Oil barons Charles and David Koch held their annual billionaires' summit in Palm Springs on Sunday, Nancy Goldstein reports in The Nation. Every year, the Kochs gather with fellow plutocrats, prominent pundits, and Republican legislators to plan their assault on government regulation and the welfare state. This is the first year that the low-profile gathering has attracted protesters.
Last week, the Labor Department reported that youth unemployment stands at 18.2%, nearly twice the national average of 9.8%. The percentage of young people without a job is a staggering 53.4 percent, the highest figure since World War II. Looking deeper, the statistics for youth of color are terrible and telling.
According to the most recent data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 40.7% of black youth between 16-19 are unemployed, almost double the amount of whites teenagers (23%). For Latinos the same age, the rate is nearly 30%. Get a little older and the gap grows wider. Unemployment for black Americans aged 20-24 is 27.1%, over twice that faced by white youth (13.1%) in the same age range.
The glaring differences indicate that unemployment is not only decidedly raced, but also that the current economic condition is wholly unforgiving for young people of color. Only a massive, well-funded set of green jobs programs explicitly designed to close those racial gaps can create a truly vital, full-employment economy.
There was a post at RedState I read over the weekend, "Defending Against an Alinsky Campaign", that illuminated Glenn Beck's and other conservative tactics recently for me. In graduate school, I took a grassroots politics class in which I read Alinsky's Reveille for Radicals, which actually predated his more well-known and popular Rules for Radicals. In it, he discusses the necessity of taking an opponent, "fixating" on an element or characteristic that could be blown up, "personalizing" it/her/him for the general public to match a negative perception with the name, and "humiliating" it/her/him as much as possible until you win. You see this to a limited extent with Van Jones- which wasn't even reported in many major outlets before he resigned, and certainly much of the public could not name who he was. But you see it to a smaller extent with Yosi Sergant with the NEA. And you see it big-time with ACORN. The two videographers fixated on what could be blown up (getting a few employees to screw up), and then with the noise machine's help, personalized ACORN and made the employees emblematic of the organization as a whole.
The attacks are seemingly unrelated, but I expect to see more that are related to the original personalizations- e.g., a petition asking those affiliated with ACORN to step down. And in some cases, they don't even need to do it. As Paul wrote last night, Democratic members of Congress- many of whom benefited greatly from ACORN's voter registration efforts over the years and advertised their close ties with ACORN- have already distanced themselves. Obama, who himself represented ACORN in a lawsuit and was affiliated in other ways with the group throughout the late 1990s, called for an investigation. I don't see what Obama did as cowardly as Congressional Dems' actions, since even ACORN's chief organizer called for the same, but it adds to the pile-on and keeps the story in the news. It works in what one colleague calls concentric circles- personalize and attack those closest to the organization, then attack those close to those you just attacked, and so forth.
The whole episode got me thinking of response tactics and a failure in organizing to stop this in its tracks. One of my favorite posts by Matt Stoller was one he wrote around failure to stop Alito's nomination and tactics that could have been pursued, but were not. There was organizing here that could have been pursued, but was not. One response that perhaps should have been pursued is similar to what Wes Boyd and Joan Blades of MoveOn.org did in the wake of the Lewinsky scandal- make the ask to "censure and move on". Slap someone/an organization on the wrist, but recognize there are a few bad apples in every organization/corporation, and that there are bigger problems. The advantage to this is that our esteemed Democratic leaders in Congress, in this kind of situation, are looking for an easy out, something to kill this story and give them something to say when a CNN reporter sticks a microphone in their face about it. A resolution is much preferable to de-funding just as a resolution is preferable to impeachment.
Another was to organize to ask for support prior to such a vote. We, including myself, should have organized earlier for a statement of support from those who benefit most/have the closest ties to ACORN, found a Progressive Block that could have blocked a defunding vote (similar to Chris' theory around holding a Block to stand firm on the public option and other key issues), and worked to lock them in. ACORN's tool to ask your member of Congress to stand firm is another step towards this.
