When the congressional Democrats joined the Republicans in attacking ACORN and cutting off its funding--without even the pretense of an investigation to establish a rational basis for their actions--they clearly demonstrated the almost utter meaninglessness of electing a Democratic majority over the past two wave elections. The elections were clearly important in terms of removing the GOP from direct power, so that it's worst abuses were either ended or toned down.
But clearly nothing remotely resembling actual Democratic governance has emerged to take it's place. And this vote was a stark, harrowing reminder of how politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum: if you don't have a positive agenda, you will end up voting for any sort of stupid, evil shit that comes down the line, if the stampede factor is high enough. Or, to put it more bluntly: If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything. So here's a quick run-down on what I see as six of the principle evils involved in this heinous act. I invite everyone to add to my list in comments.
(1) Screw The Poor, Part 1: The defunding directly takes money away fromthe leading organization involved in helping low and moderate income keep their homes. ACORN's been getting around $3 million a year to do this kind of work--counseling low- and moderate-income families and individuals.
Whatever you think about ACORN, poor people and minorities may end up being hurt the most by Congress's sudden vendetta against the group....
According to Brian Kettenring, ACORN's deputy director of national operations, the group's voter-registration work is funded entirely through private sources -- primarily membership dues and foundation grants. So that work would be unaffected.
The same goes for ACORN's core operations -- the rent on its offices, for instance.
In recent years, ACORN has been getting around $2-3 million in federal funds annually, said Kettenring, stressing that this was a rough estimate. That's about 10 percent of its total budget for the year.
That money goes mostly to housing work: primarily fair housing programs, which fight housing discrimination; and foreclosure-prevention programs, which help low-income people obtain loan modifications so they don't lose their homes, and which educate people about preventing foreclosure.
Important work these days, you might say. Losing federal funds, said Kettenring, "would impact our ability to help people save their home."
In other words, ACORN itself, said Kettenring, won't be hurt much by Congress's action. It's the people who ACORN works with -- who tend to be among the neediest -- who will lose out.
To be sure, it's fair to question how effective those programs ultimately are....
But it's not as if the federal money will now go to a different group that does this work more effectively. So the ultimate result, of course, is less help for struggling Americans, in very difficult economic times. As members of both parties compete to express their outrage, that's worth keeping in mind.
In contrast, the top-tier financial firms have received more than $10 trillion in various forms of financial assistance from the government--a sum that's over 3 million times the annual $3 million that ACORN has received. Any quetions?
(2) Screw The Poor, Part 2: Cutting back on voter registration for minority and low-income voters. The federal funds have nothing to do with this, but as Roth also notes:
Late Update: A different ACORN spokesman tells the Wall Street Journal that the group is considering cutting its voter-registration work. That's not because of any funding issue. Rather, it's a desire to avoid "political attacks."
Of course, the GOP has been fighting to suppress minority voters for more than half a century. So, way to go, congressional Democrats! Of course, since they don't really care very much about passing legislation, it's really not a very big deal to them. That's why they are the enemy every bit as much as the Republicans are.
(3) Empower Demonization: The post-New Deal GOP is entirely built on demonization, from McCarthyism to Nixon's "Southern Strategy" to Reagtan's "welfare queens" to Willie Horton and beyond. The stupidest thing that Democrats can do is cave in to rightwing demonization, and thereby empower it. So, naturally, that's what the Versailles Dems do.
(4) VALIDATE Demonization: But the Versailles Democrats didn't just empower conservative demonization by allowing it to succeed. They joined in on it--essentially saying that conservatives were right to demonize ACRORN.
(5) Invalidate the reason for voting for Democrats in the first place. This would not necessarily be a bad thing if we lived in an alternative universe were (a) national third party politics was a viable possibility, with a substantial history behind it, and (b) low-income voters were not also largely low-information voters, who desperately need sharp party divisions in order to participate in electoral politics relatively effectively. Because we do not live in that alternative universe, this action clearly demoralizes and outrages progressives, and intensifies divisions within progressive ranks between those who advocate national third party politics and those who--however reluctantly--do not.
(6) A general "fuck you" to all grassroots activists. Seriously, if I have to explain this one to you, I'm afraid that I can't possibly explain it to you.
