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How Can Hate Speech and Conspiracy Theories be Banned on Social Media?

Image by kalhh from Pixabay

            The legal answer to that question depends on how the courts treat the status of social media providers. The political answer depends on who and what you want to ban? The fragile Democratic control of Congress faces a steep challenge in passing legislation to answer these questions. And they must get the courts to accept their solution as not infringing on First Amendment rights.

            Let’s look at regulating free speech on social media from the perspectives of the courts and Congress. The first is concerned with legal precedents, the latter with the politics of passing legislation. But both are about determining who will exercise political power in defining what free speech is allowed on the internet.

            The Courts Perspective 

            Two years ago, in March 2019, the Congressional Research Service issued an analysis of Free Speech and the Regulation of Social Media Content.  Quite simply, social media sites provide platforms for content originally generated by users. According to the CRS review of court decisions, social media has been treated “like news editors, who generally receive the full protections of the First Amendment when making editorial decisions.” In effect, these private companies can remove or alter the user’s content and determine how content is presented: who sees it, when, and where.

            For instance, the major social media players, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube banned or suspended Trump’s accounts because they determined his accounts increased the risk of violence after inciting protesters to march on the Capitol. Data would seem to back up that concern.

            Before Trump was banned, research by a global human rights group Avaaz, and The New York Times, found that during the week of November 3, there were roughly 3.5 million interactions — including likes, comments, and shares — on public posts referencing “Stop the Steal.” Erik Trump and two right-wing bloggers accounted for 200,000 of those interactions. After that period and before January 6, Trump was the top poster of the 20 most-engaged Facebook posts containing the word “election,” according to Crowdtangle. All of his claims were found to be false or misleading by independent fact-checkers.

            Facebook has also banned many other accounts. One of the largest groupings consists of anti-vaccination sites which post a wide range of baseless or misleading claims about vaccines and covid. Facebook removed more than 12 million pieces of content, including false narratives about covid-19 being less deadly than the flu and that it is somehow associated with a population-control plot by philanthropist Bill Gates. To date, no social media user posting this misinformation has succeeded in forcing the media services to carry their anti-vaccine messaging. 

            Most recently, SCOTUS (The Supreme Court of The United States) unanimously moved to vacate a lower court ruling which found that former President Trump violated the First Amendment. He had blocked people who had criticized him in the comment threads linked to his @realDonaldTrump Twitter handle. However, Justice Clarence Thomas voiced his concern in a 12-page opinion, saying, “We will soon have no choice but to address how our legal doctrines apply to highly concentrated, privately owned information infrastructure such as digital platforms.” Conservative columnist George Will seconded Thomas’s concerns, without identifying a solution. Both seem to imply that conservatives are not getting a fair deal on these platforms.

            Conservative’s concerns about being discriminated against could be addressed by treating these social media giants, and perhaps other providers, as common carriers like licensed broadcast companies.  Based on this designation’s past application, providers could be at legal risk if they refuse to post a users’ material, such as misinformation or hate speech. 

            A more restrictive classification would result if they acted as a state actor. That would occur if they served as an open public forum that mimics a government-like function. According to CSR’s analysis, under this designation, that entity would have to protect its users’ free speech rights before making any editorial changes.  In other words, users of the platforms would have a First Amendment constitutional guarantee of free speech, leaving providers little wiggle room for denying a user access to the public.

            However, if the providers remain as private companies acting as an editor of publishing other’s works, the case is harder to make that the First Amendment applies to the users. This is because constitutional guarantees generally apply only against government action, not private actions.

            As social media sites continue to ban or suspend users who are posting misinformation that endangers public health or incites violence toward others, such as hate speech, the Supreme Court is more likely to be drawn into that discussion. They will have the last word determining how much the government can regulate social media without violating the First Amendment. 

            Aside from what SCOTUS may do, Congress is already in the process of drawing up legislation to address the many non-constitutional user claims that the courts reject because of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.That law provides immunity to providers as long as they act “in good faith” in restricting access to “objectionable” material.

            The Political Perspective 

            At the crux of any congressional action is Section 230, which says that content creators, referred to as users, are liable for the content they post online. Therefore, hosts are not liable, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other major social media platforms. There are exceptions for copyright violations, sex work-related material, and federal criminal law violations, but no one is contesting these exemptions. 

            The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls this section “the most important law protecting internet speech.” Because the courts treat these private companies as editors, they can create rules to restrict speech on their websites. For instance, Facebook and Twitter have banned hate speech, even though hate speech is protected under the First Amendment.  

             Section 230 garnered the attention of both former President Trump and now President Biden. In April 2018, Trump signed the FOSTA bill, which was intended to fight sex trafficking by reducing legal protections for online platforms. However, no evidence has surfaced that the law has diminished online sex trafficking. Two years later, following a kerfuffle with Twitter, Trump released an executive order in April 2020 which asked regulators to redefine Section 230 more narrowly, bypassing Congress and the courts’ authority. Trump also encouraged his federal agencies to collect political bias complaints, which conservative groups had been making. The agencies’ findings could justify revoking a sites’ legal protections.

            After Biden was elected, Trump pushed for a complete abolition of Section 230, even threatening to veto the National Defense Authorization Act unless it included a repeal of the law. Biden is also not a fan of Section 230. As President-elect, Biden favored revoking Section 230 completely, saying in January 2020 that Facebook and other social media sites are “propagating falsehoods they know to be false.” As of April 11, Biden has not proposed any legislation.

            Congress has not been sitting on the sidelines. While Presidents Trump and Biden suggested revoking Section 203, lawmakers instead aim to eliminate protections for specific kinds of content. They also question how social media algorithms have been used to attract more eyes to a platform without concern for the misinformation and the hostile political environment they help create.  

            The chief executives of Facebook, Google, and Twitter appeared before Congress during the Trump administration and did so again in March 2021 during the second full month of Biden’s administration. In the past, congressional members were interested in anti-trust issues, child sex abuse, and prostitution ads. 

            This time it was different. Facebook Inc’s Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai of Alphabet Inc, and Twitter Inc’s Jack Dorsey were aggressively questioned by Democrats on how they handled misinformation and online extremism. Republicans continued to accuse the companies of censoring conservative voices. Strangely very little was said about Trump being banned from their sites. Republicans also demanded that the tech companies protect children and teens from cyberbullying and social media addiction.

            Rep. Mike Doyle (D- Pennsylvania) attacked the social media giants for using algorithms that promote attention-grabbing disinformation. He said, “You are picking engagement and profit over the health and safety of users. Your algorithms make it possible to supercharge these kinds of opinions.” A Next TV reporter wrote that a former Facebook exec told House members at a hearing last September that their site, at least in the past, was designed to promote content that drives engagement, even if it was misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news. 

            Other Democrats also focused on reducing the platforms’ incentives for promoting attention-grabbing content, including disinformation and misinformation.

At March’s hearing, Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-Calif.) discussed her bill, the Protecting Americans from Dangerous Algorithms Act. It would amend Section 230 to remove tech companies’ protections from lawsuits when their algorithms amplify content that leads to offline violence. As written, the restriction would only apply to platforms with 50 million or more users. The Parler website, which has only 20 million users as of January 2021, would be excluded, and it has a significant user base of conspiracy theorists and far-right extremists. While this legislation has over a dozen Democratic co-sponsors, as of March 23, there were no Republican co-sponsors listed. 

            However, two significant pending pieces of legislation have bipartisan support pending in the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. 

            The Platform Accountability and Consumer Transparency (PACT) Act is co-

sponsored by Sens. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and John Thune (R–South Dakota). 

The PACT Act imposes new obligations on platforms based on their revenue and size. It requires them to maintain a complaint system, phone line and produce a transparency report. It also requires users to make complaints in good faith. Consequently, providers would be permitted to filter complaints for spam, trolls, and abusive complaints. And providers would have to review and remove illegal or policy-violating content promptly to receive Section 230 protections.
            The other pending legislation is the  See Something, Say Something Online Act of 2021. The co-sponsors are Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). It would require interactive computer services to report suspicious transmissions that they detect and show individuals or groups planning, committing, promoting, and facilitating terrorism, serious drug offenses, and violent crimes to the Department of Justice. Providers would have to take “reasonable steps” to prevent and address such suspicious transmissions. Failure to report a suspicious transmission would void their use of using Section 230 as a defense from being liable for publishing one.

            There may well be more legislation introduced given that there is bipartisan sentiment to tighten regulations, particularly on the social media platforms that appear to monopolize that medium. But Republicans and Democrats differ in their priorities. Republicans have emphasized fighting issues like sexual exploitation and various addictions on social media while taking less interest in stopping political misinformation concerning elections, covid-19, and vaccinations. Democrats have those issues in reverse order of priority.

            I expect that Republicans will use former U.S. Attorney General William Barr’s letter to Congress in September 2020 to guide what changes to pursue in Section 230. Barr acknowledges that this section enabled innovations and new business models for online platforms of social media. He makes several suggested adjustments, some are reasonable given as he notes,  “many of today’ s online platforms are no longer nascent companies but have become titans of industry.”  The largest digital platforms dominate markets; Facebook has roughly 3 billion users, and Google controls about 90 percent of the market in its field. 

            Barr captures the fundamental political tension in regulating social media’s ability to select what to post. He writes: “Platforms can use this power for good to promote free speech and the exchange of ideas, or platforms can abuse this power by censoring lawful speech and promoting certain ideas over others.” This last condition captures the Republican’s belief that social media has discriminated against conservative ideas. 

            However, a recent poll shows that while majorities in both parties think political censorship is likely occurring on social media, this belief is widespread among Republicans. Ninety percent of Republicans and independents who lean toward the Republican Party agree with this view. And 69 percent of this group say major technology companies generally support the views of liberals over conservatives, compared with 25% of Democrats and Democratic leaners believing that the industry is biased in favor of conservatives. 

            Researchers have found no evidence to support these conservative grievances. “I know of no academic research that concludes there is a systemic bias – liberal or conservative – in either the content moderation policies or the prioritization of content by algorithms by major social media platforms,” said Steven Johnson, an information technology professor at the University of Virginia McIntire School of Commerce. 

Moving Forward

            Some adjustments in moderating content are needed and supported by both liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. As I have shown above, their perspectives do not agree on what type of bias needs to be addressed. Section 230 will most likely be amended and not discarded. Without some liability protections, our significant social media infrastructure on the web would be in chaos. But to continue with the current situation will only continue to generate the spread of conspiracy theories and political violence. 

            The bi-partisan legislation so far introduced will make some minor adjustments. They will clarify the responsibilities of both the hosts and the users on the platforms. However, they should go further in setting up a process or establishing a nonpartisan body to expedite the adjudication of any disagreements regarding the veracity of a user’s material. 

            These types of legislative solutions will lessen the necessity of SCOTUS entering into the fray. Their intervention would be the least desirable path to take in this era. Given the court’s ideological composition, their decision will most likely be subject to attack as being biased. It would likely result in a more divisive political climate and fuel the growth of conspiracy theories. 

            Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist, and has served five terms on the Seattle City Council, named progressive municipal official of the year by The Nation, and is founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of 1,000 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

The inspired terrorists who invaded the Capitol were your neighbors!


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 Photo credit: Sebastian Portillo/Shutterstock.com

The major networks and cable news channels largely ignored research findings showing who were the “incited terrorists” that invaded the Capitol. Instead, they focused on those who had “planned” the violent break-in. While the FBI considers both groups to be domestic terrorists, research shows the “incited” people may be your neighbors.

Both the liberal and conservative TV media covered the event by asking who was responsible for organizing the attack and for not properly preparing for it.

The liberal stations tended to focus on the more clearly identified militant terrorist groups, like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers as the on-site leaders. After vehemently criticizing the siege of the Capitol, the conservative commentators managed to accuse the Democrats, particularly House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for failing to protect the Capitol from the Trump rioters.

They made little mention of the various right-wing militant groups that were in front of the mob.
Before reviewing several studies that identify who the insurrectionists were, it’s essential to realize the level of danger to our democracy that January 6 presents in the long term. FBI Director Christopher Wray’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, March 2, provides a needed perspective on that danger. Wray was appointed by President Trump and is a registered Republican. He is no liberal.

He said that the FBI considered the behavior of those who illegally entered the Capitol to disrupt Congress as criminal activity and viewed their actions as “domestic terrorism.” He told the Senate committee that their actions were “on the same level with ISIS and homegrown violent extremists.”

Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas asked Wray: How about the dangers also from foreign-influenced terrorists? Wray explained the two groups “have a lot in common with each other.” He labeled those that are not inspired by foreign jihadists are domestic violent extremists who are inspired by domestic sources.

Wray did refute Trump and some Republican senators’ notion that the rioters were leftist-terrorists or were disguised as Trump supporters. The FBI had not seen “any evidence of anarchist violent extremists or people subscribing to Antifa in connection with the 6th,” he said. And he added, there was no evidence that there were “fake Trump supporters” in those that stormed the Capitol.

After dispatching those myths, Wray presented a more nuanced depiction of the thousands who participated in the march to the Capitol and invading the building. He said, “there are sort of three groups of people involved.” The largest group were “peaceful, maybe rowdy protestors, but who weren’t violating the law.” They had received minimal attention from the liberal press.

The second group “may have come intending just to be part of peaceful protest, but either swept up in the motives or emotion or whatever, engaged in a kind of low-level criminal behavior. Trespassed, say on the Capitol grounds, but not breaching the building.” He viewed them as taking the opportunity to engage in criminal conduct but were not violent. Their activity would still be addressed, but he was in no hurry to do so.

He said the third group is the smallest numerically. They were the people who breached the Capitol grounds and engaged in violence against law enforcement in an attempt to stop Congress from conducting their constitutional responsibilities. Some came with plans to engage in violence that the FBI considers domestic terrorism; others were “inspired” to attack the Capitol and had didn’t have membership in an organization.

I believe the third group should be seen as two clusters. One cluster consists of “strategic terrorists” who were the ones who came with a plan to DC. The second cluster would become “inspired terrorists,” who may not have planned what they would do once they arrived in DC like those in the second group. But like 70% of Republicans, they firmly believed that Trump had won the election.

President Trump addressed this cluster of supporters while Congress was in the middle of confirming Biden as president, telling them that the election is about to be stolen. His invited speakers told the crowd it’s time to fight. Aren’t these the conditions for inspiring those listening to stop, at any cost, what they saw as an illegal transfer of power?

Two important studies have been recently released that takes a closer look at the insurrectionists’ makeup, and one looks closely at who makes up the MAGA Movement. Together they point to something that the TV commentators didn’t dwell on; there is a growing domestic anti-democracy movement. Before addressing how pro-democracy proponents should respond,

it is best to understand what the studies reveal.

A study by Robert Pape, a political-science professor at the University of Chicago, and Keven Ruby, Senior research associate of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, supports the view that average citizens acted as inspired terrorists. The Chicago study found that more than half of the arrested Capitol rioters came from President Joe Biden’s counties in the 2020 presidential election. And Biden won the fewest total counties – of any president-elect. “Most people thought right after the insurrection that these insurrectionists are coming from the reddest parts of America. That’s just not the case,” Pape said.

In February, the Chicago study analyzed 193 people charged with being inside the Capitol building or breaking through barriers to enter the Capitol grounds. However, keep in mind that there were roughly 800 people who entered the Capitol, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has opened more than 400 case files and 500 grand jury subpoenas. There may be many more inspired terrorists to be charged.

The researchers in reviewing court documents described the majority of those investigated as “normal Trump supporters—middle-class and, in many cases, middle-aged people without obvious ties to the far right.” They joined extremists to form a violent mob “in an attempt to overturn a presidential election.”

Meanwhile, those charged who had some connection to gangs, militias, or militia-like groups such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters made up only one-tenth of the Capitol arrestees the researchers studied. The rest of the arrestees had no connection or previously expressed support for those groups. Overall, some 85% of the Capitol rioters who were studied were employed, and about 40% were business owners or held white-collar jobs.

In early March, a research report was released as the Preliminary Assessment of the Capitol Hill Siege Participants by the Program on Extremism at the George Washington University. Its findings were similar to the Chicago Project’s, although they reviewed more court records of people charged in federal courts for their involvement. The broad demographics of the 257 investigated revealed that their ages averaged in the forties. There were 221 men, 86%, 36 women, 14%, and they came from 40 states, 91% coming from outside the DC metro area. And 33 had military backgrounds.

This study divided those charged into three categories. The smallest (12.8%) represented the apex of organizational planning by domestic violent extremist groups for and on January 6They fall into the category of “militant networks.”

The next largest category (33%) consists of “organized clusters,” which are small, close-knit groups of individuals who allegedly participated in the siege together. They were comprised of family members, friends, and acquaintances. The study found that they were “Inspired by ideological fervor,” and that they “lacked top-down direction from a domestic violent extremist organization but jointly coordinated their travel to DC in groups of like-minded believers.”

The largest category (55%) are the “inspired believers” who were “neither participants in an established violent extremist group nor connected to any of the other individuals who are alleged to have stormed the Capitol.” Nevertheless, they did participate in the siege of the Capitol and were criminally charged. They were “inspired by a range of extremist narratives, conspiracy theories, and personal motivations.” They would belong to Wray’s smallest group and would be the same as the inspired terrorist cluster that I described. They would also be what the Chicago study found to be middle-class normal Trump supporters.

The Panel Study Of The MAGA Movement, conducted by Christopher Sebastian Parker, Professor, University of Washington, and Rachel M. Blum, Assistant Professor, University of Oklahoma, is a more extensive, in-depth completed survey of 1,981 MAGA supporters. The survey was conducted just before and right after January 6. It was designed to assess the attitudes and behavior of the people who consider themselves part of the “Make America Great Again” movement.

Details on data collection and sampling methods are provided here. In brief, their findings are aligned with those of the other two studies.  The MAGA movement’s demographic composition is overwhelmingly white, male, Christian, retired, and over 65 years of age.

The survey showed that MAGA supporters are attracted to groups that include gun rights, charities, pro-police, anti-lockdown, pro-life, and “stop the steal.” They’re extremely politically active, all support the Republican Party. However, only about 60 percent are solid Republicans; the rest either “lean” Republican or Independent. The vast majority blamed Antifa for the Capitol Riots, not Trump. Parker and Blum concluded that the MAGA movement is a clear and present danger to American democracy.

When a democratic government loses the middle class’s trust by believing in conspiracy theories, we see normal folks supporting radical anti-democracy solutions. The demographics of those that tried to overthrow Congress’s functions on January 6 reflect the same significant portion of the German population that abandoned its Weimar Republic and the Social Democrat Party, which had been Germany’s largest party.

The pro-business middle class and small business owners repeatedly voted for putting Germany’s National Socialist Party into power in the 1930s. Similarly, that same population has been a strong Republican constituency. In Hitler’s Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany 1933-1939, David Schoenbaum notes that the entrepreneurial middle classes were the Nazis’ leading political clientele as the Nazis’ railed against the government and big business.

A large radicalized anti-democracy movement’s potential is likely to remain even if Trump diminishes his control over the Republican Party. However, the actual number of politically active people in that movement may still be relatively small. For instance, the best estimate of the total number attending the multiple Trump rallies and marches is between three-thousand and ten-thousand, according to Stephen Doig, a data journalist and journalism professor at Arizona State University.

The 2017 Women’s March (440,000 people) and the 2018 March for Our Lives demonstration (200,000 people) were massively larger. If the size of a rally or a march matters, many more citizens are willing to demonstrate their support for the democratic process than attack its legitimacy. With the FBI recording an increase in domestic terrorism, there a growing trend to attack the government’s legitimacy.

FBI Director Wray said that while some of the Capitol riot defendants have apparent affiliations with white-supremacist ideology, many defendants appear to have been motivated by anti-government ideologies. Within the MAGA Movement, an anti-government philosophy is pursued through a network of people and organizations associated with the Trump campaign. One example is Rebecca Mercer – who founded Parler; which is a major site for posting far-right content, antisemitism and conspiracy theories, like QAnon.

What percent of the millions in the MAGA movement might be inspired to repeat the January 6 attack on the Capitol if they had a leader they trusted, like Trump. Short of that, they could continue to support voter suppression measures that narrow the voting poll to mostly white voters. This would erode democracy to the point of being a mere façade of what it proposes to be. As the Chicago study said, “Targeting pre-2021 far-right organizations alone will not solve the problem.” We have to reach those who are potentially inspired terrorists.

Congress needs to pass legislation to reverse our media’s increased monopolization, including social media, so they are not used as weapons against our democratic governance. And there must be greater outreach to our youth and all citizens in understanding how citizenship works in a democratic society to protect everyone’s interests.

In future pieces, I will discuss how these two objectives are currently being addressed and what further steps to take to make them useful and lasting.

Media Monopolies Amplify Conspiracy Theories 

While Congress was in session, the Capitol’s violent invasion illustrates the power of conspiracy theories to grip average Americans.

            The FBI believes that most who violently broke into the Capitol were convinced that the election was stolen from President Donald Trump. Studies of those rioters (see The inspired terrorists …were your neighborsconcluded they were largely middle-class ordinary Trump supporters who were inspired mainly by extremist narratives and conspiracy theories.

            At the heart of any conspiracy theory is that some group secretly controls the government to manipulate our lives. That belief goes back to the beginning of our nation.  

Past conspiracy theories have shaped national politics

            One of the earliest significant conspiracy theories was in opposition to President Andrew Jackson’s re-election in 1832.  Jackson, the founder of the Democratic Party, was accused of following the Masonic Order’s directions. The Masons are a secret society whose membership at that time consisted mainly of wealthy North-Eastern businesspeople. Many Constitutional Convention attendees, and three presidents, Washington, Monroe, and Jackson, were Masons.  Conspiracy theorists formed the Anti-Masonic Party, which eventually evolved into the Whigs and then the Republican Party. I guess one could say that a conspiracy theory gave birth to the Republican Party. 

            The most recent conspiracy theory shaping our national dialogue goes back to the 1950s with McCarthyism and the John Birch Society. Both U.S. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy

and the Birch Society made unfounded accusations that a vast communist conspiracy existed within the U.S. government. Many federal employees and elected officials, including 

Republicans, like President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, were accused of being in cahoots with it and hence were disloyal to the nation. This logic is a similar accusation that President Trump and his supporters levied against those not accepting that Trump won the election. 

Media monopolies have the biggest megaphones for shaping public beliefs

            Freedom of the press is guaranteed in our constitution. It is understood to mean that the government does not control it. Anyone can publish what they wish in the marketplace of ideas. However, the constitution is silent on what happens when a few hawkers dominate the marketplace, and the free press is effectively narrowed to those controlling the most presses. 

            When analyzing the relationship between public media and the government, the role of social media providers, like Facebook and Twitter, must be considered separately. The Congressional Research Service issued a legal analysis of how federal courts and laws extend special protections from lawsuits, which are not available to public media. Consequently, I will not discuss how social media providers relate to media monopolies and conspiracy theories.

            With that issue put aside, the owners with the most presses have more eyes viewing their newspapers, T.V. networks, cable stations, and listening to their radio stations. In essence, they have the freedom to create and distribute information that could be fictitious or slanted to benefit their own financial and political interests. Two examples of this practice stick out: one from a hundred years ago and the other occurring today. 

            William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers made money and built readership by promoting sensationalist and distorted news. His efforts whipped up the public sentiment to help cause the Spanish-American War of 1898. At his peak in 1935, he owned 28 major newspapers and 18 magazines and several radio stations, movie companies, and news services. His total readership amounted to about 12 – 14 percent of the entire daily newspapers’ readership in the mid-1930s.  In 1936, he accused President Roosevelt of being a Socialist, Communist, and Bolshevik and carrying out a Marxist agenda.

            Hearst is a mere blip on the scale of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. In

2000, Murdoch’s News Corporation owned over 800 companies in more than 50 countries, with a net worth of over $5 billion. Among his newspaper holdings are the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. His T.V. flagship is Fox News, which according to Statista, the combined number of primetime viewers for CNN and MSNBC were only 81% of Fox’s share in Q4 2020. According to Nielsen Media Research, in 2020, Fox had its 19th consecutive year as the number one cable news network in total day and primetime viewers. Commentators on Fox receive some substantial credit for convincing 70% of Republicans that Biden and radical-socialist Democrats stole Trump’s election. 

Legislation has helped create media monopolies

            Over the last forty years, Congress and Presidents have contributed to the consolidation of media ownership and weakening the public’s access to balanced news reporting. The federal government had provided a more level playing field among the media owners. Thom Hartmann points out in American Oligarchy, “the telecommunications laws from the 1920s and 1930s kept most newspapers, cable systems, internet providers, and radio and T.V. stations locally owned to prevent oligarchs from asserting singular control over information and news across our nation.”

            In other words, laws made it a bit more difficult for them to use the free press to benefit their financial interests. The monopolies use their press as a powerful megaphone, which is as good as a large donation to a political campaign, and it is not reportable. 

            For instance, Ronald Reagan’s campaign team credited Murdoch’s paper, The New York Post, for his victory in New York in the 1980 United States presidential election. Once in office, Reagan “waived a prohibition against owning a television station and a newspaper in the same market.” Murdoch directly benefited because it allowed him to continue to control The New York Post and The Boston Herald while expanding into television

            Reagan then vetoed a Democratic preemptive attempt to codify the Federal Communications Commission’sFairness Doctrine into legislation. Afterward, he had the FCC abolished it. The Doctrine was established in 1949 to “devote broadcast time to the discussion and consideration of controversial issues of public importance.” In 1949, the FCC issued a report that established broadcast licensees’ duty to cover controversial issues in a fair and balanced manner. The Congressional Research Service identified the Doctrine’s essential requirement to be that broadcasters “devote a reasonable portion of broadcast time to the discussion and consideration of controversial issues of public importance” and “affirmatively endeavor to make … facilities available for the expression of contrasting viewpoints held by responsible elements with respect to the controversial issues.” However, it only applied to broadcast licenses, not cable, satellite, and Internet platforms.  

            A further slide into enabling the growth of monopolies was the Telecommunications Act of 1996. President Bill Clinton enthusiastically signed after the Telecom industry lobbyists had spent tens of millions of dollars on both parties’ legislators getting the bill to Clinton’s desk. Hartmann concludes that the Act “wiped out those protections for local media, turning our nation’s cable systems, internet service providers, newspapers, and radio and T.V. stations over to a small handful of media oligarchs.”

            The result was an acceleration of concentrating the ownership of media outlets. In 1983, 90% of U.S. media was controlled by 50 companies; as of 2011, 90% was owned by just 6 companies, and in 2017 the number was 5.

The spread of conspiracy theories has consequences

            Because of their broad-reach and centralized editorial command, media monopolies supply oxygen to spreading conspiracy theories to the public.  They attract more viewers/readers than just reporting boring factual news. Conspiracies don’t cost much to produce. Once some bare-bones facts are tossed into the narrative, no further research is necessary. Think of conspiracy theories as clickbait for attracting anyone wanting to know who is behind the screen manipulating the truth. 

            Consequently, there is less need for real journalists doing investigative reporting. Brier Dudley, the Seattle Times Free Press editor, mentions a 2018 study that found declining local political news coverage reduces citizen engagement. The decline in local coverage is due in large part to the dramatic reduction in newsroom staffing. 

According to the executive outplacement firm Challenger, Gray, and Christmas, in 2019, there was a record loss of 16,160 newsroom jobs lost, a 200% increase in losses over a year. And Pew Research Center reported on top of that; the previous decade saw a 51% loss. The cumulative effect is that opinion-makers have replaced paid journalists over this period in print and even more widely in social media. News based on journalistic ethics is being replaced by opinion leaders who pick portions of facts that support their position. 

            This trend is that the difference between facts and opinions is blurred, and trust in all media and government sinks. According to the 21st annual Edelman Trust Barometer, (January 2021), which measures confidence in institutions, Americans’ trust in the media and government has fallen to a historic low. 

            However, business is the only institution perceived as both ethical and competent, with more than half in the Edelman survey (53 percent) believing corporations are responsible for filling the information void. There is a slight irony here that some corporations benefit from conspiracy theories that significantly reduce government oversight of corporate activities. 

            Another significant survey found similar results. A report assembled by Gallup and the Knight Foundation surveyed 20,000 Americans in the three months before Covid 19 hit America. The report found that roughly three-quarters of the respondents believe the owners of media companies are influencing coverage. Fifty-four percent said reporters intentionally misrepresent facts, and 28 percent believe reporters make the facts up entirely.

            Nevertheless, news media is either critical or very important for a functioning democracy, according to 84 percent of Americans. That need is not being met if conspiracy theories undermine the public’s trust in our government and mainstream media. Knight Foundation’s senior vice president Sam Gill, said the report’s findings revealed shattered confidence in America’s news media and were “corrosive for our democracy.” 

Laws fighting misinformation can lead to authoritarian governance

            The U.S. faces a challenge in sustaining our media’s independence from government control while serving our citizen’s desire to have reliable factual based news media. The trend for the last four decades has seen the concentration of ownership in the media that distributes anti-democratic conspiracy theories.  

            But to fight this trend, we must avoid what Hungary’s parliament, dominated by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’sFidesz party, adopted. With a vote of 137–53, they passed a law to allow the government to jail for up to five years “anyone who intentionally spreads what the government classifies as misinformation.” 

            This law resulted from Orban’s financial allies creating a vast propaganda machine to enable his Fidesz party to retain control of the nation’s government. In 2019, a team of European Union NGOs specializing in press and media freedom reported on how Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government has been treating the press. They concluded that without introducing the overt authoritarian laws that Russia and China have instituted to censure their media, Orban had constructed a pro-government media empire. As a result, large parts of the public are denied access to critical news and reliable information. An uninformed electorate can easily be swayed by who has the loudest megaphone. 

            So, what steps are needed to avoid Hungary’s draconian legislation and still hinder a political party or a nation’s leader from colluding with media monopolies to overshadow access to reliable news to the public? 

Legislation can diminish the extent of conspiracy theories

            Congress is considering proposals to address some issues that have contributed to the spread of conspiracy theories. One of them is the downward trend in the number of journalists and outlets in the print and digital media platforms that had produced original local journalism. U.S. Reps. Ann Kirkpatrick, D-Arizona, and Dan Newhouse R-Wash. have proposed the Local Journalism Sustainability Act (HR 7640). It was introduced in July 2020; as of November, it had 78 co-sponsors (20 Republicans and 58 Democrats).

Although it might seem odd that Republicans support this legislation, its primary thrust is to provide economic incentives to help publishing businesses. The bill allows individual and business taxpayers certain tax credits for the support of local newspapers and media. Specifically, individual taxpayers may claim an income tax credit of up to $250 for a local newspaper subscription. The bill also allows local newspaper employers a payroll tax credit for wages paid to an employee for service as a journalist and certain small businesses a tax credit for local newspaper and media advertising expenses.

The Missouri Press Association representing 229 newspapers in Missouri, which is approximately 99.5% of all newspapers, strongly supports the Local Journalism Sustainability Act. Their Executive Director of the Missouri Press Association, Mark Maassen, spoke at a public forum noting that “nearly 36,000 employees and newspapers have been laid off, furloughed, or have had their pay reduced during this (Covid 19) crisis.”

He strongly recommended that its members contact their members of Congress in support of the legislation. 

            With over 99% of local papers in Missouri supporting the legislation, Missouri Republicans may find it awkward to oppose it. All but one of their six Republican congressional representatives objected to the certification of the election results in conformity with the election was stolen conspiracy theory. Will they vote to eliminate local jobs or be influenced by the media monopolies to oppose it?

U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash, the Senate Education Committee’s new 2021 chair, issued a report in October 2020. It recommended that a limited antitrust exemption from Congress be granted to news publishers to allow them to collectively negotiate for better terms with the tech platforms. Senate Bill 1700, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which was introduced in 2019, would allow for that. The News Media Alliance trade association, representing approximately 2000 newspapers and multiplatform digital services, helped write the bill. 

            The bill currently sits in the Senate Judiciary Committee. It has significant bipartisan support, with both Senators Mitch McConnell [R-KY] and Sherrod Brown [D-OH] becoming co-sponsors of the bill in 2020. One of the most ardent believers that the election was stolen from Trump is Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri. He sits on the Committee and will have to vote to pass it out of the Committee or not. The Missouri Press Association could play a role in moving him to vote it out of Committee. Former Democratic presidential candidates Cory Booker and Senator Amy Klobuchar and the new Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff are part of the Committee’s membership. Their combined high national profiles could mobilize support for this senate bill and the related House Bill (HR 7640). Chairman Dick Durban will decide when to bring it up to a vote. 

            The bipartisan support for both the House and Senate bills must argue that the nature of maintaining a free press has been handicapped with the introduction of new social media technology, which has lower labor costs and reaches a broader audience. The result is that they have fatter profit margins for distributing opinions instead of distributing news based on facts and in-depth research.

            Another change would be to resurrect the Federal Communications Commission’s Fairness Doctrine that required stations to “program in the public interest.” It required an equal division between local and national news. More importantly, stations that aired “editorials” from owners or management had to be balanced by an outside source with a different perspective. Those changes would have to be initiated by the FCC. Currently, the commission is evenly between Democrats and Republicans. Biden will appoint another a fifth commissioner to give the Democrats a majority. 

In Summary

            The above legislation and regulatory changes will require a significant public education effort to overcome resistance from an expected well-funded lobbying campaign by the media monopoly owners. Even if these measures are passed, it will require ongoing monitoring of the media to assure that these minimal steps to provide balanced reporting are followed. 

            Failure to pass these laws or enforce them will result in the continued unchecked proliferation of conspiracy theories being broadcasted throughout the public media. As we have witnessed, that practice foments fractionalization of our national principles and distrust in a democratic society. 

            Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist, and has served five terms on the Seattle City Council, named progressive municipal official of the year by The Nation, and is founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of 1,000 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Citizenship Politics

Thom Hartmann takes on ‘The Hidden History of American Oligarchy’

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The Hidden History of American Oligarchy

Syndicated talk show host and bestselling author Thom Hartmann returns with a new book, The Hidden History of American Oligarchy — Reclaiming our Democracy from The Ruling Class.

This book is the latest in Hartmann’s Hidden History ten-book series. He analyzes the most significant political, social and economic obstacles of today by placing them in a historical context.  And, for each, he provides tangible calls to action to address them.
          American Oligarchy is a short, pithy book, easy to dive into and read. I spoke with Hartmann about his book’s analysis of the past, current, and possible future struggles to keep our democracy alive.

Q. You begin your book by saying, “Democracy is the rule of, by, and for the people: oligarchy is the rule of, by, and for the rich.” You recount how America has had times when an oligarchy almost obtained complete power over the nation. The first followed the cotton gin’s invention, which gave birth to a “rigidified oligarchy that eventually challenged the power of the nation itself.” That threat led to the Civil War.
You see outgoing President Donald Trump as part of today’s oligarchy. On Jan. 6, Trump incited his supporters to invade the U.S. Capitol. Are we on the verge of another Civil War?

A. I think not. History tells us that civil wars almost always come out of a failure of governance. When the government can no longer provide for the people’s basic safety and needs, a giant vacuum is created to spread conspiracy theories, fringe parties, secessionist movements, and, ultimately, civil wars. The U.S. headed in that direction under Trump because he had gutted government services and federalized local police. The Biden administration had stopped that drift, well before we got to consider a civil war.

Q. A second turning point in stopping an oligarchy from running the country was when the Great Depression led straight to the New Deal and major anti-oligarchic reforms. Is the growing information technology industry, including social media giants, contributing to another oligarchy ascendancy?

A. Yes. If you look at the tech revolution, which started in the 1980s, and looks at past tech innovative improvements, there are huge similarities. They initially brought on greater widespread wealth, a larger middle class, and increased wealth concentration. But they all created a new norm, where the less-skilled folks fell out of the labor market.
For instance, the Industrial Revolution had produced the Roaring ’20s, which saw the top 10% become wealthier. Meanwhile, the wages below them went down during that same period, leading to the Great Depression and World War II. Those crises were resolved mainly by the Roosevelt administration’s economic and social reform policies.
The tech revolution that started in the 1980s resulted in more low-paid workers and a concentration of wealth at the top. The middle class saw their wealth expand for one or two generations. However, their prosperity is now shrinking as the new form of production has become more common to operate. When the middle class hurts, conspiracy theories grow.

Q. If the Biden administration can make the same kind of changes that the Roosevelt administration did, the middle class’s financial condition should improve significantly and stop America’s oligarchy from expanding. History shows that many countries have come under the control of a ruling oligarchy. Can America be an exception?

A. We were the first country in the world founded on an idea rather than genetics. Although there was a large component of genetics, you don’t find it in the Constitution or the documents of the [Founding Fathers]. They intentionally dismissed or de-emphasized it because they were aware that they were taking on a giant experiment. They learned from the Roman and Greek democracies’ experiences and from what they knew from the Native American communities.
Then they based America on the ideas of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that man can govern themselves. While it has been imperfectly implemented, it’s such a cool and contagious idea that in the 200 years since our founding, nearly half the world’s countries have adopted that idea. But we have to work to keep that idea alive.

Q. About half of Americans voted for Trump. Why don’t they see him as part of the oligarchy? They believe his policies are benefiting them. Does this attitude hinder building support for democratic values?

A. Most voters are single-issue voters. They don’t view the broader issues. Republicans understand this better than the Democrats because the Democrats keep looking at policies, while the Republicans are looking at constituents. Republicans pitch the most important issue for each group. For instance, anti-gun control rhetoric for folks wanting to keep their guns, or anti-abortion talk for pro-life religious groups, and so on. Each group ignores everything else.
If we can make democracy a single issue for voters, we can defeat oligarchies. For instance, longtime Republican Steve Schmidt, who was Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign manager, is now a Democrat because he doesn’t care about any other issue other than saving our democracy.

