Over at DownWithTyranny! (h/t TGeraghty in QH), Danny Goldberg, a former Air America CEO, has an interesting piece on lessons from the demise of Air America (excerpted here):
In the early nineteen seventies the Washington Post and New York Times were instrumental in helping expose the Watergate scandal and publishing the Pentagon papers. Conservatives felt that liberals had an advantage in setting the agenda because of the influence of New York and D.C. newspapers on the national media. In 1976 Rupert Murdoch bought the New York Post and it has lost money every year since, the total loss estimated to be more than half a billion dollars. In 1983, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon created the Washington Times, which has also lost money every year. Widely published reports place Moon's losses at over $1 billion on the Times and other political media including a purchase the venerable wire service UPI. These money losing properties have put dozens of conservatively slanted stories onto the national radar screen, altered the framing of every important political issues, and nurtured virtually every right wing pundit who now thrive as TV talking heads.
More recently, Phillip Anschutz bought the money losing Weekly Standard from Murdoch and announced plans to invest in more conservative media and his fellow billionaire and former Republican Treasury Secretary Pete Petersen started a digital news service called The Fiscal Times.
The fatal flaw in Air America's genetic code was the pretense that liberal talk radio was a great business opportunity, that progressives could have their cake and eat it too, do well by doing good, make big salaries and get a great return on investment while also pursuing an ideological agenda. Sure, every once in awhile political media like Michael Moore's movies or Rush Limbaugh's radio show will make money, but for those interested in influencing public opinion, media in all venues is vital whether they make money or not.
[...]
Some progressives blame bad management for the failure of both Air America and Democracy Radio and since I spent one unhappy year midway through Air America's life as its CEO I suppose I am one of a dozen or so who are in that category. But if progressives really wanted to address talk radio they could have started competing companies with different management. Instead, most of the monied progressive community did the opposite of their conservative counterparts and bought into the notion that media should stand or fall based on media market forces.
The whole story with Air America is of course a little more nuanced and complicated, but it does raise the interesting question of whether or not a business should be founded with the understanding that it will lose money for years, and whether or not progressives engage in that as much as conservatives do. Cenk Uygur, who hosts The Young Turks, discussed here last July how progressives have found models online that are both sound progressive media and make money, so it's not necessarily an either/or. Cenk spoke to how progressives are lapping conservatives, but the other point his piece made to me is that "it doesn't have to be this way" in terms of funding media that will always lose money. That may not apply to all the mediums out there, but it's worth thinking about. I don't know a lot about funding streams, but I also wonder if it's pieces like Cenk's that lead to progressive funders to insist on sound, profitable business models rather than being willing to fund media for media's sake, as some conservatives do- and if they do, whether that's a healthy thing or not for our movement.
Bystander breaks the news in Quick Hits- Air America announced this morning that I won their blogger contest, so I am going on the cruise. Thanks to all of you who helped, it honors me that so many folks voted for me. While I intend to have fun, I will spend most of the trip strategizing my ass off with Rachel, Howard, and the gang, so hopefully I will do you proud.
Now for those of you who voted for Digby, maybe if we can raise her some big money over the next few days, I can talk her into going along.
Okay, I know the health care bill is a big disappointment. And climate change is stalled. The big banks aren't being broken up. Who knows when immigration reform is happening? And don't even get me started about the 2nd big escalation into Afghanistan.
Politics sometimes really sucks. But I want to once again argue that you should keep hope alive, sometimes miracles do happen. By some weird lightning strike of fate, with voting closing at 5:00 pm EST tomorrow, I am currently ahead in the voting for the Air America blogger contest.
I have written a post on the reasons you should consider voting for me, so I won't go into a long rah-rah pitch, but I humbly ask that if you haven't voted yet, that you consider voting for me.
It would help Openleft, it would help give publicity to my book The Progressive Revolution, and I would get to spend a week strategizing about progressive politics with Rachel Maddow, Howard Dean, Bobby Kennedy, Jr, and lots of other smart folks- many of whom I could get to start reading and maybe even commenting here. How cool would that be?