The one problem with the latter tactic, at least, is that we operate in a media environment where pressure to de-fund, disaffiliate, distance oneself from, etc. builds like a head of steam in 24 hours, and makes it difficult to organize that kind of larger effort. The Alito nomination and the whip count on health care took months. We didn't have that kind of time. Regardless, once the Senate vote came down, something needed to happen quickly, and it didn't. Progressive movement actors, myself included, have to learn from this episode and figure out where we all went wrong in working to support those attacked. Other organizations/people will soon find themselves in a similar situation. The writer at RedState suggested targeting purple-district Congressional Dems themselves with the same Alinsky tactics and force the already-cautious among them to distance themselves from Obama. I can see this having policy implications, such as around LGBT issues. This can all snowball quickly. It is important to learn from these episodes and figure out a quicker rapid-response.
When Gertrude Stein quipped, "There's no there there," she was talking about Oakland. I always thought it was a great line, but a bad rap. I like Oakland. But maybe there was a hidden meaning in her words. You see, the Ella Baker Center is in Oakland. Van Jones used to be its executive direct. And when it comes to Glen Beck's accusations that ended up causing him to resign, Gertrude Stein was right on the money.
Calling Republicans a-holes? If that were a firing offense in DC, the place would be a ghost town. Signing a 9/11 Truther petition? Well, at first I just shrugged. Sure they're nutballs, who keep repeating refuted arguments--sort of like Republicans. But people who sign lots of petitions online are bound to sign one or two along the way that maybe they shouldn't have. That was my first thought. There's a reason that names on a petition don't carry very much weight compared to letters--even emails--phone calls or faxes. Signing a petition for something does not make it your cause célèbre.
But then I had to go and use the Google. And I found the petition. And it's totally innocuous in the conspiracism department. In fact, it's an exercise in respectability. "9/11 Truthers Clean & Sober Tour". That kind of thing. I wouldn't have signed it, because I think this phraseology is needlessly provocative and it just bugs me:
we have assembled 100 notable Americans and 40 family members of those who died to sign this 9/11 Statement, which calls for immediate public attention to unanswered questions that suggest that people within the current administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.
But it's not necessarily false. What unanswered questions suggest to one person need not be suggested to another. I can easily understand someone shrugging off that bit of innuendo as relatively harmless, given the sorts of questions they wanted answered--questions that the official investigation had clearly left hanging:
We want truthful answers to questions such as:
Why were standard operating procedures for dealing with hijacked airliners not followed that day?
Why were the extensive missile batteries and air defenses reportedly deployed around the Pentagon not activated during the attack?
Why did the Secret Service allow Bush to complete his elementary school visit, apparently unconcerned about his safety or that of the schoolchildren?
Why hasn't a single person been fired, penalized, or reprimanded for the gross incompetence we witnessed that day?
Watching the Glenn Beck show this past month, one might have assumed that Van Jones had assaulted Beck, insulted his wife, and stolen his kids' lunch money. Beck devoted time on a whopping 16 shows to crafting a distorted, despicable portrait of Van that few who know him would recognize. As political smears go, it was as serious as it gets.
But make no mistake: this attack was not about Van Jones. Beck, in league with big business groups, is seeking to derail the President's progressive agenda, and taking out Van became the vehicle for undermining clean energy and green jobs.
There was another, more personal motivation too. Beck was trying to change the subject from the previous week, when headlines were dominated by dozens of major advertisers dropping his show. Beck had no choice but to up the ante, and at the same time indirectly take on the group responsible for his shrinking ad roster. His distortions not surprisingly found purchase on other Fox News shows, spread to the mainstream media, and rather than let this circus distract from the relaunch of health care and the rest of the President's agenda, Van chose to fall on his sword.
In the fallout, one thing is certain: wherever Van decides to go from here he will be a force. But now that he has left the White House, it's time to change the subject back to Beck.