Q. What do you mean when you say that Trump and his Republican supporters are “planted in the soil of neofascism and tyranny”?

A. This is not just about the individual behavior of a particular politician. Fascism is the merger of corporate and state interests, which exhibits belligerent nationalism. We have witnessed a past president and a political movement that fostered fascism. President Andrew Jackson and Vice President John C. Calhoun empowered fascism in the Southern United States.
The America First [Committee] was a huge fascist movement in the [the 1940s], with hundreds of thousands of members. Trump’s actions also move toward concentrating money and political power in the hands of the few. I devote the last part of my book to what specific steps we can take to break the oligarchy and restore democracy. We defeated those past efforts, and we can do it again.

Biden’s Biggest Challenge Stems from Inheriting Trump’s Legacy: More Countries Wanting Nukes


NuclearWeaponsReady
Nuclear-Weapons-Ready-To-Launch courtesy of Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament

Former President Donald Trump had placed the United States on the runway to take off on another nuclear arms race.

Trump threw out two treaties that held Russia and the U.S. in check. It also deterred other nations from developing nuclear weapons over the last thirty years.
President Joseph Biden cut the throttle by agreeing to a five-year extension with Russia on their remaining nuclear arms treaty: the New SALT Treaty. But that single act is not enough to keep the U.S., Russia, and other countries, from flying off to seek security in possessing nuclear weapons. There must be a plan.

First, a quick review of the Trump administration’s actions is in order. On August 2, 2019, the United States formally withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. It required the United States and the Soviet Union to verifiably eliminate all ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. With these range restrictions, missiles from Russia’s furthest western and eastern boundaries could not reach the lower 48 states or Hawaii.

The 32-year-old treaty initiated an intrusive inspection regime, including on-site inspections, to maintain compliance. Over the past decade, the United States and Russia have charged the other country with not complying with the INF Treaty. Trump decided to “terminate” the agreement accusing the Russians again of noncompliance. As a non-sequitur, Trump also said he had concerns about China’s missiles. China is not part of the INF treaty; that concern could have been dealt with separately.

In May of this year, Trump said he was also pulling out of the 30-year-old Treaty on Open Skies. That treaty has reduced the chances of an accidental war between Russia and the United States by allowing reconnaissance flights over the two countries. Trump accused Russia once again of not complying with a treaty.

In this instance, he added that “… there’s a very good chance we’ll have a new agreement or do something to put that agreement back together.” The national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, issued a statement saying that the Trump administration would try to reach a new arms-control agreement with Russia and China. However, Trump left office without putting anything on the table to show the Russians or the Chinese.

President George W. Bush started to walk away from nuclear-arms treaties before Trump. In 2001, he withdrew the U.S. from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) with Russia. Bush sought to build a massive missile defense system.

Ironically, three former Republican presidents successfully negotiated the three nuclear-arms treaties that Trump and George W. Bush dumped: President Nixon on the ABM, President Reagan on the INF, and George H. W. Bush on the Open Skies. However, since President George W. Bush, most Republicans in Congress have not shown interest in avoiding a nuclear-arms race.
The passage of the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) under President Obama in April 2010 is a perfect example. While the Senate approved it by 71 to 26, over two-thirds of the Republicans voted against it. Even so, the current START pact, which Biden would extend, has been endorsed by six former secretaries of State who worked in Republican administrations and by past presidents from both parties.

On his first full month as president, Trump criticized the New START treaty as a “one-sided deal” and a “bad deal.” That position was undermined by an aggregate data report published by his State Department, which may have been removed from the website where it was to be posted. That report showed that the treaty was working and that both countries kept their strategic nuclear arsenals within the treaty’s limits.

This year Trump said he was trying to negotiate a shorter extension for New START than the five-year option built into the treaty to be approved by both countries. Russia’s legislative body, the Duma, has approved the five-year extension.

Meanwhile, Trump had failed to do so because he tried to include China in the treaty, as had tried to do in the Open Skies Treaty. China refused, and Trump’s envoy wasted months trying to change their mind. Biden’s team has kept their eye on the ball. It’s Russia, not China.  Biden officials have said that Moscow’s arsenal “is at least ten times the size of China’s.”

Biden’s approval of the extension does not need the Senate’s approval. But if the treaty is amended, it could be considered a new treaty subject to a two-thirds vote for Senate approval. And that would not have happened unless the new treaty dramatically conformed to any conditions the Republicans demanded.

Biden’s decision to extend New START avoided real consequences that Trump would have invited by scuttling the last strategic nuclear arms treaty with Russia. First, it would have allowed both countries to deploy an unlimited number of nuclear-armed submarines, bombers, and missiles.
Second, by significantly growing our nuclear arsenal, federal funds could be diverted from rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. Third, it would have encouraged non-nuclear weaponized nations to begin to develop them. The Washington Post reported that American military leaders recognize this danger and supported the New Start Treaty.

But those dangerous trends remain real possibilities. Biden must publicize them enough to build support for promoting a national campaign to reduce the chance of a nuclear war. That may be the only way to overcome congressional Republican’s reluctance to negotiate any arms agreements.

With more than 10,000 nuclear warheads on Earth, avoiding nuclear war is an issue recognized by the international community. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres videotaped a message saying, “Nuclear weapons pose growing dangers, and the world needs urgent action to ensure their elimination and prevent the catastrophic human and environmental consequences any use would cause.”

To that end, the first-ever treaty to ban nuclear weapons entered into force on January 22, President Joe Biden’s first day in office. The U.N. General Assembly initially approved The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in July 2017. But it did not become adopted as international law until 50 countries ratified it, and as of today, there are now 62.

Officially it bans nuclear weapons. However, none of the nine countries known or believed to possess nuclear weapons — the United States, Russia, Britain, China, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel — support it. Neither does the 30-nation NATO alliance support it.
This treaty has good intentions, but without any authority to enforce it, a replay of what happened after World War I is certain. At President Wilson’s insistence, the League of Nations’ creation was codified as part I of the Versailles Treaty ending the war. The League was a “general association of nations established to afford mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity of all nations…”

Even with those guarantees, the U.S. Senate refused to have the U.S. join it. If it had, nations belonging to the League would still have ignored its disarmament objectives since they were based entirely upon “goodwill.” There was no enforcement mechanism. Such is the case with the current treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons.

However, one existing successful treaty does not have an enforcement mechanism and is a multinational agreement. The treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) went into force in 1970. One-hundred ninety-one nations are party to the treaty, including five who have nuclear-weapons. What keeps it going is that there is a review of the treaty’s operation every five years.

The underlying success of the NPT has been an understood bargain that the non-nuclear states would not develop the bomb in exchange for the existing nuclear weapons states reducing and ultimately eliminating their arsenals. As a result, Michael O’Hanlon, the Director of Research at Brookings Institute, states that current nuclear arsenals are only about one-fifth the size of what they were a half-century ago.

Nevertheless, the U.S. and Russia are still the central nuclear-weapons states, accounting for more than 90% of the total number of warheads on Earth today. None of the other seven known nuclear-weapons states, including China, has more than 300. North Korea has the smallest amount, approximately between three and five dozen.

The danger now is that our current political climate is moving away from reaching compromises. The lack of getting them creates an unstable environment and contributes to the spreading of nuclear weapons. Trump removing the U.S. from the INF treaty and the Iran Treaty, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), has contributed to this condition.
Robert Einhorn, a Senior Fellow in Brookings’ Foreign Policy Division, believes that not only are the NPT’s disarmament goals at risk but now there are fears that the number of nuclear-armed states could increase.

Einhorn believes that if the U.S. does not return to JCPOA, Iran will consider leaving the Non-Proliferation Treaty. In response, the Saudi crown prince says the Kingdom will acquire nuclear weapons if Iran does. Then we have President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan asking why other countries’ have nuclear weapons, and Turkey has none.

Meanwhile, Trump’s one-on-one relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has not produced any positive changes. In fact, the Congressional Research Service issued a January 2021 report that said, “Recent ballistic missile tests and an October 2020 military parade suggest that North Korea is continuing to build a nuclear warfighting capability designed to evade regional ballistic missile defenses.”

Biden must avoid weakening existing treaties, which could lead to a free-for-all race to build nuclear weapons. He needs to reassert the U.S.’s role as a leader in negotiating new nuclear-arms treaties. Four presidents successfully played that role, Nixon, Reagan, H.W. Bush, and Obama. Our last president just walked away from that leadership role. Biden has the opportunity to make once again the U.S. the voice of reason in reaching complicated treaties.

The first step to grabbing the world’s attention would be to re-engage with other nations in making the Iranian treaty work better for everyone. If we remain on the sidelines, skirmishes between countries could lead to multiple nations seeking to possess nuclear weapons.
Without treaties, those conflicts could trigger nuclear wars. We are not an island. We will suffer if there is any use of nuclear weapons. The cost of lives to us will be many times greater than what we endured with the covid pandemic.

The Big Lie Strategy for Grabbing Political Power


The big lie shaking this nation for the past seven weeks is that Trump won the election by a landslide. It is a lie. President Donald Trump and his many lawyers have not produced even a shred of evidence to support that claim before our judicial system.

No court has found substantial fraud or miscounts in any of the 60 lawsuits Trump and his allies have brought before them. Eighty-eight state and federal judges, appointed by members of both parties, came to those decisions. Chris Krebs, who was appointed by Trump to head up Homeland Security’s Security Agency, tweeted that “59 election security experts all agree, ‘in every case of which we are aware, these claims have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.” After that tweet, Trump fired him.

According to a New York Times analysis, Trump’s allies did not even formally allege fraud in more than two-thirds of their cases. And yet, Trump has almost daily repeated the same lie that millions of more voters cast their votes for him over former Vice President Joe Biden.

A significant portion of our citizens do not see Trump’s declaration as a lie. Polls show that seventy to eighty percent of self-identified Republicans believe that he did win the election or that it was stolen from him. That group now includes at least one Republican from the House of Representatives and one from the US Senate, who will challenge Biden’s lawful election.
Their actions are Trumps’ last attempt to strip Biden of electoral votes when Congress meets in a joint session to officially accept each state’s electoral vote tally. What has historically been a ceremonial procedure, having taken less than 30 minutes at times, may now drag on for a half-day or more.

Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-Mo.) challenge is not raising allegations of widespread fraud, but that Pennsylvania failed to follow their own mail-in voting rules. It’s the same claim that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court dismissed. In its ruling, the court said that the plaintiff’s request to throw out some 2.5 million mail-in ballots was made after the votes had been tallied and their preferred presidential candidate lost the state.

Trump tweeted cheerfully Sunday evening Dec. 27, “See you in Washington, DC, on January 6th. Don’t miss it.” He will inevitably lose the vote because there is still a plurality of congressional Trump supporters who do not wish to destroy the Republican Party or our election process to appease him. However, it will force every Republican in the House and Senate to go on the record affirming or denying Biden’s win. Trump has threatened to punish the Republicanswho do not support his claims when they come up for re-election.

How did we get to this place in the history of our republic? No president has ever denied that the election was lawful. No sitting president has ever refused to recognize the newly elected leader of the nation, claiming that it was impossible for them to have lost, like President Trump has claimed.

There are two underlying beliefs among Trump supporters that have sustained the lie that Trump won the election. The first belief is that all politicians lie. So, what if he does lie a bit, it’s just another politician telling lies. The Democrats are exaggerating his statements because he’s doing what we want done not what they want done. The second lie that Trump supporters believe is that the Democrats cannot be trusted to protect our freedoms since they are radical-leftists who want to convert America into a socialist country.

Let’s dive into each of these beliefs and see how they square with what we know for certain.

All Politicians Lie – So What?       

Politicians do often lie, or more likely exaggerate what they will do, or what their policies can do.  Critics have attacked both former President Barak Obama and current President Donald Trump for not telling the truth about their signature pieces of legislation, the Affordable Care Act and Build the Wall.  Each is guilty but in different degrees.

Obama said something to the effect “If you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it.” OK, so there wouldn’t be any change – right? Obama was not specific enough, at least in that quote, as to how ACA would work.

Obama was “truthful” to the extent the ACA maintained the employer-based health insurance system through which a plurality of Americans is covered.  If you add those, at the time, on Medicare, Medicaid, VA, and public employee plans, the vast majority of people would, truthfully, be able to keep what they have. Those details were explained in public by Obama’s staff and were in written form for all to observe. While that quote was inaccurate, the truth was not hidden. The details were available to the public and publicized.

In comparison, Republicans argue that Donald Trump, as a presidential candidate kept his promise that he would build a wall between our country and Mexico. He said we are in an emergency situation, however, the number of people crossing into the US from Mexico is down 90% from 2000. How do you have an emergency when the apparent threat to our security has been shrinking, not expanding? Is that a lie or just an exaggeration?

When Trump launched his presidential campaign in June 2015 he promised, “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border and I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall.” He repeated that promise at his rallies. Since his election, the southwest border wall was extended from 654 miles of primary barriers to 657 miles as of this past summer – that’s right, 3 miles.

That’s because as of late June 2020, 184 miles of dilapidated primary barriers were replaced with updated fences. And an additional twenty-nine miles of new or raised structures were built on the secondary barriers, which back up the primary walls. All-weather border patrol roads, lighting, cameras, and other surveillance technology were also added. However, Mexico has not contributed a dime to this project, while American taxpayers have contributed over $4 billion on border barrier planning and construction. Was it a lie that Mexico would pay for the wall? Or was it just an optimistic promise?

There are dozens of politicians from both parties who have made exaggerated and false promises – enough to write a very long book. However, they all were limited to specific policies, programs, and projects. It’s the second type of lie that opens the door to questioning the legitimacy of how a democracy should be governed. The cornerstone of that lie is promoting an exaggerated fear and the government’s inability to provide safety from it.

Big lies promote an existential fear and a belief that our democracy will die unless they win.            

Trump has played the fear card as adroitly as Republican Senator Joe McCarthy did in the 1950s. Both divided the nation between citizens who are enemies and those who are patriots. Enemies are labeled as communists or socialists, with liberals now being called far-left radicals who want to destroy this country. The two Georgian Republican Senators who have embraced Trump’s claims are facing two strong Democratic challengers. The Republican Senators have been running ads attacking the Democrats using these labels.

Historians and popular commentators paint McCarthy as one of the most feared and hated politicians in America. However, Yale history professor Beverly Gage points out that at the peak of his influence, McCarthy boasted a 50 percent approval rating. Gage reminds us that McCarthy, “as with Trump, not everything he said was false, but the constant slippage between truth and lies served to destabilize the national conversation and upend political norms.”

A handful of Republican senators rebuked McCarthy in 1950 in a declaration that McCarthy’s promotion of “fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear” had turned the Senate into “a forum of hate and character assassination.” The rest of the Republicans silently tolerated him, particularly after they swept to victories in both congressional offices and retook the White House in 1952.

This is a similar behavior we are witnessing today as the Republicans did far better in the congressional races than either they or the Democrats had expected in this year — despite Trump losing the presidential race. Knowing that the core pro-Trump Republican base can determine who will win their party primaries, almost all Republican members of congress have gone mute on Trump’s blatantly false statements. Consider the one he tweeted in all caps on Christmas Eve, “VOTER FRAUD IS NOT A CONSPIRACY THEORY”. Voter fraud is not a conspiracy theory, but Trump claiming that he won by over 7 million votes, is based on his own conspiracy theory.

The Republicans finally censured McCarthy in 1954 when they recognized that he posed a real threat to democratic institutions. He had begun accusing just about anyone of being a communist who did not agree with him, including Republicans. Unlike Senator McCarthy, who was a mere subcommittee chair holding meetings, Trump is President of the United States. He is the leader of the Republican party and holds rallies with tens of thousands of attendees.

Republican Senators did not recognize McCarthy-like behavior when Trump fired or attacked his critics, including Republican governors and senators, who did not support his accusations of election fraud. With very few exceptions, Republican congressional leadership not only refused to censure his action, but many continued to support his fantasy that he won the election.  Or, at least, they argued that he should have won if the system had worked properly.

Through his daily tweets, Trump has commandeered the national theater of politics. His supporters speak off the same script he uses when he exits the stage. Like when McCarthy was censured, Trump will say that a corrupt and self-interested Washington establishment violated the constitution by not stopping Biden from stealing the election.

Historian Gage foresees that no matter how much Trump may recede from the media, the “tens of millions of Americans whose identities and aspirations are wrapped up in …Trumpism” will continue to influence our nation’s future. She does not mention that their continued influence will depend on sustaining and spreading the belief that our democracy is dying. It is a belief that is shared by both the far right and the far left.  The far-right argues that Biden stole the election. The far-left believes elections are not worth the effort to participate in. Both move toward believing that no federal election is fair.

There is an element of truth in recognizing that there is no perfectly fair election. But to argue that all elections are corrupt and stolen because they are unfair is to promulgate a lie, as much a lie as Russia’s Putin claim that his nation’s elections are democratic. Civic leaders and politicians across the spectrum must not succumb to ignoring the facts and replacing them with unsubstantiated beliefs. They must speak out and protect our election process and not toss it out when their candidate does not win. That is the only way to sustain our democracy.

As Hannah Arend wrote in her Origins of Totalitarianism, people become subject to tyranny when they can no longer distinguish “between fact and fiction” and when the differences between true and false no longer exist.

Is a fascist movement developing here?

Written by Nick Licata | 12/17/20


 

 

After Joe Biden won the presidential election, there has been a proliferation of right-wing Trump rallies. Is this a movement to discredit our democratic institutions?

ProudBoys
Proud Boys march during a rally for President Trump on Saturday in Washington. (Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post)

Since the media declared that former Vice President Joe Biden won the presidential election, right-wing Trump rallies have declared that the election was a fraud and Trump’s win was stolen from him.

Historian Timothy Snyder in his book “On Tyranny” argues that institutions preserve our decency. They do not protect themselves. They fall if citizens do not protect them.

The Trump-appointed Director of Cybersecurity, Chris Krebs, was fired because he announced the vote across the nation “was the most secure in American history.” Krebs has since filed a lawsuit charging that Trump has initiated a campaign of intimidation, retaliation, and threats against Republicans.

Those are the Republicans who as state officials administered their elections. Trump attacked them for refusing to back up his unsubstantiated claims of massive election fraud. The national leadership of the Republican Party did not step forward to protect them. They were silent.

Trump, as president of our democratic republic, should be our national leader in citizenship. Instead, he has repeatedly refused to recognize that every judge he has asked to overthrow Biden’s victory, including judges he appointed as true conservatives, has concluded that his claims of fraud are baseless.

A couple of thousand pro-Trump anti-election protestors marched and rallied in Washington D.C. on Saturday, Dec. 12, two days before the electoral college made the president’s loss official. Washington Post journalists described them as maskless rallygoers cursing the Supreme Court, President-elect Joe Biden, and even Fox News for not recognizing Trump’s victory. Trump tweeted his support of the demonstration, “Wow! Thousands of people forming in Washington (D.C.) for Stop the Steal. Didn’t know about this, but I’ll be seeing them! #MAGA.”

Police estimate that the crowd included about 700 Proud Boys wearing their colors of yellow and black, with a number of them dressed in body armor and helmets. Trump had previously asked them to “stand down and stand by,” hinting that he may need them to engage in some sort of physical struggle to assist him. The Proud Boys were reported to have marched through downtown in military-like rows, shouting “move out” and “1776!” At some point, they burned a “Black Lives Matter” banner belonging to the Black community’s historic Asbury United Methodist Church.

Despite the Proud Boys being accused of damaging four Black churches in DC, strong Christian beliefs appear to sustain Trump’s campaign to overturn the election. Addressing the gathering, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, the host of Infowars, spoke of God and how Joe Biden “will be removed one way or another.” Another speaker, Black right-wing podcaster David Harris Jr., said if there were a civil war, “we’re the ones with all the guns.” Harris is a devout Christian who rails against authoritarian statism, secularism, and socialism as threats to a free society.

Protestor Ruth Hillary, 58, a pastor from California, is a prime example of the spirited foot soldier in Trump’s camp. In an interview with Washington Post reporters, she said she would continue protesting and holding up her sign, “Stop the Steal”, as long as the president believes she should. If he accepts a defeat, then she would too, “But right now, this is a Godly protest.”

Trump has founded and propagated an anti-democratic populist movement that appears more loyal to him than to our democracy. His supporters repeatedly proclaim that they are simply defending our constitution. But the verbal defense of a constitution or a republic, without acknowledging that both are sustained through a stable democratic process, is not enough to avoid moving toward tyranny.

One can trace this faulty, if not devious, strategy back two thousand years when Caesar Augustus became Rome’s first emperor without ever proclaiming that he was. Instead, he took the title of first citizen, assuring the Senate that his efforts were to save the republic, not to terminate it. We know how that went. The republic died and never returned.

In the period between the two world wars, fascism was created by Benito Mussolini, who had become disillusioned with socialism. Like any ideology or “ism” there will be many competing definitions. But in the end, all ideologies have a cluster of features that describe them.

Author and professor Eco Umberto provides a list for fascism in his 1995 essay titled Ur-Fascism (Eternal Fascism). He begins by noting that fascism creates a cult of tradition which leads to a belief that there is no need for additional learning, the truth has already been spelled out. Tradition is elevated to the point of conflicting with the scientific approach of critical thinking. Using a verifiable truth to argue against a traditional but unproven truth is seen as the work of a liberal intelligentsia betraying traditional values.

Consequently, we see protestors opposed to: (1) wearing face masks to mitigate the spread of the covid-19 pandemic because it’s just like the flu; or (2) reducing industrial pollution to avoid climate change because the climate is always changing: and (3) accepting verified election results because it’s impossible that a Democrat campaigning from a basement office could get more votes than a president drawing in tens of thousands to his rallies.

Umberto sees fascism as seeking to build a consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. In other words, it is an appeal against the intruders, those who are new to our community, like immigrants, or who have been here but are seen as different, like people of color.

Those divisions easily lead to separating the general population into either deserving or undeserving communities. This is an attitude that has historically appealed to a frustrated middle class, and I would add a working-class as well, particularly when suffering an economic crisis or feeling politically humiliated. The economic crisis of the working class has been unfolding for over forty years as its members’ wealth and standard of living has at best stagnated, if not shrunk. And, who likes to be called a deplorable or an un-woke, ignorant person?

Another feature of fascism that is relevant to today’s political environment is what Umberto describes as an obsession with a plotThat would be the conspiracy of the Deep State that predates President Trump and can be traced back to the John Birch Society that saw communists everywhere, including Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The conspiracy of communists still lives on for Georgia Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler. She has repeatedly referred to her Black Democratic opponent Rev. Raphael Warnock as “radical liberal” often adding socialist to the label and accusing him of supporting communism. To the average Georgian voter, being accused as a communist is as close as it gets to being a national enemy. The Trumpite movement has been described as populist, but Umberto sees fascism as promoting popular elitism. Those that belong to it are the best citizens, those that do not are considered the enemy, whether accused of being a communist, a radical, or a liberal.

The above features that Umberto identified as conditions that could lead to a fascist movement are certainly present. Many if not most of them have been in America for a long time. But we have not before now had a significant homegrown fascist movement dramatically threatening our democracy. I think that is largely due to the durability of our citizens’   belief in our democracy. While politicians will come and go, those we like and those we don’t, we believe that the electoral system will continue to function. That is why democracies are a threat to authoritarian leaders.

A fascist movement above all opposes democracy. When the authoritarians took over Russia, Germany, and Italy, the first thing they did was to either abolish their legislative bodies and their independent judicial system or take them over with ideologically acceptable functionaries. Trump’s ability to throw out a legitimate election is hindered by not having an organization large enough and strong enough to do either. He could personally intimidate only so many Republicans.

Still, the Republican Party is currently under his sway, particularly at the federal level. So much so that 126 House Republicans signed onto an amicus brief submitted in the Supreme Court case seeking to overturn Biden’s victory. The most conservative Supreme Court in the past seventy years unanimously rejected Trump’s appeal.

As I wrote before, he will still try to overturn the popular vote when the electoral votes must be counted by Congress. And he will fail, even though his White House advisor Stephen Miller told Fox News that “an alternative” group of electors was voting in the contested states and were sending “those results to Congress.”

Trump’s final loss will not stop him from fanning opposition against our electoral process. Are his actions contributing to an emerging fascist movement? There’s not a real movement, yet. At this point, there are no organized national paramilitary groups like the Free Corps that existed in Germany after WWI, but from the beginning of our nation’s founding, there has been an anti-democratic subculture.

However, at times a political personality emerges who taps a well of discontent that cares less about how a democracy should work.  Donald Trump did it brilliantly, according to former long-time Republican strategist, Rick Wilson, author of Running Against the DevilTrump exploited the grievance culture with messages that have powered past fascist movements, “Everyone is coming to get you.” and “You will be punished for not believing the right things.”

The task of defeating fascism requires addressing these messages through understanding the problems of all communities and working with them to arrive at workable and just solutions. That approach will take determination, persistence, and time in order to sustain our democracy. These are tasks that both parties must pursue.

Trump’s Last Chance – Pence Counts the Electoral Votes

Written by Nick Licata | 11/25/2020


 

The last avenue available to Trump for winning the election is using the Electoral Count Act of 1877. This law puts Pence in the driver’s seat.

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EVAN VUCCI /  AP

Conservative journalist Geraldo Rivera told Fox News on Sunday, Nov. 22, that he had talked to President Donald Trump the previous week. He described Trump as a realist and a proud person who will finally concede once all the avenues to reversing the results of the election have been closed.

The catch, however, is that his vice president, Mike Pence, could keep one last avenue open for a Trump win. It would seemingly be legal and playing by the rules. It would also violate our democratic norms but, as I have written elsewhere, Trump’s politics discard them — to the detriment of our republic’s stability.

The last avenue available to Trump is using the Electoral Count Act of 1877. This law mandates how electoral votes are counted by Congress following a presidential election. It would allow Pence to throw the election to Trump. It would be the final ploy, as his two other strategies — court challenges and rogue Republican legislatures — are failing.

His first strategy was to get Biden’s vote count reduced through court rulings. So far, Trump’s lawsuits have failed to overturn Biden’s popular votes in any state. Trump has lost or withdrawn 22 challenges to the voting procedures in courts around the country. He has slowly retreated from pursuing legal cases in five swing states that Biden won: Nevada, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

The remaining lawsuits are likely to face the same fate as the recently decided one that challenged Pennsylvania’s election results. There, the conservative District Judge Matthew Brann — who was a former chair of the county Republican Committee and active in the Federalist Society and the National Rifle Association — wrote in his decision that Trump’s campaign had used “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations” in trying to negate the millions of Pennsylvania votes that had already been counted.

Trump’s second strategy was more convoluted and even less likely to succeed. He appealed to Republican-controlled state legislatures in key states to conclude that Biden’s majority popular vote in their state was a result of fraud and therefore not legitimate.

The Trump Campaign had hoped to replace Biden’s electors with ones supporting Trump. But Republicans in at least Michigan, Georgia, and Arizona legislatures, at this writing, have rejected Trump’s allegations of massive fraudulent voting. The leaders of these legislatures have all maintained that their elections were as fair as any in the past and that Biden’s win should be certified.

Nevertheless, these defeats have not deterred Trump from still claiming he won the election. On Monday, Nov 23, after he allowed Emily Murphy, head of the General Services Administration, to finally gave Biden access to the normal transition information that a president-elect would receive, he tweeted, “Our case STRONGLY continues, we will keep up the good fight, and I believe we will prevail!”

There is only one path left for Trump to win. It depends on the fact that Mike Pence will be the presiding officer of a joint session of both Congressional houses on Jan. 6, 2021.

His task under the Electoral Count Act is to announce the electors from each state that have been won by each presidential candidate. This procedure occurs in every presidential election and is usually a mere formality.

However, the Electoral Count Act describes how that count should proceed when there are competing slates of electors being sent to Congress from one or more states. The law has never really been tested.

Commentators throughout history have considered it “very confused, almost unintelligible,” a law that “invites misinterpretation,” its language “turgid and repetitious” and finally with central provisions that “seem contradictory.”

The best example of the act’s inability to deal with what could become a major constitutional fight is its ambiguity as to the solution when multiple slates of electors are sent from a state. In that case, the House and Senate are expected to vote separately on which slate to accept. But the two bodies may or may not agree on whether the slate certified by the governor should count or that no slate should count.

To make matters worse, the law states that in the joint session it would take only one representative and one senator to object to a state’s slate of electors. If the two bodies do not agree, it’s an open question whether the presiding officer (i.e., Pence) of the reconvened joint session could break the tie.

Other details of what is required are not spelled out in the law. For instance, if there is an objection, must there be an alternate slate of electors proposed, and who would have the standing to propose them? Could there simply be an objection asserting that no slate from a particular state be recognized due to an irreconcilable voting irregularity?

The parliamentarian could rule on these procedures, but that ruling could end up going to the Supreme Court, where conservatives hold a 6–3 majority.

The bottom line is that, if Trump truly does not care if the Republican leadership wishes him to concede defeat, he could still tie up the electoral counting process. All he needs are a couple of supporters within Congress to object to the elector slates in enough states to deny Biden 270 electoral votes.

Is this a far-fetched scenario? Perhaps, but then again, have we ever had an incumbent president string out an election when losing by such a large margin in both the popular and electoral votes? The answer is no. This would have been unthinkable. But here we are.

 

Does Esper’s Firing Imply Using the Insurrection Act?

Written by Nick Licata | Originally published 11/15/2020


 

Trump’s firing of Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, two months before leaving the White House, may mean Trump is keeping a domestic military intervention in his playbook.

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Esper publicly rebuffed President Trump’s invocation of the Insurrection Act in June. Trump wanted to use that act to justify Esper sending active-duty military troops into cities experiencing violence associated with protests. Esper’s statement, “I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act,” was counter to the president’s wish. Trump told Fox News, “Look, it’s called an insurrection. We just send them in, and we do it very easy.”

At that time, Trump was referring to the massive urban unrest that was occurring over the police killings of several Black citizens, many of whom were unarmed. Those protests and the ancillary lootings have largely disappeared. So why would Esper be fired now?

Think about it for a moment. Every military commander-in-chief must look at all options for how to battle the enemy, even if those options are never pursued. President Trump is no exception. In this instance, as he has often implied if not said, the enemy is the Democratic Party. As of this writing, he has still refused to concede defeat on the electoral battlefield. He is employing both legal and political strategies to try to retain the presidency by denying former Vice President Joe Biden the more than 270 electoral votes needed for victory.

Trump understands that he lost the popular vote by even more millions of votes than Hillary Clinton beat him by. (The spread is over 5 million ballots and counting.) Many of those folks are concentrated in the Democratic-dominated urban areas that witnessed last summer’s street protests. Should Trump’s strategies result in overturning Biden’s legitimate victory, he is not blind to the high probability that there would be massive street protests in those cities. Most of all in Washington D.C. which was the greatest anti-Trump voting city with 95% plus voting against him.

Given public anger over Trump negating Biden’s election, the chances are that those urban gatherings would witness stores being looted, buildings set on fire, and other types of physical damage. Such destruction is almost always the result of a tiny contingent of street agitators who are more intent on the direct action of destroying everything they can lay their hands on rather than pursuing more abstract long-range reforms. But these instigators provide a platform for Trump and his allies to attack the democratically elected local representatives who pursue various responses to such chaos. Trump’s solution is to simply overrule local governments’ efforts with military force.

Esper’s resistance to using the Insurrection Act to employ our national military for domestic law enforcement in our cities does not spring from liberalism. He is no liberal. Esper served as chief of staff for the very conservative Heritage Foundation. He made clear to whom he feels a loyalty to when he responded to his firing with a letter to Trump saying, “I serve the country in deference to the Constitution, so I accept your decision to replace me.” Democratic Representative Elissa Slotkin, a former Pentagon official, said in a statement that Esper’s firing may signal that Trump “wants to take actions that he believes his secretary of defense would refuse to take.”

Expecting personal loyalty from the person in charge of the Pentagon appears to be critically important to Trump. Others, besides Esper, have apparently fallen short of that expectation. Esper’s replacement, Christopher C. Miller will be the fourth Secretary of Defense since Trump came into office. Miller is seen as a straightforward soldier who has served his country admirably. But he has no experience running a massive bureaucracy.
Professionals within the Defense Department have expressed doubt that he could stand up to any of the president’s requests.

Esper’s departure was not a one-off incident. It has been followed by the departure of the top Pentagon officials overseeing policy, intelligence, and the Defense Secretary’s staff. They have been replaced by people who are considered more loyal to Trump.

The new Undersecretary of Defense for policy is Anthony J. Tata. Trump nominated him for the position last summer, but the nomination was withdrawn when even some Republican senators considered him too extreme. As recently as 2018, Tata tweeted that Barack Obama was a “terrorist leader” who did more to harm the US “and help Islamic countries than any president in history.”

Trump will be unable to stage a coup to stay in power. If he doesn’t concede by December 14, which is the date the electors meet and vote, his probability of retaining the presidency approaches zero. His only hope is that the courts, in concert with Republican state legislatures, toss out Biden’s victory. And if they did, as I said, there would certainly be major demonstrations in many cities for overturning a legitimate vote.

Trump could again try to invoke the Insurrection Act to send in troops to quell riots. It would not be the first time a president has used the act for dealing with that situation. Since the end of FDR’s time in office, George H. W. Bush did it twice, Lyndon Johnson did it four times, and John F. Kennedy once.

However, since municipal officials and state governors have not requested such assistance under Trump, doing so now could still be seen as exceeding the Act’s intention. This is what Esper determined when he told the New York Times this past June that active-duty troops in a domestic law-enforcement role “should only be used as a matter of last resort and only in the most urgent and dire of situations.”

The easiest way to avoid these scenarios is for Trump to realize that he not only didn’t win the election but that the longer he fights the election result the more he damages his own standing and his chances of running again in 2024.

As I pointed out in my Oct 21 Citizenship Politics, Trump needs to once again be a media star of his own reality show. This time the show would be titled “Watch Former President Donald Trump Become the Future 2024 President.”

The Battle Will Come After the Voting is Over!

Written by Nick Licata


Even if Biden had clearly won enough electoral votes after the November election, Trump’s attorneys are prepared to go nuclear. 

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Two recent Citizenship Politics columns dealt with the slowdown of mail-in ballots by USPS (past the deadline for them to be counted) and President Donald Trump’s strategies for capturing the electors.

The Trump Campaign will try to disqualify as many mail-in ballots as possible. Trump has personally implied through his public statements that armed civilians should monitor polling stations. Armed militias have already made statements that they will not allow the Democrats to steal the election from Trump. The public has no way of knowing the full scale of these efforts. But their intent is clearly to discourage people of color and other members of the Democrats’ base from voting.

Since a number of key states will not reach a final tally of mail-in ballots until the end of the week.  Trump may have a majority of the popular vote that’s been counted on election night — something known as the “red mirage.” Most mail-in votes will be added later in the week. Trump will say they are fraudulent and that counting them would be unlawful.

This situation drives Trump to say that the Supreme Court will decide the election. His strategy after Election Day will rely on (1) invalidating as many mail-in ballots as possible; (2) blocking enough states from certifying their electors that the election is thrown into the House of Representatives; and (3) asking the Supreme Court to rule on which slates of electors must be accepted.

If no candidate receives “a majority of the Whole number of Electors appointed” — as specified by the 12th Amendment — the House will vote on Jan. 6 among the top three candidates (probably Trump, Biden, and Libertarian Party candidate Jo Jorgensen). Each state delegation will get one vote (not one per representative). This one-state-one-vote rule is another advantage granted to rural states, in addition to those states having extra weight in the Electoral College.

At the present time, Republicans hold a majority of House delegations in 26 states. Democrats hold a majority of delegations in only 22 states, and two other states have tied delegations. If that is still true when the new House members meet on Jan. 6, the winner would be Donald Trump, 26–22, with 2 states tied and not counted.

If Biden earns a majority of electors based on each state’s popular vote, Trump’s strategy will be to hold up enough state counts in court so that a few states are barred from certifying any electors by Dec. 14, when the Electoral College convenes in state capitals.

For the sake of this discussion, let’s say Trump on Dec. 14 received 268 electoral votes while Biden received only 250. (Imagine that a state, like Pennsylvania, with 20 electoral votes was prevented by a court from appointing any electors for Biden.) Trump’s 268 electors would be fewer than 270 — an absolute majority of 538 — but his 268 would be 51.7% of the 518 electors who managed to be appointed by Dec. 14.

The Supreme Court would decide. Does “a majority of the Whole number of Electors appointed” mean the number who were legally appointed by Dec. 14 or does it mean the number who could have been appointed? With Amy Coney Barrett on the court, the conservative majority could vote 6–3 that the phrase means the number who were legally appointed by Dec. 14. Of course, they would justify their decision by saying that they took the wording of the constitution literally, i.e. they were not acting as activist judges. Trump would win the Electoral College, 268–250, or 51.7%. Even if Chief Justice John Roberts joined the liberals to make the decision only 5–4, Trump would win.

The 26 House delegations that have a majority of Republican representatives would vote on Jan. 6 to follow the Supreme Court’s ruling. Trump would be re-elected, no matter how small his popular vote was.

The voting on Jan. 6 will involve the newly elected members of Congress, not the old lame-duck members. Could Democrats flip enough US House seats on Nov. 3 to control 26 state delegations on Jan. 6?

The answer is almost certainly, “No.”