If I've convinced you, please vote here. And if you want to help with the GOTV operations, while we are not going door to door, you could post this links to your Facebook Status:
I love the four other candidates in the Air America contest. They are all great bloggers and a couple of them I am delighted to call friends. This is an election, though, and I like competing in elections, so I thought I would give you reasons you should consider voting for me in spite of the high quality of my competitors. I am not going to call it my top ten reasons, because I might think of others later that are even better, but for today, here are ten:
1. Progressives fight for underdogs and I am a serious underdog in this race. The whole nature and mission of the progressive movement is to fight for the underdog, and I am a really serious underdog. The other bloggers have more traffic on their sites. Karl has the whole massive organization backing him up, for God's sake. Digby is the huge favorite, because she is well, Digby. OpenLeft is just this modest little blog devoted to helping the movement get stronger, so I don't have much of a natural base by comparison. And speaking of reasons for being an underdog...
2. I am an evil insider. I know, I know, this will actually be seen by many of you as a reason to vote against me. But here's my argument: if I win this contest, I think it will give me added leverage with the insiders I am trying to push in a progressive direction. Right now, the people in DC who talk to me do so because they know me - I have worked with them on campaigns (issue and electoral), I have served on boards with them, I worked with them while in the White House. But if I am also seen as an influential blogger, it gives me that much extra leverage when I am leaning on them to move more to the left.
3. OpenLeft is an important blog and deserves attention. OpenLeft is one of the most important blogs in the progressive blogosphere, a place where important new projects get launched, other bloggers and movement leaders get influenced, DC insiders take notice, and progressives really engage each other in the debate. My winning this contest would really boost OpenLeft's exposure to new readers.
4. I played a role in launching Air America and getting other progressive radio/TV hosts off the ground. A few short years ago, progressives had almost no presence in radio or cable talk. I am proud to have played a role in changing that for the better:
The 501(c)(4) organization I founded and chaired, American Family Voices, hosted a conference of progressive donors and strategists in the spring of 2002 where the idea of Air America got hatched.
I served on the board of Democracy Radio, a non-profit group that helped launch the Ed Schultz Show and other progressive radio shows.
Leo Hindery and I sent a memo to the top management at MSNBC in 2004 laying out the reasons and metrics of why they should go to more progressive talk, suggesting that with Fox dominating conservative Cable news viewers, and CNN taking most of the mushy middle, there would be a bigger audience potential if they had some strong progressive voices on the air. While our strategic ideas did not take hold immediately at the station, over time they became convinced we were right and began moving in that direction.
5. I have helped some other cool organizations get started:
MoveOn.org. Wes Boyd described me as the first insider who understood what MoveOn was trying to do, and who helped them in their early days.
Center For American Progress. I played a big role in the early days of launching CAP.
Progressive Majority. I was one of the three founding board members.
Ballot Initiative Strategic Center. Was a co-founder, housed them in my office, raised their initial seed money, and was the first chair.
USAction. Housed them in my office, and helped them get off the ground.
Americans United For Change. Was a founding board member.
Center for Progressive Leadership. Was a founding board member.
I am currently working with Darcy Burner to launch the Campaign For A Progressive Congress and the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC, the new 501(c)(4) and PAC organizations that are working with the CPC.
6. I have been attacked by name by Rush Limbaugh at least 3 times. Once when I was working in the Clinton White House, once when AFV held a conference of progressive donors, and once when AFV did phone calls to Republicans about the Foley/page scandal. Pretty cool, huh?
7. I helped save school lunches. In early 1995, Newt Gingrich was on a rampage, getting much of the Contract With America passed through Congress without breaking much of a sweat. Democrats were demoralized and ineffectual in their initial response. The first issue we were able to put them on the defensive with and then beat them on was the school lunch issue. I was the White House point person for getting a coalition organized in opposition to the Republicans on that issue.
