A New Way Forward has sent out a call for signatures to pressure Bank of America to join in lobbying for an end to the fillibuster of unemployment insurance. Here's a copy of their email alert:
Friend,
Yesterday's Washington Post reports that there is no extension of unemployment benefits in sight for the long-term jobless. The Senate is filibustering. It's a dire situation.
We need your help to pressure Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America, to pressure John McCain to break the filibuster:
It sounds like a strange demand--why not ask McCain himself?--but we all know that BofA has incredible power in Washington, and McCain has ignored pleas from activists.
Here's the idea: If Bank of America came out with an urgent demand for extensions, McCain would act--they've given him enough money, after all. (Along with Goldman and Citi, over a million.)
Tell Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan that he needs to make a statement and proactively lobby for emergency unemployment benefits:
The big banks need to help fix the disastrous unemployment they've caused, just like BP needs to pay for the oil spill. Join Bob Borosage, Mike Konczal, Steve Lerner, Mike Lux and Nomi Prins and make the demand.
Bank of America is heartless not to fight for unemployment benefits extensions. They have so much power in government--we cant let them off the hook.
Pass it on.
Break up the banks!
- Tiffiniy, Donny, Zephyr
A New Way Forward
www.anewwayforward.org
Some copy from their petititon-signature page on the flip.
A New Way Forward is doing nationwide video and town hall discussions of the banking issue and overall economic picture the entire week. Tomorrow morning I'll be speaking ona panel on the same topic, with the esteemed Simon Johnson, Nancy Cleeland, and John Taylor. It's at 9 AM in the Rayburn House Office Building, near the Capitol South metro. You can RSVP here and stop by for a good discussion of the overall picture and what we can do about it.
A New Way Forward is hosting a live webstream of a discussion on the banking issue and overall economic picture tonight at 7 PM EST, in NYC, with Leo Hindery, Les Leopold, and Alice Kessler-Harris You can watch by clicking here.
Other events webcasted this week are:
San Francisco, 6/10 at 6:30 PM PST with Ernesto Dal Bo, Doug Rucskoff, Donald Goldmacher at Mechanic Library
New York City, 6/10 at 7 PM EST video screening with Danny Shechter, New Roosevelt Institute, Working Families Party at Le Poisson Rouge
Washington DC, 6/11 at 9 AM EST with Simon Johnson, John Taylor, Nancy Cleeland, and me
As many of you know, I have been involved in getting A New Way Forward off the ground and working to re-organize the banking system. They are kicking off a series of forums and town hall meetings next week for Americans to learn about the crisis and get involved in making the system more decentralized and progressive. The first is Monday, June 8th at 7 PM EST in NYC with my friend Leo Hindery, Les Leopold, and Alice Kessler-Harris. It's at The Tank in NYC, a great non-profit performing arts space where I have one of my most fun and interesting book events, and I'll post the video here. You should go if you are in the city.
If you're in DC, on Thursday June 11th at 9 AM, I'll be doing my part at a discussion right at the heart of it, on Capitol Hill at the Rayburn House Office Building (the Gold Room, Room 2168A). Joining me will be Simon Johnson, Nancy Cleeland, and John Taylor. RSVP here.
You can also organize your own video screening or town hall meeting with their help. On a problem this big, with the banking lobby probably the most powerful in the country, we're only going to make progress if we generate momentum everywhere.
A New Way Forward is sponsoring demonstrations nationwide today in more than 60 cities, calling for real structural change in the financial sector:
NATIONALIZE: Experts agree on the means -- Insolvent banks that are too big to fail must incur a temporary FDIC intervention - no more blank check taxpayer handouts. (see Krugman on nationalization)
REORGANIZE: Current CEOs and board members must be removed and bonuses wiped out. The financial elite must share in the cost of what they have caused. (see Simon Johnson on reorganizing)
DECENTRALIZE: Banks must be broken up and sold back to the private market with strong, new regulatory and antitrust rules in place-- new banks, managed by new people. Any bank that's "too big to fail" means that it's too big for a free market to function. (see Mike Lux on decentralization)
Open Left's own Mike Lux is an honorary national co-chair, along with Jane Hampshire Hamsher of Firedoglake.
Unlike the wingnut's "Teabagging" movement, A New Way Forward doesn't have a whole cable news network promoting its activities. What it does have is a coherent analysis and a viewpoint about what needs to be done. One of the local organizers, Greg Coleridge, director of the Economic Justice and Empowerment Program at the Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee, appeared on Democracy Now! yesterday (video and transcript here). His organization is sponsoring the protest being held in Cleveland on Saturday. Every community in America is suffering from this crisis. It is not a Wall Street crisis, it's an American crisis--and Cleveland is one of its epicenters.