There are currently only four US states that could change from a US House delegation that is Republican-majority or tied to a delegation that is Democratic-majority or tied (assuming one seat in each state flips from R to D). Pennsylvania and Michigan currently have tied delegations. Florida has a one-seat majority for the Republicans, and Wisconsin has a two-seat Republican majority:

• Pennsylvania’s delegation is currently tied, with 9 R’s and 9 D’s. As of Oct. 21, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates only one seat in Pennsylvania as a toss-up: Rep. Scott Perry’s seat in Congressional District 10.

• Michigan’s delegation is currently tied, with 7 R’s and 7 D’s. Cook rates only one seat in Michigan as a toss-up: Rep. Justin Amash’s seat in CD 3. (Note: Amash switched from Republican to Libertarian earlier this year, but he is not running for re-election. The seat has been held by a Republican, including Amash, for more than a decade.)

• Florida’s delegation is currently majority-Republican, 14 R’s, and 13 D’s. Cook does not rate any seats in Florida as toss-ups. Therefore, none of the seats are likely to change parties.

• Wisconsin’s delegation is currently majority-Republican, 5 R’s and 3 D’s. Cook does not rate any seats in Wisconsin as toss-ups. Therefore, none of the seats are likely to change parties.

Even if the D’s somehow flipped one seat in three delegations — Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Florida — 25 states would then vote for Trump/Pence and 25 would vote for Biden/Harris. This would be a tie, producing no winner.

In that case, the Senate would cast one vote per senator (not per state) for the position of vice president. If Republicans are still a majority of senators on Jan. 6, the Senate would vote for Trump to become vice president. But Trump would immediately become president, because the office of the presidency would be vacant, due to the House’s tie vote. However, if the Senate did flip over to a 51–49 Democratic majority after the election — which would require a net gain of four seats — the new senators would be voting, and Biden would win.

As if all of this weren’t already too mind-boggling, the president of the Senate on Jan. 6 will still be Mike Pence, since his term doesn’t expire until Jan. 20. This provides Trump an opportunity to have his vice-president determine how the Senate rules will determine the electors for selecting the next vice-president.

Should Republicans retain control of the Senate, the Democratic senators could conceivably boycott the Senate vote, thereby depriving the body of the two-thirds quorum that is required by the 12th Amendment. If the House were tied, and the Senate had no quorum, neither the House nor the Senate would legally have made any decision. Most likely the Republican Senators would meet and vote anyway, claiming victory. The Supreme Court could then rule on which candidate had enough electoral votes to win.

Even if Biden had clearly won enough electoral votes after the November election, Trump’s attorneys are prepared to go nuclear with one last tactic. Before the House can formally vote to accept the Electoral College votes in January, Republican-controlled legislatures could convene November special sessions in states where he lost the popular vote. The R legislators could declare that there was “massive fraud” in a state’s mail-in ballots — for example, millions were printed and mailed by Ukraine — and appoint the legislature’s own slate of Trump electors. This is arguably permitted under the US Constitution, which provides that electors shall be appointed “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Changing the manner of elector selection after the votes have been counted might violate existing state laws, but guess who would decide on this — the Supreme Court.

Trump might lose the popular vote in five states rated “toss-up” by 270toWin’s 2020 Consensus that happen to have Republican legislatures and governors. They are Florida (29 electoral votes), Ohio (18), Georgia (16), Arizona (11), and Iowa (6). If all five legislatures acted, a total of 80 electoral votes would shift from Biden to Trump. That would be a highly controversial move. It would also require a lot of coordination among state Republican leaders. Nevertheless, it is 2020, and many unbelievable things have happened already.

Four other toss-up states have R-majority legislatures but Democratic governors. They are Pennsylvania (20), Michigan (16), North Carolina (15), and Wisconsin (10). Under the US Code (3 USC §5), governors may submit their own slate of electors by Dec. 8, 2020, if electors in a state are contested. A Democratic governor’s slate would compete with a Republican legislature’s slate when the US House votes on Jan. 6 whether to accept each state’s electors.

If Republican legislatures “went rogue” and appointed their own electors, could states with Democratic legislatures and governors play “tit-for-tat, replacing Trump electors with Biden electors? Not really, because the Democrats only control Maine that has both a Democratic-controlled legislature and a Democratic governor.

The Supreme Court would decide which slates were the legitimate ones. The conservative majority of the court could side with the legislatures’ slates. The court could also bar the US House from considering competing slates that were based on the popular vote. Trump would win a majority of electors.

With the slew of attorneys that are now working for the Trump Campaign and the Republican National Committee, the above possibilities are serious legal mechanisms that Republicans may fully intend to use. On the other hand, neither strategy would work if Biden won such a huge majority in the Electoral College that even switching the electors of several states from D to R would not get Trump re-elected.

For the good of the nation, the path to a peaceful and normal transition to a new presidency would best be secured by a Biden landslide. That would not be necessary if Donald Trump had not repeatedly claimed that fraud and cheating were the only possible reasons why he would lose.

Hold on tight for the battle that will begin on Nov. 4.

Trump’s Plan for Winning the Election in 2020 or Even 2024!

Written by Nick Licata


 

Trump began months ago executing a seven-step plan to win or at least upset the apple cart. Here is how it is playing out.

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Donald Trump plays politics as a game to win. And he never, never admits defeat. He is always victorious. He whips his mask off on the White House balcony to show that he has conquered the coronavirus pandemic. His supporters love it. Trump is the ultimate showman.
Nevertheless, the Republican party realizes that Trump may lose his re-election. Consequently, the R’s are doing some really hard work. They are registering more new voters than the Democrats are in key swing states. They also have a massive door-belling campaign to get their supporters out.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are eschewing that practice so as to not spread the pandemic. Instead, they are relying on personal phone calls and social media. Studies have shown that the Republican’s in-person contact is about three times more effective than the efforts that the Democrats are pursuing.
For Trump, that is not enough. He continues to ignore democratic norms and pushes extreme positions. At a campaign rally 12 days before Election Day, Trump called for locking up his opponent, former V.P. Joe Biden, his son Hunter and tossing Hillary Clinton into the clink for good measure. His daughter-in-law Lara Trump excuses her father-in-law’s encouraging rally attendees to chant “lock her up” as just him “having fun.”
But more important than merely inciting his supporters, Trump has a clear plan to depress the Democratic vote, to seed doubt about the election’s validity, and to ultimately force a close election to be decided by the Supreme Court or other means. If all that fails to secure a win for Trump, then what happens? Trump posed that question out loud at a recent rally, “If I lose, what do I do?”
Well, he is not going to stage a military coup. But he will call the election a sham. And be prepared to have him declare that he is a presidential candidate for the 2024 election. It is his only way of retaining his media-star stature as the Defender of the People against the Deep State. And he’ll need that mantle to help him raise funds needed to fight off the upcoming civil and criminal cases he will be facing due to his prior business practices.
In the meantime, Trump began months ago executing a seven-step plan to win or at least upset the apple cart. The results could literally see the streets filled with angry Trump supporters believing, as Trump said, the election was rigged against him. Here is how it is playing out.

Trump’s seven-step election strategy

First Step – Stop Democrats from casting their votes 

Democrats refer to this effort as voter suppression. Republicans see it as keeping our votes safe from fraud. Halting or reducing mail-in balloting is the major Republican strategy. That could affect the ability of more than a third of registered voters who said they will vote by mail this fall, according to the latest Economist/YouGov Poll. That poll also found that those voting by mail this year are more than twice as likely to be voting for Biden as for Trump.
Trump has claimed on Twitter that “mail-in ballots will lead to massive electoral fraud and a rigged 2020 election.” However, MIT found that this was not true by analyzing data collected by the very conservative Heritage Foundation. MIT’s conclusion is that over 20 years, there has been only an average of three cases per state. That works out to about 0.00006 percent of the total votes that were cast.
To address the perceived danger of voting fraud, Republican governors have set up hurdles that include the ballots lack a signature or a witness, or that the ballots did not arrive by an arbitrary time.

Second Step – Sow doubts about the validity of the election results

Trump openly questions our electoral process. He has insisted without evidence that the 2020 election will be rigged against him. At a campaign stop in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, he told his supporters, “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if this election is rigged.”
The Russian state media and its proxy websites are also bolstering that perception, according to a Department of Homeland Security intelligence bulletin. The Russian message is that the vote-by-mail processes and alleged lack of transparency are creating vast opportunities for voter fraud.
To further instill distrust in the election process he is promoting an image of Democrats wanting to destroy our democracy. He has turned to call Democrats fascists. He accused former V.P. Joe Biden of looking to “replace American freedom with left-wing fascism.”
His basic message emboldens far-right movements such as QAnon. Trump claims not to know about the group, which says that Washington harbors Satanists who are protected by a “deep state” that Trump is fighting against. Trump has not denounced the group, instead of calling its followers “people that love our country.”

Third Step – Create chaos in the election process

Creating chaos is not an articulated Trump strategy, but chaos will likely result from his actions. For instance, in front of a TV audience of millions, Trump made a debate-stage call-out for volunteers to stand to watch at voting polls.
The Republican Party has promised to recruit 50,000 volunteers in 15 contested states to monitor polling places. According to an Atlantic article, they will be ready to challenge voters they deem suspicious-looking. Trump campaign spokeswoman, Thea McDonald, guarantees that “all Democrat rule-breaking is called out. And if fouls are called, the Trump campaign will go to court to enforce the laws.”
A number of states are open carry states — meaning that individuals are allowed to carry an unconcealed weapon in public. Virginia is such a state. In the 2016 election, a Trump supporter stood outside a Loudoun County polling place with a handgun in his waistband, offering sample Republican ballots to voters. Election officials said the man broke no laws.
Trump campaign officials say that they will not intimidate voters and that their volunteers will be trained. But who will be training them? In most states, poll monitors must be registered with state authorities. With Trump seeding claims that the election is going to be rigged, suspicions are running high among his supporters. What happens if one of them walks off the street and demanding to be a poll watcher, without any prior registration or non-partisan training and is refused by a poll worker. Given Trump’s inciting distrust in the electoral system, it’s not likely going to be a friendly chat.
Finally, Trump has advised his supporters on Twitter to vote twice.  He said, “Go to your polling place to see whether or not your mail-in vote has been tabulated (counted). If it has you will not be able to vote & the mail-in system worked properly. If it has not been counted, VOTE (which is a citizen’s right to do).” It is highly likely that official poll workers will not have that data available. Some states, such as Wisconsin and Florida, do not begin counting any ballots until polls close on Election Day. Some Trump voters will vote twice and if caught, their vote will be tossed. If that happens, expect Trump’s attorneys to file a lawsuit.

Fourth Step – Have the House choose the President

The House of Representatives chooses the next president if neither presidential candidate receives the 270 electoral votes needed to win, or if some legal dispute that is not clearly decided by the Supreme Court prevents determining a clear winner.
It has only happened three times in our country’s past, and all were before 1900. However, it could happen again. University of Virginia’s Center for Politics noted that if Trump won all the states currently rated as a toss-up, it would result in a tie.
If the election were thrown into the House, each state delegation would have a single vote, regardless of how many representatives a state may have. Republicans currently have a majority in 26 state delegations. Democrats are a minority with 22 delegations. However, the House delegates casting the votes for each state would be those elected into office this November, not those currently sitting in the House. 2020 House elections could be even more important than the Senate races!
It should be noted also that the 12th Amendment requires a quorum of two-thirds of the states being present in the House in order for the vote to be taken. If the Democrats’ 22 delegations didn’t attend, the House could not vote. In that case, the Senate decides who becomes vice president, with one vote per senator.
These scenarios are so steeped in procedural minutia, that it is apparent why Trump has so far dismissed going to a House vote. It would have to be a last-ditch effort. As long as Judge Amy Coney Barrett is voted onto the Supreme Court, there is no apparent need for him to promote a House vote as a viable plan.

Fifth Step – Reassign a state’s electoral delegates from Biden to Trump

The most precarious strategy for Trump to pursue would be to have Republican legislators or other elected officials in several swing states appoint Trump-friendly electors to the Electoral College. Barton Gellman’s article in the Atlantic explores this option in detail. He notes that states are not constitutionally required to appoint electors based on the popular vote. Trump’s campaign could convince state legislators that the popular vote was fraudulent, justifying the legislature itself appointing its own slate of electors.
The Atlantic notes that there are ways to keep Republican legislators from appointing delegates to Trump if he did not win a state’s popular vote. Democratic governors or secretaries of state may nullify the legislators’ actions by certifying the popular vote. Alternatively, a slate of Democratic electors could band together and challenge the plan by certifying their own legitimacy.
In the six swing states that have Republican-majority legislatures, both Florida and Arizona have Republican governors. To add a level of complexity, the Arizona secretary of state, who oversees the state’s elections, is a Democrat. Those internal state divisions could result in two different slates of electoral delegates being submitted to Congress for final approval. That could put pressure on the Supreme Court to determine which list would be accepted.
This situation brings us to the final step in Trump’s plan to secure the election: give the deciding power to the Supreme Court. Which will have six conservative justices, three of whom he has appointed.

Sixth Step – Clutter the courts with filings to force a Supreme Court decision

All of the above steps open the door for the election results in battleground states to be challenged in the courts. As of a month ago, Trump and the Republican National Committee already have legal teams involved in more than 40 lawsuits. The number is growing rapidly. The Democrats are playing catch-up, litigating 30-plus lawsuits in at least 17 states.
Politico reports that “Republicans are preparing prewritten legal pleadings that can be hurried to the courthouse the day after the election, as wrangling begins over close results and a crush of mail-in ballots.” It is clear that the authenticity of mail-in ballots and the deadlines for mail-in ballots to be received and counted will be at the heart of most Republican challenges.
Conflicting interpretations of applying the Constitution to the election procedures in various states could extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day. That period of time could be shortened if the Supreme Court intervened. It is likely that with so many lawsuits there will be multiple court jurisdictions making conflicting decisions.
While the Supreme Court often refers to decisions back to the local courts to decide on an issue, that won’t happen in this instance. The justices will have to make a decision.
Or perhaps they could issue a decision that punts the actual final decision to the House of Representatives by claiming that the Constitution gives the authority to select a president to them. That might be how strict “constitutionalists,” such as judge Amy Coney Barrett and fellow justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, might decide. If the court made a decision after the elections for U.S. Representatives are certified, the winner would be apparent by which party controls the most state delegation.
One final note on how the Supreme Court might be influenced by Judge Barrett. She worked on the Bush v. Gore case in 2000, helping Bush’s legal team retrieve and complete thousands of absentee ballot request forms on which voter-registration information was missing. The Republicans back then were trying to keep voters from being disenfranchised. Would that prior court decision provide a precedent for Barrett to determine that ballots with minor procedural elements missing should be counted? The Trump attorneys are expected to oppose counting them.

Seventh Step – Election lost, and a candidate is reborn

If there is a landslide vote for Biden, Trump may be forced to recognize that he has no chance of overturning enough votes to secure the election. More importantly, the Republicans may come to that conclusion as well.  Other scenarios might also lead to the same conclusion, such as a House vote or a Supreme Court decision.
Finally, if none of those events occur, he could contest the election right up until the inauguration. That might just be a bridge too far for a number of Republicans in congress to cross. They could decide it’s time to save the party rather than Trump.
However, Trump could turn his final act in this play into the start of another performance. If he were to announce that he would be a presidential candidate in 2024, he would certainly capture national headlines. He could follow in the steps of Grover Cleveland and be the second president in history to serve two non-consecutive terms. If he won in 2024, he would take office at the age of 78, which is how old Joe Biden will be if he wins and takes office next year.
Most importantly, it would allow Trump to use his greatest resource. No, it’s not his money. It’s his die-hard base of supporters. Pew Research Center estimated that one-in-five adult Twitter users in the U.S. follow Trump’s personal account. He could use them as leverage, not against the Democrats but in opposition to the Republican “establishment” if they stray from Trump’s policies. For those that do, he could threaten to support a primary challenger.
What would he want from the remaining Congressional Republicans? Help with media coverage and with funds to fight off the impending civil lawsuits and criminal charges that he has postponed since gaining high office. No longer being President exposes his business empire to these coming legal battles. Without the Justice Department protecting him he may find it leading the charge to force him, his institutions, and associates to release incriminating documents.
If he can retain his following, Trump can once again be a media star of his own reality show — former President becoming the future President. Stay tuned and watch how he does it!

Democrats have been a minority on the Supreme Court since 1970

Written by Nick Licata | Originally published 10/11/20


 

The Senate Judiciary Committee begins hearings Monday, Oct. 12, on the appointment of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Her seat on the court will solidify its already very conservative majority.

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Photo by Rachel Cooper, “The “Authority of Law” marble statue by sculptor James Earle Fraser on the steps of the Supreme Court Building.

National polls have shown that most citizens do not wish her, or anyone, to be appointed until after the presidential election. A few Democrats have argued that if Barrett is appointed, seats should be added to the Supreme Court to balance its philosophical views.

President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence both asked their Democratic opponents in the recent debates whether they would pack the court, presumably with liberals. Both former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris danced around the issue, never answering the question. They should have told the truth: The court is already packed — with conservatives.

In fact, in every year since 1970, the majority of Supreme Court justices have been Republican appointees. Since the beginning of Chief Justice Warren Burger’s court until the death of Justice Ruth B. Ginsberg, there have been 17 Republican appointed-justices and 8 Democratic appointed-justices sitting on the Supreme Court.

 At no time was there a majority of Democratic justices on the court to write its majority decision. By going to the web link for each of the last three Chief Justices, you can see those numbers.

In addition, the last four Supreme Court chief justices have been politically active Republicans appointed by Republican presidents:

• Chief Justice Earl Warren (1953 to 1969), was the Republican governor of California and Thomas Dewey’s vice-presidential running mate.
• Chief Justice Warren Burger (1969 to 1986), played a crucial role at the 1952 Republican National Convention to get Dwight D. Eisenhower the presidential nomination.
• Chief Justice William Rehnquist (1986 to 2005), was a legal advisor to Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater.
• Chief Justice John Roberts (2005 to current) served in Ronald Reagan’s and George H. W. Bush’s administrations in the Office of the White House Counsel.

You couldn’t select more-partisan chief justices.

When Trump warns the voters that Democrats would “pack” the court with liberal judges, he is basically saying he’s against the court sustaining liberal laws. But which ones? The three Republican-controlled Supreme Courts under Burger, Rehnquist, and Roberts have decided in favor of some major liberal issues.

Burger’s court with its Roe v. Wade decision recognized a broad right to privacy that prohibited states from banning abortions. They also unanimously rejected Nixon’s invocation of executive privilege in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Trump and some of the current Supreme Court justices have indicated they would not have supported those decisions.

President Ronald Reagan’s appointment of William Rehnquist as Chief Justice was approved with divided Democratic support in the Senate, despite his role as the most conservative member of the Burger Court. Times were different then. Qualifications played a greater role than ideology. The Rehnquist Court was more conservative than Burger’s, as evidenced by its decisions limiting access to abortion (while still allowing it). On the liberal side, they overturned a prior court decision by ruling that intimate consensual sexual conduct was protected under the Fourteenth Amendment.

John Roberts’ nomination as Chief Justice was approved by the full Senate, 78-22, with half of the Democrats voting in favor. It was considered a narrow vote at the time, but subsequent confirmation votes make it look like a landslide. The New York Times describes the Roberts Court as the most conservative since the 1940s. Nevertheless, a few liberal bills have received majority decisions.

The most controversial ruling upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. Engendering more heat, the court also proclaimed that same-sex couples had a right to marry and that businesses cannot discriminate against LGBT people in matters of employment.

However, conservative decisions made thus far by the Roberts Court—and by prior courts under the two former chief justices—far outweigh the liberal ones. Often the more-liberal decisions were reached on a 5-to-4 vote. The addition of judge Barrett would make the Roberts Court even more rigid than it has been to date. So, it is inevitable that the court will interpret laws from the most conservative point of view possible. Even the few liberal remnants from prior conservative court decisions will be subject to further truncating.

How did this situation arise? There are a number of theories. One of the more meticulous explanations is provided by Prof. Nancy MacLean in her book Democracy in Chains. It details the influence of billionaires, like the Koch brothers, who have shaped our judicial system to their liking. They fund networks of organizations to oppose federal interventions that would place commonwealth concerns above individual liberties. Hence, they support states’ rights and legal philosophies that do not interpret laws in the context of modern social and economic problems. Justices that treat the constitution as a tool to navigate our current conditions are labeled as “activist judges.”

Quinta Jurecic and Susan Hennessey of The Lawfare Institute make an additional point. Writing in The Atlantic, they accuse Republicans of timing voluntary retirements of Republican-appointed justices “to effectively bequeath seats to their political party.” Sounds like a cool gimmick, but the pattern is not readily apparent. Two of the last three Republican-appointed justices that retired voluntarily were replaced by liberal Democrats. The exception was Samuel Alioto replacing Sandra Day O’Connor in 2006.

The current composition of the Supreme Court derives from how the Republican Party has slowly adopted an ideological litmus test to appointing and confirming justices. This did not occur overnight. Nominees from both parties had generally reflected a liberal or conservative approach. But within that approach, there was much variation. Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed a variety of justices. Hugo Black advocated a textualist reading of the United States Constitution, while Felix Frankfurter advocated judicial restraint in the judgments of the court. Both approaches are widely supported by Republicans.

Republican presidents, likewise, used to appoint people who were within the Republican fold but were broad-minded justices first. As a result, Chief Justice Earl Warren arranged a unanimous vote for the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which declared that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Right-wing reactionaries began an “Impeach Earl Warren” campaign over his refusal to support segregation.

Accusing some Democrats of wanting to enlarge the court with liberals is true. Yes, they would like to follow in the footsteps of the conservatives in shaping the courts more to their liking. But at this moment in history, if Democrats did expand the court, the result is most likely going to be similar to what FDR experienced. Even with the Democrats controlling both Congressional houses by huge majorities, and FDR being a popular president, the public frowned on making such a jolting structural change.

Republicans have been able to reshape the philosophical orientation of our federal courts because the organizing effort has been underway for decades.
That doesn’t mean Democrats cannot still make changes. They should recognize that they need to learn from the Republicans, who provide an intellectual rationale for conservative justices. Liberal justices need one as well. A rationale that is open, not closed — one that can provide guidance, without requiring loyalty to any one creed.

Democrats believe their philosophy will help Americans across the political, economic, and racial spectrums. They must not apologize for embracing this.

The Republicans embrace conservatism. But Democrats fear embracing liberalism because the very word has been so consistently attacked by the Republicans. Democrats seem to be searching for another label, such as progressive, social democrat, populist, or whatever. The label doesn’t matter so much as the ability to explain it in simple terms. Democrats must believe in it and have the courage to openly present and defend it.

 

Could the Covid-19 virus Delay Barrett’s Confirmation?

Written by Nick Licata | Originally published 10/4/20


 

The push for the Senate’s confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett may be impacted by the pandemic.

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Virus-infected Sen. Tillis meeting with Judge Barrett

Sen. Mitch McConnell has delayed the convening of the full Senate until Oct. 19 because three Republican Senators have tested positive for the Covid-19 virus. But he is pushing ahead with Barrett’s confirmation hearing scheduled for Oct. 12.
Is it now possible that the Covid-19 virus could do what the Democrats can’t do—fatally delay the nomination of President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett?

It depends. Let’s see what it would take.

SCENARIO ONE

For the Republicans to confirm Barrett as scheduled, she would have to test negative on the Covid-19 virus up to and during Senate Judicial Committee hearings. If she tested positive, she could still be interviewed remotely. However, the optics of her not being present in the Senate committee room and just appearing on a screen is not good for the Republicans. It would provide ammunition to the Democrats’ charge that this is an unnecessarily rushed endeavor to bypass public input. Already, over 60% of those polled agree with this charge.

It’s unlikely that Barrett will test positive. According to Washington Post sources, she had already tested positive last summer. Neither she nor the White House, however, have released a statement confirming that.

Since the time she recovered from her infection—if, in fact, she had one—she’s regularly tested as negative. For her to test positive again would mean she’s either been reinfected or the first test was a false positive. Both conditions are statistically unlikely. Still, Barrett has been on the Hill at least three times during October’s first week, meeting with roughly 30 senators in one-on-one meetings to discuss her nomination. If she wasn’t wearing a mask for those closed room meetings, she could have been infected.

Also, at the Rose Garden reception for her nomination on Sat., Sept. 26, Barrett (along with the majority of attendees) was not masked most of the time nor practicing social distancing. She greeted many attendees in a reception line. At least six of the participants have since tested positive, including Republican Senators Mike Lee of Utah and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.

SCENARIO TWO

Both senators sit on the Judiciary Committee, which is scheduled to begin hearings on the Barrett nomination on Oct. 12. Republican staff has said they expect the committee’s opening statements, questions, and testimony from outside witnesses to last three or four days.

The public health agency CDC recommends that someone who has tested positive and is asymptomatic should isolate for 10 days after their symptoms began. The agency recommends a more stringent 14-day quarantine period for those who have been in contact with an infected person but do not have confirmed infections.

If those guidelines are applied, Lee and Tillis would isolate for 10 days from Oct. 2. That was the date they announced they were infected. Sen. Lindsey Graham, the chair of the Judiciary Committee, said that they would be able to attend the committee hearing on Barrett’s confirmation because it starts ten days later on the 12th.

It’s lucky for them they’re not professional baseball players. The baseball leagues require players to receive two tests showing they’re negative after their 10-day period of isolation. There is apparently no such concern for infecting fellow elected officials.

Senators who’ve been in contact with the infected Lee and Tillis may choose to adhere to the 14-day quarantine period. If they are on the Judiciary Committee, they would be limited to participating virtually.

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, have asked to delay Barrett’s hearing. They believe a virtual committee meeting will set a dangerous precedent for the Senate. As expected, the Republicans have rebuffed their request.

But here’s the unknown factor: The actual committee vote is scheduled for the Judiciary Committee on the 22nd. By that date, if two more Republicans on the committee are infected and quarantined, the committee could not vote out a majority recommendation to confirm, assuming that all the Democrats on the committee vote against it.

That might not stop a full Senate vote, but it could delay such a vote past Election Day. Should Joe Biden be confirmed as the winner of the election before the final vote is taken on Barrett’s confirmation, increased public pressure not to confirm she might persuade some Republicans to change their minds.

Since Trump intends to challenge Biden’s election all the way up to the Supreme Court, a delayed SCOTUS decision might push a confirmation vote into the next Congressional session.

SCENARIO THREE

There’s one other Covid-19 scenario:  If both parties are hit with Covid-19 absences, the Republicans could be denied a full Senate quorum to confirm Barrett. Senate rules currently do not allow for remote voting.

An analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service explains how quorum works in the Senate. The Constitution states that “a Majority of each [House] shall constitute a quorum to do business….” The Senate presumes that it is complying with this requirement until a Senator “suggests the absence of a quorum.” The Senate cannot resume its business until a majority of senators respond to a quorum call by the Senate Clerk. If a quorum fails to be reached, the Senate adjourns or sends out the sergeant of arms to secure the attendance of enough senators to constitute a quorum.

Now here’s a scenario that could work for the Democrats stopping Barrett’s confirmation. It would require that at least three Republican senators are absent. That would reduce their number to 50 from 53 Republicans being present. That may not be too much of a stretch. Forty-eight senators are over the age of 65, which puts them into the high-risk category of becoming ill or succumbing to the Covid-19 virus.

If the Republicans have only 50 members present, and all but one Democrat is absent, the quorum rule could come into play. The one Democrat on the Senate floor would ask for a roll call to determine if there are 51 senators present. The reason for the need of that one Democrat is that if there were none present, then it is not expected that any Republican would ask for a quorum. And without the ask, the Senate could proceed to conduct its business. Once the request is made, the Democrat could leave, not answering the call. Do the math and see if they then have a quorum. The vice president only votes to break a tie, not to create a quorum.

All of the above conditions are dependent on at least one “if.” But “ifs” do happen. Who would have expected that President Trump would have contracted the virus so close to the election? So, preparing for “if” situations, may not be a fantasy but preparation for a possible opportunity.

RBG’s replacement will cut Civil Rights for Women

Written by Nick Licata | Originally published 9/27/20


 

Senate Republicans discard their principles and rally religious anti-abortion voters to re-elect them.

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In Republicans’ rush to appoint a new justice to the Supreme Court, the first casualty was their prior commitment to honor the will of the people.

Both Senator Mitch McConnell (KY), who is the majority leader in charge of the Senate calendar, and Lindsey Graham (SC), the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which handles Supreme Court nominees, embraced hypocrisy. The two old pros stopped the Senate from even holding a hearing on President Obama’s court appointee, Garland Merrick, when the nomination was eight months before a presidential election.

In effect, McConnell and Graham undermined the trust that citizens should have that Congress will govern fairly and honorably. That was their first blow to a stable, democratic republic. The second blow will be landed if the Trump nominee sits on the Supreme Court. Why? Because our nation will move one more step away from being a nation of rational, secular laws, toward a regime ruled by the constraints of religious beliefs.

The Republicans’ motivation may not be so much adherence to a moral doctrine as a personal interest in maintaining political power. They’ve watched how Donald Trump has obtained and used power. Now, to be sure, Trump isn’t a religious person. Then again, neither was Elmer Gantry. But they both used the force of organized religion to get what they wanted. In Trump’s case, it is winning votes and elections. Particularly as he is promising to end abortions.

A core of religious voters, consolidated within the evangelical movement and the Catholic Church, believes that women are sinners if they have an abortion. God will punish them. But the persuasive force of religion is not enough to actually stop women from controlling their own bodies. These churchgoers need the power of government to stop doctors from safely conducting abortions.

If the religious right can impose laws that stop or constrain that activity, many women will go to non-professional abortionists, who operate in garages or basements. As was often the case in the 1950s, many will also wind up in an emergency room for botched abortions. Some politicians champion that era as the best time for all Americans. That is a reactionary belief. It turns the clock way back, unlike conservatives who just don’t want it to go forward.

Republicans lead the push to place an anti-abortionist on the Supreme Court

Let’s examine Graham and McConnell’s re-election races.

Graham easily won his last three Senate races by double-digit margins. He had originally been considered a moderate conservative by both Democrats and Republicans. Initially, he called Donald Trump a “race-baiting xenophobic bigot,” but now refers him to as “my new best friend.” That may because Trump won South Carolina by 14% over Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Currently, Trump leads Joe Biden by 6% among likely voters in the state. Meanwhile, Graham is statistically tied with his Democratic challenger, Jaime Harrison in the latest polls. Just 3% of voters say they are unsure who they’re going to vote for on Nov. 3. Graham is borrowing scare tactics from Trump to either pull out more of his base or pull that thin slice of undecideds over to him.

Using Trumpian hyperbole, Graham calls Harrison a radical, when the Democrat is in fact a moderate. Fanning the flames of fear, Graham said that if the Democratic Party controls Congress and the Presidency, “They’ll pack the Supreme Court.” However, with 15 of the last 19 justices having been appointed by Republicans, we actually have a court that’s been packed with Republican appointees.

Both Graham and Trump need to pull out their strongest base of supporters: the white evangelicals. Trump received 82% of this group’s vote in 2016, and that same percentage still support him today. Evangelicals make up 35% of South Carolina’s population. They are the most anti-abortion of all major religious faiths. Sixty-three percent believe that abortion should be illegal. Getting a committed jurist on the Supreme Court who holds that belief could only help Graham with those voters.

McConnell is not in as tight a race as Graham. A poll in the summer showed him ahead of his Democratic opponent, former Marine fighter pilot Amy McGrath, by only a couple of percentage points. But the most recent poll this month shows him leading by 15 points. McConnell has hit McGrath with TV ads claiming that she supports abortion in the ninth month of pregnancy. This twists something McGrath did say: “I don’t think the government should be involved in deciding on a woman’s body.”

Those who demand anti-abortion laws often interpret a response like McGrath’s as supporting late-term abortions. The most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report found that only 1.2% of abortions in the U.S. were performed at or after 21 weeks of pregnancy. To counter McConnell’s accusation, McGrath made clear that she is “opposed to late-term abortions (except when it comes to issues of the life of the mother).”

Ardent anti-abortion evangelicals make up 49% of Kentucky’s population. So McConnell’s ads may soon be presenting him as the person who confirmed enough reactionary justices to the Supreme Court to finally revoke if not practically stop access to abortions.

Mitt Romney (R-UT), who is at times a Trump critic and was called a moderate conservative, showed that he too wants to get back to the abortion prohibitions of the ’50s. Although he supported Roe v. Wade in 1994, he’s moved since his first presidential bid in 2007 to believing “we should overturn Roe v. Wade.” He once said he would be “delighted” to sign a bill as president that would outlaw abortion. Although Utah has relatively few evangelicals, 62% of Utah’sresidents are Mormons. They are even more anti-abortion than evangelicals, with 70% of Mormons opposed to abortion. Romeny’s term is not up this November, but supporting Trump’s nominee will certainly help him win re-election.

Many Republican Senators are from states with enough evangelicals to swing almost any statewide election — if they come out to vote. According to the Cook Political Report, two Senate Republicans are in toss-up elections in states with high percentages of evangelicals: Sen. Joni Ernst in Iowa (28%) and Sen. Thom Tillis in North Carolina (35%). Both of them joined Mitchell and Graham in chucking their previous statements to oppose appointing a new justice in a presidential election year. Now they want the new Supreme Court vacancy filled before the Nov. 3 election. They are counting votes and they know whose votes to get out in their state.

Two senators in particular, whom The Hill describes as “two rising GOP stars with White House aspirations” are competing to be the leading executioner of the Roe v. Wade decision. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) wants explicit evidence from a nominee that Roe v. Wade was just plain wrong. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) just wants to get rid of the decision. Both come from states with a significant evangelical voter base. Thirty-six percent of Missouri residents are evangelicals. In Arkansas, the percentage is 46%. Cotton is seen as a solid winner for his re-election, and Hawley is not up this fall. But if they do aspire to the White House, Trump showed them the power the white evangelicals have to help them capture the Republican Party’s nomination.

An unintended consequence may unfold for the Republican Senate

As the Republicans rush to take the politically correct religious position on abortion, they might just lose control of the Senate. It’s not a stretch to see how likely that is when you look at how the numbers add up.

First, Trump, may not be much help to Senators in retaining their seats. Although he’s repeatedly accused the media and the Democrats of being the enemy of America, many voters may consider him to be. His job approval rating at this point in his presidency is lower than that of all of his recent predecessors except George H.W. Bush. And his disapproval rating is not statistically different from Bush’s, being about 59%. Bush lost his re-election by a margin of 5.6 points to Bill Clinton. Joe Biden has held a steady 6-point lead over Trump in polling of likely voters since February.

A major hurdle that the Republicans face is that not a heck of a lot of folks is undecided on who to vote for. At this point in the election cycle, usually, around 15% of the population still has not decided how to vote. This year, it’s less than half that: about 6%.

The push by Republican Senators to seat an anti-abortion judge could swing the sliver of still-undecided women and men over to Biden’s camp. Protecting the right to have an abortion has been supported by the majority of Americans for over two decades.

Reviewing its polling data, the Gallup Organization found that at no time since 1993 has less than 50% of the populace supported abortion as “legal with some restrictions.” Currently, the figure stands at 50%. Over that same time period, support for abortion as “legal in all circumstances” has ranged between 21% and 33%. Today, the number is 29%. Meanwhile, those who support making abortion “illegal in any circumstance” has floated between 12% and 22%. It currently stands at only 20%.

Senate Republicans are demanding that the next Supreme Court justice side with the smallest slice of the populace on the abortion issue. Will the freedoms of all Americans be defined by a religious minority?

Under our democracy, every religion is protected to practice freely. But that does not give churches the right to define how others must behave. Despite this, Republican Senators making a play for evangelical, Mormon, and conservative Catholic votes cannot afford to upset those faithful few. If Republican Senators wish to keep their jobs, they need Fox News watchers to see them trying to get Trump’s nominee, federal judge Amy Coney Barrett, to commit to overturning Roe v. Wade.

However, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), has stated that any justice who says “I believe that Roe v. Wade should be overturned,” should be disqualified. She argues that “It’s not just on abortion. It’s on anything that could be pending before the court like that.” Could that simple civics argument sway a couple of Republicans that government and religion should not be commingled on the Supreme Court?

There is some irony that the Democratic Party—the Party of Hope, the party of easy-going liberals—may have nothing to play but the “fear” card. You know, the one that Trump slams on the podium in every speech he gives.

But the fear is real this time if the Republican Party succeeds in establishing the most reactionary Supreme Court since the Dred Scott decision of 1857. That cruel ruling basically said to a freed slave in the North, you are still someone’s property and you are still a slave if you go back to the South. It precipitated the conditions that led to Abraham Lincoln winning the Presidency. Those 19th-century Supreme Court judges could be considered “constitutionalist,” because the Constitution did not recognize slaves as citizens with rights. Just as it does not explicitly recognize women having the right to access abortion. Barrett is already being hailed as a “constitutionalist” jurist.

This time, it will be a Supreme Court telling all women that they have to conform to the morals of a religion they may not belong to. The state will now enforce those religious views on everyone.

It will also be a Supreme Court that makes working families lose their newly acquired health coverage. Trump’s new appointee will likely vote to pull the plug on the coverage provided by the Affordable Care Act. Now, millions could once again face financial ruin paying medical bills. Even though Trump promised more than three years ago to provide a new health plan that would be much better, he has provided nothing.

These are fearful living conditions to return to. The Democrats will certainly highlight them to the voters.

There are still many moving parts as Election Day approaches. No one really knows what will determine the outcome. What is certain is that the Republican Party, with its Freedom Caucus in the lead, has declared that our highest court in the land must not allow women the freedom to decide how they can live.

And, that’s how you Make America Great Again?