8. I got on the air one of the most effective ads against Bush in his first term. After 9-11, Democrats were generally scared for many months afterwards of going directly after Bush. But when he decided to go to Wall Street and give a speech on corporate elites, I couldn't resist. I dug up some of the old records from Harken Energy and Haliburton, and did an AFV produced and paid for ad directly attacking Bush and Cheney for their hypocrisy on that whole corporate elite thing. The White House made the mistake of calling a press conference within 3 hours of our ad going up, and attacked it repeatedly, causing the cable and broadcast network news programs to run it repeatedly on and off for weeks afterward. The ad and the ensuing media flap drove Bush's approval ratings down 15 points over the next 6 weeks, marking the low water mark for him before the 2002 elections, and giving momentum to get the Sarbanes-Oxley financial regulations bill passed.
9. Lord of the Right Wing. On December 17th, 2003, ironically on the 6th anniversary of the day voting ends in the Air America contest (is that fate or what?), a new PAC I founded launched one of the biggest political web videos of all time. (I bet you didn't know that about me, did you?) Called Lord of the Right Wing, and released the same day as the 3rd Lord of the Rings movie, it was a cartoon of George Bush as a Gollum-like character grasping for power. It ended up getting over 8,000,000 views over the next few weeks.
10. I know when to stop. This post has gone on long enough. I hope I convinced you. Vote here.
Amazing news from Luxland: I actually made it into the top five in the Air America blogger contest. Thanks very much to those of you who were kind enough to support me, I really do appreciate it. Given how awesome my fellow finalists were, I am honestly blown away that I'm on the list, congrats to all of you. (And they are all such good people, I guess I'm going to have to cancel my plans to get friends of mine to do multi-million dollar independent expenditure attack ad campaigns against them.) You can check out the Air America announcement here. I'm so proud.
It's too soon to do any campaigning, but I would sure appreciate your vote. Voting has started this evening, and you can click here to cast a vote for me in the 2nd round. I won't go wind-surfing, though, or let Digby try to swiftboat me, so I will be back to make my pitch to vote for me soon enough.
I am surprised, delighted, but mostly humbled to report the news that Air America is reporting that I am currently 3rd on their list of nominated bloggers going into their contest's Dec 3rd deadline for deciding which five bloggers make it into their final round for being selected. I am especially surprised given my evil DC insider status, and that I haven't been blogging as long or as much as many other deserving folks, but I am extremely grateful to those of you who nominated me.
I am letting you know for three reasons. The first, quite honestly, is that I am tickled pink by the news. Given all the wonderful bloggers out there, to even be on the list blows me away.
Secondly, I wanted to let those of you who think that an evil insider like this myself should never win something like this a fair chance to vote me down. When I think of some of the great folks who made their top 20 and the amazing people like Chris Bowers from this site that didn't make the top 20 list but should have, I would understand if you decide to vote for someone else.
But third, since it's an election and I'm in the running, I hope I can get your vote. Perhaps you like the idea of a surprise underdog choice like me, relatively new to the blogging game, winning this thing. I know I would be an unconventional choice because I am not the kind of person one usually thinks of when one thinks of bloggers, but I actually think that it is a great thing for the blogosphere that someone like me made the list, because what so many conventional wisdom followers in DC is that there is only one kind of blogger: the proverbial pajama clad, long-haired, Cheetos-eating geek sitting at home late at night in front of their computer.
What the CW stereotypers don't realize is that bloggers come in all shapes and sizes and colors. They include economists, lawyers, businesspeople, scientists, local activists, and yes even political insiders. They include some of the smartest and savviest folks I have ever met. Being a blogger is certainly not my main identity, but I am proud to have it be a big part of who I am now, and I hope you will consider me in part because I break the stereotype.