While there are still plenty of DC progressive groups working with the White house on policy, in many ways relationships between the broader progressive community and the White House are frayed right now. Paul Krugman and Arianna Huffington have been writing critical columns about President Obama now for months. Bill Maher and Rachel Maddow have been giving more and more negative commentary about him on their TV programs. Much of the blogosphere has been in full scale attack mode. Keith Olbermann, among others, is raising the specter that there may be a primary against him. And all of that was before the White House failed to defend progressive hero Van Jones when Glenn Beck started to attack him, and accepted Van's resignation this weekend.
Going into tonight's big speech, the question is this: Is the relationship between Obama and the progressive community broken or just bent?
Maybe it's because I'm an optimist. Or maybe it's because I read a lot of history and know how mad abolitionists got at times with Lincoln, how upset labor leaders got sometimes with FDR, or how frustrated King and John Lewis frequently were with the Kennedys. But I am still hopeful this relationship can be repaired so that progressives and Obama can work together to get the big changes Obama promised done, because history also shows that without a constructive working relationship between progressive movements and a President, big changes don't get done. The good news is that we are only nine months into Obama's term, and Presidents can change direction and make up a lot of ground when they decide they need to. I know that after NAFTA, the weak ending to the health care fight, and the 1994 election, the relationship between Clinton and the Democratic base was pretty rocky. But the combination of a lot of behind the scenes work and Clinton's critical decision to stand up to Gingrich on the 1995 budget fight repaired the relationship, helping Clinton win big in the 1996 re-election campaign.
I know that if this White House understands the importance of the relationship, they can reunite the Democratic party. That's a big if: they don't always act like they get it. But Barack Obama is a pretty smart politician, and I still have hope.
A speech alone, though, will not change the dynamics - just like the speech alone won't get serious health care reform done. The number one thing that will cause many things to be forgiven is to show progressives that Obama will fight for and deliver legislation for true health reform, legislation that will reign in the power of the insurance industry and- as Obama likes to say- keeps them honest.
As the anger over Van Jones over the weekend showed, this breach is not just about health care. Here are some other thoughts I would suggest to President Obama:
1. I know the Afghanistan situation is incredibly complex, and I don't know what Obama is going to decide. But whatever is done, even if you do something that will make a lot of us unhappy and put more troops in, give us a clear signal that there is an exit plan and some kind of timeline here. Progressives in Congress have been pushing for legislative language on developing an exit plan, and doing that simple thing would go a long way to giving us hope that you get our concerns, that we are not going to be stuck in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future.
2. Okay, Van Jones is gone. We're disappointed, but now is the time to redouble your efforts on building a green economy. As soon as health care is over, a major push for millions of new green jobs would make us believe that Van's dream is not dead.
3. When the banking reform legislation comes to the forefront, be willing to fight hard for it, and be willing to take Wall Street head on to get it done. If we see you really fighting for us against the big special interests who have wrecked this economy, it would go a long way.
4. Reach out in a real way to the broad progressive community, Mr. President. Now that Van's gone, appoint some other strong progressive to the administration, in addition to the good people you have already like Melody Barnes, Patrick Gaspard, Jared Bernstein Hilda Solis, and Phil Schiliro. And when progressives challenge you, don't let your staff delete them from invite lists to White House events, or disparage them to reporters: invite people from the progressive community who have constructive criticism in for honest discussions.
One final note here: as I've written before, this is not just on Obama. Progressives should try to work in good faith with the White House. One thing I know from my life in politics: if you assume the worst about people, including politicians, you usually will get it. I know that whenever I write anything nice about the President, I get commenters disparaging me, saying Obama is hopeless and awful. But assuming Obama is awful on everything is dumb politics, because if we want to get anything done to further our issues on the federal level in the next three to seven years, it will only be through this White House. Even if you don't like Obama, we are stuck with him, and the White House is stuck with us, so if you want progress, we have to figure out how to work together.