Citizenship – Bridging Individualism & Community to Sustain our Democracy

Written by Nick Licata | Originally published 9/17/20


Citizenship should support a democratic republic that protects individuals’ freedoms and the community’s welfare. We need it to avoid another civil war.

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The U.S. stands out since its creation as championing the rights of all individuals, as proclaimed in the Declaration that Jefferson wrote for the new nation. Always clever, Jefferson substituted “pursuit of happiness” for “possessing property” to cast a wider net.

Although initially those who did not own enough property, or were women or Jews, were deprived of the vote by state governments. Enslaved blacks, of course, were not even considered citizens — they were someone else’s property.

Still, America’s revolution, which championed individual freedoms, can be seen as the spark in the U.S. for abolishing slavery and guaranteeing women the right to vote.

Today, defending individual freedom has been used to defend the “right not to wear a mask,” ignoring the fact that its absence may result in your fellow citizens being infected with the coronavirus. Others claim the right to possess an assault rifle, which is solely designed to kill people.

For some citizens, concern for the welfare of the larger community is too abstract a notion to compensate for losing such personal freedoms. That is the tension between an individual’s freedom and the community’s welfare.

Progressive-Democrat Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, in her book, Use the Power You Have coined the derisive term “individual supremacy.” It describes an attitude that “rejects compassion in favor of fear of others,” and pits “individual needs versus what is best for the whole communities”. She believes such a perspective “stops us from thinking about how we are linked” and the responsibility we have to each other to tackle big issues such as climate change.

Trump-Conservative Sean Hannity, Fox News’ lead political commentator, attacks leftists in his book Live Free or Die, for “decreeing what kind of straws you can drink from, what kind of lightbulbs you can use, and what kind of power your home can use.” He does not see these individual acts contributing to climate change and causing any harm to the larger community. Such regulations that limit our behavior are unacceptable to him and others.

But Hannity does favor promoting our nation being built upon a community of Christians that require individuals to adopt their values. He fondly quotes the book, The Light and the Glory: 1492-1793 (God’s Plan for America) in describing how our nation’s founders were “chosen by God for a specific purpose: … rediscovering God’s plan to join them together by His Spirit in the common cause of advancing His Kingdom,” and to “operate not as lone individualists, but in covenanted groups.”

The difference in how Jayapal and Hannity frame responsible individual rights to a larger community would seem to be unbreachable. Nevertheless, some folks are leading an effort to redefine citizenship as a means to find some common ground between these opposing forces — before they are resolved on a battleground, as happened in 1860.

Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer, in Gardens of Democracy, identify the rise of new citizenship. It builds upon our founders embracing the ideas that emerged from the Enlightenment. They created a democratic republic separate from the confines of a single religion and church. It substituted reason for doctrine, independence for obedience, scientific method for superstition, and human ambition for divine predestination.

Liu went on to give 19 speeches around the country promoting active citizenship, to rehumanize our politics, and rekindle a spirit of love in civic life. His book Become America: Civic Sermons on Love, Responsibility, and Democracy contains all of his sermons.

Harry Boyte, co-director of the Institute for Public Life and Work at Augsburg University, argues in Awakening Democracy through Public Work that citizens should be seen as producers, not consumers. He sees a need for a stronger, more participatory democratic society, which recalls the citizen-led effort of the Civil Rights Movement.

He goes beyond defining democracy as free elections and largely the activity of government. That approach relies on selecting good political leaders who encourage broad citizen participation. But when the nation’s highest elected leader divides citizens into patriots and terrorists based on their beliefs, there is a need for strong institutions and a culture of acceptance that can push our public officials to unite all citizens to work for the common welfare.

One such organization pursuing that endeavor is Braver Angels, formed primarily by academics and church leaders representing a grassroots movement to depolarize America’s politics. Their board of directors, staff, workshop participants, and funding sources — all are balanced between liberals and conservatives.

They now have more than 11,000 members working in their project, With Malice Toward None, to collect individual pledges not to “hold hate” toward others who vote differently. A signer pledges “to understand the concerns and aspirations of those who voted differently,” to listen to the opposition rather than fear the opposition. It’s an exercise in self-control that is particularly relevant to our presidential election since they see evidence “that we are now as polarized as we have been since the Civil War.”

Some of President Trump’s highest appointed public officials would agree. They are preparing for a real war out of fear – of what? Losing the election? That appears to be the case with Michael Caputo, who handles communications for the Cabinet department in charge of combating the coronavirus.

He charged government scientists on Sun., Sept. 13, of sedition (a felony punishable up to 20 years in prison). He further asserted that left-wing hit squads were preparing for armed insurrection after the election. He made that charge after officials at the Centers for Disease Control told various media how Caputo demanded the agency revise, delay, and scuttle CDC’s public health updates that could imply that the pandemic is not under control.

Caputo sees a gunfight come January. He posted on Facebook, “when Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin,” and added, “If you carry guns, buy ammunition, ladies, and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get.” Caputo vowed that “as God is my witness, I am not stopping” his effort to control the scientists’ work, because President Trump supports him.

It reminds me of Hannity’s certainty in the righteousness of America being tied to “God’s plan to join them [Americans] together by His Spirit” in a common cause. Would that cause me to keep Donald Trump as president on election night if all the votes are not counted?

As this newsletter was about to be released, the Trump Administration decided that leaving Caputo in his very public position was not helping the President win his re-election. Consequently, he was put on a 60-day administrative leave to tend to his mental health. He will be collecting his full pay and benefits and of course, be free to do as he pleases. Perhaps he will campaign for Trump and, as he recommended others to do, go out and buy some ammunition.

A final note on how citizenship can bind us together, and not necessarily through Christianity, or any other religion or ideology like capitalism, socialism, or otherwise.
Citizenship should unite us in a belief that a democratic republic protects individuals’ freedoms as well as the community’s welfare.

David Mathews, president of the Kettering Foundation, tells of a small but telling, incident.  One that points to how our country became a model for liberating individuals from authoritative powers.

“In a draft of the document [the Declaration of Independence], Thomas Jefferson had written the word subjects. Later, he expunged the word, smearing the ink, and carefully overwriting it with another word — citizens. This finding reveals an important shift in the Founders’ thinking: the people’s allegiance was to each other, not a distant King.”

We should add that our allegiance is to our fellow citizens and not to any individual president’s self-interest.

Two Conventions – In One Nation Divided between Liberalism and Populism

Written by Nick Licata on 9/2/20 for Medium


 

 

Defanging Repressive Immigration Legislation City by City

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The party conventions televised a growing chasm in our nation.

Under Biden, the Democratic Party will pursue its tradition of being the liberal party: steadily moving policies forward to expand social services and individual legal rights. The Republican Party, under Trump, is now not so much a conservative force to maintain the status quo as it is a populist party seeking to break the status quo in reaction to the threat of liberalism.

Liberalism in America reflects the core philosophy of the establishment left. But liberalism is not socialism, as Donald Trump and Republican National Convention speakers would like the public to believe. Historically, liberalism is a rather steadying force. It is often seen as accommodating change, but not pushing radical change. In many other developed countries, the liberal parties are the most conservative party. In Japan, for example, the conservative party is called the Liberal Democrat Party, while the left party is the Constitutional Democratic Party.

Populism can swing either to the right or the left. As author John Judis notes in The Populist Explosion, “There is no set of features that exclusively defines … populist.” He believes that it cannot be defined in terms of left, right, or center. He believes populist movements arise when people see the prevailing political norms – those put forward by the leading segments of society – as being at odds with their concerns.

However, a populist movement can usher in either right- or left-wing governments. These movements may promote nationalism through emphasizing territory or abroad, diverse community. The Republican convention’s theme each of the four days was based on “Land of…”. Insert here: Heroes, Promise, Opportunity, and Greatness. By contrast, the Democratic Convention’s daily theme was based on “We the People…” Insert here: Demanding Racial Justice, Helping Each Other Through Covid-19, Putting Country Over Party, Recovering.”

The difference between liberalism and populism also affected each of the two conventions’ operations. Both parties were forced to make dramatic convention changes due to the coronavirus pandemic, but they responded differently.

The Democrats tried to adhere to CDC guidelines, while still attempting to elect their presidential nominee with traditional procedures. They nominated their presidential candidate through a televised roll-call vote by state. Video clips of Democratic delegates from each state gave their pitch for supporting Biden.

On the other hand, Trump’s Republican convention broke with the status quo in a number of ways. It began with a perfunctory vote to select Donald Trump as the presidential nominee. His nomination, the seconding speeches, and the roll call all remained in the original convention site, namely, Charlotte, North Carolina. The audience was limited, and no nationally televised coverage was solicited for the gathering.

In a similar vein, the Democrats kept to the tradition of releasing reports from the Rules, Platform, and Credentials Committees, even though the reports had been negotiated and voted on remotely before the convention. . Their reports were then presented with short speeches by the co-chairs of each committee on the convention’s first day.

At the Republican Convention, by contrast, there were no speeches regarding any of their committee reports. Their relevant committees did not meet, except for the credentials panels. Since the Republican platform committee never met, they simply adopted the 2016 platform again, which was largely shaped by Trump supporters.

The Democrats’ 2020 platform, to their credit, was a new one. In their case, it was a result of negotiations between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden delegates to maximize their voter turnout.

There was no need for negotiations within the Republican Party on the platform. Those who opposed Trump’s populist approach had already chosen to keep a low profile or leave the party. The number of Republican defections to the Democratic ticket is a very noticeable sign of this political migration.

Over 300 former staffers who worked for President George W. Bush, the late Senator John McCain, or Presidential candidate Mitt Romney have publicly come out against Trump’s presidential campaign in 2020. Most of them signed a letter saying, “We believe that decency in government must not be allowed to die on the vine and insist that it returns to the Office of the President.” They joined former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, former US Rep. (R-NY) Susan Molinari, and Trump’s former homeland security chief Miles Taylor in supporting Biden for president.

Populism at its core is about disrupting the status quo and even removing institutions that are upheld by the current political and societal norms. It takes a different path than liberalism, which believes that the procedures and norms that keep the current institutions functioning are important to reform but not abolish.

At the Republican convention, this was manifested in the absence of delegate caucuses and council meetings; there was no mention of them. By comparison, the Democrats listed 17 caucuses and council meetings held throughout their four-day convention.

Trump gave the stage over to seven citizens to give personal testimonials claiming they suffered and were victimized by Democratic policies. Four different individuals testified about members of their family killed by gun violence. The repeated message was that Democrats do not believe in law and order and — as a direct result — a family member died.

One couple that claimed victim status was featured for their toughness in standing up to the chaos around them “created by Democrats.” Mark and Patricia McCloskey pointed guns at Black Lives Matter protesters who marched past the St. Louis couple’s 52-room mansion. The pair didn’t accuse anyone of stepping on their mansion’s yard. But the protestors’ chanting drove Mr. McClosky to say, “I thought we were going to die.” National network and cable news channels showed Mrs. McClosky waving a pistol and Mr. McClosky brandishing his semi-automatic AR-15 rifle. They have since been charged with one felony count each of unlawful use of a weapon.

The Republican convention also spotlighted eight citizen activists. There was as an anti-abortion activist who used to work at Planned Parenthood, two health professionals (a doctor and a nurse) who thanked the president for leading the fight against Covid-19, a small manufacturer who thanked Trump for his economic policies, and a dairy farmer applauded him for his trade policies. Even one of Trump’s White House assistants, who had been a socialist and voted for Bernie Sanders, testified to Trump’s greatness as a president for all.

The Democrats featured a few more citizen activist speakers. They spoke to issues that the Republicans did not.  Such as young activists talking about climate change, a Hispanic family talking about emigration hurdles, members of the George Floyd family talking about the need for love to overcome injustices, and survivors of domestic violence talking about protecting the safety of women.  The tone of their messages was not with anger but with hope for a greater understanding between people.

The Republican Convention did reach out to Black voters, despite Trump receiving only 8% of the Black vote in 2016. Two Black civil-rights activists were featured, speakers. Out of a total of 90 speakers at the convention, 13 were Black speakers, three of whom were women.

There was, of course, a higher percentage of Black speakers at the Democratic convention, with two of their four emcees, who rotated through the four days, being Black women. As for the percentage of women speakers at each convention, the Republicans ensured that 41% were female, not far behind the Democrats’ 46%.

Even both conventions showcasing citizen activists and providing entertainment, the Neilson viewer ratings were not impressive for either convention. A nightly average of live TV viewers was 21.6 million for the Democratic convention and slightly less at 19.4 million viewers for the Republicans. Both figures were roughly 25 percent below the 2016 conventions’ viewing rates.

The drop-off might be attributable to more viewers using online outlets and streaming services to follow live events. A poll from this past May showed that 70% of those aged from 18 to 34 years old currently subscribe to a streaming service, compared to just 49% of those aged 65 or above. If true, each party must adjust its outreach to better attract those younger viewers.
Since the GOP’s voter base is older and less likely to use streaming technology, Democrats could reach out to their potential younger voters who use that digital medium. They should harness their convention caucuses and councils to produce and distribute short personal testimonials through the internet.

National political conventions rarely determine who wins the presidency. But they do show how they go about choosing their leader. It was clear that each conventions’ political philosophy will guide Biden and Trump in leading our nation.

The Democratic party today, as in the past 80 years, embraces “liberal empathy,” while Trump’s Republican party resurrects the kind of “populist anger” as propagated by former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. One convention asked Americans to be responsible for a broader community for our common good. The other warned Americans that they must defend their personal safety and freedom from the broader community.

Love is not a word that is used often in politics, but both presidential candidates spoke of love in their acceptance speech. Biden proclaimed that we need “love for one another”. Trump said, “A new spirit of unity that can ONLY be realized through love for our country.” Which approach would lead to a stronger democracy? Biden said that a “great purpose as a nation… [is] to save our democracy.” Trump, in a speech that was almost twice as long as Biden’s, never used the word democracy.

A John Lennon quote captures the difference between the parties shaping our political life in a future America. “There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. Evolution and all hope for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.”

Citizen Politics Seattle Blog

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Three WWII Books Mirror Our Current World Conflicts

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World War II ended 75 years ago, the problems that it left behind, displaced immigrants, lack of international law, and the use of nuclear weapons, are all still with us.

 

The 75th Commemoration of the End of World War II is Sept. 2, 2020. This fall, three new books cover foreign-policy issues from the conclusion of that war. Those issues are still with us today: how to care for the plight of millions of displaced and desperate immigrants, how to apply international laws to punish enemies, and how to justify (if we can) the use of nuclear weapons. They’re worth a read this fall.

Michel Paradis’ “Last Mission to Tokyo: The Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raiders and Their Final Fight for Justice” (Simon & Schuster $28), wrestles with this question: How does one determine justice in a war?

The U.S. public supported punishing the Japanese for executing three captured American pilots who bombed Tokyo after the attack at Pearl Harbor. To pursue a legal course our prosecutors had a problem—“there was no clear legal theory for charging anyone higher up the chain of command … beyond low-level grunts and functionaries.” The Japanese legal system that approved the pilot’s execution was also flawed since the pilots “had no lawyers, no witnesses, and no opportunity to defend themselves.”

Paradis also notes that the U.S. condemned Japan torturing our prisoners, despite Japan’s national pride in having abolished it. However, in the course of the trial, a Japanese officer volunteered that “higher-ups” had approved of U.S. prisoners being beaten, strung up, and electrically shocked.

The reality of not having a universally enforceable legal system to punish war crimes then, as now, shows how such a standard is not easy to achieve in the current war against international terrorists.

Lesley M.M. Blume’s “Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World” (Simon & Schuster $27) tells how John Hersey, a Pulitzer Prize recipient, noticed that after we dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, very few survivors were interviewed. The articles published afterward were willingly sanitized by reporters after a little nudging from the U.S. military. Hiroshima’s devastation was televised but the U.S. limited access to the city.

Hersey was not deterred in finding out something more. He personally interviewed civilian survivors and wrote about them as ordinary human beings. Blume explains it was “a then-revolutionary approach to the subject of the atomic bombings” given that the Japanese prodded American entry into the war with the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Hersey’s 30,000-word essay “Hiroshima” was printed in The New Yorker, with the editors eliminating all other articles. A year had passed from the bombing and the major media outlets believed that Hiroshima was old news. However, it became an overnight sensation, to the horror of the government, which had tried to cover up the resulting civilian human suffering in Japan by limiting physical access and coaxing the press to present a patriotic message.

Hersey’s piece woke the nation to the peril of entering an era of nuclear warfare—one that could be unleashed on U.S. civilians. “Fallout” is particularly relevant now that the U.S. and Russia are moving away from agreements that restrained them from starting a new nuclear arms race. It is a reminder not to ignore the suffering and total destruction a nuclear war can unleash.

At the end of World War II, Germany hosted up to 4 million refugees. David Nasaw’s “The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War” (Penguin Press, $35) tells of the last million who had been confined to refugee camps for five years. Most of them were Eastern Europeans who feared going back home. Nasaw explains the politics that drove the U.S. to maintain those camps but to eventually push for the refugees to be settled in Europe, or Palestine for the Jewish refugees.

Like today, countries differed as to whether they would accept refugees. Britain saw refugees as cheap labor but limited the number of people they would accept. The Soviet Union demanded that all of the former occupants of Eastern Europe return home. However, many had collaborated with the Nazis on some level and feared being jailed or executed. Worse-off was the Polish Jewish population. Although the Polish government welcomed them back, even including some in governing, Nasaw concludes that “years of Nazi occupation had not lessened Polish anti-Semitism” but had “legitimized, hardened and regularized it.”

Wars spin-off refugees as collateral damage. Currently, about 1 million Syrians are stuck in refugee camps in neighboring countries. Through great research, Nasaw helps the reader understand the complexity of permanently relocating refugees to a new country. The U.S. led that effort at the end of World War II—could it do it again?

How Slowing Mail Delivery Affects the Vote Count 

Written by Nick Licata


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In five swing states, local officials must have mail-in ballots in hand
 by Election Day, or they will not be counted.

Thirty-four states and DC currently allow mail-in and/or absentee voting, as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. However, in five key swing states (listed below in a table) mail-in ballots must be in the hands of local officials by Election Day. Any ballots that were postmarked by then but were not delivered to the county clerk by Election Day cannot by law be counted.

Leading Democrats have argued that a misfunctioning US Postal Service (USPS) could result in many properly completed ballots being thrown out. Any delay in delivering mail will likely impact a higher number of voters in urban areas than in lower turnout rural areas because their post offices’ workload will be heavier. Urban voters usually veer toward Democrats and not Republicans, discarding ballots from those areas would favor Trump winning a state’s electoral votes in the election.

Democrats’ concerns were raised when Trump-appointed Louis DeJoy, one of his mega-donors, as the Postmaster General in May. Trump has repeatedly said that USPS is poorly administered and running over budget, calling USPS “one of the disasters of the world”, in an interview with “Fox and Friends.”

It has been losing nearly $9 billion annually before the pandemic, which has increased by about 50%. Consequently, Democrats are pushing hard to allocate $25 billion from the negotiated stimulus package to fund a mail service that can deliver on time. That amount of support was recommended unanimously by the Board of Governors of the US postal service, with a majority of Republicans on it and all appointed by President Donald Trump. In addition, a recent poll found that 92% of American voters said they supported direct financial aid for USPS as part of the next coronavirus relief bill.

CNN reported how Trump, in a Fox News interview, said if those funds were not provided to the USPS, he believes “you can’t have universal mail-in voting because you’re not equipped to have it,” That does not bother Trump, publicly saying that if you have a mail-in election, “you’ll never elect another Republican.” He may have seen the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll which found that Biden supporters are more likely than Trump supporters to say they will vote by mail.

While Trump has denied asking for the mail to be delayed, he also tweeted in May, using all caps: MAIL-IN VOTING WILL LEAD TO MASSIVE FRAUD AND ABUSE.”  The Trump administration has provided no evidence that is a true statement. Those who he has appointed to run the Post Office can read his attacks on mail-in voting. As a result, Trump’s message is bifurcated, to the public he says, “Speed up the mail, not slow the mail,” but to his subordinates he says, don’t worry about not enabling mail-in voting because it will lead to massive fraud and endanger Republicans from winning elections.

DeJoy apparently understood Trump’s tweets. He immediately reduced USPS costs he deemed to be critical to make before the November elections. One of his first acts was to eliminate overtime for mail carriers. In response, the American Postal Workers Union president, Mark Dimondstein, released data showing that nearly 20% of all work by mail handlers, city carriers, and postal drivers is done in overtime.  The Trump administration has not challenged their findings.

A significant portion of USPS’s labor budget is devoted to pre-fund 75 years of retiree health benefits, a period of time almost never seen in other agencies or private companies. The law was passed with the support of the George W. Bush administration. Consequently, it is more cost-efficient to pay for overtime than hire new employees.

DeJoy has no plans to hire more employees to make up for the cut in hours. He has recently acknowledged that he may extend hours as needed. Given his cost-cutting orientation, the definition of what is needed will probably be very narrow.

The second major cost-cutting change Dejoy made was to remove high-speed sorting machines from a number of cities. A list of those cities was not released to the public by DeJoy, although CNN obtained documents showing that 671 such machines are slated for “reduction” in dozens of cities this year.

The agency did start removing machines in June, according to postal workers. USPS spokesperson David Partenheimer told the media outlet Motherboard, “The Postal Service routinely moves equipment around its network as necessary to match changing mail and package volumes.” He did not say where they were being reassigned, or even if they were to be.

DeJoy has begun other cost-saving changes such as leaving mail undelivered at the end of a shift, taking of mailboxes off the streets, and reducing post office operating hours. The accumulation of so many changes over a short period of time had been initiated without input from line workers as to what would be most effective, and apparently without concern as to the impact on citizens being able to vote.

Looking at the Numbers

To help understand the potential impact of slowing mail delivery, I have compiled the table below from various sources. It shows how just a one-day delay of just 5% of the mail-in ballots in a county could result in ballots not being counted if they were received after Election Day.

To be clear, if voters mailed their ballots a week before Election Day, there is a high probability that they would arrive in time to be counted. Understandably citizens do have some responsibility to mail early. Nevertheless, a study by Tulane professors using National Election Studies data found that in the past 2 decades, between 15% and 24% of voters in Presidential elections do not decide who to vote for until 2 weeks before and up to Election Day. Human nature as it is, this pattern will likely be unchanged in November.

The increase in projected mail-in ballots from the mid-term 2018 elections to this November’s 2020 election is shown in column (4). This figure should not include in-person absentee voting, which allows voters (excused or no-excuse) to fill out and drop off their absentee ballots in person, rather than through the mail.

Column (5) shows how each state’s 7 most populous counties voted in 2016. Normally these would be leaning to vote for Democrats since they contain the largest cities. But in 2016 the majority of the most populated counties in Arizona and Wisconsin voted for Donald Trump.

Column (6) shows what the total vote for Hillary Clinton from the 7 counties from each state was in 2016. It then shows what a 5% drop-off from that total Clinton vote would be. There is no way at this point in time determining what the voter turnout will be for either former Vice President Joe Biden or current President Donald Trump.

However, it is evident from these numbers that if the USPS slows or hinders the collection or delivery of ballots from these particular counties in these states, it will widen the gap for Biden to overcome Trump’s vote from 2016. In Michigan and Pennsylvania, the impact would more than double the gap.

Going Forward

In response to bipartisan concerns, the Postmaster agreed to appear before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in a virtual hearing on Friday at 9 a.m. and before the House Oversight and Reform Committee on Monday, Aug. 24, at 10 a.m.

Shortly after announcing that he would appear before Congress, Dejoy announced that he is suspending any further changes until after the election is concluded. Hence, no further mail processing equipment and blue collection boxes will be removed from the streets.

Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh said DeJoy’s commitment to hold back on operational changes is insufficient and not specific enough. If USPS does not return sorting machines and override earlier instructions about leaving mail undelivered at the end of a shift, he will pursue filing a lawsuit with over a dozen other states AG’s demanding such actions be taken. No Republican AG’s as of this posting have signed onto this effort.

At the core of Democrats’ concerns, is whether the USPS will be prepared to efficiently handle a projected significant increase in mail-in ballots so that all citizens have an opportunity to have their mail-in ballots counted.

The majority of mail is handled by Sectional Center Facilities that sort, compile and then truck mailed-in ballots to the county clerk. Because of the volume around Election Day, delaying a single truck for a single day could be enough to reverse that state’s electoral vote.

The vast majority of Americans, as a recent Pew Research Center poll found, more than 70% think any voter who wants to vote by mail should be able to do so. It is not just Democrats who want that right guaranteed since 49% of Republicans were in that majority. Republican support for mail-in balloting even jumps to almost 70% in states where a sizable amount of the population already votes by mail.

If DeJoy does decide to have USPS properly prepare to meet its obligation to deliver mail-in ballots on time, having a fair presidential election will move forward. Nevertheless, it is still not immune to various types of interventions that are underway to tilt the election results.

All concerned citizens need to be aware of those practices and who is promoting them. An educated and informed electorate is our ultimate guarantee of maintaining a functional and responsive democracy.

Running against the Devil by Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson

Rick Wilson has worked to elect Republicans for thirty years, but he will “no longer use those skills to serve the party I once loved. That party is gone.” He has not become a Democrat, but he is adamantly anti-Trump. His book, Running Against the Devil; A Plot to Save America From Trump and Democratsfrom Themselves, is a rant against President Donald Trump as the worst president in history. The explosion of Black Lives Matter demonstrations in all fifty states this past month indicates that he is not alone in that opinion.

Wilson’s message is serious, but his delivery is hilarious with over-the-top snarky comments and profanity. It’s a fun book to read, but the bottom line is that the Democrats must stop Trump from winning a second term. Wilson sees Congress unable to respond other than sending him “a strongly worded letter.”

Wilson’s example of Trump’s corruption is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocking bipartisan efforts to stop Russian election interference in the 2020 election. It occurred right after a Russian oligarch announced that he would build a new aluminum plant in Kentucky, where McConnell is unpopular and faces a close re-election.

According to Wilson, Democrats must not focus on the national vote. Instead they must remember to run fifteen disciplined state campaigns; it is absolutely necessary to win in the swing target states. Their messaging and strategies cannot rely on miracles. Nor should they waste energy releasing anger, “even though he deserves it.”

He advises that Democrats must stop insisting on picking candidates based on what policies they love versus what wins and that means according to him, “Do not scare the shit out of the Republican squish voters, as in Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Arizona.” They cannot afford to choose candidates “who strokes their ideological happy place.”

Wilson drapes his strategy with a string of poll findings. A January 2019 Pew survey asked democrats if they wanted their party to become more moderate or more liberal. Only 40 percent wanted a more liberal approach, whereas 53 percent said they wanted a more moderate approach. Data shows how socialism may not frighten the populace like communism did in the fifty’s but in the swing Electoral College states for 2020, it could stop the Democrats from attracting the key voters that flipped the House from Republican to Democrat control. For instance, according to a February 2019 Public Opinion Strategies poll, 54% of the voters in 11 of those swing states oppose socialism; as did 57% of suburban women and 56% of independents.

From his prior experience in leading Republican campaigns, he believes that Trump’s advisors want to “make this election about a core package of issues, NOT a referendum on Trump’s personality, leadership and accomplishments.” Consequently, if democrats run on detailed policies they will be appealing to the brain and lose, instead they need to appeal to the heart by focusing on Trump’s faults.

In brief, Wilson is saying that Trump is a flawed president, but a clever one who has brilliantly exploited the Grievance Culture of “Everyone is coming to get you.” They are the immigrants, Black Lives Matter, Anitfa, Muslims, women and Sloths — Wilson’s dry, cutting humor graces every page.

Running Against the Devil will probably not convince many Republicans to vote against Trump. Also, Wilson’s advice to the Democrats runs directly counter to the progressive drift of the party, which pushes a progressive agenda to the front lines, no matter what surveys say about its effectiveness in getting votes in the swing states that won the election for Trump.

Wilson may convince Democrats that Biden’s victory is not about a popular vote. Hilary Clinton got that and still lost. Trump made the election about her, not her policies. Wilson knows how that was done, and he is doing it now to Trump. He has co-founded the Lincoln Project with other well-known Republicans to produce and run attack ads against the president. By provoking anxiety and fear about Trump, they hope to persuade enough disaffected conservatives, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents in swing states to abandon him and perhaps even vote for Biden.

Nick Licata is author of Becoming A Citizen Activist, and
has served 5 terms on the Seattle City Council, named progressive municipal official of the year by The Nation, and is founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of 1,000 progressive municipal officials.

Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Urban Politics

Civilized to Death – The Price of Progress


Originally published October 20, 2019, in the Seattle Times

In Civilized to Death – The Price of Progress, author Christopher Ryan proposes the most controversial explanation offered today for what is wrong with our world. The problem began with the advent of agriculture which gave rise to civilization: the movement of human activity from a life of cooperative community foraging together to one of individual competition for personal gain.

Ryan notes that scholars wonder why for thousands of years when humans lived in hunter-gatherer (forager) societies, “nothing was happening” to signify progress. His explanation is that humans were essentially happy and satisfied with their lives. Then they became civilized promoting the concept of progress that has led humanity into misery.

Digging into a treasure trove of research on pre-historic societies and those of the few existing forager societies, Ryan demonstrates that measures of health, longevity, security, and leisure have all declined because of civilization. He notes that “skeletal remains confirm that neither famine nor obesity were common until the advent of civilization.” Researcher Eileen Crimmins found that while pre-historic life was short-lived, data shows that today’s longevity is a net loss from that period in terms of functional longevity; we are simply expanding the period of suffering from dying.

Ryan posits that civilization has given rise to competitive institutions that thrive on ever-expanding commerce, displacing the sense of meaning and happiness that humans had during the 99% of our existence on this planet. This decline is due to the stratification of communities into hierarchical status groups that accompanied agriculture, such as owner and worker, man and women, and wealthy and poor.

Using data from modern-day American life as a prime example of how this stratification has taken us from a past paradise to our current dystopia, Ryan cites a 2013 Gallup poll showing “that 70 percent of Americans hate their jobs…” The impact is that “the use of antidepressants in the U.S. is up nearly 400 percent since 1990.” A section of his book shows how our culture even denies us one of the few nonaddictive drugs that the ancients used to achieve happiness, psychedelics.

Another section focuses on how the free expression of sexuality is thwarted in our society, unlike the sexually liberal forager societies. This repression results in enraged perversions of desire, particularly among males. Ryan references an essay by philosopher Stephen Asma linking this condition to the rise of male terrorist acts. In 2016, Asma wrote “Of the past 129 mass shootings in the United States, all but three have been men. The shooter is socially alienated, and he can’t get laid.”

While these examples illustrate how civilization has corrupted our initial non-aggressive human nature, the author could have tackled some possible exceptions. For instance, there is not a word about the fate of the foraging Neanderthals, our closest relation in the Homo genus. They disappeared when foraging Homo Sapiens came into contact with them. Could possibly aggressive behavior from us account for their demise?

Ryan draws a hard line between forager and farmer societies but fails to analyze the role of herders, which are as nomadic at the foragers, but they tend animals. Would they be inclined toward peaceful or aggressive behavior? The nomadic Mongols were not considered civilized by the great states that existed in the thirteenth century; however, they all fell violently to Genghis Kahn and his herder-hunter tribes.

Civilized to Death is a fascinating read, with plenty of references to studies. However, Ryan provides only a few examples of how to foster and preserve elements of our lost forager culture. He does cite the practices of the progressive European societies that replicate the forager parenting values by assuring community support for parents via generous maternity and paternity leave.

Ryan barely mentions that foraging societies usually consisted of fewer than 150 people. Yet he says that close personal contact was critical to fostering community cooperation. Because he recognizes that the advent of agriculture accelerated population growth, and stratified communities into competing groups, he supports reducing birth rates.

Ryan also encourages capturing the egalitarianism and empathy of the forager societies by promoting “peer networking”. The successful non-centralized Kickstarter app, which uses cooperation to fund projects, is his prime example.

After blaming civilization’s problems on the idea of progress, Ryan returns to it as something positive, describing another period of Enlightenment, when progressive thought celebrated ancient Rome and Greece. This time, progress would mean introducing forager practices into our modern world, replacing top-down corporate structures with communal alternatives.

Progress may just be what saves our civilization.

Book Review of Rodham – An Insight On How She Became President and He Did Not

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Hillary Clinton is the most famous woman politician of the twenty-first century, despite not becoming President of the U.S. Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel Rodham (Random House $28) creates an amusing and yet personal portrait of her playing off of the “what if” scenario of Hillary never marrying Bill. As with all uplifting fiction, it has a happy ending: Hillary Rodham, unlike Hillary Clinton, does become president.

The author describes fictional incidents that mirror real ones, with Hillary narrating her inner thoughts as she strives to make the right choices. Her public persona, plain-spoken with a bit of self-doubt, is nicely captured. They give weight to what could have been a tinsel-esque embellishment of her psyche. But this is no political melodrama: It is a personal story and it is entertaining.

There are three elements that generally influence who people vote for: policy issues, group identity, and a candidate’s personality, which may be the most important factor. “Rodham” is a masterpiece for understanding how personality may just be at the heart of our political landscape.

The relationship between Bill and Hillary underlies the novel’s story. Sittenfeld’s portrait of the nearly married couple will have you believing you actually heard their conversations. Although the first quarter of the book is not focused on politics, it left me with a better understanding of the couple’s motivations for jumping into that arena. They are portrayed with such ease and empathy that you see how fiction can be more revealing than the fractured truths some in the media toss out as fact.

Most of the principal locations and events are true. Hillary growing up in metropolitan Chicago, going to Wellesley College and then meeting Bill at Yale Law School. He did go back to Arkansas right after graduating to run for congress and he did lose to later become the state’s longest-serving Governor.

The novel is sharpest when Sittenfeld weaves these real events in with incidents so believable that the reader wonders where reality and fiction diverge. This is most effective for many of the smaller scenes that reveal the personal tug and pull between Bill and Hillary, which the public was made aware of only from a distance.

Bill proposes to Hillary but is unfaithful and asks for forgiveness. She does, but ultimately, they mutually recognize that his sexual behavior will not change, so she goes her own way. Yet she continues to be emotionally connected to him, despite considering him to be a sexual predator. She becomes a senator from Illinois defeating Carol Moseley Braun and incumbent Allan Dixon in the primary. Although in reality, Braun won the primary defeating Dixon. Hillary never marries and has no children. Bill has two divorces and two children and becomes a billionaire from his high-tech corporate connections.

The last section of the book has fun with Hillary running for President in 2016 following Barak Obama’s two terms. Bill jumps into the primary and is initially neck-to-neck with her in the polls. While Sittenfeld skims the political strategies of campaigning, she aptly depicts Hillary’s self-doubts and Bill’s unflagging charm. In a chilling nod to the reality of the real 2016 presidential election, Bill’s supporters chant “Shut her up!” at his rallies which he ignores but allow to continue.

Donald Trump plays a role as an unsolicited supporter of Hillary because he dislikes Bill so much. Sittenfeld pulls off this fantasy by capturing his political posturing and using Trumpian talk. He tells Hillary in a casual conversation that he will not run for president, but says, “Every day, people beg me to run for president.”

This novel could have become a fanciful farce or just boring given that the Clintons have been covered so much. And throwing Trump into the mix could have made it even less credulous. But the characters are so perfectly tuned that they perform as an ensemble, drawing the reader ever deeper into their play, making it difficult to put down the book.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column]

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Three Books on the 2020 Presidential Election and their relevance to the Black Live Matter Protests

Each discusses strategies on how the election could address minority and racial injustices that have long been ignored.

The recent killings of unarmed Black citizens by police or white vigilantes have initiated the largest national outpouring of angry protests since Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968. With less than five months until the 2020 presidential election, three books help contextualize the election. To varying degrees, each discusses strategies on how the election could address minority and racial injustices that have long been ignored.

Ezra Klein’s “Why We’re Polarized” may be the most relevant book in understanding how our nation’s politics have emphasized divisions, not unity, among citizens. Klein astutely sees that culture shapes political strategies. He recognizes that since the civil rights era, the Democratic Party has embraced racial equality while “the Republican Party has provided a home for white backlash.”

Using scientific studies, he concludes that we are no longer a nation of citizens who hold overlapping loyalties. The intolerance of another political party leaves little room for cooperation. As a result, the political middle has shrunk, with independents more partisan than ever before. These are nonpartisans who probably sympathized with protesting as a democratic exercise. Now they may be split between tolerating protester violence as a justified reaction to racist police actions, or perhaps they condemn it as an immoral act of destructive chaos.

Klein’s analysis would have candidates this November work to remove the injustices that have grabbed our country’s attention by emphasizing our shared values, and not by labeling opponents as enemies.

David Plouffe, President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, has written “A Citizen’s Guide to Beating Donald Trump,” in which he eschews insider party politics for the need for a candidate’s volunteers to pursue pragmatic actions that can influence key voters. Although he managed the campaign to elect America’s first Black president, he arguably fails to recognize the importance of Black voters. He mentions the NAACP only once and admits that Hillary Clinton could have increased contact with African American voters, but limits that attention to focus on the upper Midwest.

Black voters did not turn out for Hillary Clinton as they did for Obama, and yet 96% of them voted for her. That means many Black voters could help Joe Biden—or Donald Trump. Plouffe provides solid advice on how to mobilize supporters to get the vote out, but his book is weak in providing motivation for Black citizens to come out and vote for a Democrat. To reach out to Black voters, campaigns should consider Plouffe’s “Citizen’s Guide” while also addressing what the protests have been demanding: respect for Black and minority citizens by our local and federal governments.

Richard L. Hasen says in “Election Meltdown: Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy” that voter suppression is one of the major dirty tricks that both Democrat and Republican parties use to influence voters. But Hasen demonstrates that the Republican Party and President Donald Trump have supported tactics that make it specifically more difficult for African Americans to vote, blunting efforts to be represented by those challenging the racial inequalities in our laws.

