Here in Kentucky Progressives have gotten quite used to the hypocrisy of the Senator who represents Communist China for the state of Kentucky, Mitch McConnell. However, even as hypocritical as he has always been in fighting against working men and women all over the world, sometimes his stunning hypocrisy actually manages to surprise. Like on the banking bailout and new regulations. Of all folks in Washington it seems McConnell would be the one that would just want to keep his mouth shut. I guess when you have gotten away with flat-out lies and rank hypocrisy for so long however, you just expect to keep doing it.
I have been in the battling-the-rich-and-powerful-on-behalf-of-the-poor-and-middle- income business for a very long time now (almost 30 years), and it can get pretty discouraging at times. For one thing, in some news that I am sure will be shattering to you, the rich and powerful have a lot more money. And they have seemed to have a lot more political friends over that era than do the poor and the middle income folks combined.
But hope rises anew from time to time, and there are encouraging signs. The most obvious one, of course, is that we have a President and both houses of Congress led by center-left politicians who will be with the poor and middle income quite a bit more than their predecessors in the Bush White House and the Republican led Congress - not always, of course, but more than the last set of politicians. But my hopes are rising for a lot less visible reasons than that.
More on what those reasons on in the extended entry.
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.
Most of us who have been working on the banking issue from the restructuring side of things (meaning put the big banks into receivership and break them up into smaller components that are no longer too big to fail), including people I know far closer to the administration's economic team than I am, have come to the conclusion that the administration's policy regarding the big Wall Street financial institutions is fairly set for the time being. There are a variety of reasons Obama has chosen this path - the fact that Geithner and Summers really believe it is better to resuscitate the big banks rather than to fundamentally restructure them, the belief (reinforced by the Senate's recent failure on cramdown legislation) by senior administration officials that despite the populist anger among the general public that there is no political will in DC to take on the big banks, the reality that most of the media's shallow interpretation about whether something works is whether the Dow Jones goes up the day the plan is announced. But regardless of the reasons, this is the reality we are living with. Obama has clearly chosen a path, and those of us with a different idea about how to work on these issues have to live with the fact that we have lost the debate, for now, inside the administration. The question now is: what do we restructuring advocates do now?
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.
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