There may come a time when the relationship between progressives and Obama is irretrievably split. It happened with LBJ over Vietnam and Carter over economics and health care. But we're a ways from that point, and both sides ought to try and repair what is bent, because as you may recall - the split with LBJ gave us Nixon, and the split with Carter gave us Reagan. That is one part of history I definitely don't want to repeat.
Tonight's speech will be a very big moment, not just for passing health care reform, but for moving forward or backward on repairing a relationship a little too bent and bruised for the sake of anyone wanting to change the country for the better. Hopefully, it will be a speech progressives can rally behind. After the speech, though, the real work begins, and it would be a lot better if we were all working together.
I just received a forwarded email memo from a friend. It's a memo that was sent to all teachers at Cranston High School East (RI):
"On September 8, 2009, President Obama will be sending out a live address to students across the nation. Per the Superintendent, no one should show this address live or taped to any students. The address will be taped by the school for showing at a possible later date. Thank you for your cooperation in this matter."
Can you imagine if a public high school would have attempted to prohibit a teacher from showing a speech by President George W. Bush, only a year ago? Imagine the heyday Fox News would have had!
The point of this post: this matters. The escalating right-wing hysteria we have been witnessing this summer-and the ways it is successfully framing the dominant media narrative-matters a great deal.
The intended audience of this post: progressives and radicals who think that their disillusionment/frustration/anger with the Obama Administration and/or the Democratic Party somehow excuses them from actively fighting the right-wing racist cultural backlash we are experiencing.
I am not asking you to defend the Obama Administration or its policies. I am asking you to defend part of what it symbolizes: progress on social-and particularly racial-equality. Yes, I know, the Administration symbolizes a great deal more than that. Maybe it symbolizes empire to you. Maybe it symbolizes corporate or banking interests. Great. You're preaching to the choir. But none of the realities of this Administration's policies negate the reality that our society's and our movements' gains on social and racial equality are under attack by an organized and resourced Right that is feeding and exploiting a growing cultural backlash. This backlash is rooted in a classic combination of economic anxiety and white supremacist attitudes (masked or, increasingly, open).
Reading through David Sirota's righteous entry, I was at once both encouraged by his passion for defending Van Jones and dismayed by the casual, utterly condescending Kos-like dismissals of those who seek the truth behind 9/11 as mere quacks. Most of these dismissals came from readers who posted comments, but even Mr. Sirota's entry contained at least one.
For the record, there is no single "9/11 Truther" movement of which I am aware. There are those who choose to engage in the worst forms of speculation, trying to bolster their ideas about what really happened with hypotheses that simply do not stand up to scrutiny. Yet there are those of us who believe that, if nothing else, criminal negligence was the main thing that allowed the attacks to occur on that terrible day eight years ago this Friday. The latter group deserves, if nothing else, serious consideration and support from the left if for no other reason than a a full and honest accounting of what allowed the attack may finally be put on the public record (as opposed to the whitewash we were saddled with).
Part of the reason the left is so weak against the far right is that it refuses to support its own - even when doing so has little or no political risk. Van Jones signed a petition by people who honestly seem to believe, if nothing else, that the Bush-Cheney regime had more than enough time and information with which to take some sort of preventive action to stop the attack from being carried out. It's part of a pattern of criminal negligence in the previous regime, one proven so disastrously in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It's not such an extreme question for any sensible American to ask. Yet it is lumped in with the people who, for better or worse, think that there was more active involvement and who have chosen to subscribe to unprovable notions. As a result, a sane, progressive voice of reason in the White House has been forced to leave because he asked questions. It is only coincidence that those questions happened to be ones the powerful - in their zeal to protect their own at any cost (so long as the rest of us pay it) - would rather not be asked at all.