Hasen illustrates how that occurs in large Democratic-leaning cities with sizable Black and other minority populations. The Republican-dominated state legislatures often do not provide those cities adequate election resources. The result is Black voters waiting in long lines in those cities to vote, and a delay in the final vote count. That delay has been characterized by Trump and Republicans as evidence of “rigging” the election against Republicans.

Hasen also cites an Oxford University report revealing that Russia’s Internet Research Agency has used social media to encourage Blacks to boycott electoral politics by preying on anger with racist and economic inequalities. Those seeking to deflate the Black vote this November may again use bogus organizations to post inflammatory statements to encourage protesters to boycott voting in the “irrelevant” presidential elections, in the hope of securing a Trump victory.

 

The Supreme Court DACA Decision—It was about politics—of providing a “reasonable” executive order

Urban Politics – USA  6/25/20
Written by Nick Licata


 

authority of law

Photo by Rachel Cooper, “The “Authority of Law” marble statue by sculptor James Earle Fraser on the steps of the Supreme Court Building.

On June 17, 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that the 700,000 immigrants, who were minors when they were brought into the US without immigration papers, would continue to be protected from being deported. The media largely focused on the humane impact the decision would have on the many lives whose future depended on it. 

But the decision seemed to rely more on a nuanced legal interpretation of the Trump Administration’s failure to follow the proper procedures to invalidate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program (DACA). A reading of the decision reflects both were considered. And, as President Trump tweeted that it was about politics – it did come into play.
 
Since President Obama established DACA in 2012 by Executive Order, these immigrants have had a temporary legal status if they graduated from high school or were honorably discharged from the military, and if they passed a background check. Thereby they have been allowed to work and attend school legally in the U.S. 

One government study found that more than 90 percent of DACA recipients are employed and 45 percent were in school. Meanwhile many have started families, having 200,000 children of their own who are U.S. citizens, and they collectively pay $60 billion in taxes each year. 
 
Donald Trump campaigned for president on eliminating the DACA program. After he was elected, Trump issued his own Executive Order doing so. While the court’s decision maintains DACA, the ruling by the majority of five justices, which consisted of the four liberals and the conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, made it very clear that this was not an endorsement of DACA. 

Their majority ruling states: “We do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies. “The wisdom” of those decisions “is none of our concern.” We address only whether the agency complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action.” 
 
The ruling found that the Trump administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) in rescinding DACA by failing to meet its arbitrary-and-capricious standard requiring that agency action be reasonable and be reasonably explained. Importantly this approach did address a humane element, when Roberts wrote that the Trump administration failed to show what, if anything, would be done to address the hardship to the DACA recipients if the program were eliminated. 

From a more strictly procedural approach, he cites that a memo from Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen justifying the recension of DACA, which was released nine months after the decision to rescind DACA was made, consisted “primarily of impermissible “post hoc rationalization.” 

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in his concurring minority judgment, expects that the Court’s decision will allow the Homeland Security Department to remand to relabel and reiterate the same substance that was presented in Nielsen’s memo. However, that memo failed to address Robert’s concern about providing a reasoned plan “to address the hardship to the DACA recipients” when that program is eliminated. Kavanaugh does not address that need in his opinion. 

It would seem that another attempt to rescind DACA would have to provide a reasonable one. Otherwise, that necessary condition would not have been met, despite as Kavanaugh bluntly stated that “all nine Members of the Court accept, as do the DACA plaintiffs themselves, that the Executive Branch possesses the legal authority to rescind DACA and to resume pre-DACA enforcement of the immigration laws enacted by Congress.”

Trump said that the Supreme Court’s decision was about politics. Perhaps in a way it was, just as his executive orders are about politics, as all past president’s executive orders have been. Trump appears to be the more engaged in politics than previous presidents, given that he has been the most prolific in issuing executive orders. He has averaged more of them, on a per-year basis, than Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barak Obama, whom he has surpassed by over 30 percent. 

In the instance of the DACA decision, it may come down to the politics of not reasonably taking care for the welfare of people living in the U.S. who are contributing through work, community activities and paying taxes, but who lacked the proper paperwork when they were brought into the country as children. A Pew Research Center survey conducted June 4-10, 2020 found that “about three-quarters of U.S. adults say they favor granting permanent legal status to immigrants who came illegally to the United States when they were children”

It might not be the wisest political strategy for Trump to continue pushing to rescind DACA so near the November elections. For one thing, the past lower court decisions have gone against Trump’s efforts to dissolve DACA, which could easily push court appeals into the midst of the final month of the presidential campaign.  This strategy would hinder Trump winning the following critical states that have considerable electoral college votes and a high percentage of eligible Latino voters: Texas 30%, Arizona 24%, and Florida 20%.

Justice Clarence Thomas begins the lead minority opinion saying that “Between 2001 and 2011, Congress considered over two dozen bills that would have granted lawful status to millions of aliens who were illegally brought to this country as children. Each of those legislative efforts failed.” 

The politics of his decision can be seen in how he lays out his arguments. He references “millions of aliens” being included under DACA. The largest number estimated has come from the Migration Policy Institute, and that was 1.3 million. However, those actually included in DACA topped out at just under 800,000 and has leveled off to around 700,000, which is the amount that Chief Justice John Roberts used in his majority opinion. 

Thomas also bases his argument on a 2017 opinion written by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who concluded that DACA was illegal and be rescinded. It is interesting to note that as a Senator, Sessions strongly opposed Democratic efforts to establish a path to citizenship for any applicant who was in the United States illegally. Roberts found that the application of Sessions’s decision to eliminate DACA fell apart because of faulty logic. Thomas does not substantially respond to Roberts’ critique.

Thomas was right in pointing out that Congress has to provide a workable immigration plan. As Congress is currently configured, it is unlikely to reach one with Republicans in charge of the Senate opposing legislation allowing for a path forward for DACA recipients to become citizens.

If Trump is re-elected, then he will certainly appoint a new Supreme Court justice who would be confirmed by a Republican Senate. That newly appointed justice would most likely eliminate the legal requirement that the federal government must come up with a plan to address any hardship resulting from the demise of DACA. 

Their decision was about politics, whether executive orders have to be reasonable or not.

An “Autonomous” Three Block-Long Seattle Street Threatens America – What?

Written by Nick Licata


 

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President Donald Trump from his New Jersey private golf club tweeted this past Friday morning June 12, that “The terrorists burn and pillage our cities.” He was referring to demonstrators occupying three blocks along a single street, in Seattle’s most culturally active neighborhood. Trump demanded that the mayor and governor, “Must end this Seattle takeover now!” Or else he would call in the army.

What was he talking about?

This national threat began on Sunday, June 7, when a small section of the Capitol Hill’s business district (known as the Pike-Pine Corridor) saw demonstrations outside one of Seattle’s five precinct stations. Like other demonstrations held around the nation for over a week, people of all ages and races were in the streets supporting Black Lives Matter’s demand to erase racist policing, opening up the move to either defund or reduce police departments’ budgets.

That Sunday the police said on Twitter that some people had thrown projectiles and fireworks at officers, although they did not provide any evidence beyond one what appeared to be a single candle. Accordingly, they responded with pepper spray, blast balls, and tear gas, which the mayor had previously promised to not use for the next 30 days. But protecting themselves from thrown projectiles triggered an exclusion to that prohibition.

Councilmembers who had attended as witnesses told me that there did not appear to be any threat to the police officers’ safety and the police over-reacted to the chants from the crowd, who did not wish to be pushed away from the East Precinct police station.

The only terror activity that occurred was when a civilian driver headed his car into the demonstrators. An unarmed twenty-seven-year-old Black man reached into the open window of the car as it was passing, grabbed the steering wheel, and halted it from hitting people. The driver pulled out a gun, shot and wounded the man as the car came to a stop. The driver then left the car with a gun in hand, walked over to a line of police standing nearby, surrendered himself, and was arrested.

The next day, on Monday, June 8, the police emptied the police station of guns, files, and critical equipment as they prepared to no longer defend the building. They apparently thought it would be destroyed by the demonstrators, who were mostly residents of the East Precinct, some of whom live in multi-million-dollar mansions as well as in low-income social housing projects. The precinct also has the highest concentration of apartments and small independent retail businesses in Seattle. Historically it has been the city’s most liberal council district; and since 2013 has repeatedly elected a Socialist Alternative Party member to the City Council, over the opposition of much better-funded business-community candidates.

By Tuesday, June 9, a loose conglomeration of demonstrators came together to use the former police street barricades to close off Pine street for a length of three blocks. Although Trump tweeted: “These people are not going to occupy a major portion of a great city,” it is not even part of downtown. It is a two-lane road lined with small neighborhood businesses and a park. The area came to be called by the occupants as CHAZ, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, and they put up a website.

However, the local conservative radio host Jason Rantz, interviewed by Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson on Thursday, June 11, said it was a violent place. And that similar occupations to the one taking place in Seattle could happen in cities across the U.S. if the authorities allow it.

Although Carlson began the interview saying that Rantz was one of the few people he knew who had visited CHAZ, Rantz basically admitted that he had not been inside when he replied to Carlson’s question of what he saw inside CHAZ, he said, “Right now, it’s too violent for us to go in.” He provided no examples of what kind of violence he was referring to.

The next day, Friday, June 12, having been a prior resident for decades in that neighborhood, I went to see what dangers lurked in a community without police patrols.
I casually walked pass by the CHAZ street barrier and the three community sentries, who sat off away behind it, talking to each other. No conversation or ID needed. It was a wide-open passage, where I discovered that CHAZ had become a bit of a tourist destination for curious Seattle residents taking photos of all the posters, graffiti, and the one-block colorful mural painted on Pine Street spelling out BLACK LIVES MATTER.

The businesses on the street were still open as was the park when I visited. There was no sign of smashed windows or burnt buildings. There had been no looting and there was no violence of any sort occurring.

There was a “No Cop Co-Op” covered stand offering free fruit, vegetables, snacks, umbrellas, hand sanitizer, and water set up in the middle of their occupied territory. There was also a covered truck converted into a People’s Community Clinic with its own emergency medical team. There were many memorials to victims of police violence, along with were other little touches of an emerging community; an open-air conversation café with sofas, a small basketball court, an improvised smoking corner, and a private food stall, the Dirty Dog hotdog stand, among other things.

One of the most ambitious undertakings was begun by Marcus Henderson, who helped create the community gardens that occupy part of the adjacent Cal Anderson Park. Henderson is typical of educated citizens who understand that disruptive moments like CHAZ offer a positive opportunity. He had the knowledge for sustainable gardening from obtaining an Energy Resources Engineering degree from Stanford University and a master’s degree in Sustainability in the Urban Environment.

Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan visited the gardens and met with Henderson the day after Trump had tweeted “Take back your city NOW. If you don’t do it, I will.” In response, Durkan accused Trump of purposefully distorting the activities in CHAZ to fit his tough law and order mantra.

Trump may have also been watching Fox News, which was engaged in the same practice. Thanks to an article by Seattle Times reporter Jim Brunner, it came to light that Fox ran digitally altered images in coverage of CHAZ. Three separate photos were photo-shopped to create an image of a heavily armed man guarding the entrance to the zone. Another image, with a caption of CRAZY TOWN, blazoned over a portion of it, showed huge flames pouring out of a building with a demonstrator running away. But it was not Seattle, the photo was from a May 30 protest in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Fox and other outlets also jumped on a comment by a Seattle police commander suggesting protesters were extorting payments from businesses within CHAZ. Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best had to refute that statement, saying that it was based on rumor and social media. “We haven’t had any formal reports of this occurring,” she said.

Best also said that she did not want to abandon the precinct station but had to because of pressure. However, she did not say the order came from Mayor Durkan, who did not say she made the decision. I got the impression that internal pressure came from the police union’s members to leave the precinct. This was particularly true when some councilmembers asked that the hard surface street barriers be removed that the police had set up to separate the demonstrators from standing on the street next to their police station.

The police attitude that their station might be torched and that chaos and disorder would follow in the neighborhood by allowing protestors to peacefully demonstrate so close to them was bolstered not only by the unsubstantiated comment from the police commander but also from comments made by a local police officer and the union’s president.

A resident of one of the nearby apartment buildings, whom I know very well, told me of her interactions with a police officer. She was standing in front of her building on Monday, June 8 at noon asking people what was going on. A police officer came by and announced, “We are all pulling out, and you’re all going to be on your own. We are not coming back in and you are not going to get help and bad elements will come in.” Then he added, “And who would want to work in Seattle [as police]?”

On the same day, June 12, that I visited CHAZ, Michael Solan, president of the Seattle Police Officers Guild, told Fox News “This is the closest I’ve ever seen our country, let alone the city here, to becoming a lawless state.” It would lead one to believe that the police union had lost faith in receiving political cover for their use of excessive force if the city council and mayor were to allow protestors so close to their precinct station.

Police officers in Seattle are not allowed to strike, but they may have actually adopted an old fashion factory “walk-out” by letting the police chief know that they could no longer execute their usual police practices if they remained there.

The most recent turn of events came in an interview on Saturday, June 13, when a person who represented the Seattle Black Lives Matter group said that the area popularized by the title CHAZ was not what their group was using to describe the street space that has been controlled by demonstrators since the police left their precinct station.

The Seattle BLM did not know who came up with that name and had not met anyone representing them. That unknown group declared the name CHAZ and then spray painted the CHAZ slogans all around the area. Instead, BLM is calling this zone CHOP — Capitol Hill Organizing Project. They posted a tweet: Black Lives Matter @djbsqrd “WE ARE #CHOP, not #CHAZ stop spilling lies and spreading this narrative of being autonomous.”

The future of this urban resistance project, initiated by the Black Lives Matter movement, still has to be played out. Organizers continue to push for their objectives, which are posted on the CHAZ website. Talks and open-mike discussions occur regularly in large outside public forums on the purpose of this unique effort.

Overall, observers and participants will need to continue thinking about how claiming a portion of public space for an underserved and discriminated community can initiate effective social and political change, and not perpetuate the status quo or ignite a right-wing backlash that pursues further repressive policies.

Hydroxychloroquine Could Help Trump⁠—Politically

Written by Nick Licata


 

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This month, President Donald Trump boldly continued to promote the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a protection against being infected by COVID-19. In an almost off-handed comment during a briefing, he said he was taking it himself, although the size of the dosage was not mentioned. At the same time, a new study of 96,000 coronavirus patients on six continents taking the drug concluded that they experienced a 34 percent increase in the risk of mortality and a 137 percent increased risk of serious heart arrhythmias. Those findings would seem to answer Trump’s question of “What do you have to lose?” in encouraging people to take the drug.

The media, with CNN often in the lead, has kept hammering away at Trump’s apparent ignorance or hubris or just stubbornness in pushing the consumption of hydroxychloroquine as a possible way of stopping the pandemic. Their primarily liberal audience probably reacts with disgust at having such an irresponsible president leading innocent but desperate and frightened Americans down a path toward a measurable risk of heart problems or death. Liberals likely expect that it could only damage his chances of being reelected.

Not so fast; here’s why hydroxychloroquine is not a risk for Trump. Promoting a potentially harmful drug for treating Covid-19, is not moving the political needle. No number of experts testifying on CNN or MSNBC against the use of this drug will alter the mindset of Republicans as a whole. Surveys show they trust Trump’s handling of the pandemic.

For instance, the number of coronavirus infections has exploded from early March, when Trump disbanded the Directorate for Global Health Security and at the same time declared a national emergency around the coronavirus. The number of confirmed infections soared from twenty-nine on March 4 to over twenty-six thousand on May 4 according to the University of Washington’s IHME. Nevertheless, Republicans have been far less concerned with the coronavirus than Democrats or Independents. According to the NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll taken on March 12–13, 2020, 60% of Republicans did not believe coronavirus was a real threat, while 50% of Independents did. Two months later in late May, 82.2 % of Republicans approved of Trump’s handling of the pandemic while only 12.5 % of Democrats did, according to a poll by FiveThirtyEight.

The pandemic could also hurt the Democrat vote more than the Republican vote in this coming November’s elections. Black and Hispanic populations account for a higher share of confirmed cases and deaths compared to their share of the total population according to a mid-April analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation. It also found adults with low incomes are more likely to have higher rates of chronic conditions compared to adults with high incomes, which could increase their risk of serious illness if infected with the coronavirus. These populations are the most likely to be harmed by taking hydroxychloroquine because of the greater likelihood of complications coming from their well-documented poor health conditions. They also overwhelmingly vote for Democrats

The percentage of validated 2016 voters in these three groups reported voting as follows: Blacks 91% for Clinton, 6 % for Trump; Hispanics 66 % for Clinton, 28 % for Trump; people making less than $30,000 a year 53 % for Clinton, 41% for Trump. Since they are not part of Trump’s voting base, any complaints about their illnesses or deaths from using hydroxychloroquine will not likely result in the administration quickly responding or even publicly acknowledging it.

Most importantly, Trump’s promoting hydroxychloroquine shows that he can buck

the health experts who he strongly implies are providing foolish overprotective restrictions that are putting people out of work and out of business. He does not point to infection charts and lectures about the dangers of getting back to normal life. Instead, he comes across as just using common sense to promote a tried and true drug to give Americans a chance to get over this pandemic. He says I’m taking it, and I’m doing fine. Try it! His attitude of being bold and going forward has him applauding protestors in Michigan who want their restrictions lifted, by tweeting “Liberate” Michigan.

He understands that culture has far more influence than data in swaying the populace: how people perceive the pandemic determines their behavior more than what they know about it. He frames the pandemic as a cultural war between the elites and the people, not a dry discussion of the facts lead by academics. Remember Trump was a very successful producer of a popular TV reality show. He knows what grabs people’s attention. It is not tables with numbers on it. Thus, he promotes an unproven drug and refuses to wear a face mask. Not wearing one communicates that he is with those who want to move on and not dwell on the minutiae of health statistics.

Those statistics may actually work in his favor. While the death count will soon exceed 100,000 and the infection rate climbs over a million and a half, the flip side of those charts is that 90% of the population feels fine or in the same health condition they had before the pandemic. Less than 5% of the population has been tested with over 80% of those showing not being infected with the virus. And many of those infected may never show any symptoms. As a result, a false sense of security will continue to grow, since few people have relatives or close friends who have a confirmed infection.

Consequently, Trump has downplayed the need for testing because it is time consuming, costly, not reliable and most importantly it might highlight the extent to which the virus has spread. That would encourage the Democrats in office to continue restrictions on social and business interactions to avoid further infections and deaths. That is something Trump will not tolerate because he desperately needs to get the economy moving before November if he is to stand a chance of being reelected.

He must hold onto the democrats in the key swing states who voted for him. Many Democrats, according to a poll by Morning Consult, believe he was responsible for the strong economy before the pandemic hit. In 2019, just 49 percent of Democrats said Trump was responsible for the then-strong economy, but in the latest survey, 70 percent said Trump was responsible. He must not let them slip away as unemployment among them skyrockets.

As a calculating pragmatist, Trump is focused on the calendar. It doesn’t matter what the pandemic does after the election. Above all, people have to get back to work and receiving income before the election. He will either be president, in which case his strategy worked for remaining as president or if he loses, then the pandemic will be someone else’s problem.

The only effective counter to Trump’s narrative is to capture the cultural high ground by emphasizing that America is one community, not separate cultural tribes. That a united community protects everyone and not just the lucky healthy ones. It is also one that recognizes that protective measures must be designed to move toward normalcy in social and business activities, in a cautious and controlled fashion. The data supports such an approach.

Recently two studies released by universities identified an economic benefit of over $5 trillion results from saving lives across the country in an effort to slow the pandemic down, despite the massive hit to our economy through societal distance restrictions. But that rational approach is boring and too abstract for many people. Instead, this nation needs leaders who can stoke the American spirit of cooperation and trust among our citizens. When that spirit is overshadowed by individualism and personal protection, our society and republic splinters into factions and ultimately invites our nation’s collapse.

It’s Time for A Robot Tax

Written by Nick Licata


It’s simple; the robot that replaces every worker or reduces their pay will be taxed.

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The Robot Maria Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis

Taxing robots sounds unnatural, almost sci-fi like. While I use “robots’ to personalize automation, the reality is that workers, human beings, are being replaced by automation, often in the form of robotic functions in our major industries.

The coronavirus pandemic will push the automation of work into hyperdrive as a huge section of our employment force is laid off. As of May 7, 2020, over 33 million workers have applied for unemployment benefits out of a labor force of 165 million that peaked in February 2020.

The number of unemployed with no benefits will also go higher as federal aid is reduced because many will no longer be eligible. In 2016 there were about 26 million were nonfarm (unincorporated) sole proprietorships, with estimated three-quarters of them with no employees. Many of these people had not been eligible for unemployment insurance. Because of congress’s Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) self-employed workers, including independent contractors, can now collect unemployment benefits.

Those benefits will stop long before the pandemic does if the Republicans control either chamber of Congress in 2021. In the push to restart our economy, Republicans are resisting any continuation of funding for these workers. Companies are also facing more employees, particularly those represented by unions, requesting a safe work environment requiring protective measures like safe distancing. Meatpacking plants are just the most publicized example of this tension. Robots do not need safe distancing, nor do they organize for a safe work environment.

The pandemic’s long term impact will be an additional new incentive to automate work production and services. Business leaders have recognized the displacement of human labor by robotics for some time. Tesla co-founder and SpaceX founder Elon Musk told the World Government Summit in Dubai in 2017, “There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better (than a human). These are not things that I wish will happen. These are simply things that I think probably will happen.” To mitigate this trend other billionaires are promoting a tax on robots.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates told online publication Quartz, that if a robot replaces a human worker, there should be a tax on robotics to offset automation’s societal effect. Gates said that replacing human labor with machines can have a positive impact if it frees up people to use their human empathy and understanding to help the many who need help to survive and enjoy life. However, the money to allow them to assist the larger community needs to come “from the profits that are generated by the labor-saving efficiency there; some can come directly in some kind of robot tax.”

Billionaire and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban, said that robotics and artificial intelligence “is going to cause unemployment and we need to prepare for it.” In response to Gates’ robot tax suggestion, Cuban tweeted “There should be a tax and some should be paid in stock of the company.”

Their concerns are backed up by PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of the world’s Big Four accounting firms, which released a study in 2017 that estimates 38% of US jobs could be lost to automation by the early 2030s. Employees in the industries related to transportation, manufacturing, and retail would be the most likely to lose their jobs to robots. Meanwhile, in response to these concerns, Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said “I’m not worried at all,” and added that AI and robotics “aren’t even on their radar screen”.

However, Business Day columnist Kevin Roose, attending the 1919 World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, reported that executives there claimed that if they don’t automate jobs as quickly as possible, their competitors will. A spokesman for Cognizant, a technology services firm, described the conflict that these executives must address. On one hand they “absolutely want to automate as much as they can,” and on the other hand they are “facing a backlash in civic society.”

To address that backlash, businesses argue that “workers whose jobs are eliminated by automation can be “reskilled” to perform other jobs in an organization.” The unfortunate news for those fired is found in a January 2019 report by the World Economic Forum that estimated that only one in four can be profitably reskilled by private-sector programs.

Only a few politicians have shown interest in a robot tax. Former San Francisco Board of Supervisor Jane Kim had created a task force to explore an automation tax because income disparity in her district could be attributable to the use of robots. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio also advocated for a robot tax during and after his presidential run. But such no robot tax has been pushed in Congress.

The huge number of unemployed workers has kicked our economy into the basement. Consumer demand, which accounts for 70% of our economic growth, has steeply declined. The result is a calamitous fall in sales and profits for most businesses, forcing them to lay off employees, which further erodes consumer demand. If total wages remain depressed, last year’s demand will not return for the foreseeable future. This will compel businesses to search for ways to reduce their costs. And, that swings the door wide open to automation, the silent killer of human employment.

Candidate Donald Trump ran on a platform of getting jobs back to those that lost them. Think of the coal industry. There were multiple causes for the decline in jobs in coal production, such as the competition from lower-sulfur Wyoming coal, or the production of cheaper natural gas, or world decline in demand for coal. Trump ignored them and emphasized government regulation while the Democrats focused on automation as the cause.

Trump just talked about getting back jobs, although there are now fewer coal miner jobs than when he got elected. Hillary Clinton’s approach was more honest and more tone-deaf. She bluntly said the nation was going to “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” Her answer was a $30 billion plan to secure their health care and pension benefits, offer tax credits and job training, and economic development. Long on details, but no punch line: I’ll get the jobs back.

This is why a robot tax carries a better political message. It’s not the usual promise of the government spending more of your money to help the needy. It’s simple; the robot that replaces every worker or reduces their pay will be taxed. Automation does provide benefits: faster service and more production, and lower labor costs. But the savings are not shared with the employees. If automation does not produce additional work opportunities at comparable wages, then the consumer market shrinks, while profits increase. The result is wealth is concentrated among the owners and investors, while those working are cut free to seek lower-paying jobs.

A robot tax stops that trend by shifting a portion of business profits to the workers by funding a viable social net to protect their living standards and provide training for new jobs at equal or better wages. Now is the time for Congress and candidates this November to raise it as a serious attempt to resurrect our economy and save or create jobs for the millions who are unemployed now and perhaps for years to come.

The Next President Must Harness the Virus Debt for Economic Growth

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Historic Levels of Unemployment Claims and Business Shutdowns Have Required the Greatest Surge in Government Debt Since WWII

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            Because of the Covid-19 pandemic the Federal government, with the support of both parties, has issued close to $3 trillion in government debt to stop the economy from cratering. However, this debt could also create an opportunity to expand our economy. First, let’s review how we got here.

            With stay-in-place laws and mandatory closing of most businesses, unemployment has skyrocketed. Before the pandemic it was at 3.5 percent on December 20, as of April 2020, the Economic Policy Institute has estimated that unemployment rate to be at 18.3 percent. Many economists using April’s Labor Department data predict that the unemployment rate could reach 25 percent this summer if the existing practices remain in force. That level would match the peak of the Great Depression in 1933. However, then it took three years not six months to reach that level.

            The health security measures taken so far by states and the federal government have also dramatically reduced the size of our 2020 GDP. Fitch Ratings predicts it will shrink by around 6 percent from 2019. This would wipe out all the growth that took place in the last two years.  The GDP has increased by 2.3 percent in 2019 and 2.9 percent in 2018.

            With numbers like these, both President Trump and Democrat leaders pushed for federal loans. Trump initially said in February, “I think that we’re doing a great job,” requesting $1.25 billion in new funding to address the coronavirus pandemic. However, the House Democrats passed the CARES Act ( Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (H.R. 748) at a much higher level of funding.

            In the first week of March, Congress with bipartisan support replaced that bill with a Phase 1 funding package totaling $8.3 billion to treat and prevent the widespread transmission and effects of COVID-19. By the end of March, a new Phase 3 added $2 trillion more and was passed by the Senate unanimously and in the House by voice vote, with Trump signing it the next day. Still waiting in the wings is CARES 2, which provides another half-trillion for emergency relief. It is scheduled for a House vote when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi determines that it is safe for the members to return to D.C.

            These loans are pumping up government debt to new levels. Previous government spending increases and tax cuts had already pushed U.S. government ratio of debt to the GDP to nearly 80%, the highest in over 60 years. It was only 35 percent at the end of 2007. Germany’s second-largest bank, Commerzbank, believes that the current coronavirus relief packages will push that figure to 96% by 2022.

            Although the Republicans are reluctant to push for the larger CARES 2 funding package, economists have been predicting that more support for workers and companies harmed by the pandemic will be required. However, with unemployment approaching an all-time high,
tax revenue will decline along with economic activity, pushing the government deficit even further.  Bernd Weidensteiner, one of the German bank’s economists, says that could well happen if Congress passes further aid packages and the economy does not revive quickly; US debt could then exceed the previous high of 106 percent set right after WW II.

The Next Administration Faces Two Options for Addressing Our Current and Growing Government Debt

Next year’s administration, whether under Donald Trump or Joe Biden, will face a huge federal debt due to the Covid-19 pandemic. There are two different approaches to take. On the whole, conservatives support paying off the debt as soon as possible to avoid inflation, while liberals support using debt to expand the nation’s services and economy.

Balance the Budget by Cutting Public Services

            This month the leaders of the conservative Republican Study Committee (RSC) sent a letter to the top four leaders in both chambers saying that there is an “urgent need” to address the “fiscal health of our nation” because of the growing debt created by dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. Their solution is to offset debt payments with spending cuts and to limit the growth of the federal revenue to 60 percent of the GDP.

            Their approach is similar to the conservative movement to pass a Balanced Budget Constitutional Amendment, which would require the federal government’s total revenues to be equal to or greater than total expenses. Inflation would be avoided by cutting or curtailing the growth of social spending, like social security and Medicare entitlement programs. That effort has been around since the 80s.

            President Ronald Reagan pledged in his first term to do “all I can” to get the Republican-dominated Congress to pass a resolution for a constitutional amendment to require balanced federal budgets. But in his two terms, he never proposed a balanced budget to Congress. Instead, he ran budget deficits as a result of providing business tax cuts. In particular, real estate developers benefited, like Donald Trump, who amassed $3.4 billion in debt by 1990, and was personally liable for a quarter of it. Meanwhile, during Trump’s presidency, our nation’s deficit is up nearly 50 percent from Obama’s last term by pushing big military spending increases and additional tax cuts.

            Bush, like Reagan, believed in a balanced budget but continued to run deficits. His cure was to make funding cuts in social spending that impacted Social Security, Medicare, and education. However, Democrat Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama also worked to achieve a balanced budget.

            Clinton vowed to reform welfare but in 1996 when the Republicans gained control of both Congress’s chambers and he faced an election for his second term, he signed off on Republican legislation. It ended six decades of federal guaranteed help to the poorest and turned over the responsibility to the states. In the process, he balanced the budget – by abandoning his initial proposal to increase welfare spending by $10 billion and instead cut it by nearly $55 billion.

            President Obama also pursued a balanced budget when he convened the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles “National Commission on Budget Responsibility and Reform” in 2010. It recommended a complete overhaul of the tax code, with the objective of lowering the debt-to-GDP ratio to 60% by 2023. Among its recommendations was increasing the normal retirement age to 69 by 2075, reducing federal retirement benefits, school loans, and farm subsidies. Congress never adopted it.

            New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, argues that conservatives use budget deficits “as an excuse to cut social programs” — for example, a number of states have made it much harder to collect unemployment benefits when their budgets shrink. State business tax revenue has been drastically reduced by measures to control the Covid-19 pandemic. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates states could suffer a collective shortfall of $500 billion through the fiscal year 2022. Unless they receive national assistance, they will have to eliminate services to both citizens and businesses.

            State assistance has been blocked by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell; he says it would cost too much. He said if states cannot afford to handle the coronavirus pandemic, they should declare bankruptcy. There is a certain irony in that suggestion since McConnell’s Kentucky is one of only four states where local and state debt exceeds 90% of their combined revenue. Despite Trump tweeting, “Why should taxpayers be bailing out poorly run cities and states, in all cases Democrat-run and manage…” three of these four states have fiscally conservative Republican governors.

Focus on Expanding the Economy, not Balancing the Budget

            Although cutting debt to achieve a balanced budget may still be pushed by Trump or Biden, the Covid-19 pandemic has created a new set of conditions.  An increase in federal debt may not be a problem but a means to sustain a growing economy. Krugman recently wrote, “While we will run very big budget deficits over the next couple of years, they will do little if any harm.”

             A report from the Brookings Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy came to the same conclusion. The world market is “awash in savings; people and institutions with savings are particularly eager to invest the money in U.S. Treasury debt right now.” This makes it “easier for the U.S. Treasury to borrow more without being forced to pay much higher interest rates;” And, “with interest rates at historic lows… investment demand is likely to be very low in the face of the uncertain economic outlook associated with the pandemic.”

            An industrialized country can have a ratio of government debt to GDP to be well over 100 percent, and still have a growing economy without excessive inflation. Artie Green of Cognizant Wealth Advisors suggests looking at Japan as a positive case study. It has the highest debt to GDP ratio in the world (currently 273%), its economy has been doing relatively well. Unemployment slid from 5% in 2008 to less than 3% in 2017 and its inflation rate has not topped 3% for the past two decades.

            Four academics from the U.S. and Europe in the field of economics issued a paper on why running a government budget deficit is stabilizing instead of destabilizing, if it is used to invest in full-employment strategies and assisting small businesses. Both the owners and their employees’ benefit. The owners receive financial assistance to keep their businesses alive and their workers employed during emergency conditions, like the pandemic or the last recession

            They point out that in past instances when the debt was expanded, like the Obama bank bailout after the 2008 crash, the Trump tax cuts and Coronavirus financial bailout, money was not used to finance new infrastructure, expanded employment, or improve living standards. Instead, most of it was given to the finance, insurance, and real estate sectors of our economy so that they could remain profitable.

            This approach, highlighted by the balance-the-budget mentality and sustained by the belief that financing investors will create good-paying jobs, has been pursued by both Republican and Democrat administrations. The result is a gradual but measurable shift in wealth from middle class working families to a thin slice of the population whose wealth is measured in billions of dollars.

            A report by Chuck Collins of the Institute for Policy Studies found that since 1980, the taxes paid by billionaires, measured as a percentage of their wealth, dropped 79%. He also found that after the 2008 financial crisis, it took less than 30 months for billionaire wealth to return to its pre-meltdown levels. But as of 2019, the net worth of middle-class families has yet returned to the 2007 level of wealth. “People went into the pandemic with the economic hangover from the Great Recession,” he says.

            In order to have a growing economy, the federal budget will need to lift up employee’s wages. Our economy is consumer-driven and dependent on small businesses for sustaining our workforce. Consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of American economic growth. Over 99 percent of America’s 28.7 million firms are small businesses and they create two-thirds of net new jobs.

The Nation Needs a Plan for Moving Forward 

            The next presidential administration must have a plan for dealing with the Covid-19 induced government debt. The Trump administration’s tax cut and Covid-19 government debt cut services to balance the budget. If Biden is to offer something different, he needs to articulate how our current debt does present a challenge but also an opportunity to sustain and expand our economy.

The closing down of businesses and the restrictions of personal travel have hurt small businesses and their employees. It has also slowed down the spread of the pandemic. But it has come with a huge economic cost, resulting in protestors across the country demonstrating against these protective measures. They have legitimate concerns, but their actions are promoted by interests that want to see government funding flow to those least in need of assistance.

That practice will continue to hinder middle-class incomes from keeping up with increasing living costs. It produces anger, resentment, and a willingness to support whoever is willing to take drastic steps to alter their slide away from a stable income and secure future. In other words, they support candidates, like Donald Trump, who run against the government because it has failed to protect them. Such leadership does not seek solutions but someone to blame: a deep state of elites, dangerous migrants, fake media, and government-funded scientists. It is a pattern we are now seeing in countries with weak democratic institutions, like a free press or an independent judiciary. These countries will either face social unrest or move to cripple those institutions that protect their citizens.

The U.S. does not have to go down that path. The next administration can choose to use our debt to create decent-paying jobs and update our aging physical infrastructures. The public, the voters, need to hear a plan. One that uses the federal budget to provide us both economic growth and a safer, healthier environment. We need a leader that moves beyond blaming others for our problems to one who corrals our debt as a resource, not a burden to fund such a journey. Biden must step up to that challenge if he is to be a viable alternative to Trump.