And, hey, I've never been on a cruise ship before, so that would be very cool. And I promise to be very strategic with all the people I meet on the cruise. I go to a number of retreats and conferences each year, and have helped produce a number of key progressive infrastructure pieces as a result. So it's not just a cruise- it's an opportunity to build progressive power.
Thanks if you gave me an early vote, and if you haven't, please go vote now (just enter my name and OpenLeft.com) by clicking here.
For weeks, Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) has opposed climate change legislation. In the Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee, he openly voiced his doubts and was the only Democrat to refrain from voting for the bill's passage. Now that the bill is in the Finance Committee, which Baucus chairs, many worry that the bill is doomed. However, it looks like Baucus might have outwitted us all.
This week the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held three hearings on the Kerry-Boxer clean energy bill and, as David Roberts reports for Grist, Republican Senators had an "adolescent tantrum" about the cost of emission reductions. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Energy Information Administration (EIA) and other organizations have extensively debunked this line of debate.
Now that trillions of taxpayer dollars have been pumped through the financial system, Wall Street giants JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs are reporting record profits-and giving out record bonuses. Goldman is planning to pay out $11.4 billion in compensation "earned" with our money. Even worse, attempts to regulate reckless financiers or empower ordinary workers are still being stymied by influential corporate lobbyists.
How did Goldman score the biggest quarterly profit in its history? Matt Taibbi explains in an interview with GritTV's Laura Flanders. The $10 billion in direct capital that Goldman received from taxpayers under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is actually one of the minor offenses. The company also converted corporate charters to become eligible for guarantees, and issued a whopping $28 billion in debt guaranteed by the government.
Banks were foundering last Fall, and very few investors were willing to supply them with emergency capital. So the FDIC guaranteed their debt, which allowed banks to raise funds at extremely low interest rates. The FDIC guarantee means that taxpayers will get stuck with the bill if the company defaults. If you can raise money at absurdly low rates, its very easy to turn over huge profits, as both Goldman and JPMorgan did.
There are other outrages: We still don't know how much money the Federal Reserve loaned Goldman through its emergency lending facilities. The government's bailout of AIG served as a huge windfall for the company, funneling at least $12.9 billion in taxpayer largesse directly to Goldman Sachs.
"AIG owed Goldman about $20 billion, and if AIG had gone through a normal bankruptcy, Goldman probably would have gone out of business. Instead, they got paid 100 cents on the dollar for every dollar that AIG owed them," says Taibbi, author of a blistering take-down of the investment banking giant in the most recent issue of Rolling Stone.
In Salon, former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich says that this year's big bank failures have resulted in a heavier concentration of financial influence in the few surviving firms, namely Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan. We have taken the "too big to fail" problem and made it bigger. JPMorgan acquired rival Bear Stearns for a pittance last March with billions of dollars in government guarantees. The company also picked up national banking giant Washington Mutual last fall. That means more risk in our economy and a greater concentration of lobbying power in our political system.
"We've ended up with two giants that now have most of the casino to themselves, are playing with poker chips backed by taxpayers, and have a big say in what the rules of the game are to be," Reich writes.
Adam Schlesinger of Air America took to Wall Street to compile a hodgepodge of one-on-one interviews with bailout critics and condescending financiers. Schlesinger underscores the absurdity of Goldman's pending bonuses by posting his own checking account balance ($13.75). The point of this massive bailout was to make the economy function for ordinary people. Instead, we've made sure that it benefits extremely wealthy bankers.
The government so completely resists doing anything about this staggering inequality, as Eyal Press writes for The Nation. There are two ways to approach the inequality problem. We can rein in the recklessness at the top by imposing serious regulations, and empower those at the bottom by giving them greater negotiating leverage with their employers (i.e., promoting unionization). While the bonus money flows on Wall Street, the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), a key bill to empowering unions, was just stripped of a crucial provision that would have made it easier for workers to organize, as David Moberg reports for In These Times.