It's easy to say that taxpayers should not bail out the robber barons who made obscene profits on Wall Street over the past decade. But it's hard to listen to lectures on fiscal responsibility from John McCain and other "conservatives" who got us into this economic mess with their blind faith in right-wing "free-market" ideology.
McCain and his friends pushed through deregulation of financial systems in the last two years of the Clinton administration, but it took George W. Bush's maladministration to really mess things up. Under Bush, the cops were taken off the beat at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department while the free market let bankers sell subprime mortgages to marginal, if not hapless, homebuyers. Then the bankers made off with uncounted billions of dollars in profits while they stuck other bankers, financiers, insurance companies and pension funds with uncounted trillions in shaky securities.
Now Wall Street is supposedly busted. The Bush administration was so alarmed by a potential credit freeze that it moved to nationalize not only Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two largest secondary mortgage buyers, but also AIG, one of the largest insurance companies in the world. Next, the Bush administration proposed to pay $700 billion from the US Treasury to the private sector to start cleaning up the mess that the financiers have made. Nobody knows how much the cleanup would really cost. And Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson wanted no oversight and approval by the end of the week.
But there are reasons to be skeptical of the alarms. Democratic Congressional leaders rightly pushed for limits on executive compensation and demanded that the government get equity in return for every dollar it spends buying "toxic" assets from ailing financial institutions. They also want to help struggling homebuyers restructure their mortgages to stay in their homes.
The banking and securities industry oppose all three points, and so, apparently, does Paulson. On the requirement that firms participating in the bailout grant the government warrants to purchase stock, the Washington Post reported Sept. 23 that, according to sources "familiar with the Treasury's thinking," such warrants would limit participation in the program. "Only failing banks would be willing to give the government stock in exchange for buying up their bad assets, these sources said," according to the Post.
We thought failing banks were the ones we were trying to help.
Bloomberg News reported Sept. 22 that securities firms Goldman Sachs (Paulson's former employer) and Morgan Stanley, who are relatively healthy, may be the biggest beneficiaries of the bailout. And it turns out that the Bush administration has been drawing up this bailout plan for months before it was dropped on Congress, even as Paulson was assuring Congress that all was well.
David Cay Johnston, the former New York Times reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize reporting on tax policy, posting at the Romenesko News blog at Poynter.org (Sept. 23) asked fellow journalists to check out if the credit markets really are about to seize up. "If they are, then lots of business owners should be eager to tell how their bank is calling their 90-day revolving loans, rejecting new loans and demanding more cash on deposit. I called businessmen I know yesterday and not one of them reported such problems. Indeed, Citibank offered yesterday to lend me tens of thousands of dollars on my signature at 2.99%, well below the nearly 5% inflation rate. That offer came after I said no last week to a 4.99% loan."
(Our inbox has letters offering 3.99% loans from Advanta Bank Corp. and Bank of America, so banks can't be too choosey.)
For weeks now there's been a sort of conventional wisdom amongst the netroos\blogosphere that the American people want the democrats to stand up and fight President Bush for issues that they believe in.
The narrative went like this. Congress's approval rating was much higher than President Bush's when they took power earlier this year. You can see congressional dems were in the 40s and Bush was still in the 30s. Well, since then Democrats have capitulated to Bush over and over again. Now we're in the situation where Bush's approval is still in the 30s, but congress and even congressional dems approval has plummeted. At least that's the convetional wisdom in the netroots. (Just one example of this conventional wisdom)
By it's nature the Out Of Iraq Bloggers Caucus is, as our tagline describes, a "coalition of the willing", not a top down organization speaking with one voice, but a gathering place for bloggers united in opposition to the Iraq occupation, each with their own motivations, each with their own ideas on how the occupation can be ended.
I want to talk today about my own views, and also about a short conversation I had yesterday about whether and about how the Iraq occupation could be ended - but first I want to provide some background against which to express my own thoughts. I also hope here to encourage other OOIBC members to post their thoughts. I speak only for myself here.
OOIBC is subset of a much larger "coalition of the willing", a microcosm of the tens of millions of people who, expressing, in the words of Keith Olbermann "the collective will of the nearly 70 percent of Americans who reject this War of Lies", in the 2006 midterm elections repudiated the Republican party and I think George W. Bush's foreign policies, and swept the Democratic Party into a Congressional majority on the strength of one single issue, one overwhelming mandate.
A mandate they have since, in my view, grievously insulted the people who gave them the Congressional power they now hold by ignoring.
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