Trump Disrupts the Distinction Between Personal Loyalty & Constitutional Allegiance

Written by Nick Licata

Trump has expanded his responsibility for dealing with a pandemic by firing federal government watchdogs.
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           Donald Trump was elected president to disrupt our government and society; to drain the swamp.
           The specifics were vague, but the understanding was that someone had to change the “system”. As Trump said at the 2016 Republican nominating convention in Cleveland, “Only I can fix it.” And, he wants explicit loyalty to him from government employees as the means for doing that.
            While the coronavirus pandemic is ravaging our country, President Trump’s attention has shifted from deflecting responsibility for appropriately preparing for it to firing the institutional watchdogs that Congress had created to keep it informed of any department problems that could usurp their authority or endanger the public’s health.
            A bipartisan Congress established a network of independent watchdogs over various federal departments when it enacted the Inspector General Act of 1978. In an era when, despite party affiliations, there was a common recognition that congress needed to curb excessive presidential authority; the House passed it 388 to 6.
            The law clearly states that Inspector Generals were created, “to conduct and supervise audits and investigations” and “to provide a means for keeping … Congress fully and currently informed about problems and deficiencies relating to the administration of such programs and operations and the necessity for and progress of corrective action;”
            Congress in the past, has resisted presidents from interfering in the duties of IGs. President Obama’s administration attempted to do so when it issued a 2015 legal memo allowing departments to withhold some information from them. Senator Chuck Grassley, then Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, amended the existing legislation guarantying the IGs had access to “all records” of the agencies they oversaw. It was then signed into law by President Obama.
            On April 3, 2020, Trump fired Michael Atkinson, the IG for the intelligence community. He handled the whistleblower complaint that eventually led to Trump’s impeachment. Atkinson said the firing was retaliation for doing his job. A bipartisan letter of eight senators led by Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, to President Trump followed the firing in less than a week. It accused him of not providing a sufficient explanation for firing Atkin and for apparently circumventing Congress’s authority by not providing proper 30-day notice.
            Trump did not break new ground here. President Obama in 2009, removed the IG for the Corporation for National and Community Service after that IG investigated an Obama supporter. Obama said he no longer had the “fullest” confidence in the IG. Trump said that he lost his “vital” confidence in his IG. Obama gave Congress a thirty-day notice, as did Trump, but both of them put the IG on administrative leave, effectively removing him from his position before the completion of the statutorily required notice period.
            Congress failed to fix this ability to bypass Congress’s authority back in 2009, by stripping out a key provision in the  House version of the Inspector General Reform Act of 2008.  The final bill became law, but it did not include the House’s “for cause” requirement for removing an IG for 9 specific reasons, such as Neglect of duty; Malfeasance; Knowing violation of a law, rule, or regulation; gross waste of funds; or Abuse of authority.
             So, the wording for firing IGs remained simply that an “Inspector General may be removed from office by the President. The President shall communicate the reasons for any such removal to both Houses of Congress.” As a result, presidents have fired IGs because they just darn wished to. President Reagan in 1981 fired all the watchdogs nominated by his predecessor, President Carter, a Democrat. After a fierce backlash, he reversed some of those dismissals.
            All presidents appoint “loyal” followers to key White House positions so that they can speak and act as freely as possible in pursuing any policy they choose. Such loyalty is to be expected. But Trump differs from former presidents, in that he has expanded his expectation of loyalty to offices that in the past were considered to be more bound to government rules and regulations than personal loyalty to the president.
            Loyalty has come down to executing Trump’s policy or instructions, regardless of what some musty, old rules may say. The assumption that federal employees should be personally loyal to him, puts employees in an awkward position. Do they follow an allegiance to the nation’s constitution and law, or do they maintain the trust of the president by supporting his decisions if they run counter to the law?
            Early in Trump’s first term, former Senator Jeff Sessions found himself in that dilemma. Trump appointed him as Attorney General after Sessions had been the first senator to endorse Mr. Trump’s candidacy. Sessions recused himself from his Department of Justice’s probe into whether Russia had interfered with the 2016 presidential election because a DOJ regulation forbid its officials from investigating campaigns of which they were apart. The session was a Trump campaign surrogate throughout the race and served as chairman of the campaign’s national security advisory board.
            In retaliation, President Trump said he never would have hired Sessions if he knew he was going to recuse himself, despite Trump knowing that if Sessions headed the investigation it would have violated that Department’s rules. Session defended his decision saying that the DOJ “needed to do its work fairly and impartially according to the law and Constitution”. Trump was outraged and removed Sessions; loyalty was more important than the law.
            Trump has fired several professional employees who have served under prior presidents who he considered disloyal for carrying out their legal duties.
            FBI Director James Comey had served in the administrations of President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama and was overseeing the Russia probe. Comey claimed that in a personal meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, he was asked to end the investigation into Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, who was later found guilty and sent to prison. Two months after Sessions’ recusal Comey was fired.
            Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch was appointed as an ambassador three times, twice by a Republican President, and once by a Democrat. She was abruptly told to come back to Washington from Ukraine “on the next plane.”
            In D.C. Deputy Secretary of State informed her that the President had lost confidence in her and the Department had been under pressure from the President to remove her, although he told her that she had done nothing wrong. Her office’s anti-corruption efforts raised concerns with Ukrainians who “played by the old, corrupt rules sought to remove me,” Ms. Yovanovitch said. Trump’s attorney, Rudi Giuliani was representing the interests of some of these individuals. She was subsequently dismissed as the Ambassador to Ukraine before her term was over.
            Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a director for European Affairs at the National Security Council, testified before the Trump impeachment inquiry because he had raised concerns that a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky threatened US national security.
            Afterward, Trump called him “insubordinate,” and said Vindman had reported his “’perfect’ calls incorrectly.” The Army said they would not investigate him for disciplinary action, despite Trump recommending that they do so because Vindman told  “horrible things” to the House investigators. Two days after Trump’s acquittal, Vindman was fired and escorted out of his White House office.
            Most recently Trump has begun focusing on IGs who might balk at carrying his political message on the coronavirus pandemic rather than just reporting factually on it. He attacked Health and Human Services Inspector General Christi Grimm after she released a report describing widespread testing delays and supply issues at the nation’s hospitals. In his tweeter account, Trump dismissed it as “Another Fake Dossier!” He mentioned that she served under the Obama administration, but did not note that she had also previously served under the Bush administration.
            More significantly, Trump removed Glenn Fine as the coronavirus relief watchdog. Fine had just been named by the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency to lead the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee because he was the acting Pentagon IG.
             Since Trump did not have a say in that decision, he could not be assured that Fine would loyally publicize Trump’s role in fighting the pandemic. So, while Congress was out of town, Trump named a new acting official to Fine’s position, who automatically became the new watchdog of the federal government’s efforts to fight the pandemic.
            The president has the right to replace certain government employees, but they have constraints when those positions protect the public’s interests. Trump’s dismissal of ambassadors, justice department and investigation department directors, and IGs has revealed a pattern of firing those who do not follow his policies as opposed to following the law that frames their responsibilities.
            To avoid having these critical positions becoming fixated on being loyal to a particular president’s political agenda rather than having an allegiance to the constitution, Congress needs to pass new legislation. It should reintroduce the 2009 legislation requiring a president to only fire an IG for a specific cause. Also, they must not allow an IG to be suspended or put on administrative leave to circumvent Congress publicly reviewing his reasons for dismissing an IG before that person vacates the position. Unless Congress acts accordingly, government agencies will fall under the sway of a president that cuts off public scrutiny of mismanaged or corrupt agencies.
            Any candidate for president could endorse such legislation and pledge to get it passed during their first year. Nevertheless, regardless of who becomes president in 2021, Congress must recognize that they are the government branch that must check any president, Republican or Democrat, from corralling too much authority that could endanger the public’s safety and liberties.

Authoritarian Leaders Rejected the Danger of a COVID-19 Pandemic Because It Challenged Their Image

Written by Nick Licata


 

     They responded in two ways, first ignoring it and then blaming others.

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A Brazilian government official (r) posing for a photo next to President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence at Mar-A-Lago who tested positive for the 2019 novel coronavirus.

In the current coronavirus pandemic authoritarian-oriented leaders, whether communist or capitalist, initially portrayed the virus as an insignificant danger. Once they could no longer ignore the mounting number of infections and deaths, they turned to deflect criticism to condemning the behavior of others. Their major concern was not protecting the welfare of their people but protecting their image as a leader whose control was above being challenged by men or nature.

Bad news resulting from natural events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic is particularly troublesome to them. The leaders of the two largest authoritarian nations, Russia’s Putin and China’s Xi, both initially downplayed the coronavirus pandemic and then accused others of their nation’s derelict response. And, the leaders of two of the largest democracies, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and our own President Donald Trump followed the same behavior of first ignoring the coronavirus problem and then blaming others.

On January 20, Chinese President Xi Jinping commented publicly for the first time on the virus and ordered “resolute efforts” to control the outbreak. However, a transcript of China’s most powerful decision-making body, the Politburo Standing Committee, revealed that Xi was already aware of the virus on January 7. Two days later, the Chinese health commission said a 61-year-old man, had died of the virus. Xi did not inform his people about the spreading virus for two weeks while, according to his government, it infected close to 300 people.

Even within China’s tightly controlled mainstream and social media, word of a deathly virus was spreading too fast for the censors to shut down. Once Xi had to admit that there was a such a virus, he began to find someone to blame.

China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Zhao Lijian, tweeted that “It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan.” Xi blamed local communist officials in Wuhan for not dealing with the virus after they had pointed to China’s top-heavy central government for not giving them the authority to act. Soon afterward, several top Wuhan and Hubei officials were fired for not acting fast enough to contain the virus.

Russia’s President Putin reacted in a similar fashion of initially downplaying the coronavirus. Through his control of the media, very few coronavirus infections were reported. As late as Sunday, March 22, CNN reported that Russia, with a population of 146 million had fewer confirmed cases than Luxembourg, with a population of less than 1 percent of Russia’s. A few days later he was assuring the public that the coronavirus was “under control”.

It was not until Saturday, March 28, Putin decided to close all of its borders and ordered all citizens to stay home for a week unless they provide essential services. His staff probably had gotten to him that the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 reported to the World Health Organization had more than doubled. Although no health experts have suggested a week’s confinement is anywhere close enough time needed to contain the virus from spreading.

Opposition posted on the internet that there were over 20,000 confirmed cases. Like in China, the government was removing any critical postings on social media. Fortunately for the public, Anastasia Vasilyeva, a doctor and leader of the non-government Alliance of Doctors union, was able to get out her claim that the authorities were using pneumonia and acute respiratory infection as a cause of sickness, not the coronavirus. Technically the authorities were correct because people don’t die from the virus, they die from the conditions that it produces, which is pneumonia and acute respiratory failure.

Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro was elected to office just 2 years ago on a very conservative anti-government platform. In the case of the emerging COVID-19 pandemic, he denied its danger. He calls the coronavirus a “little flu” that largely threatens the old and vulnerable. On Sunday, March 22, he told his supporters, “Confront it like a man, not a boy!”

He has found Brazil’s democratic process detrimental to his own political goals. In particular, he ignored his health officials trying to prevent the spread of COVID-19 by publicly gathering small crowds in neighborhoods within Brazil’s capital.

Bolsonaro, on March 25, blasted as criminals the governors and mayors of Brazil’s largest states and cities for imposing lockdowns to slow the coronavirus outbreak. He explained to the media that “What a few mayors and governors are doing is a crime. They’re destroying Brazil.” He is seemed more concerned with meeting his campaign promise to revitalize their economy than protecting the public’s health. His Minister of Health said recently that if the government is unable to curb transmission, the country’s health system would collapse by the end of April.

President Trump is not an authoritarian, although he has admired the power they have within their own country. He had initially denied the coronavirus as dangerous and expected it to be over soon. On February 26th, Trump said  “we’ve done a great job in keeping it down to a minimum. We’ve had tremendous success —”. At that time, he proudly pointed out there were only 15 infections in the US. “As they get better, we take them off the list, so that we’re going to be pretty soon at only five people.” Two weeks later on March 12, we had 1,645 people infected with the virus. The next day Trump blamed Barack Obama for his own administration’s inability to adequately test enough Americans for the coronavirus outbreak, claiming “I don’t take responsibility at all.”

Trump first blamed China for our country’s slow response to the pandemic because he said they withheld information for two months about the coronavirus. However, the time-lapse between the first known death from the virus in China on January 9 and when Trump suspended entry into the United States by any foreign nationals traveling from China on January 30th, was less than a month. Without any evidence, Trump has repeatedly made the two months claim.

When some Democrats were critical of how he was implementing restrictions on travelers from China, he accused them of  “working the Impeachment Hoax. They didn’t have a clue! Now they are fear-mongering.” Trump also singled out Democratic Governors for not appreciating his efforts and told Vice President Mike Pence not to call them, “I say, ‘Mike, don’t call the governor of Washington. You’re wasting your time with him. Don’t call the woman in Michigan.’” Trump was upset that they were critical of him for not using federal authority and resources to provide emergency medical supplies and assistance to their states.

In all of these countries, including ours, the authoritarian-oriented leader has received a lot of support because they are perceived as strong leaders. Also, they either control the media or have ideological media allies that endorse their policies, so that the public gets to hear directly from the leader what he wants them to believe.

But, as COVED-19 spreads, even an authoritarian approach cannot demand an end to a pandemic in two weeks. Once the infections and deaths reach a certain point, they must introduce policies that acknowledge that they are not in total control. If there is any lasting effect from this health crisis, it may be a more knowledgeable electorate in democratic countries appreciating that an effective government is an institution, not a cult of supporters following a strong leader.

Trump’s State of Denial, Not the Deep State, kept us unprepared for the COVID-19 Pandemic

Written by Nick Licata


 

I lay out how Trump’s consistent denial of the need to listen to government experts exposes his suspicion of a deep state conspiracy against him and has made this country unprepared to handle the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump

Photo by Evan Vucci AP

 

President Donald Trump prides himself on being optimistic no matter how dire the situation. That is not necessarily a bad trait; it helps to get by in hard times. But deniability of past or repeated behavior when it results in harm to yourself or others is not a positive trait. In fact, as president of the USA, it endangers everyone. Trump’s State of Denial has led us to the current horrendous situation of not being as prepared as we could have been for the coronavirus, i.e. COVID-19.

For instance, South Korea announced its first coronavirus case just one day before the USA. Yet in the 7 weeks that followed, South Korea had tested more than 189,000 people, we had tested less than 2,000. We have a population over 6 times larger than them, to match their extent of coverage we would have tested 1.1 million people. As of March 21, less than a quarter-million in the US have been tested according to the John Hopkins School of Medicine The COVID Tracking Project. The Federal Government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as of March 23, had not publicly released the number of people who have been tested as of that date. Although at a press conference on that date a White House staff member estimated that 250,000 had been done.

The following are examples of Trump’s State of Denial and its negative impact on controlling the coronavirus pandemic.
TRUMP: “It’s something that nobody expected”
On Saturday, March 14, President Trump said that the coronavirus caught him and the world off guard. About a week later, on March 21, Trump repeated his denial of having any advance reason to expect a probable massive pandemic; “The magnitude is something that no matter who you were, no matter where you come from, nobody ever thought a thing like this could happen.”

Trump Was Given An Explicit Warning Of A Possible Huge Pandemic
In January 2017, as Trump was coming into office, the New York Times reported, “outgoing Obama administration officials ran an extensive exercise on responding to a pandemic for incoming senior officials of the Trump administration.” Trump has never denied this information being provided to him.
The New York Times also reported that in 2019 the Health and Human Services Department performed startling government simulations to show how underprepared the United States was for such a pandemic. Nothing was done in response. Department Secretary Alex Azar has mentioned these simulations at the White House Press Conferences.
TRUMP: “I don’t know anything about it”
At a March 13, 2020 press conference Trump said, “I just think it’s a nasty question,” when asked why he disbanded the Directorate, known as the “Global Health Security and Biodefense” team on the National Security Council, which was responsible for coordinating federal agencies’ response to a pandemic outbreak. “And when you say ‘me,’ I didn’t do it. … I don’t know anything about it.”

Technically Trump is right, he didn’t disband the nation’s only Health Security Team, John Bolton did.
Trump appointed Bolton to lead the National Security Council in April 2018. A month later, Bolton eliminated the team for pandemic preparedness. It was created in the aftermath of the 2014-15 Ebola outbreak to avoid seeing again a fragmented U.S. response and preparedness strategy and ended up costing U.S. taxpayers $5.4 billion in emergency supplemental funding.

On May 7th, 2018 Luciana Borio, director of medical and biodefense preparedness at the NSC, spoke at a symposium at Emory University “The threat of pandemic flu is the number one health security concern,” she told the audience. “Are we ready to respond? I fear the answer is no.”

Bolton said he intended to streamline the NSC, which it may have done, but at the cost of not having anyone around to coordinate a response to a pandemic so the country would not end up where they are now, repeating our Ebola experience. Bolton’s first step was to eliminate the team’s Director position and then disperse the team staff across other parts of the NSC which focused on other priorities; two of them went to the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate within NSC.

TRUMP: “I’m a businessperson,” he said in denying the need to fund scientists working on disease control.

During a February 26, 2020 briefing on his coronavirus response, Trump said he cut global health experts from federal staff and tried to slash funding for the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who try to spot and respond to epidemics. “Some of the people we cut, they haven’t been used for many, many years,” Trump said justifying those efforts. “I’m a business person — I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them,” he said. “When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.”
Shrinking government budget may be good unless it costs the public a trillion dollars later.

Trump’s logic of eliminating a government professional group to fight a pandemic runs counter to organizational consultants who point out that eliminating positions that are highly skilled do not result in cost savings but result in lager long term costs in finding replacements or teach new ones. On Jan 29, 2018, a coalition of global health of 200 organizations and companies sent a letter to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar asking the administration to not cut funding to programs as essential to health and national security, warning there will be ever more costly outbreaks.

Two years later, on February 25, 2020, Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, was in the Trump State of Denial, telling CNBC that the government had “contained” the coronavirus and would not seriously harm the economy. “I don’t think it’s going to be an economic tragedy at all.” By March 212020, Kudlow switched to getting the Deep State to start spending more than $2 trillion to save our economy through a stimulus package in the Senate to stop a depression because of the coronavirus pandemic, which had never been “contained.”

TRUMP: He first learned about the coronavirus when he closed the border to China

At the White House, March 21 Press Conference Trump was asked “When did you first learn that this was going to be a problem? (in reference to the spread of the coronavirus). He responded, “When I learned I started doing the closing, so probably around that time. We didn’t know about it until it started coming out publicly, but I wish they could’ve told us earlier about it, because we could’ve come up with a solution. They (referring to the White House Coronavirus Task Force) read about it in the newspapers like everybody else.”
Why wasn’t our State Department functioning to inform Trump?

The reporter who asked that question should have followed up by asking “When did our Ambassador to China, Terry Branstad, inform our State Department about a dangerous virus outbreak in the city of Wuhan?” The first death from an illness caused by a new lethal virus occurred there on January 11, 2020, as reported by Chinese state media The Xinhua news agency.

That information would have obviously been available to our ambassador and our foreign service corps. Did they inform Secretary Mike Pompeo? Or, as former Ambassador to the Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch has accused the Trump administration, had our experienced foreign service personnel been dramatically reduced, because of a fear that there is a Deep State conspiracy to undermine Trump’s authority, that they were not functioning properly?

The next major event occurred on January 23 when Chinese authorities cut off Wuhan, a city of more than 11 million, by canceling planes and trains leaving the city. At this point, at least 17 people had died there. Were Trump and Pompeo still uninformed of this development?

It was not until January 31, that Trump said he became aware of the problem and suspended entry into the United States by any foreign nationals who had traveled to China in the past 14 days. That was one day after the W.H.O. declared a global health emergency, where 213 people had died and nearly 9,800 had been infected worldwide. How could he not have been aware for over two weeks that there was a new lethal virus spreading? Was it because he called this developing virus pandemic a “Chinese” virus that he optimistically believed would not affect America? However, since he had disbanded the group of experts two years prior who were trained to track such a threat, so who was around to warn him?

TRUMP: “It may get a little bigger; it may not get bigger at all,”

On February 26 at a White House Press Conference – Trump said regarding those with the coronavirus, “We have a total of 15, they’re in a process of recovering, with some already having fully recovered.” He was not including those on the cruise ship from Japan.

“We’re going to spend whatever is appropriate.  Hopefully, we’re not going to have to spend so much because we really think we’ve done a great job in keeping it down to a minimum.  We’ve had tremendous success — tremendous success — beyond what people would have thought.”

By denying that the coronavirus could manifest into a potential epidemic in the US, Trump decided, along with Fox News and some Republicans, to blame the Democrats and the media for creating panic.

Trump tweeted on February 26 “Low Ratings Fake News MSDNC (Comcast) & @CNN are doing everything possible to make the “Caronavirus” (his spelling) look as bad as possible, including panicking markets, if possible.” The next day Fox News Commentator Laura Ingraham called Democrats the “pandemic party” and trying to undermine Trump’s administration. That same day another Fox News Commentator Sean Hannity said the Democrats “sadly politicizing and weaponizing an infectious disease as their next effort to bludgeon President Trump.”

Trump continued to politicize the coronavirus at his campaign rally in North Charleston, S.C on February 28, by accusing the Democrats of “politicizing” the coronavirus, saying “This is their new hoax. Democrats will always say horrible things,” Trump said. “Democrats want us to fail so badly.”

On February 29 “It may get a little bigger; it may not get bigger at all,” Trump said in a national TV address at the time.

Trump’s antipathy toward the Deep State has reshaped the Republican Party’s character from being small-government advocates to a grievance coalition highly skeptical of government, borrowing Washington Post reporter Robert Costa’s description. That attitude was reflected by a number of Republicans echoing Trump and making light of a possible coronavirus pandemic. Trump’s leading Congressional defender Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), on March 8, dismissed concerns about the coronavirus pandemic and said on Fox News that “it’s a great time to just go out, go to a local restaurant.”

It wasn’t until March 13 that Trump declared a national emergency, which would have been six weeks since he said he became aware of the coronavirus as a “problem”. The explosion of infections was so great by the time Trump declared a national emergency that the legendary GOP strategist Ed Rollins, who now chairs a pro-Trump super PAC, said, “The right underestimated this and thought the media was beating up on Trump again.”

Bottomline Of This Exercise

Any national leader must accept responsibility for their past actions and their publicized opinions, especially when it impacts the security of our nation’s health. President Trump’s attitude to the approaching pandemic has not been one of optimism but of denying the probability of its existence and of deflecting responsibility for appropriately responding.

The result may be why our nation now has the third-highest number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the world, going from 1,645 people on March 12 to 43,000 as of March 23, a span of 11 days. And, we are still struggling to contain the outbreak and providing medical supplies to our state governments and hospitals as well as supplying the proper safety gear for our health care workers.

Competency is not determined by party affiliation, but by the performance of our nation’s leadership. The Trump Administration has not had a record of competency in fighting the coronavirus.

Does the Scandinavian Model support Bernie’s Socialist Message?

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Written by Nick Licata


 

map

 Credit: WORLD BOOK map

And does it matter if it is not socialist, but would benefit the average American?

Washington Post Columnist Fareed Zakaria in an op-ed accused Bernie Sanders’s repeated exultation of the Northern European countries of Denmark, Sweden and Norway as examples of the kind of economic system he wants to bring to the United States as being an unrealistic fantasy; Sanders either ignores or misunderstands their policies.

When it comes to supporting working people, Zakaria notes that none of these countries has a minimum wage. In addition, they have adopted a “flexicurity” policy that combines flexible labor markets that allow employers to hire and fire workers easily, without excessive regulation or litigation. Although that is balanced with favorable benefits.

Zakaria points out that while Sanders admires these countries’ economic policies, their tax practices do not match his intent that “Billionaires should not exist.” Sweden and Norway both have more billionaires per capita than the United States. Remarkably either they do not have inheritance taxes (Sweden and Norway) or are at 15 percent (Denmark). Meanwhile, the US level is at 40 percent.

Worse yet, Zakaria says that taxes in the Scandinavian countries fall disproportionately on the poor, middle and upper-middle class. For example, Denmark’s highest top income tax rate is 55.9% which is levied on anyone making 1.3 times the average national income, using that same formula in the US anyone making above $65,000 would be taxed at that level. Meanwhile, these states have a national sales tax, referred to as a value-added tax, of 25%, while sales taxes in the US average only 6.5%.

These facts could make for killer TV attack ads by Republicans against Sanders and democratic candidates from conservative areas if the message is to make the US like the Scandinavian countries without mentioning their benefits. John de Graaf, co-author of the best-selling book Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemicsays that while he considers Zakaria’s description fairly accurate in many ways, it is deceptive in others.

For instance, these countries do have billionaires, but they have far lower rates of poverty and almost zero homelessness. They do not have official minimum wages, but the prevailing wages are set by union/government/business agreements, apply to almost all workers and are over $20 an hour, with most workers receiving very generous family, sick and vacation leave.

Even with high taxes, Scandinavians have quite high disposable incomes. Subsidies and “social housing” make housing affordable to all, and medical care is mostly free, although some co-pays and deductions do exist. When looking at workplace comparisons, Flexicurity is a popular system with businesses there, but it is coupled with very generous unemployment compensation, job training, workforce development, which companies pay for.
It is true that their corporate taxes appear lower than in the US but they are much better enforced — fewer loopholes. For example, data from 2010 showed while Sweden had an official corporate tax rate of 25% their companies ended up paying 22%. The US had an official rate of 35%, but an actual rate of 9%. Our approach breeds distrust in the honesty of our tax system.

To measure inequality in a country, a common metric is the GINI coefficient, with a lower score indicating greater equality in wealth among the population. The Scandinavian countries are close to 3.0 while the US is at about 4.5. Surveys comparing our citizens to theirs reveal that they are happier than Americans by a fairly wide margin, and much more secure in their lives.

The takeaway from Zakaria’s and de Graaf’s descriptions of the Scandinavian political-economic model is that calling those countries socialist is a stretch if not outright wrong. The Scandinavians and their leaders don’t consider themselves as living in socialist countries.
Socialism has many different faces depending on the angle of your view. From America, those countries may appear to be socialist. That is understandable given that our dominant political culture, which for well over a hundred years, has seen any government regulation of the marketplace and provision of economic assistance to the populace as socialistic.

Such an expansive definition of socialism renders the term useless as a guide for determining public policy. It leads to sloganeering, both pro and con, on any policy that alters the current economic structure of our nation. Ironically both Trump and Sanders, have pitched their main message as overhauling our economic system. But, in radically different ways. Trump’s message emphasizes that maintaining the racial order that benefits white ethnic groups is necessary for our security. Sanders wants greater economic equality to create better-living conditions for everyone. Trump calls his system capitalistic and Sanders calls his socialistic.

The problem that Sanders and the Democratic Party candidates face, is that the percentage of voters 45 and older is twice the number voting under the age of 29, as was shown in the most recent 2018 congressional elections as reported by the census data. The older set of voters have grown up with a negative image of socialism, and reinforced by past and current authoritarian governments that call themselves socialistic. In reality, China, Venezuela, and Cuba are not socialist, just authoritarian anti-democratic governments that provide some level of benefits to their populace that a free marketplace would not.

Sanders has and will continue to condemn all authoritarian governments, but that does not change people’s perception of socialism overnight. He is being forced to spend time informing the public on the difference between authoritarian versus democratic socialism, without being sucked into distinguishing the more than two dozen different kinds of socialism that, for instance, Wikipedia identifies. However, this educational effort is hindered by the fact that no matter how progressive, there is no economically developed, democratic country that calls itself socialist. Sometimes more progressive countries have Socialist Party governments and sometimes they don’t, but their democracies remain functioning with economics that reflects both capitalistic and socialistic elements, regardless of the change in their political leaders.

Sanders has defined his socialism as democratic socialism and points to the practices in the Scandinavian countries of what he is talking about. However, in many interviews he is more general, defining socialism as a democracy that has achieved economic justice, social justice, environmental justice, and racial justice. That describes an ideal state; one that does not exist now and may never exist. By Sanders saying he is a socialist, he is basically saying that he wishes to work toward those goals, much like what he sees the Scandinavian countries pursuing. But those goals do not inherently result in a socialistic country. They rather reflect the will of the voters within a democracy, not thrown out of balance by the influence of money.

Sanders’ political objectives are really reminiscent of those pursued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and before him Theodore Roosevelt, particularly when he ran as a populist candidate for President. This is despite Sanders’ admiring and producing a documentary on the socialist and union leader Eugene V. Debs, who garnered 6% of the vote in the 1912 general Presidential election. That was the highest watermark that any socialist presidential candidate has ever received. If Sanders wants to go much beyond that level, he must unite the Democrats as a presidential candidate. To do that he needs to reevaluate how he is crippling his own message by clinging to terminology that older generation voters have identified as poisonous to our freedoms. Instead, Sanders should echo the statement he made in the now-defunct magazine called Vermont Affairs in 1986, “…all socialism is about is democracy.”

Arguing that many Scandinavian public policies promote higher standards of living and happiness, is a strong rational argument. But, don’t sell those countries as socialist, which they are not. Having proportional electoral systems has resulted in all of them having coalition governments from time to time. Often those other parties are Christian parties and on occasion, those coalitions have even attracted the support of right-wing parties.

The bottom line is that Scandinavian countries maintain robust democracies providing services and policies that work to meet the social and economic needs of all of their citizens. That is the lesson that we can take away from their experience. And, it must be the political message of whoever is the Democratic candidate, if the Democrats are to energize people of all ages to vote in a new president who represents those values.

Could Putin actually prefer Sanders over Trump?

Written by Nick Licata


 

Sanders presents a more stable and predictable adversary but with a foreign policy similar to Trump’s.

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Bernie Sanders at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., June 2019
Carlos Barria / REUTERS

An aide to Joseph Maguire, the outgoing acting director of national intelligence, briefed the House Intelligence Committee on Feb. 13 that Russia was interfering in the 2020 campaign to try to get President Donald Trump re-elected. Separately, the Washington Post reported that U.S. officials have told Sen. Bernie Sanders that Russia is attempting to help his presidential campaign as part of an effort to interfere with the Democratic contest, according to people familiar with the matter.

A number of Democratic Party leaders believe that Sanders may be promoted by the Russians because he is seen as the weakest candidate that Trump could face, and hence could help assure his reelection. That rationale runs counter to polls which show Sanders beating Trump in some of the most important states. Axios reports that a Quinnipiac Poll last week (Feb 16th to 23rd) showed Sanders beating Trump in Michigan and Pennsylvania. A CBS News/YouGov poll had Sanders beating Trump nationally.

There is also a common belief that the Russians support Sanders because they believe it would sow more divisions within the Democratic party than supporting any other candidate. Concerns about such divisions are coming mostly from party leadership and as of now, not reflective of any rumblings from the general membership. However, there are two other reasons that could explain why the Russians could support Sanders.

First, between dealing with a mercurial, spontaneous decision-making adversary or one that is methodical and stable, Sanders would appear to be the safer bet in not pursuing aggressive military moves. Although he would not be as deferential to President Vladimir V. Putin as Trump, he conceivably could be a more reliable steady negotiator.

But there is a more important reason for the Russians to promote Sanders above the other Democrats running for president. And, it has nothing with him being a democratic socialist. It has to do with his approach to a foreign policy being more similar to Trump’s than any other Democrat.

Sander’s past foreign policy positions parallel those of Trump’s. Both were opposed to the US invading Iraq, although Trump’s claim is suspect given that two months before the war, in a Fox News interview with Neil Cavuto, Trump expressed neither support nor opposition to the concept of invading Iraq. Meanwhile, Sanders lead the opposition to the war in Congress.

They both have pushed for pulling our troops out of Afghanistan. Sanders in an op-ed in Foreign Affairs wrote: “Withdrawing from Afghanistan is something we must do,”. Trump ran as the only candidate in 2016, of both Republicans and Democrats, who would remove our troops from that country but in his second year in office, he increased US military presence there. Now, facing reelection, he has resurrected his original promise to pull them out. Is he concerned that if Sanders is his opponent, Sanders will hammer Trump, like he did Hillary in committing our troops overseas fighting an “endless war”? That attack will cut deeper into Trump’s base than all the impeachment coverage that the Democrats generated.

Trump in an address to military members in 2017 complained that Americans were “weary of war without victory” and with a “foreign policy that has spent too much time, energy, money, and most importantly lives,” on trying to rebuild countries. Because Sanders is not a liberal interventionist, he is the strongest Democratic candidate that can win a fight with Trump on the need to rebuild our nation first before pursuing military ventures. And, he can accuse Trump of having failed in his promise to do just that.

Sanders, like Trump, has argued that the US has wasted billions in taxpayer dollars, allowing competitors such as Russia and China to exploit the “forever wars” and expand their political influence. This approach reflects Trump’s “America First” policy that would end US involvement in pointless wars in the Middle East and elsewhere and instead invest that money in rebuilding America’s economy. Sanders could pull off diplomacy oriented “America First” approach without Trump-like blustering tweets that have generated far more media coverage than foreign policy gains.

Russell Berman of The Atlantic aptly pointed out that “The U.S. has now elected two presidents in a row who were, or claimed to be, against the war. Sanders is hoping voters decide to pick a third.” It worked for Barak Obama, distinguishing himself from Hilary Clinton by his opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq from its outset. It worked again for Trump who claimed to be against the war. Now Sanders is in a position to do it again.

It is insightful to note that 11 percent of Sander’s supporters in 2016, said they voted for Trump. Since it is likely that many of these folks were opposed to foreign military incursions, could there be a similar percentage of current Trump supporters moving over to Sanders if he is seen as being able to pull us out of “endless wars”?

Sanders is interested in avoiding military conflicts, but also in reshaping the military budget. He likely would challenge Trump’s massive expansion of our nuclear weapons program. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that Trump’s next biannual expenditure in this area would increase by $92 billion over the previous estimate of $400 made in 2017, which was already 15 percent higher than the previous 2015 estimate.

While much of this money purchases additional tactical nuclear weapons, in reality, they have been practically useless in achieving political objectives in military conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Iraq or Afghanistan. That funding could be diverted to building up our failing national infrastructure of roads and drainage lines, and pursue projects to build high-speed rail, and G5 network to catch up with other nations. These projects would provide jobs that voters of both parties would like to see. Let Trump defend spending billions on nuclear weapons while the country falls apart. Who is the strongest candidate willing and able to challenge Trump’s military budget as more lard than meat?

The Russians may still prefer Trump, but if there is a Democratic President, they may see Sanders as someone they can work within reaching agreements that Trump has been unable to achieve, like securing a lasting Iranian agreement.

More importantly, they need someone to revive their nuclear arms treaty with the US, which President Reagan created but President Trump ditched. Putin does not want to be dragged into another nuclear arms race. It didn’t go well for the Soviet Union; it busted their economy. It will not go well for Putin’s government either. He needs to negotiate with a national leader whose foreign policy is not erratic and tied too closely to that leader’s whims.

Could Putin be willing to see Trump dumped?

A Very Stable Genius: Donald Trump’s Testing of America

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Book Cover of Stable Genius

William Galston, a Brookings Institution senior fellow, said that “we are a government of men and not law.” It has no force until people enforce it. That is the underlying theme of Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig’s A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America. The test is how far can one person, in this case, a self-declared stable genius who is the president of the world’s longest-running democracy, repeatedly stretch or ignore the legal norms of a democratic government before a breaking point is reached? The current Republican-controlled Senate Trial of President Donald J. Trump will answer that question.

         Rucker and Leonnig interviewed more than 200 sources – most on condition of anonymity. Trump turned down their request to be interviewed. Their chronological account of his first term in office is an insider’s view of what they describe as his “vainglorious pursuit of power…”

         The universal value of the Trump administration was loyalty…” According to the authors, not to the country or its laws but to him personally. Among multiple examples, one that stood out for me was his attack on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. This law does not allow US companies, like real estate developers, such as himself, to bribe foreign governments to secure special services for their business. He asked  Secretary of State Rex Tillerson “to get rid of that law”. Tillerson said he’d have to work with Congress. Unsatisfied, Trump turned to his senior policy advisor, Stephen Miller, to draft an Executive Order repealing the law.

         Trump besides demanding loyalty, he delighted in abusing those whom he felt resisted to his proposals. For instance, he ridiculed national security advisor General H.R. McMaster’s work performance in front of other White House staff for delivering boring briefings with too much detailed paperwork. McMaster’s aid said, “The president doesn’t fire people, he just tortures them until they’re willing to quit.” Both Tillerson and General McMaster were finally pushed out.

         Trump wants loyalty to extend to his staff and federal executive agencies, like the Justice Department, which he referred to as “my” Trump Justice Department. He couldn’t understand why it would not release a pro-Trump memo to help him, saying “They are supposed to be my people.”

         Trump is revealed to not understand or care how government works and is suspicious of all agencies as being part of the anti-Trump Deep State if they don’t agree with him. The authors show how Russia’s autocrat President Putin manipulated Trump by telling him that his ideas were brilliant warned that he couldn’t trust anyone in his administration to execute them. When the Justice Department indicted twelve Russian intelligence officers for hacking Democratic emails, Trump came to Russia’s defense after Putin personally told him that they didn’t.

         Trump admires how other leaders can control their governments, like North Korea’s autocrat Kim Jong Un who got his people to “sit up at attention” when he spoke. Trump called Kim “very talented,” and “very smart,” and that Kim “felt very badly” about Otto Warmbier, the twenty-two-year-old US college student who died following seventeen months in a Korean prison. Kim told Trump he didn’t know about Warmbier. Trump’s response, “I take him at his word.”

         This book should be read by students in business management. It illustrates how a new company CEO with prior successes brings ideas that worked elsewhere but were not matched to the new one. Like Trump telling his generals, “We need to make a profit…” on US troops stationed around the world.

         While Trump rightly boasted he was a megastar in the real estate and entertainment businesses, the authors declare that Trump is a chaotic, inconsistent and ignorant manager over this nation’s federal government. Some of his staff recognized these weaknesses and provided him ways that would limit his impulsive decisions, so laws were not broken. A Very Stable Genius repeatedly shows how these professionals were worn down by what they considered the inanity, impropriety, and illegality of his ideas and directives.

         One of his longtime friends defends Trump, saying that he “has genius characteristics… Like all savants he has edges… he has a kind of brilliance and charisma that is unique, rare and captivating, although at times misunderstood.” That would explain how he attracts new acolytes to replace those he tortured and then summarily dismissed.

         Would this book’s possible wide circulation, which sketches out a damning portrait of Trump’s personal flaws, impact his reelection bid?  Will the voters care? If not, then it provides a glimpse of what to expect in the next four years.

Trump’s Acquittal may Flip the Senate

Written by Nick Licata


 

 

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US Senate in session

The Senate’s acquittal of President Donald Trump could flip the Senate to the Democrats.  That is because swing voters could be more negatively influenced by the Republican’s Senate trial than the Democrats’ House impeachment. Why is that?

Compare each party’s main critique of the other party’s performance. Republicans charge the House Democrats for not proving their case that Trump was guilty of abusing his power or obstructing congress. The Democrats charge the Republicans in the Senate for not allowing critical new testimony and previously denied documents to be shown in the trial.

For voters not glued to their TV, the positions come down to this: the Democrats could have done a better job, like pursing the courts to get testimony or documents, while the Republicans barred the Senate from receiving additional relevant information.

The Republicans have the weaker message in addressing the issue of fairness because it boils down to “the Democrats needed to do a better job”. That is a charge that all of us have been blamed for at some point in our lives. It is not unique; it is not a direct accusation of not being fair. The Democrats are accused of rushing the impeachment, but they are also accused of holding the impeachment too near the next presidential election. That’s a confusing attack. It undermines the Republican’s argument because they criticize the Democrats for taking either action, which in itself is not seen as fair.