So I know this may be a little twisted, but there are a few things more fun for me than being attacked by right wingers. I consider it one of the greatest honors of my life that I have been attacked by Rush Limbaugh (4 times by name), Sean Hannity, Cal Thomas, and Paul Weyrich, and even had an "expose" of me done by National Review. I get a little thrill every time it happens.
It happened again today, this time as a way of attacking the New Way Forward movement, and as usual, they got the most basic facts in their article wrong. A reporter named Judi McLeod, whose work (according to her byline) has appeared on the aforementioned Limbaugh along with Newsmax.com, Drudge, Fox News, and Glen Beck, "broke" the following news flash:
I agreed this week to become an honorary co-chair of A New Way Forward, a spontaneous grassroots movement that is reminding me of the early days of MoveOn.org. This impressive group of passionate organizers got involved because they were listening to progressive economists and business leaders talk about alternatives to the Geithner plan on re-building the banking system, and they decided to get involved. Some of these organizers are old hands like Joe Trippi (who truly is an old hand - I met Trippi when he was helping Walter Mondale in Iowa in 1983, and he already seemed like an old hand then) and Zephyr Teachout of Dean campaign fame, and some are relative youngsters like Tiffiniy Cheng.
I agreed to become a co-chair in part (of course) because I strongly support the principles for banking policy that they have laid out - the same ones supported by all of the economists and economic policy thinkers I respect the most, people like Paul Krugman, Dean Baker, Joe Stiglitz, William Greider, Simon Johnson, Jamie Galbraith, Leo Hindery, and Rob Johnson. But I also agreed to help because the spontaneous passion and obvious organizing skill, completely unsupported with money or institutional DC help, reminded me of the early days of MoveOn.org. Before there was ever the online organizational giant of MoveOn.org, it was a simple internet petition written and put online in the living room of Wes Boyd and Joan Blades and forwarded to a few of their friends. Wes and Joan didn't know anything about how Washington, DC works, or how a PAC operated, or how a poll was conducted. They didn't have any money or institutional support when they started, although a few of us in DC recognized their potential and lent a helping hand. All they had was their passion about an issue (in that case, the impeachment fight) and great instincts about online organizing.
While A New Way Forward does have some old hands at online organizing involved, their spontaneous passion about their issue and their creating a protest with national implications with no financial or institutional support reminds me exactly of MoveOn.org's launch 11 years ago. It also reminds me of the practically spontaneous mass street demonstrations done in 2005 on the immigration issue by prominently young Hispanic organizers mostly driven by text messaging.
One of the reasons I am so excited about A New Way Forward is that this approach to organizing a campaign around the banking issue is exactly what is needed. Traditional DC organizations were always going to be reluctant to get into this fight. For one thing, very few DC organizations work on banking and finance issues. For those that do, they are deeply engaged in working with the White House to get the budget and health care reform passed, and don't want to throw cold water on that White House relationship.
Here is the information about the April 11th rallies. I will be speaking at the one in DC, but please don't let that discourage you from coming. My message will be simple: I support Barack Obama, support his budget and his agendas for health care and climate change and immigration reform and the Employee Free Choice Act. But on banking policy, we need A New Way Forward.
As I have written several times over the past several months, I think the most important thing progressives can do over the next four years is to help President Obama succeed. Through most of our country's history, if a President didn't succeed, it was bad for himself and his party, but not necessarily for the country. But there have been a couple of times in American history - in the 1860s during the Civil War period and in the 1930s/40s during the Great Depression and World War II - when a President's success was fundamental to our country's success. I believe that our economic crisis is profound enough that now is just such a time.
Beyond that, President Obama's very identity makes it fundamental to progressive prospects for the future that he succeed. As a multi-cultural, African-American, son of an immigrant, and as the personification of hope for an idealistic young generation, if Obama fails, it hurts progressive hopes for decades if not generations to come, and likely engenders a dangerous right wing populism in response that will undoubtedly be tinged with racism and anti-immigrant fervor.
The good news is that President Obama has gone out on a boldly progressive course on his budget, health care, climate change, and education plans, and that his stimulus bill had more progressive investments for the public good than any single piece of legislation in history. Progressives can and should be proud of, and push hard for, all of these great legislative goals of the President.
The problem comes when those of us who are strong supporters of the President disagree with him on something important.
A new group named "A New Way Forward" is organizing nationwide local protests for a people's bailout next Saturday, April 11, at 2 PM EDT. Many are already set up, and others are still being organized. William Greider is a strong supporter of their efforts, and an excerpt of a recent op-ed he wrote (on the flip) sketches out a useful framework for thinking about what a truly people-oriented bailout and financial restructuring would look like. A New Way Forward says:
Big bankers ruined our economy and now they are gaming the political system so they can profit even more off the crisis they caused. They must be stopped.
On April 11th, 2009, the public will come out in cities across the country to express their frustration and disapproval with how our elected officials have handled the economic crisis. No one has been left unscathed; this protest is yours.
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