And so, for that reason, yet another lesson was reiterated about Obama and his inner circle: far right crazies will always be given deferential treatment, while progressives - no matter how rational, competent, effective, and passionate - are expendable. That is the larger hurt in all of this mess over Van Jones. Legitimate questions deserve legitimate answers, and the left is supposed to be about (among other things) welcoming both. When we don't do that, when we dismiss even the most rational of questions and treat the people asking them like pariahs, what do we gain? Nothing. But as Van Jones' dismissal from the White House demonstrates, we do have plenty to lose.
Fox News screaming head Glenn Beck now tells President Obama to fire White House employees, and Obama obeys. While Obama presumably believes obedience will cause Beck to like him and begin praising him, Beck is building a list of additional people whose heads he will demand and denouncing Obama as hiding vast secrets by having complied with the demand to fire Van Jones.
As noted in a couple of quick hits, Van Jones has resigned from the Obama Administration:
White House Adviser Van Jones Resigns Amid Controversy Over Past Activism Updated 12:53 a.m.
By Garance Franke-Ruta and Anne E. Kornblut
White House environmental adviser Van Jones resigned Saturday after weeks of controversy stemming from his past activism.
"On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me," Jones, special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said in a statement announcing his resignation just after midnight Saturday. "They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide."
He continued: "I have been inundated with calls -- from across the political spectrum -- urging me to 'stay and fight.' But I came here to fight for others, not for myself. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future."
Jones issued two public apologies in recent days, one for signing a petition that questioned whether Bush administration officials "may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war" and the other for using a crude term to describe Republicans in a speech he gave before joining the administration.
Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) called on Jones to resign Friday, saying in a statement, "His extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this administration or the public debate."
Mike Pence? Friday's "Worst Person in the World" for thanking a constituent who compared health care reform advocates to Hitler?
John McCain claimed during Friday night's debate that building 45 new nuclear power reactors by 2030 would create 700,000 new jobs in the U.S. We're so used to politicians pulling numbers out of their asses at this point that hardly anyone beyond the blogosphere seems to question statements like this. Kudos to my fellow Kossack nirsnet, who took the trouble to refute McCain's preposterous claim:
This is a video interview of Congresswoman Hilda Solis, a progressive leader in the House. I'll have a few more clips over the next week or so.
Believe it or not, we do have some progressive leaders in Congress. Not enough, of course, but they're there. One of them is Hilda Solis, Congresswoman from the 32nd district in California and a dedicated progressive. Though elected in 2000, Solis is quite powerful, serving on the Energy and Commerce Committee (including Environment and Hazardous Materials, Health, and Telecom Subcommittees). She's also on the new select committee on global warming, which puts her squarely in the Ed Markey camp, politically speaking.
The reason I'm interested in Solis is that she's working on a structural problem facing the environmental movement: race. With the Ella Baker Center in Oakland, she successfully pushed a green jobs initiative which made its way into the energy bill. On August 16th, she's hosting a community forum on global warming, an issue that is not really on the radar for most people in her predominantly Latino district, though generically, pollution is a huge problem and global warming offers interesting political opportunities.
By turning global warming into a jobs issue, Solis is working to reframe the often depressing and disempowering rhetoric of the environmental movement into language that different groups can get behind. There are interesting and unexpected allies here. A few weeks ago, I accompanied a Sierra Club lobbyist to a visit with freshman Tim Walz, and he's using the same strategy in his rural Minnesota district - sustainable energy means jobs. Conservative rural residents are now proud of wind turbines, because it means economic growth. The political combination of rural and urban constituency groups is quite potent.
What Solis is doing on August 16 is a very different model of environmental organizing - she's actually working to put together a coalition, which is rare in a Congressional leader. A new economy is coming, and the fruits of that economy are how we can build the political consensus necessary to deal with the scope of the problem.
So the clip above is the first part of my interview with her. I'll have more from Solis over the course of the week, including her discussion of ethnic media and blogs, and her defense of the progressive caucus.
Thoughts and comments are welcome, especially from videographers who want to rip my amateurish skills apart. I'm just learning how to do video editing, so be nice.
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