As EFCA is gutted, bills proposing regulations for the financial sector are moving at a snail's pace-even after two years of economic turmoil. Last week, Congressional leaders from both parties nominated members for a new panel, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, to investigate the causes of the financial crisis. The investigation seems doomed to failure by its very design. Zachary Roth details the committee's various shortcomings for Talking Points Memo. Of the panelists, six were nominated by the Democratic leadership, while four were nominated by the Republican leadership. If all four Republican nominees vote to block a subpoena, the committee cannot issue it, and without broad subpoena power, the entire exercise is futile.
Roth also emphasizes the excessively political nature of the appointees, particularly on the Republican side, which named former Rep. Bill Thomas, R-Calif., as Vice Chair. The Democratic picks are generally uninspiring, except for Brooksley Born, who fought to regulate derivatives in the 1990s as head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. But the Democrats have nobody anywhere near as frightening as Rep. Thomas, a vicious partisan who specialized in ushering money to special interests during his tenure as Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.
Mary Kane of The Washington Independent explains the troubling record of another Republican commission appointee, Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank. The various conspiracy theories Wallison peddled include a robustly debunked belief that a decades-old anti-discrimination law is responsible for the mortgage meltdown. The law in question, known as the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), dates back to 1977, and Wallison's conspiracy theory has been rejected by nearly everyone in the financial commentariat, including regulators appointed by George W. Bush.
The Community Reinvestment Act requires banks to make loans to communities where they collect deposits. If you accept deposits at a branch in a poor neighborhood, you have to offer responsible loans in the same community. The idea is to expand access to affordable credit in the inner cities, while the subprime crisis is heavily concentrated in the suburbs. CRA loans have to be affordable, which means high-interest subprime loans do not count. CRA does not require banks to lower their lending standards, because any recipients have to be credit-worthy. Only 6% of high-interest mortgages were made by companies subject to CRA regulations, and lest we forget, this law was passed in 1977, while financial crisis erupted in 2007.
Instead of appointing toothless commissions, we should be making sure the financial oligarchs do things that are good for the rest of us. Congress should be writing regulations to curb risk in the financial system as fast as bankers are paying themselves bonuses. They're our representatives, after all, and it's our money.
In May, Mark Walsh, founding CEO of Air America and a Democratic media strategist, accepted Grow the Hope's invitation to speak to the community about messaging and media. Many of the people in attendance had rallied behind Obama on his presidential campaign. Their work is not over, however. As David Hart, the founder of Grow the Hope (GTH), would say:
"Electing a smart and moral man as our President was an important step, but it's not enough... The challenges we face are far too massive for any one person to solve alone. The task is not his alone, it is ours together."
Another stunning reminder of the U.S. economy's dire condition arrived last Thursday. The nation shed a total of 467,000 jobs in June according to the Department of Labor. That's 35% more than it lost in May. Despite talk about "green shoots" from Wall Street, a meaningful recovery with full employment and rising incomes is a very long way off. It's time to start pushing another round of economic stimulus to help those searching for jobs get back on their feet, according to several independent media outlets.
The situation is grim, but not hopeless, as Ruth Coniff notes for The Progressive. The stimulus package Obama signed in mid-February was a good start, but it was designed to tackle a much less drastic economic downturn. Looking at the current slate of unemployment figures, Coniff reaches a clear conclusion: "The situation calls for a big new round of government stimulus spending," she writes. And she's right.
Steve Benen at The Washington Monthly offers a great, if depressing, translation of the unemployment data. Economists expected job losses to come in at 365,000, but were off by over 27%. June's payroll declines pushed the unemployment rate to 9.5%, the highest level in 26 years. That would be bad enough on its own. But if you include people who've been out of a job for more than a year and the number of people who are working part-time jobs but want to be working full-time, the total number of unemployed climbs makes a whopping 16.5%. That's the worst figure of its kind on record. If these figures don't serve as a reality check for policymakers, nothing will.