On the other hand, the charge of not allowing witnesses who have spoken directly to the President is unique. It is simple to understand as a necessary condition for conducting a fair trial. The Republican’s defense of why testimonies were not necessary is fractured. Some like Senator Lamar Alexander, say no more information is needed. They admit that the President did try to get a foreign power to influence his election, but it doesn’t require his removal from office. It’s an explanation that undercuts the President’s position that he did nothing wrong.

Republican Senators will be heading into a quagmire of endless explanations of why they voted for no testimonies as more of John Bolton’s book reveals the President’s involvement. Plus, the courts will likely force the Trump administration to release more damaging documents. As the Republicans’ justifications become longer and more complex, the public will lose interest in the details and just remember what the Senate failed to do. A simple message always overshadows a complex one, particularly if a simple one is repeated and supported by a unified group.

As Chris Wallace of Fox News said, the Democrats “will be able to argue, … from now until November that this was a cover-up and that all the Republican senators who are up for re-election in 2020 were part of that cover-up.” The Democrats just need to remind the public that trials involve “critical” witnesses and the Republican Senators denied their appearance. That decision might have saved the election for Trump, but it might also help the Democrats flip the Senate.

The Democrat House Managers in the Senate Trump trial repeatedly stressed the need for Congress to check the growing power of a president. The Senate failed to do so, and in a caviler manner because they assumed that Trump’s support is critical for winning their primary elections. But his support isn’t a magic potion for winning their general elections.

Admittedly Trump’s rallies are huge. As the Iowa caucuses were about to begin, Trump visited the state. As reported by The Hill, Trump attracted 7,000 people in Des Moines, twice the size that attended Sen. Bernie Sanders’ rally in Cedar Rapids, which his campaign claimed was the largest held by any Democrat during this political cycle in Iowa.

However, Trump’s ability to get his candidates elected is limited. In the 2019 Alabama Senate Race, Trump supported Luther Strange in the Republican primary, he lost to Ray Moore, who Trump then supported. He lost to Democrat Doug Jones, the first Democrat to win a Senate race in Alabama in 50 years.

A more telling measurement of Trump’s limited ability to help Republicans is to look at Trump’s endorsements of Republican Governor candidates in 2018 and 2019. Seven of his thirteen endorsed candidates going for an open seat or challenging an incumbent lost in 2018. Last year he endorsed in only four governor races, his candidate lost in three of them.

In the 2018 US Senate races, he did well with incumbents, but horribly with challengers, only four of his 14 endorsed candidates won. In 2019 there were no Senate races.

The Brookings Institute also did a study of how candidates fared in 2018 for House and Senate races where Trump and Democratic politicians endorsed them. Brookings tracked the PVI (partisan voter index) for the states or districts involved. Trump supported candidates in heavy Republican-leaning districts that measured R+7.6 whereas Biden chooses districts that swung districts with roughly divided support between the parties. Trump’s endorsed candidates won 56% of the elections, Biden’s won 76%. This is a pattern that could be repeated in statewide races where the urban higher educated voters, who have been steady conservative voters, are upset with Trump’s imperial behavior.

The takeaway is that since 2018 Trump’s ability to sweep other Republicans into office does not match his power to attract people to his rallies. That’s because Trump is a unique phenomenon to watch, but not a force in persuading swing voters to vote for his candidates. It appears that congressional candidates will be judged more on how well they have served or will serve in public office than whether Trump endorses them.

There is another unintended consequence of acquitting Trump that plays to the Democrats’ advantage. It mutes Trump’s image as a victim, which has energized his base of supporters to come out and save him. Now that he is a victor, there will be some relief among his core support and hence they could be less motivated to mobilize folks to get out and vote.

Meanwhile, Trump’s acquittal should stimulate Democrats to mobilize voters to do what the Senate refused to do. The public is on the same page as the Democrats. According to a January 28, 2020 poll by Quinnipiac University, 75% of voters said to allow witnesses in the Senate impeachment trial and 53% said President Trump was not telling truth about Ukraine. Although this is a national poll for all registered voters, it does show that Democrats have the potential to sweep up swing voters in key states to support Senators who would act as a check on Trump from further expanding his executive powers. If the Democrats run solid candidates to beat incumbent Republican Senators, they can campaign on stopping a Republican Senate from appointing one or two more Trump adherents to the Supreme Court.

The Trump Senate trial has provided the Democrats a platform for carrying a simple message: the public needs a functioning Senate. One that is a real government watchdog – not a guard dog for their party leader.

Senate Republicans have more to lose than the Senate Democrats in the Trump Trial

Written by Nick Licata


 

 

Realistically the focus for the Democrats should be to sway public opinion, more than persuading the Republicans to convict Trump

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House Managers of the Trump Trial walking to the Senate

Now that President Donald Trump’s Senate Trial has begun there are some critical points to keep in mind in evaluating both the process and the likely outcome. All analysis, up to now, is based on the very low probability that 14 Republicans would break party ranks to convict Trump on the two articles of impeachment (Abuse of Power & Obstruction of Congress).

It is not likely they will abandon Trump, despite two recent developments. The nonpartisan Congressional General Accounting Office concluded Trump violated the law by withholding assistance to Ukraine. And, Lev Parnas, an associate of the president’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, said that Trump approved and directed public tax dollars to influence the election by asking Ukraine to investigate his potential main rival, former Vice President Joe Biden.

Republican senators won’t break from him because these “facts” don’t matter in their upcoming primary elections. It doesn’t matter if they lose liberal independents, they never had them, and in most states, they don’t vote in the primaries. As long as they can keep their core Republican primary voters, who are 90% plus behind Trump, they will win the primary.

But afterward, winning their general election could be severely jeopardized if the public perceives the trial as phony or not taken seriously by the Republicans. More importantly, the conservative independents, who are more Republican than Trumpites, could be swayed to vote for a Democrat who believes in the rule of law. That doesn’t mean those voters would necessarily go for liberal candidates, they could just sit on their hands and not vote. This is what makes the senate Republicans vulnerable, much more than their Democratic challengers.

For instance, there are 22 Republican senators up for reelection in 2020, while there are only 12 Democrats. Ballotpedia did an analysis of these races using the 2016 presidential election and race ratings from three of the top organizations analyzing the races (Cook Political Report, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, and Inside Elections with Nathan Gonzales) they identified 12 Republican incumbents and 5 Democratic incumbents as being potentially vulnerable. The Republicans have greater exposure.

The Democrats do not need to win the Senate trial by convicting Trump, no matter how much evidence that he should be. If the Republicans refuse testimony or admittance of documents, polls indicate that would alienate more voters than anything else. A poll taken ABC News and The Washington Post on December 10th, before the House voted for impeachment, showed 70% of

Americans believe that administration officials should be able to testify. That attitude crossed party lines; 79% of Democrats, 64% of Republicans and 72% of independents agree that Trump should allow them to appear in a Senate trial.

The struggle to control the trial’s image will not be a high drama TV event. The senators do not speak! Their questions or motions are submitted on paper to the presiding officer, i.e. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. He decides whether to bring them forward. If he refuses, he can be overruled by a simple majority of 51 senators. Almost all of the TV political pundits have made much of the 51 vote rule, which allows the Senate to create their own procedural rules for the trial. It gives control of the trial to the Republican since there are 53 of them.

There is a slight wrinkle in that description because the Standing Rules of the Senate details the rules of order of the United States Senate. Normally it takes a two-thirds vote to alter any of the 43 standing rules that were last adopted in 2000. These rules could serve as a possible hurdle for the Republicans, and they may seek to alter them to protect Trump.

In the past, both Democrat and Republican Senate majority leaders had employed a “nuclear” option, by using just a majority vote to permanently alter the standing rules. Both actions had to do with eliminating the 60-vote rule for approving federal judicial appointments, including Supreme Court nominations.

This means that the Republicans probably could exercise that authority; with 51 votes they could do anything. But if they use this nuclear option, it would appear to the public as an excessive force in manipulating the senate trial to Trump’s advantage. That could be the straw that breaks the public’s back in seeing the Republican-run senate trial as a fair one.

Most dangerous to the Republican senators seeking reelection this November, is that this move could dampen the support of their traditional conservative constituents to get out and vote for their reelection. Interestingly, one of the few mentions of the two-third rule being needed to change the senate’s standing rules was brought up by Fred Lucas, a reporter from the conservative The Daily Signal, which is funded entirely by The Heritage Foundation.

The conservative tradition is to respect the law and procedures. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell rejecting the request by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to have four White House officials testify during the impeachment trial is going to hurt the Republicans more than the Democrats. When the Republicans realize that problem, they will offer to repeat the process that was used in President Bill Clinton’s trial; having off-site testimony videotaped and then selected portions shared with the full senate.

Having live testimony with cross-examining, would make for a huge TV audience, but given the character of those testifying, the spectacle would likely confuse rather than educate the public on Trump’s guilt. Plus, there is no telling what they will say. In the Clinton senate trial, all of those testifying had done so before, so it was known what they were going to say.

The Democrats should propose having Chief Justice Roberts make the final decision on what portions of the videotaped testimony should be shared. Although the Republicans could overrule his decision, that action will be remembered by the public long after what was said in the testimony.

The bottom line for the Democrats, and the Republicans as well, is that their behavior will be judged as much as President Trump’s. Since he will not be present, the actions of the House Prosecution Managers and the President’s Defense Team will receive the immediate attention of the public watching and the media personalities commentating afterward.

Book Review of ‘Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism’ by Sharyl Attkisson

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One out of three adult Americans have no trust in our mass media, according to a September 2020 Gallup poll. Sharyl Attkisson attempts to explain why in her new book, “Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism.”

Attkisson argues that we live in an Orwellian news environment: The major media outlets carefully filter information to make sure that journalists only present the “correct” view to their audience. Attkisson says reporters are so aware of this condition that they name it The Narrative.

I wanted to see who Attkisson reveals as the formulator of The Narrative, since she asserts there is a “Big Brother constantly revising ‘facts’ to fit the government’s ever-changing story.” In this book from Attkisson, a five-time Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author, I was expecting a deep dive into the corporate world to find the culprits. It turns out, Attkisson says, it’s the liberals — not the billionaires.

Although she never directly points her finger at liberals, she does point to left-leaning trademarks: recognizing President Donald Trump’s statements as lies, finding systematic racial, economic and police oppression as the root cause of our social problems, and presenting polling as spelling doom for Republicans.

Attkisson does not see news producers and editors as having evil motives so much as they believe they have a higher purpose. They do not trust the public “to process information and draw your own conclusions because you might draw the wrong ones.” She writes that editors also succumb to pressure to conform to The Narrative from outside lobbyists, lawyers, unions, ideological research organizations, other mainstream media players, etc.

In her opinion, CBS killed an investigative report of hers because it did not lead their viewers to the “right” conclusion — it was critical of President Barack Obama’s administration. She discovered that Michigan labor unions were angry that $300 million of President Obama’s green energy stimulus program was given to Korean companies and foreign Korean workers, at U.S.-based plants. The money was intended to employ U.S. workers.

In another instance described in the book, in 1996, CBS assigned Attkisson to report a story on why Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes’ flat tax would not work. She noted that the assignment, as worded, assumed a prejudged conclusion that fit The Narrative — his flat tax would benefit the rich and hurt the poor.

It is not always a liberal bias that Attkisson illustrates, though. When Hillary Clinton, then the first lady, stumbled when descending a set of stairs, the news implied that Clinton’s stumble proved she was seriously ill. Attkisson’s point: Truthful information can qualify as a narrative when it is amplified beyond its news value in order to promote a particular bias.

Unfortunately, she tends to set up straw men to make a point. For instance, she recognizes that there may be a good reason to discuss the frequency of tornadoes or rising floodwaters theoretically in terms of global warming. But she says that by linking every weather phenomenon to man-made climate change, without consideration to scientific counterpoints, implies that contrary views are illegitimate. Is that happening? Is the media linking every weather event to global change? Or does mentioning it as a possibility, mean that equal time should be given to say that it may not be happening?

Attkisson says because President Trump has exposed bias, flaws, and weaknesses in the news media, journalists lost “their collective mind and shed all pretense of objectivity.” Particularly when he said that the media is an “Enemy of the People” and provides “Fake News.” She defends Trump saying he was only talking about the dishonest press – not everybody. 

Curiously, she doesn’t identify which media organizations Trump considers honest. The pro-Trump, conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group would probably be an honest one. For five years, it has hosted Attkisson’s weekly investigative news program, which reaches 700,000 households on Sinclair’s network of nearly 200 television stations.

She realizes that Trump, like all politicians, exaggerates or make jokes that are taken as serious statements. But she will not call him a liar, nor any politician a liar. It’s up to the public to decide if they are telling the truth. As evidence she cites how she did not call President Obama a liar when he promised that Americans could keep their own health care plans and doctors under the Affordable Care Act. The journalism nonprofit Poynter Institute’s fact-check feature, PolitiFact, did call that Obama claim the 2013 “Lie of the Year.” However, she doesn’t mention that Trump’s own statements were awarded PolitiFact’s 2015, 2017 and 2019 Lie of the Year. 

So, when is it the responsibility of a journalist to go beyond just repeating whatever politicians say? Attkisson says that the term “without evidence,” when applied to a politician’s statement, is an invented concept for the purpose of slanting the news. “Throughout time, few newsmakers presented ‘evidence’ when making statements,” she writes. But she does not distinguish the critically important difference between when they were expressing opinions or apparent facts.

When California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, told NPR, that Trump was lying when he spoke at an event in West Virginia in April of 2018 that, “In many places, like California, the same person votes many times – not a conspiracy theory folks. Millions and millions of people.” Was Trump expressing an opinion or was he stating something as a fact. Attkisson’s rule would not include a qualifier of adding “without evidence” to his statement. Is that good journalism, or is it just broadcasting a false accusation.

Attkisson gets credit for listing 12 publications she believes are doing honest, important work. Two of them are left-leaning, The Intercept and The Hill. Seven are right-leaning or just straight out hard-right such as Judicial Watch, which has described climate science as “fraud science.”

A liberal might easily put aside the book as another one written by a Trump apologist or a blinded conservative. However, reading “Slanted” stretches your mind to consider how major networks slant the news to conform to their prejudices. Attkisson assumes that there is a rigid mindset among most major media outlets that presents and shapes the facts to conform with generally liberal beliefs. For evidence, she provides a selection of detailed and presumably accurate examples. 

Nevertheless, Attkisson’s Slanted ignores her own strong conservative bias in choosing which examples to support her position. That approach ultimately frames her own confining narrative of the book’s orientation and consequently greatly diminishes its value. Nick Licata is author ofBecoming A Citizen Activist, andhas served 5 terms on the Seattle City Council, named progressive municipal official of the year by The Nation, and is founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of 1,000 progressive municipal officials.

On Fire by Naomi Klein

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Reading Naomi Klein’s new book, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, is similar to watching a mega-disaster movie in a theater. Except, you can leave your fears behind when you exit the theater. Klein’s message is that our human-induced climate change is devastating our livable earth, we are stuck here, it is not safe, the house is on fire.

Klein does not harvest new horrors in her book, plenty of them are presented chronically in her collection of writings and speeches over the span of a decade, the last entry being April of this past year. The introduction and epilogue carry forward the book’s urgent advocacy to act now, in order to avoid our imminent extinction.

To shake us out of our slumber, she presents heroes who are sounding the alarm. A prime example is Greta Thunberg, the 15-year-old girl from Stockholm Sweden, who in a period of just eight months has sparked the creation of the youth climate movement that culminated in March 2019 with nearly 2,100 youth climate strikes in 125 counties and with 1.6 million young people participating. Thunberg said, “We cannot solve an emergency without treating it as an emergency.” 

Along that line of reasoning, Klein argues that climate change efforts do not need to figure out every detail of the proposed solutions in advance, “what matters is that we begin the process right away.” The emphasis on action and not planning may be why Klein recognizes that denialists have gained traction by arguing that efforts to halt climate change “will destroy capitalism… killing jobs and sending prices soaring.” 

The moderator at the 2018 Heartland Institute’s Conference on Climate Change put it bluntly, this issue could be “a green Trojan horse” filled with “Marxist socioeconomic doctrine”. A senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute sees that there is a push to remove freedoms that would stop the government from imposing draconian measures to fight climate change. The conference’s keynote speaker, Patrick Michaels, who is a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute, called the effort to support locally owned biofuels refineries akin to a “Maoist” scheme.

Although these statements are from a handful of right-wing institutions, Klein shows how public opinion has dramatically shifted. From polls taken in 2007 and 2011, the percentage of those that believe “the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause the climate to change” dropped from 71 percent to 44 percent. 

Importantly, she adds that individuals cannot win this struggle but only through a mass united effort. Klein notes that unity accomplished incredible feats among the general population in winning World War II. For instance, in 1943, three-fifths of our nation’s population “had “Victory Gardens” in their yards, growing fresh vegetables that accounted for 42 percent of all those consumed that year.” Unfortunately, Klein ignores the power of the presidency to sway public opinion and obstruct such unity. In WWII we had a president who focused the public’s attention on winning a battle, today we have a president who denies that there is even a battle to be fought. 

Klein admits that the deniers realize something that many liberal politicians ignore, that to stop the earth from becoming an uninhabitable place there must be a radical reordering of our economic and political systems that are antithetical to the “free-market” belief system. In particular, she calls for a new civilization paradigm that does not dominate nature but respects it by rejecting the “growth imperative”. Her solution is to reduce the amount of material stuff that the wealthiest 20 percent of people on the planet consume. 

To accomplish such a sweeping change, she supports publicly funded elections and stripping corporations of their status as “people” in this country. For all countries, she suggests cutting military budgets by twenty-five percent and imposing a transaction tax on the financial sector. However, as she recognizes, that just being a “socialist” country has not proven to be the solution: the Soviet Union had even higher carbon footprints per capita than Britain, Canada, and Australia. And a recent report says that Communist China is constructing over a hundred coal-fired power plants in poorer nations as a way of outsourcing a portion of its carbon emissions. 

Regardless of a government’s ideology, Klein argues that “we will not get the job done unless we are willing to embrace systemic economic and social change.” The core of that change is adopting the head-spinning notion that economic growth is the villain not the savior of mankind. Unfortunately, she does not provide any country that rejects economic growth as a working model.

She concludes that incremental changes have not worked because the climate change battle links all social justice struggles. Working separately on each issue creates artificial boundaries between them. Consequently, the single largest determining factor “to pull us back from the climate cliff” will have to come from “actions taken by social movements in the coming years”. 

Klein provides data and vision. Her hope is to see a coordinated global movement to successfully reverse carbon consumption within each country; a challenge that will require something more than a book, like a future world-wide radical mass movement that will challenge every nation’s government. Klein’s next book might want to present a plan for how that would happen.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column]

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The Minimum Wage Could be Raised in the Majority of States – This Year

Written by Nick Licata

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The 2020 new year marks a historic landmark for dramatically improving many people’s living standards by increasing the minimum hourly wage. According to David Cooper of the Economic Policy Institute, nearly 7 million workers will start the new year with higher wages. This is not due to Trump’s tax cut which reduced the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to as low as 20 percent. That change resulted in doubling the number of companies paying zero in taxes, according to research from the Center for Public Integrity.
Instead, guaranteed higher wages was a result of citizens working in their communities to make local governments accountable to them. This year half of the states will have raised the minimum hourly wage, an effort that was led by 22 city and county governments, with states now trying to catch up.
The movement to raise the minimum wage to $15 first caught the nation’s attention when in 2013 the Washington State city of SeaTac, with a population of less than thirty-thousand, passed a citizen’s initiative establishing it. A coalition of unions, faith groups, immigrant and community groups came together, inspired by one-day walkout strikes by non-union fast-food workers in New York City in the late fall of 2012. They demanded better working conditions and a $15 minimum wage. Walkouts by fast-food workers occurred early the next year in cities like Chicago, St. Louis, and Milwaukee demanding a higher minimum wage.
SeaTac’s victory encouraged workers and citizens to mobilize in neighboring Seattle, with a population of over 600,000.  Astonishingly, within six months of Sea-Tac’s victory, Seattle became the first major city in the US to adopt a $15 minimum hourly wage for all employees, working part and full time, including those receiving tips.
Several books have described how this victory came about. My book, Becoming a Citizen Activist, begins with a glimpse of how the city council came to pass the legislation. More detailed descriptions of how the effort began in Sea-Tac and spread to Seattle are covered in David Rolf’s The Fight For $15 and Jonathan Rosenblum’s Immigrant Workers, Faith Activists, and the Revival of the Labor Movement.
The desire to raise minimum wages is not confined to large liberal cities. It crosses regional and political boundaries, uniting Grassroot efforts to challenge entrenched political parties who control the state governments. For example, look at how voters in both New Jersey and Missouri increased the minimum wage, overturning their governor’s and state legislator’s actions.
In November 2013, New Jersey voters effectively overrode Governor Chris Christie’s veto of the minimum wage bill the legislature had passed. The voters approved an increase through a ballot measure. These were not hard-core democrats since republican Christie and his lieutenant governor were re-elected with over 60% of the vote. In Missouri, voters passed a higher state minimum wage at the ballot box after state lawmakers nullified city minimum wage ordinances that had been enacted by local governments in Kansas City and St. Louis. Missouri is a trifecta state, where the republicans simultaneously hold the governor’s office and majorities in both state legislative chambers and since 2000, has voted 100% for a Republican presidential candidate. Raising the minimum wage once again was critical to voters who also voted republican.
These local and state actions have become necessary because congress, under the control of either the democrats or the republicans, has up to now, been unwilling or unable to increase the minimum wage. And it is about time that they act. The federal government last raised the minimum wage to $7.25 in July 2009, and since then its purchasing power has declined by 17 percent. This past July, the democratic controlled U.S. House of Representatives passed the “Raise the Wage Act of 2019”, a bill that would raise the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2025.
It has been sent to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, but he has denied it an opportunity to be voted on, along with a hundred other bills from the House of Representatives that have been referred to the Senate.
However, no matter what occurs in D.C. this November, organizing must continue at the local and state level. Below are some strategies to consider for doing so.
Five Critical Strategic Steps For Passing
Higher Minimum Wage Legislation at the Local Level.
First, Have dedicated staff –  there must be full-time staff working with community groups to provide them outreach services. Unions, like SEIU and HERE Unite, that have been in the forefront and others who are involved, may have paid staff to fill that role. Unions provided the organizational strength that allowed both SeaTac and Seattle to ultimately succeed. Meanwhile, the faith community’s organizations are more likely to provide a pool of volunteers to work with paid staff and reach out regularly to their membership.
Second, Do good research – it is critical to provide reliable data to the public. The executive director, John Burbank, and the policy director, Marilyn Watkins, of the local and nationally recognized think tank, the Economic Opportunity Institute, provided data to convince both politicians and the public that raising the minimum wage was good for the economy. On a national level, Economic Policy Institute’s David Cooper continues to track efforts to increase the minimum wage throughout the nation. That research does not end after legislation is passed, because those opposed to this type of government regulation will continue to site studies that could eliminate or hamper such legislation. Watkins’ article Poor research leads to poor findings on minimum wageprovides a perfect example of why such attention is needed, as she systematically dissects a study critical of increasing the minimum wage.
Third, Work with politicians – community groups need to identify and work with elected officials who are willing to champion, support or even discuss the need for increasing the minimum wage. Timing is important. If there is an election, use it to promote increasing the minimum wage. As a city council candidate, socialist Kshama Sawant built a grassroots $15 Now campaign and made increasing the minimum wage an issue that both Mayoral candidates adopted in the general election.
Even without introducing legislation, a local councilmember can hold public forums to get information out to the public and to other politicians. Ady Barkan, the founding director of the national network of one thousand elected municipal officials, Local Progress, writes in his book Eyes to the Wind, how Local Progress worked with me to bring national experts and councilmembers from other cities to a Seattle symposium to discuss how minimum wage legislation could help employees avoid poverty while expanding the economy. Three months later the Seattle City Council passed the legislation.
Fourth, Involve national groups – without the support of groups like Local Progress and SEIU, Seattle’s effort would have had to rely just on local resources. National groups are not going to win a campaign, but they can bring in resources, like speakers, national media, and critical strategic advice. If they can send a representative to your city, make it a media event by inviting the public to hear them. Also, line up interviews for them with reporters, bloggers, politicians and opinion leaders.
Fifth, Feed all types of media – use social media to broadcast events, solicit volunteers and educate the public. Use the radio to appear on talk show programs, all of them. It doesn’t matter if the host is a conservative, as long as you can get your message out, you will pick up some support. Meet regularly with bloggers to give them an inside look at what is happening on this issue and do the same with newspaper columnists and reporters. Don’t forget to reach out to the community, church, and any group that has an electronic newsletter.
To borrow from Eric Lou’s book title, You’re More Powerful than You Think. Now you just have to work with others to exercise that power to get your local government to raise the minimum wage.

Seattle’s Urban Light Rail Needed Transparency to Get Built

Written by: Nick Licata


 

Back-on-track

 

I often read the inspiring tale of The Little Train That Could to my two-year-old granddaughter.  When she gets older, I should read her Bob Wodnik’s book, Back on Track – Sound Transit’s Fight to Save Light Rail, because like that children’s book it is inspiring.

Wodnik served as the senior communications specialist from 1999 to 2017, for the Seattle region’s bus-rail agency, Sound Transit. He tells the inside story of how transit advocates fought against an array of formidable critics to build the multi-billion dollar Link Light rail train network, now running from north Seattle to the SeaTac Airport far south of the city for a total of 22 miles.

The book is not an analysis of how this system compares to other options that could have been pursued. Seattle would have been the only city in the country with a major monorail system but after passing four ballot votes, it was defeated on the fifth, and construction never began. There have also been proponents for building an alternative Rapid Bus System, using dedicated lanes. But it never came close to a city-wide vote, despite the critics providing details and statistics on how such a system could work. And finally, some relied on just paving more roads instead of laying down rail – a solution attempted in other cities without lasting traffic congestion relief,  the roads just fill as soon as they are built.

But getting broad public approval for building an urban rail system is not an easy sell to the public. Approving a fixed-rail rapid transit for a city is one of the most contentious decisions that an urban populace can make. It is often rejected through popular votes, as has happened in Austin, Tampa, San Antonio, Nashville, and in Seattle, where it was defeated at the election polls in 1968,1970, and 1995.

Wodnik clearly reveals the internal problems that plagued Sound Transit’s initial debut. It struggled to gain creditability, after its massive budget gap was revealed, with some of the most influential regional players, like the Chamber of Commerce and the daily newspapers suggesting that the project was a loser. Public officials, both Democrats, and Republicans, including two former governors, Booth Gardner and John Spellman, two County Council members, Maggie Fimia and Rob McKenna, and two city councilmembers, Peter and I, severely criticized its management for lack of transparency.

The turning points for Seattle came in 1988 when a countywide advisory ballot to build light rail passed with 70% approval but with no costs attached, and in 1996, when the proposal, with costs, identified, passed in the three contiguous counties, King, Snohomish, and Pierce. Their county councils would have representatives on the newly created Sound Transit board, which had the authority to build light rail, commuter train and rapid ride bus lines for the region. The bus lines became the workhorses, out of the limelight but delivering early results. The commuter rail, although struggling for ridership, did not create opposition like the light rail system.

In a suspenseful tale, Wodnik details how it took 13 years to open Light Link rail, fighting off opposition from eight different organized citizen groups, seven lawsuits and often the two daily newspapers. They were accused of ignoring the poorest neighborhood in Seattle, the Rainier Valley when the light rail was to be on the surface and not buried in a tunnel.

On the other hand, they were also accused of mission creep as various interest groups argued for different rail alignments that best suited a business and residential community’s needs.  Such competing objectives, which is typical in other urban rail projects, it is a wonder how they succeeded? Wodnik attributes it to hard work, luck and a focused leader.
Sound Transit’s main challenge was getting out solid and consistent information to the public. People often support the idea of rapid transit, it’s in accepting the details and cost that dilutes that support; focus groups strongly favored Seattle having a light rail system, but not so much when the details were revealed.

The biggest revelation occurred at the end of 2000 when the newly hired and highly competent  Joni Earl was hired. The former city manager for Mill Creek, and a trained accountant, took only two months to discover that Sound Transit’s Link Rail cost estimates were a billion off and would take 3 years longer to finish the project than what was promised to the voters.

Multiple newspapers, including the Daily Journal of Commerce, skewered the agency for its arrogance. The Federal Transit Administration’s Inspector General undertook a two-year investigation to out any fraud that may have occurred, holding up a half a billion-dollar grant that Sound Transit desperately needed. No fraud was found, but public trust in the agency was not shored up until the agency opened up its first stage of light link rail, running from downtown Seattle to the airport in 2009.

Wodnik presents both light rail critics and advocates fairly. The core supporters, however, were not the often skeptical business leaders. Instead, all but one of the eighteen major players he lists at the front of the book, were Sound Transit employees and board members who believed that a public rapid transit system was desperately needed to meet Seattle’s tremendous growth. Between 1960 and 1990 the number of jobs in Central Puget Sound more than doubled, the population grew 82%, and the number of registered vehicles was increasing faster than the population.

Although Sound Transit’s Link Rail teetered on failure, it did get built. Although some critics might claim that was because big money backed the project, there was no evidence presented that building a light rail system was conjured up in some backroom deal. Instead, the increased traffic congestion in Seattle brought about a large public recognition that something had to be done to move people around in a better way. It’s a condition that other cities have also struggled with.

In the end, Seattle’s Light Link rail’s success came down to the critical need for competent management of a multi-billion dollar project. Wodnik strongly credits its CEO Joni Earl, for leading that agency through its rocky years to get Sound Transit back on track. Such leadership, and continuous public oversight,  is needed to bring an urban rail system into any city and to keep it accountable to the public.

Back on Track – Seattle’s Urban Light Rail Story

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I often read the inspiring tale of The Little Train That Could to my two-year-old granddaughter.  When she gets older, I should read her Bob Wodnik’s book, Back on Track – Sound Transit’s Fight to Save Light Rail, (Washington State University Press) because like that children’s book it is inspiring.

Wodnik served as the senior communications specialist from 1999 to 2017, for the Seattle region’s bus-rail agency, Sound Transit. He tells the inside story of how transit advocates fought against an array of formidable critics to build the multi-billion-dollar Link Light rail train network, now running from the University of Washington to the SeaTac airport far south of the city for a total of 22 miles.

The book is not an analysis of how this system compares to other options that could have been pursued. Seattle would have been the only city in the country with a major monorail system but after passing four ballot votes, it was defeated on the fifth, and construction never began. There have also been proponents for building an alternative Rapid Bus System, using dedicated lanes. But it never came close to a city-wide vote, despite the advocates providing details and statistics on how such a system could work. And finally, some relied on just paving more roads instead of laying down rail – a solution attempted in other cities without lasting traffic congestion relief, since usually the roads just fill as soon as they are built.

But getting broad public approval for building an urban rail system was not an easy sell to the public, especially after federal grants diminished. Approving a fixed-rail rapid transit for a city is one of the most contentious decisions that an urban populace can make. It is often rejected through popular votes, as has happened in Austin, Tampa, San Antonio, and Nashville. In Seattle, rail proposals were defeated at the election polls in 1968, 1970, and 1995.

Wodnik clearly recounts the internal problems that plagued Sound Transit’s initial debut. It struggled to gain credibility after a massive budget gap was revealed, with some of the most influential regional players, like the Chamber of Commerce and the daily newspapers, suggesting that the project was a loser. Public officials, both Democrats and Republicans, including two former governors, Booth Gardner, and John Spellman, two County Council members, Maggie Fimia and Rob McKenna, and two city councilmembers, Peter Steinbrueck and I, severely criticized its management for lack of transparency.

The turning points for Seattle came in 1988,  when a countywide advisory ballot to build light rail passed with 70 percent approval but with no costs attached. In 1996, when the scaled-back proposal, with costs identified, passed in the transit-rich portions of three contiguous counties, King, Snohomish, and Pierce. Their county councils would have representatives on the newly created Sound Transit board, which had the authority to build light rail, commuter trains, and rapid ride bus lines for the region. The bus lines became the work horses, out of the limelight but delivering early results. Commuter rail over existing private tracks, although struggling for ridership, did not create opposition like the light rail system.

In a suspenseful tale, Wodnik details how it took 13 years to open Light Link rail, fighting off opposition from eight different organized citizen groups, seven lawsuits, and often the two daily newspapers’ editorial pages. The transit agency was accused of ignoring the poorest neighborhood in Seattle, the Rainier Valley, where the trains were to be on the surface and not buried in a tunnel.

On the other hand, they were also accused of mission creep and buying off opposition as various interest groups argued for different rail alignments that best suited a business and residential community’s needs.  Given such competing objectives, which is typical in other urban rail projects, it is a wonder how they succeeded. Wodnik attributes success to hard work, luck, and a focused leader, Joni Earl.

Sound Transit’s main challenge was getting out solid and consistent information to the public. People often support the idea of rapid transit, but the details and cost dilute that support; focus groups strongly favored Seattle’s having a light rail system, but not so much when the details were revealed.

The biggest revelation occurred at the end of 2000, when the newly hired and highly competent Joni Earl was hired. The former city manager for Mill Creek and a trained accountant, Earl took only two months to discover that Sound Transit’s Link Rail cost estimates were $1 billion off and would take three years longer to finish the project than what was promised to the voters.

Multiple newspapers, including the Daily Journal of Commerce, skewered the agency for its arrogance. The Federal Transit Administration’s Inspector General undertook a two-year investigation to ferret out any fraud that may have occurred, holding up a $500 million grant that Sound Transit desperately needed. No fraud was found, but public trust in the agency was not shored up until the agency opened its first stage of light link rail, running from downtown Seattle to the airport in 2009.

Wodnik presents both light rail critics and advocates fairly. The core supporters, however, were not the skeptical business leaders. Instead, all but one of the 18 major players he lists at the front of the book were Sound Transit employees and board members who believed that a public rapid transit system was desperately needed to meet Seattle’s tremendous growth. Between 1960 and 1990 the number of jobs in Central Puget Sound more than doubled, the population grew 82 percent, and the number of registered vehicles was increasing faster than the population.

Although Sound Transit’s Link Rail teetered on failure, it did get built. Some critics might claim that was because big money backed the project, but there was no evidence that building a light rail system was conjured up in some backroom deal. Instead, the increased traffic congestion in Seattle brought about public recognition that something had to be done to move people around in a better way. 

In the end, Seattle’s Light Link rail’s success came down to the critical need for competent management of an enormous project. Wodnik strongly credits CEO Joni Earl for leading that agency through its rocky years to get Sound Transit back on track. Such leadership and continuous public oversight are needed to bring an urban rail system into any city, especially Seattle, which long lagged the nation in building rail transit.

Fired Prosecutor Is Trump’s Savior from Impeachment

By Nick Licata


 

The Republican Defense of Trump Relies on a Ukrainian Prosecutor Removed from Office for Tolerating Corruption 

ViktorShokin

Prosecutor General of Ukraine Viktor Shokin – Wikipedia photo

President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress have repeatedly asked Ukraine to open an investigation into their country’s corruption. Rather than work with, Ruslan Ryaboshapka, Ukraine’s current General Prosecutor, a position that is similar to our Attorney General, they have sought out a former prosecutor who was removed for refusing to pursue charges against individuals and corporations that had been identified by his own office as corrupt. Is there a gap in logic here?

That prosecutor is Viktor Shokin. He was appointed by the oligarch Petro Poroshenko who won the election for president as a reformist after the Euromaidan 2014/15 populist revolt against the government of President Viktor Yanukovych. Shokin was not a holdover from that corrupt government, so the expectation was that he would diligently pursue those who had bilked the Ukrainian people out of billions of dollars.

Although Shokin only served from Feb 11, 2015, until March 29, 2016, his term in office became controversial. He had come under repeated criticism within Ukraine for not prosecuting officials, businessmen and members of parliament for their roles in corrupt schemes under the former President Viktor F. Yanukovych.

That mounting dissatisfaction with Shokin was reflected in December of 2015 when the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, said there were no vigorous efforts to combat the kind of self-dealing that had occurred in the past. Meanwhile, Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, which props up Ukraine financially, said fighting corruption was so weak that “it’s hard to see how I.M.F. support can continue.”

Shokin was also implicated in tolerating corruption within his own department after troves of diamonds, cash, and other valuables were found in the homes of two of Mr. Shokin’s subordinates, suggesting that they had been taking bribes. When prosecutors in Shokin’s office tried to bring the subordinates to trial, they were fired or resigned, and there was no further inquiry. Shokin’s own deputy, Vitaliy Kasko, resigned in February 2016, alleging that Shokin’s office was itself corrupt.

Because Shokin was not investigating other serious signs of corruption,  foreign donors suspected their contributions were being stolen without restraint Americans provided them support. Vice President Joe Biden visited Ukraine in 2015 and 2016 to complain about the ongoing stalled efforts to fight corruption by the prosecutor’s office.

In his last visit, March 2016, Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees if Ukraine failed to address corruption by employing a new more aggressive general prosecutor. The Ukrainian Parliament voted to remove Shokin by a comfortable margin that same month.

Given the breadth of Shokin critics, stemming from street demonstrations to the head IMF official, and in the end even his own deputy, it is puzzling why our President Trump, would go out of his way to describe him as a “very good” former prosecutor to the new Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky on his July 25, 2019 call.

Also, why would Congressman Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, in December 2018, meet with Shokin in Vienna, 2 years after Shokin left the office. Nunes has denied that the meeting took place. Public records do show that Nunes traveled to Europe from Nov. 30 to Dec. 3, 2018, with three of his aides. U.S. government funds paid for the group’s very short four-day trip, which cost just over $63,000.

