is for cutting taxes, promoting gun rights and family values -- as long as those families don't include homosexuals. They depict Democrats as wanting to stop kids from praying in school, promoting abortion, sending gays out to collect our guns and raising taxes to let lazy people live off welfare checks. What do you say to a neighbor who has spent a generation listening to talk shows depict Democrats as pro-abortion, anti-prayer, pro-gay, anti-gun, pro-tax and anti-work-ethic?
It would help if Democrats had a list of principles that could be cited and easily understood. The Democratic National Platform, adopted last summer in Boston, was a typically useless document with 43 pages of platitudes designed mainly to avoid offending people (see democrats.org).
Senate Democrats under new Minority Leader Harry Reid took a step toward establishing concrete principles Jan. 24 as they unveiled their opposition agenda. They presented 10 bills that reflect legislative priorities, including adding as many as 40,000 military troops by 2007; improving veterans' benefits; increasing college aid; allowing prescription drugs to be imported; creating national standards for federal elections; restoring overtime pay benefits to workers who lost them under a 2004 labor rules change; and increasing access to family planning services and insurance coverage of birth control products.
It's a good legislative package but it consists of half-measures that won't get a hearing anyway. So if they want to lure back the working class that lately has had a hard time figuring out what the Democratic Party would do for them, party leaders might as well take the offensive against the plutocracy.
Our proposals to rebrand the Democratic Party:
1) Preserve full Social Security benefits at age 65;
2) Enact universal health care. Expand Medicare to let all Americans see the health provider of their choice.
3) Rebrand social welfare policies as "pro-life" policies.
4) Ensure free, quality public education for all through the university level.
5) Promote a demilitarized foreign policy that features human rights and multilateral cooperation through the UN, NATO and other international organizations. Turn Iraq over to the UN as soon as possible and bring US troops home.
6) Make worker rights and environmental standards part of all trade accords.
7) Repeal the USA PATRIOT Act, much of which violates the Bill of Rights anyway.
8) Make corporations accountable. Establish a Bill of Rights for workers, including the right to a job, a safe workplace, decent wages and benefits. Secure the right to organize and be represented, grieve about working conditions, strike, get fair compensation for injuries and have secure pension and retirement benefits. Enforce antitrust laws to protect small businesses from large corporations.
9) Promote clean energy and natural resource conservation. Repeal right-to-pollute laws. Toughen environmental enforcement against polluters; reduce oil dependence; spur investment in alternative energy sources, including hydrogen, solar, wind, biomass and hybrids. Encourage clean energy technologies that produce new jobs.
10) Promote rural communities and sustainable family farms and ranches.
We also support media reform, of course, but after the mugging of Howard Dean and then John Kerry last year, don't expect an even break from the networks.
George Bush, his 2-point mandate in hand, is going full-steam ahead with his scheme to privatize Social Security. This fraudulent plan is a gift to Wall Street; Democrats should treat it with the scorn it deserves. If Democrats can't drive this privatization campaign back into the hole where it belongs, they don't deserve to govern.
Republicans won a majority in Congress in 1994 in large part because they assured seniors that they would not do anything to harm Social Security Insurance. But now that they have a firm hold on the White House and both chambers of Congress, a White House aide wrote Jan. 3 in a memo leaked to the press, "for the first time in six decades the Social Security battle is one we can win." That is, surrendering guaranteed retirement benefits to the whims of stock markets. But to win, White House aide Peter Wehner wrote, the public must be convinced that "the current system is headed for an iceberg."
Also, George Bush also tortured the truth in his recent junket to Illinois Jan. 6 when he labeled Madison County and neighboring St. Clair County (commonly known as Metro-East, across the river from St. Louis) "judicial hellholes," He claims that limiting the damages juries can award to injured patients will fix the nation's health-care problem.
Public Citizen and Victims and Families United advocate a new approach to the medical malpractice impasse: It's called "Sorry Works!" This program encourages doctors to apologize quickly for medical negligence and errors, and it offers fair compensation to families and their attorneys. Sorry Works! is proven to reduce anger, lawsuits and medical liability costs, but victims receive swift justice, constitutional rights are not limited, and repeat medical errors are reduced.
Conservatives have spent the past 20 years consolidating control of the news media -- particularly radio and TV -- since Ronald Reagan's Federal Communications Commission did away with the Fairness Doctrine. The past few election campaigns show progressives can't expect to get a fair shot from Disney's ABC, General Electric's NBC or Viacom's CBS, much less Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, New York Post or Weekly Standard.
Wall Street may control who owns the airwaves, but the First Amendment still lets the rest of us start our own newspapers (and nowadays, produce our own websites and weblogs to connect far-flung progressive media).
Our survival is a tribute to your hunger for news that you can't get from the corporate media. We will continue to send you the meat and potatoes, as well as dessert and snacks.
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