In a blog post for The American Prospect, Tim Fernholz explains that the ever-rising unemployment rate is worse than it seems, because so many policies are based on rosier economic expectations. Remember the stress tests the government conducted to figure out how much more money banks would need to operate? The unemployment rate has now exceeded the worst-case scenario contemplated by those tests, meaning that banks are going to be strapped for cash for a long time. And cash-strapped banks don't make loans. They sit on their money and wait for things to get better.
Banks have behaved very badly over the past decade, but they're an important part of the recovery mechanism. Lending can get productive businesses off the ground and help existing enterprises meet payrolls and buy supplies. Indeed, the size of President Barack Obama's economic stimulus package relied very heavily on a healthy financial sector actively lending money out into the economy. We're watching a destructive feedback loop play out: the financial implosion has created massive job losses, and those job losses have made banks reluctant to lend, which forces businesses to lay off more people.
Some major long-term policy trends are playing out in the unemployment numbers, as Leo Hindery Jr. and Leo W. Gerard note for The Nation. The U.S. economy's manufacturing base was hardest-hit, and has shed 13% of its workforce since the recession began. But we don't make very much stuff in the U.S. anymore. The manufacturing sector has declined steadily over several administrations, and now represents just 11.5% of our total economy. Unfortunately, there is a limit to the number of service-sector jobs you can create or save when manufacturing is in a death-spiral.
And while Germany, Japan, South Korea and China all work to preserve their manufacturing operations,Hindrey and Gerard argue that the Obama administration hasn't learned its lesson. The U.S. is fighting bank bailouts, which is deepening a global imbalance that leaves our economy vulnerable. Sure, we bailed out GM and Chrysler, but the bailout money has been devoted to shutting down dozens of factories and outsourcing jobs to other countries, as Mike Fritz and Harry Hanbury demonstrate in a video spot for American News Project. We have to make a dedicated public commitment to making useful stuff. Green energy and infrastructure are the right place to start.
But what do all these dire statistics and structural imbalances actually mean for ordinary people? AlterNet's Rachel Neumann profiles Luz Guerra, a 52-year-old unemployed mother of a college student. Guerra left her last job to care for a sick family member and started looking for work in 2008. She has over 30 years of experience as an organizer and adult educator, covering topics from multicultural awareness to popular economics. These are skills that have a lot of social value that could help a lot of people in the current economy, if anyone were hiring. After months of searching in every sector from non-profits to retail, the 52-year old is running out of financial rope. She's been surviving by racking up tremendous credit card debt and selling off her possessions, one by one. Now she faces foreclosure and the prospect of losing her health insurance coverage. This is what unemployment means. It's not a lazy life for ne'er do wells. It's a constant process of searching and interviewing, where even hard-working, accomplished people struggle to make ends meet as a result of enormous structural forces beyond their control.
We can't just sit back and hope the programs the Obama administration has enacted will work. Air America carries a piece by prominent economist Dean Baker, who explains that the economic stimulus package has already doled out most of its support. Even though much of the government spending hasn't taken place yet, the majority of the stimulus was composed to lower taxes and expanded benefits. This is as good as the first round is going to get.
If we're serious about fixing the economy, we need to roll out a second stimulus package to promote plenty of manufacturing jobs and bring work to our workers.
The media conglamorate's in deep doodoo. Their rapid expansion to dominate radio was financed with debt, and they're unable to service it with declining ad revenues. January saw massive layoffs, and they've even cut the salaries and bonuses of their top execs.
While they may be able to avoid bankruptcy, the next step will be the sale of their less viable stations, at firesale prices.
There's talk of lefty millionaires buying up some properties, but this is not the winning model.
Local, community based ownership is more stable. In contrast to centrally produced syndicated shows, local on-air personalities can offer small business advertisers like restaurants something an operation like Air America can't, in person events at the place of business. This doesn't mean the new generation of progressive radio won't offer SOME national shows.
We learned the tools of community organizing in the campaign, let's put them to work to Buy Back the Media.
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