Shokin told President Trump’s personal attorney Rudi Giuliani associate Lev Parnas that he had met Nunes. Parnas is willing to testify under oath before congress of what he knows, but unless there was a third person present, who is willing to appear before Congress, it will be Parnas’s word against Nunes’s. Shokin has worked closely with the Russian government and they would not look kindly on him if he were to confirm anything that endangered Trump’s presidency.

Giuliani had previously met Shokin because he had started investigating Burisma as the former prosecutor-general. Nunes was probably encouraged by Giuliani to visit Shokin to gather some incriminating information about Hunter Biden. However, Shokin’s investigations were either dropped or dormant by the time he was fired.

His lack of pursuing an investigation of Burisma was noted by the Anti-Corruption Action Center (AntAC). Daria Kaleniuk a leader of AntAC told the NYT, “Shokin was not investigating. He didn’t want to investigate Burisma. And Shokin was fired not because he wanted to do that investigation, but quite to the contrary, because he failed that investigation.” Just before he was fired, Shokin’s office raided the AntAC headquarters, claiming that it had misappropriated aid money.

While there is no smoking gun or a tape recording of the Nunes meeting with Shokin, the likelihood of such a meeting makes sense. Parnas had worked with Trump’s former Campaign Manager Paul Manafort as a lobbyist for Ukraine at a time when Ukraine’s government was aligned with Russian interests under the former president Yanukovych. Parnas was also working with Giulani to push Ukraine to open an investigation on Hunter Biden since he was on the Burisma company board. Although Shokin has claimed that if he was still in office, he would have investigated Biden, he did not while he was the prosecutor.

It is reasonable to believe that Shokin would have told Parnas that he had met with Nunes since all three were trying to discover if Biden had participated in corruption. They were all on the same team.  Additionally, Nunes was about to relinquish his committee chairmanship to a democrat since they would be in control of the House of Representatives the next month. Interviewing Shokin may have given Nunes an opportunity to make one last media splash if Shokin had something valuable and newsworthy to share.

Republicans would surely have released any item that Shokin could produce that would incriminate Biden. They haven’t. But Trump and the Republicans still insist that he was fired because Vice President Biden demanded it. Trump accuses Biden of fearing that his son Hunter Biden could be drawn into some corruption scandal. He may have feared that but none of the three last general prosecutors have investigated Hunter Biden and all have said that they have had no reason to.

The bottom line is that Trump and the Republicans suspect that Hunter and papa Joe are somehow connected to corruption in Ukraine. However, the only prosecutor they trust for information is the only one that the Russians trust – Shokin, who was kicked out of office by a duly elected parliament – for being corrupt.

The 20th Anniversary of the WTO Battle in Seattle

Originally posted at the Medium. Written by Nick Licata.


 

The freedom to dissent was tested as the US closed out the twentieth century with a demonstration that grabbed the world’s attention. Forty thousand citizens marched through Seattle’s downtown on November 30, 1999, to protest a meeting of the World Trade Organization Ministerial (WTO.)

Having decided to hold its third biannual meeting in the US, over forty cities competed to host it. Seattle beat out the others by promising to spend over $9 million, almost twice as much as the nearest bid from Honolulu. The City Council wasn’t asked to approve the offer because the Seattle Host Organization, consisting of members from the region’s major corporations and chaired by Microsoft’s Bill Gates, promised to pick up the tab, although they ended contributing far less.

This was to be the most important trade conference ever held in the US; the newly formed WTO was assuming powers that far outstripped its predecessors. In particular, it would not only continue to regulate manufactured goods, but services, intellectual property, and agriculture would be added.

More importantly, it would have the authority to require the elimination of local labor standards and environmental protections if they violated trade agreements. It was a wet dream for corporate leaders bent on expanding trade opportunities, and a nightmare for those defending worker rights and the environment.

Without firing a shot, the world was seeing the formation of a new international power. The context for Seattle’s WTO meeting was set, it would not happen without vocal and visible dissent from those affected.

To publicize our city council’s concerns with the WTO, I sponsored, and the council unanimously passed, resolution number 29926 in April, expressing the Council’s ability to regulate and pass laws regarding environmental protection and fair labor practices within its jurisdiction and that it opposed international agreements that could restrict that ability. It was a small attempt to support those opposing WTO’s growing power.

Just as delegates from the 130 countries and the several thousand media correspondents were preparing to attend, so were citizen activists. I met with Mike Dolan from Public Citizen; a Ralph Nader initiated organization, in the spring of 1999 to discuss how to create an open environment in which citizens could be heard. Dolan was building community support by acquiring venues to accommodate a huge number of open educational meetings.

Meanwhile, another organization from San Francisco, the International Forum on Globalization, organized two-day teach-in the pristine downtown Benaroya Symphony Hall. Each day more than 2,500 attendees packed the hall to listen to an analysis of how WTO was reshaping the world around profits, not human needs.

Opposition to the WTO came from three groupings distinguished by their tactics and objectives. By far the largest one was a precedent-setting alliance between organized labor and environmental groups, referred to as the “Teamsters and turtles” coalition, due to hundreds of protestors appearing in sea turtle costumes to protest WTO’s rules harming sea life. Labor leaders, for their part, wanted any new WTO trade agreement to set minimum labor standards in factories around the world, so as not to drag down labor agreements in the US.

Although they tussled over whether saving jobs or the environment was more important, they recognized that they faced a common fate of being sacrificed on the alter-of-trade if they didn’t ultimately shrink WTO’s authority. Their tactic was to organize and lead tens of thousands of demonstrators in a permitted march into downtown. I participated, walking alongside AFL-CIO President Sweeny and Congressman Dennis Kucinich, and a number of other labor and Congressional leaders who were present.

The second group, numbering perhaps a thousand, came together under an umbrella group, the Direct Action Network (DAN) whose publicized objective was to use non-violent civil disobedience (calling for no property destruction) to stop the WTO from the meeting. Their long-term goal was to create a mass movement to challenge global capital, “making a radical change and social revolution.” Their actions evolved from independent affinity groups that had been training for months on their tactics.

They arrived downtown hours before the mass march was to arrive. By forming large circles of protestors with arms interlocked with duct tape or bicycle locks, they successfully blocked major intersections. Delegates were unable to enter the Washington State Convention & Trade Center while buses and cars were suddenly diverted around the downtown retail core to avoid the protestors.

The third and smallest group, numbering a hundred at most, consisted of militant anarchists, referred to the black block. They systematically blockaded streets with newspaper boxes and smashed the windows of retail outlets owned by exploitive corporations. They also reached the downtown core before the mass march.

The media showered this group with attention while ignoring the anti-WTO forums. Throwing a garbage can through a store window certainly is more eye-catching than a snapshot of a room full of people listening to a lecture. But I couldn’t help but ask, which is better suited for building a lasting informed social movement for change?

As November 30, 1999 approached, public officials had recognized there would be thousands of protestors. Even President Bill Clinton told the workers at a Harley Davidson factory before heading to Seattle, “Every group in the world with an ax to grind is going to Seattle. I told them all, I wanted them to come… I want everybody to get this all out of their system…”

Mayor Paul Schell, a former war protestor himself, said Seattle would welcome all who came to protest peacefully against WTO. And I got the City Council, through a resolution, to request that the Mayor help accommodate all visitors arriving for the Ministerial, by encouraging “…organizations who are serving demonstrators coming to our community to explore opportunities to ensure adequate lodgings and homestays.” It was going to be needed; Mike Dolan informed me that there were 750 Accredited Non-Governmental Organizations actively recruiting people to attend the WTO ministerial.

I had attended a number of meetings between our police leadership and leaders of the mainstream protestor groups, to see if they could agree on how to proceed with the demonstrations. Representatives from both sides were cautious and the meetings were inconclusive. The reality was that dissent would be taking many forms and no amount of volunteer parade marshals could keep folks walking in a straight line down the road.

There was anger in the air that the City did not take into account. Our police showed pictures to the councilmembers of what happened sixteen months earlier at the WTO’s second ministerial conference in Geneva, Switzerland. Five thousand protestors gathered there, firebombing three autos and damaging other cars and stores. The Seattle police were scared but the mainstream protest leaders assured them they would lead a peaceful march.

As I walked down First Avenue with thousands of other protestors from the huge AFL-CIO rally held about a mile north of downtown, I felt that we would show the world how much opposition there was to WTO’s plans. At the front of the march were labor leaders and Congressmen.

When we reached the retail core, we were to proceed to a gathering spot and not continue to the Convention Center; however, some protestors emerged from the march and encouraged us to veer towards it. Confusion reigned and the march splintered into smaller streams of protestors.

Meanwhile, the DAN group blocked the main intersections and the black block faction attacked Starbuck and Nike stores, spraying graffiti on their windows that had not been smashed.

Perhaps stunned by the violence and not prepared for a strategic response the police initially failed to intervene with those smashing windows. The parades’ monitors took up protective positions outside some of the retail stores, fearing that the plate glass windows being shattered by handkerchief-masked anarchists would overshadow their own orderly protesting.

Even as the police began using tear gas to break up DAN’s circles to allow the WTO delegates to enter the Convention Center, a couple of blocks away from other protestors, many in costumes, chanted, waved signs and even danced in the streets. David Solnit, one of DAN’s organizers, described the scene as a festival of resistance, from which the labor leaders and congressional representatives quietly slipped away.

With the situation deemed dangerous for the upcoming visit of President Clinton, Mayor Schell declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew on most of downtown starting at 7:00 p.m. The police moved into the crowds in late afternoon using pepper spray, tear gas, and rubber bullets to end the demonstrations and property damage.

Several hundred protestors were pushed up into the dense residential Capitol Hill neighborhood abutting the Convention Center. Not confident of securing downtown for the next day, Mayor Schell issued another emergency order establishing a “no protest zone” — in 25 blocks of downtown.

Governor Locke called in the National Guard, so that by daylight on Wednesday, troops lined its perimeter.   Police then used tear gas to disperse any crowds. More than 500 people, including downtown residents and employees leaving work, were jailed that day for not clearing out from the heart of downtown Seattle. In the evening, a smaller contingency of protestors returned to shout and throw debris at the police, who responded with concussion grenades and large quantities of tear gas, fearing they would be overrun. The firefighters’ union refused a request to turn their fire hoses on the protestors.

Although accusations were repeated in the media that firebombs and bags of urine were thrown at the officers, later investigations revealed that to be false. Wednesday evening, the protestors and the police were once again in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, infuriating residents, as their main retail street became a battleground.

Having lived on Capitol Hill for twenty-five years I walked the familiar streets talking to both police officers and protestors, in a vain attempt to lower the level of hostility. There was no room for any rationale dialogue in an atmosphere filled with fear and pepper gas. On Thursday, the President left and both the police and the protestors ratcheting down their confrontations while the WTO meeting petered out.

Did the massive and confrontational expression of citizen dissent achieve its objective? The massive outpouring of protesters did play the most visible role in stopping the WTO from reaching a new trade agreement.  However, it was also widely acknowledged that intense divisions among its delegates also contributed to that failure.

It remains as the only one of nine WTO meetings held up to 2013 that did not issue a Ministerial Declaration, perhaps because it was the only one that experienced massive citizen opposition. Other WTO Ministerial were held in places that did not allow or severely restricted demonstrations, like Dubai and Singapore, or were in difficult places to reach with few accommodations like Cancun. And, those that were held in Geneva never saw as many protestors as appeared in Seattle.

Supporters of WTO and those critical of the protestors, accused political leaders of inviting trouble when they encouraged citizens to Seattle to demonstrate their opposition. They ignored the basic principle of our American democracy, a strong faith in the right to assemble and protest.

Seattle, known as a tolerant city, was portrayed as naïve in expecting things to go peacefully. Perhaps, but more importantly, the City was not prepared for massive demonstrations. Review reports issued from the ACLU, the Police Department and the City Council all concluded that our police force was not properly trained for crowd control or for moving in quickly to isolate those destroying property.

While both DAN members and the police agreed in advance that their members would be arrested peacefully, the police relied on teargas and pepper spray to accomplish that task, which needlessly affected all those nearby. Perhaps the worse example of the police response was their pursuit of protestors up to Capitol Hill where uninvolved residents, business owners, and shoppers found themselves breathing in teargas or even arrested for being in the wrong spot while the police rounded up protestors. Those actions and the Mayor’s enactment of a no protest zone treated many citizens as criminals.

Eight years later in January 2007, a federal jury found that the city had violated protesters’ Fourth Amendment constitutional rights by arresting them without probable cause or hard evidence. Although the Council passed the Mayor’s emergency declarations, I and Councilmembers Peter Steinbrueck, and Richard Conlin voted against it.

After the WTO meeting ended, the city council held two public hearings to allow citizens to air their grievances. The first evening went from 4 pm to 1 am and the second one took almost as long, with over three hundred people testifying. Their complaints were similar to the emails I received; a few blamed the protestors for all the trouble but most were critical of the police response.

“Mr. Licata, they are smashing up downtown, you’re personally responsible since you supported them.”

“You welcomed the protestors, in Seattle 52 years, it’s become a sewer, why aren’t you in Westlake to quite these people down. Why wasn’t City prepared for anarchists? You expect taxpayers to pay for all this? I’d fine them, make them clean it up, and then cut their nuts off.”

“Yesterday Police let hooligans get away with too much. Today people with legitimate protests are being mistreated. Disgusted with the situation.”

 “I’m upset about Police actions downtown, throwing tear gas canisters at peaceful protestors all day; I’m a resident and taxpayer, and got a mouthful of it. I’m outraged that Police we pay to protect us would do this.”

“I was impartial about events before, but seeing what Mayor and SPD have done is wrong and illegal, going way too far, I hope there are repercussions for Mayor and the Police Department.”

“The Police action on Capitol Hill last night was like military action, it was indiscriminate, no reason for it. Whoever authorized it should be fired.”

Police Chief Norm Stamper resigned soon after the protestors and the WTO delegates had left town. Latter he said using tear gas was wrong and that there was a need to move away from paramilitary tactics in policing. Mayor Paul Schell lost his next election, failing to get past the primary, in part due to the WTO events.

The City Council formed a special WTO Accountability Review Committee, which convened three independent citizen panels and had staff review more than 14,000 documents accompanied by interviews with key individuals.

The Council then passed three separate pieces of legislation. The first (Ordinance 120096) required every SPD peace officer to wear a nametag on the outermost layer of the peace officer’s uniform since many accusations of police abuse could not be traced to any specific officer. The second (Resolution 30340) implemented a new process notifying the Council of any solicitation of major events and allowed them to formally review any requests made of the city. This would allow the City Council an opportunity to have a public process, if necessary, for evaluating the impact of a controversial gathering.  Lastly, the procedures used to declare and/or terminate a civil emergency were modified to allow greater Council control over how long one would remain in force.

The WTO meeting came to be known at the Battle in Seattle. Were the protests a legitimate expression of concern for our citizens wanting to protect their jobs and quality of life? Or as critics charged, were the protestors just hooligans and anarchists’ intent on destroying our civil society?

Observations from both the police and the media noted that the latter group made up less than a half percent of all who protested. Despite the critics who charged that Seattle’s reputation had been irreversibly damaged, overall holiday sales rose 6 percent in 1999 and Seattle has gone on to become one of the most economically prosperous cities in the country, while still promoting strong labor protection laws and environmental regulations.

All parties agreed that the public suddenly became aware of the WTO and its growing international power.  Despite the media’s attention on the vandalizing of property, a month later, in January 2000, a Business Week opinion poll found that 52 percent of Americans sympathized with the WTO protestors in Seattle.

What had been had been buried in the back pages of the business section had now emerged as an important topic of debate within our democracy. The massive turn out by thousands of protestors in Seattle, proved the effectiveness of citizens exercising their right to publically and forcefully dissent to alter the course of their democracy when it threatens their livelihood and quality of life.

The Russian Job – Book Review

Douglas Smith is a Seattle-based independent Russian scholar. His 2018 book, The Russian Job – The forgotten story of how America saved the Soviet Union from Ruin, reads like a thriller as he describes the commitment of anti-communist capitalists helping the Russian people survive one of history’s most devastating famines — in a country whose government was dedicated to the eradication of capitalism.

Smith sets the stage by introducing Herbert Hoover, not as the President, but as a humble Quaker with a blacksmith father. Hoover eventually became a very wealthy operator and investor in mining operations around the world. He left business to be a philanthropist during World War I, creating and then managing the independent Commission for the Relief of Belgium to help their citizens fight off starvation. After the war, President  Woodrow Wilson made him the director of the American Relief Foundation, which distributed over $1 billion in aid to 32 countries including the defeated Germany.

A letter published in the American press from Russian writer Maxim Gorky, pleading for foreign assistance to feed their starving peasants, caught Hoover’s attention, by then the U.S. secretary of commerce under President Warren Harding. Hoover convinced the president to put him in charge of a new organization, the American Relief Administration, which eventually fed 11 million people in 28,000 towns and villages. And, in the process the agency restored 15,000 hospitals serving 80 million patients.

Image: Wikimedia

Although Hoover was a life-long foe of communism, describing the Soviet Union as a “murderous tyranny,” he preferred providing food rather than intervening in Russia with troops to stop the Bolsheviks from consolidating control of the country. He pushed a $20 million appropriation through congress to distribute food directly to starving Russians through the ARA, despite opposition from both the right and the left.

Henry Ford suggested the ARA was controlled by Jews and Bolsheviks. The chairman of the National Civic Foundation described the ARA as  a “shrewd scheme” to pay Midwestern farmers to dump their surplus grain. On the left, the ACLU and the Nation, not trusting Hoover’s intentions and objecting to the U.S. for not recognizing the Bolshevik government, both opposed ARA’s famine relief effort. Likewise, the Soviet leaders worried that ARA’s goal was to overthrow their government, particularly since Hoover had previously helped feed the White Army that tried to do so.

Initially Lenin welcomed the famine since it would destroy the people’s faith in God and the Tsar. Nevertheless, he overcame the objections of Soviet leaders, like Stalin, to support Hoover’s America-run feeding program once reports came in from the countryside that people were not only dying, but literally eating dead corpses left on the streets. An array of macabre photos throughout the Smith’s book testify to the depths of suffering, from cannibalism to starving children that the American workers witnessed. Even after the ARA set up kitchens, food was so scarce that they were feeding children one meal a day of 100 grams of bread and corn grits.

Aside from the politics, the heart of the book is about the sacrifices that the Americans and their Russian staffs endured as they fought off famine’s tidal wave. The secret police arrested numerous Russians who were helping in the effort, because they were enemies of the people, coming from bourgeois families. To ward off bandits, Americans had to carry pistols when they walked outside their offices in some of the worst-stricken regions.

Although some Americans returned home early, overwhelmed by exhaustion and trauma, others wanted to return to Russia after the project ended because they loved the Russian people and culture. In fact, one in ten ARA men married a Russian woman. Smith details how all were touched by an experience that forever impacted them. Meanwhile both countries buried the memory of this unique effort because it did not conform to their political agendas.

Douglas Smith

I recently had a chance to interview the award-winning historian Douglas Smith, with a focus on how his book offers lessons on ways cooperation on big issues can be achieved between enemies.

Q. Why did you write this book?

Douglas Smith: I first learned about the American mission to Soviet Russia while researching an earlier book — Former People — on the fate of the Russian nobility after the revolution. I discovered that quite a few former princesses and countesses worked as interpreters for the American Relief Administration.  I was shocked by this story — it was so dramatic, moving, powerful, and historically important — yet few Americans, and even fewer Russians know about it.

Q. Why should anyone be interested in this obscure incident?

First of all, it’s just a downright hair-raising story about a human catastrophe on an epic scale.  It’s also a book filled with cloak-and-dagger intrigue, espionage, romance, and even cannibalism. What’s more, while historians write so many books about war and conflict, we also need to know about cooperation and collaboration. This was a powerful moment when adversaries came together to take on an enormous humanitarian crisis.

Q. Can current politicians learn anything from how a past Republican Administration dealt with an adversary?

Yes, most definitely! Beyond the story of humanitarian relief, my book reveals how Americans working there tried to make sense of Soviet Russia. I show how the most perceptive Americans, like Herbert Hoover, the leader of the operation, were skeptical of America’s ability to bring about major changes in Soviet Russia. But that didn’t mean the two countries couldn’t work together to address concrete problems, such as the famine. Although Hoover remained wary of Soviet Russia’s leaders — their motives and sincerity — he also believed that there were ways the two countries could cooperate.

Q. Are there any similarities to the national political dynamics that occurred a 100 years ago to what is happening today in Wash DC?

Yes, indeed, perhaps the most apparent being the voices in the media and in politics speaking out against aid and comfort to needy people based on some notion that they are undeserving. A century ago, when Hoover was pressing Congress for additional funding to help starving Russians, many Americans argued that we couldn’t afford it or that Russia’s misery wasn’t our problem. Hoover swatted away these arguments, and thanks to his efforts, over 10 million lives were saved.

The exploits recounted in my book are among the most glorious in our country’s history. We need to know about them, and they should guide our actions today.

Why Big $ is Pouring into Seattle Council Elections

Seattle’s city council election this November has seen a record-breaking amount of funds being spent by Independent Expenditure Committees (IEs). Amazon’s $1.5 million contributions to the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce IE called Civic Alliance for a Sound Economy (CASE) drew national attention, with both Presidential Candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders condemning it. But many folks don’t understand how Independent Expenditure Committees (IEs) influence our democratic process.

Normally candidates can receive no more than $500 from a single donor, person or business. If they take public funding through Seattle’s democracy voucher program, then that limit is $250. However, IEs have no limit on how much they can receive and disperse to support, or oppose a candidate, as long as that candidate does not have anything to do with the IE. Basically, wealth distorts a fair distribution of verifiable information to the voters. CASE and its allied IEs have mounted such attacks against candidates that are deemed too progressive. 

 

Most Of The IE $ Is To Halt The Council’s Progressive Agenda

Most of IE money is being spent with the express intent to stop the perceived leftward drift of the council. In the last 2 council election cycles, not including the 2017 race for just the 2 at large positions, IEs have crashed into our local elections in a big way. 

A review of data collected by Seattle’s Ethics and Elections Commission for the council elections of 2013 (4 at large races) , 2015 (7 district & 2 at large races) , and 2019  (7 district races), show that IE contributions went from less than $4,000 in 2013 (to 1 candidate) to $494,000 in 2015’s general election (an additional $300,000 spent in the primary), and now, as of Oct 21, about $6 million has been collected by all the IEs with over $600,000 of that still not spent. All of those reserve funds are in the anti-council IEs.

Some have argued that both businesses and unions have contributed substantially to IEs to shape the council’s policies. However,  a close review of how the money has been spent or earmarked for use this November shows that $4.4 million is for the Chamber endorsed candidates, which includes Amazon’s $1.5 million to CASE, the Chamber’s IE. 

As of October 21st, if you look just at the IE money spent for 3 progressive candidates, Herbold, Lewis and Strauss, the amount totals $488,000 with 76% of that going to just one candidate, Andrew Lewis, from the Unite HERE union. Councilmember Sawant has received just one thousand dollars in IE funds. On the other hand, the Chamber endorsed candidates, Tavel, Orion, Pugel, Pedersen, and Wills, have received a total of $1,585,700. 

But numbers don’t cover the entire story. For instance, in the Andrew Lewis vs Jim Pugel race, the IEs spent for each candidate, as of October 21,  about an equal amount. However, there are hundreds of thousand dollars still available to the pro-Pugel IEs to spend on him and other Chamber candidates, while the IEs supporting the progressive candidates appear to have little if any funds left. For instance, in the Herbold versus Tavel race, IE expenditures for Tavel have been 4 times greater than IE expenditures supporting Herbold, and Will’s IE support has been 11 times greater than Strauss’s IE support.

The chart below shows how the IE funds were dispersed as of October 21st.

 

CANDIDATE I.E. MONEY RECEIVED (10/21/19) in 1,000’s
District 1 – Herbold – incumbent   36.4        
District 1 – Tavel 151.8      
District 2 – Morales   17.2      
District 2 -Solomon   71.1
District 3 – Sawant – incumbent       1.0
District 3 – Orion –    280.7
District 4 –  Pedersen   173.2
District 4 –  Scott       1.8
District 5 – Juarez – incumbent     31.1
District 5 – Davison Sattler       0
District 6 – Wills   533.8
District 6 – Strauss     48.4
District 7 – Lewis   373.4
District 7 – Pugel   375.1

 

It should also be noted that one of the three unions IEs, the FireFighters PAC, has only supported Chamber endorsed candidates. And on the other side of the ledger, there are wealthy individuals, like Nick Hanauer, who support progressive candidates.

 

Two Reasons For The Rise Of IE Money

I believe there are two reasons for the rise of IE money flooding into our elections. 

One is that past ordinances have clipped the wings of businesses to conduct their operations by mandating requirements to address the working conditions of their employees, like increasing the minimum wage and requiring paid sick leave. In the case of landlords, they have been required to accommodate their tenants’ safety needs or lessen the burden of increasing rental costs. This last focus has resonated with tenants, who are the fastest-growing demographic in the city making up 54% of all households.

The second reason is that the process of running for council seats has been adjusted to allow a greater range of candidates, more women and those with modest means. Let me provide examples of both. 

The council over the past two decades has passed several ordinances that have resulted in a more responsive and accountable city council to working families. I assume that the two major contributors to CASE, Amazon at $1.5 million and Vulcan at $255,000, are most concerned about how future legislation will impact their ability to develop their downtown property and keep their operational costs minimal. 

However, the largest number of businesses affected by the council’s policies are the hoteliers, restaurateurs, apartment owners/developers and smaller property developers concerned about keeping their labor costs as low as possible. Associations representing these groups are the next largest contributors to CASE. 

Aside from corporations, owners and employees from both Amazon, Vulcan and smaller businesses have made huge contributions to both CASE and People for Seattle. The resulting combination has produced a formidable political force. However, a counter political force has also come to the fore through citizen initiatives pushing for electoral reforms. 

 

Expanding Tenant Rights

The law that began a series of other tenant improvements was passing the Rental Registration and Inspection Ordinance  (RRIO) in 2013. It helped ensure that all rental housing in Seattle is safe by requiring mandatory inspections for 250,000 renter households. Property owners helped draft it and the council passed it unanimously. 

In 2016, the council passed unanimously an ordinance that said renters could not be denied a rental application for counting income from a pension, Social Security, unemployment, child support or any other governmental or non-profit subsidy. A report to the city from the Washington Community Action Network helped its passage by showing that 48% of individuals who pay for rent with Social Security Disability Insurance or Social Security retirement income said that discrimination prevents them from having successful rental  applications.” The following year the Council again unanimously voted to create a Renters Commission to provide tenants political power within the city government to address topics ranging from housing affordability and neighborhood rezones to transportation and access to open space.

This year, 2019, the council mandated that all landlords were required to register with RRIO before a landlord issues an eviction notice and that they had to provide information on the rights and resources of tenants with notices to terminate a tenancy and an increase in rent.

 

Expanding Employee Rights

The first significant push for expanding employee rights began in 2011 with an 8 to 1 vote (Conlin – No) approving a Paid Sick and Safe Time Ordinance requiring employers operating in Seattle to provide all employees with paid leave to care for themselves or a family member with a physical or mental health condition, medical appointment, or a critical safety issue. Over 190,000 Seattle workers gained this coverage with its passage.

In 2015 Seattle’s Fair Chance Employment Ordinance went into effect which restricts how employers can use conviction and arrest records during the hiring process and course of employment within City limits.

The biggest employee gain also came in 2015. Seattle’s Wage Theft Ordinance went into effect protecting against wage theft by requiring employers to pay all wages and tips owed to employees, provide written notice to employees, and itemize pay information when employees are paid. Getting more attention Seattle’s Minimum Wage Ordinance which began April 1, 2015, that phased in the higher wage of $15 an hour over three to six years depending on the size of the company. 

Not as well known to the public, but in the long run as important as any ordinance passed was the council creating the Office of Labor Standards (OLS) in 2014. Its mission is to advance labor standards through community and business engagement, strategic enforcement and innovative policy development, with a commitment to race and social justice. 

The Secure Scheduling Ordinance, which passed in2016, established secure scheduling requirements for covered retail and food services establishments, and prescribed remedies and enforcement procedures. The law applies to retail and food services establishments with 500+ employees worldwide, and full-service restaurants with 500+ employees and 40+ full-service restaurant locations worldwide. 

The Domestic Workers Ordinance of 2018 was one of the last ordinances passed to protect employees. It made Seattle the first U.S. city to have a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. This law gives minimum wage, rest break, and meal break rights to domestic workers. It is one of the most progressive pieces of legislation that Seattle has adopted, and it was not initiated by the city council, but rather it was a result of a direct vote by Seattle residents. 

 

Do These New Laws Appear To Be Too Radical For Seattle Voters? 

All but one of the above ordinances were passed while there was, and still is, only one lone socialist on the city council, Kshama Sawant.  The CASE and the pro-Chamber People for Seattle have campaigned against some city council candidates as being under her sway, and consequently, are socialist or something leaning that way. But for what reason? For passing the above legislation? 

When asked on a recent poll the open-ended question, “When you think of Seattle city government, who do you think of?” The term liberal came up at only 2%. Councilmember Sawant came up at 3%. The Mayor came in at 47% and the Council at 43%. These findings do not point to a conservative backlash. Sawant may have the most name recognition, a status I had for some time on the Council during my 18 years there. And neither of us had any sway on the other councilmembers because of that. It takes the hard work of talking to your colleagues and working with constituents to influence them. That’s what gets the vote, not some achieving high marks in name recognition.  

There is a certain irony that former Councilmember Tim Burgess, who founded and heads up the pro-Chamber People for Seattle IE, is opposing candidates based on their too liberal legislation, although he voted in favor of all of the above pieces of legislation. All but one of these ordinances passed unanimously by a council that had a majority of members receiving Chamber support in some fashion. 

 

Citizen Initiatives Are Bringing Out More Candidates And Money

I believe there is another reason for the attacks. There is a fear among the business community that future councilmembers will be even more aggressive in pursuing various kinds of government regulation or taxes to achieve public benefits. That fear was fanned with the passage of two public initiatives, which passed about the time as the above pieces of legislation were written and adopted. The initiatives reformed the electoral process to allow for greater participation. 

In 2013, with an approval vote of 65%,  Seattle voters approved Charter Amendment 19 – Council Districts which converted 7 of the city council seats to District Elections, leaving just 2 at large.  The first city council elections based on districts were held in 2015.

That same year, 2015, Seattle voters passed an Initiative – 122 levying a property tax of $3 million per year to fund the Democracy Voucher Program for the next 10 years. It passed with a 63% yes vote and began distributing vouchers in 2017.

The last major citizen initiative was not a vote on election reform, but it is a good indication that the public appears to be in line with the major thrust of the council’s efforts to meet the needs of residents. In 2016, the voters overwhelmingly, with a 77% yes vote, passed Initiative -124. It mandated increases in workplace safety for hotel staff, including the addition of panic buttons for all workers and improved health insurance. 

 

Electoral Reforms Brought More Candidates And More Money

These two electoral reform initiatives resulted in two new historical developments. First, more candidates have surfaced than ever before under at-large council elections. The 2015 elections, the first one that used district elections, resulted in 37 candidates running for the 7 district seats. In the 2019 elections when democracy vouchers were available for district candidates, 54 candidates ran for the 7 district seats. This trend will probably ease off, but certainly, there is more incentive to run for an office that can be partially publicly funded and with a limited geographical area to campaign in. 

Second, there was the unintended response of drawing more money into the campaigns, most of it from outside the district boundaries and most of it from wealthy individuals or businesses, with smaller amounts from unions. The total amount of money collected by IEs for the council races was $5.9 million, the total amount collected by all the candidate’s personal campaigns was $4.7 million. 

 

What Does The Most Recent Poll Tell Us?

This month a new poll was released by Crosscut/Elway with a lead in CrossCut reading that “More than two-thirds of likely voters said they want candidates elected who will take the council in a new direction.” That statement plays into the narrative that the council has gone too far in making changes.  However, a closer look at the survey’s numbers and crosstabs don’t necessarily support that conclusion. It all depends on how you slice the pie. 

For instance, the response to the question “Overall, how would you rate the job the

City Council is doing? Would you say…”  percentages responding for each response is shown below.

 

Good 26%
Fair 40%
Poor 29%

 

CrossCut combined Poor and Fair to get a 69% Negative position toward the council.  Why not include Fair with Good to get 66% to get a Positive attitude toward the council? Fair is between Good and Poor it could go either way or just call it neutral. 

Later in the survey, when asked to choose if the council direction should continue or change, the response was divided between the Negative and Positive. Since the Negative includes all of the Fair responses the percentage saying that there is a need for change is much larger coming from the Negative than the Positive. However, if the Fair had been added to the Good, it is possible that the response from the Positive folks would have been greater than those from the Negative folks. 

So, the assumption that the council needs to change direction could be coming from the Positive folks who want to see more progressive change, just as much as from the Negative folks, who would want to see less such change. I hope I didn’t lose anyone here. But as you can tell, even the simplest use of statistics can result in different conclusions depending on how you cut and slice the data. 

Two other findings identify what groups of Seattle residents are responding positively to the council’s agenda. Close to double the percentage of Renters over Home-Owners, believe that the council is doing a good job. Also, a consistent statistically significant higher percentage of those with income under $50,000 viewed the council as doing a good job than any other income bracket.  Both data points would indicate that the council’s efforts to raise the livability for Seattle residents who are on the lower end of the income scale are being recognized and appreciated. 

 

Homelessness Is A Lightning Rod For Political Change

Seattle’s political struggles will continue as long as homelessness appears as an unsolvable problem. The Elway/Crosscut asked those surveyed, “Which of these issues is most important to you as you decide how to vote in the race for city council?” Addressing homelessness came up on top, registering 3 times higher than housing density and five times higher than reforming the police department. And disapproving the current direction was twice as high as those approving of it.

I believe it is the unsheltered homeless that cause the most concern since they are the most visible. According to the 2018 count there are about 4,500 Seattle residents who are unsheltered homeless, which includes living in campers – about half of one percent of Seattle’s population. And, contrary to some claiming that Seattle’s policies attract many homeless here from out of state to get benefits, only 4% who were out of state residents have lived in King County for less than a year. Rather, economic hardship accounts for 55 % of those who are currently homeless, which is reported as having lost a job, been evicted or had medical bills. 

For a city with the third-highest median income in the nation, at $94,000, one would expect that we could figure out how to provide at least shelter for such a small percentage of people. It is that expectation that is being used against the most progressive councilmembers on the city council. 

For instance, district one Councilmember Lisa Herbold, who as a legislative assistant to me for 18 years, probably worked on more legislation than any other councilmember promoting housing for the homeless and fighting displacement of renters and homeowners from becoming homeless. However, we still have homelessness, which leads her current opponent to say, “I don’t see any solutions coming from Lisa … it’s about a city that is failing to step up when it should.” But her opponent and the other Chamber backed candidates have not proposed how to fund the additional resources to solve the homeless crises. 

A Downtown Emergency Services Center social worker put it bluntly in a CrossCut article,  “It’s not a question of managing resources, it’s that they don’t exist.”

Council critics argue that city government spending is inefficient in solving these human needs crises. But they fail to mention the number of new affordable housing units that have been created with efficient use of public funding assistance. For example, the 2016 city reported that the 2009 Housing Levy exceeded the goal of providing 1,670 additional units it promised to Seattle voters, by adding 2,527 affordable rental units and reinvesting in 400 existing units to keep them affordable to low-income families.

Seattle’s overall population has exploded, growing 20% from 2010 to 2018,  and while homelessness has also greatly increased, unsheltered homeless still remains well under 1% due to the council’s efforts.  But it does remain, and additional funds are needed to house these folks. The belief that we can solve the problem of housing the homeless without additional public funds, is not new. It was used to beat down the council’s proposal to tap a new dedicated revenue stream to provide housing for the homeless – the head tax. 

 

Corporations Bludgeoned The Council On The Proposed New Head Tax 

This was a tax that had previously been in force to pay for transportation needs. It was dropped mostly because its forms were confusing and time consuming for businesses. When it was brought back it was streamlined and projections showed that only the largest 3% of Seattle’s businesses would pay the tax, exempting those with under $20 million in taxable gross receipts. Keep in mind that the corporation’s opposition to the new tax was occurring at the same time that the Federal Tax Bill passed in December 2017 lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, a  tax cut of 40%.

As the Seattle City Council was unanimously passing a “head tax” ordinance, Amazon became the lead corporation to finance a referendum to repeal the legislation creating the head tax. The financial impact on Amazon was minimal considering its overall budget. The average salary for Amazon employees in Seattle is $158,851 per year. The head tax was set at $275 per employee a year, which would have amounted to a .2% increase in their payroll costs. Nevertheless, because of its passage, Amazon’s Vice President said all of its construction had been halted and clearly implied that the company’s future growth in Seattle could be seriously reduced unless the head tax was repealed. Then it plopped down $250,000 to provide the lion’s share of funding the referendum campaign. The tactic of writing a large check to get rid of a pesky political policy emerged again this year as Amazon became the largest contributor, by a factor of six, to create a new city council better aligned with its interests.

Wisely, the referendum campaign, titled No Tax On Jobs, never publicly attacked those who were homeless but instead attacked the council for not solving the homeless crises and for chasing businesses away. Polling showed that about a year before the council’s vote, 66% of the public supported an increase in taxes to help the homeless. So, the referendum campaign did not deny the need to help them but instead attacked the council for failing to meet their needs. After the referendum’s well-funded media campaign began, accompanied by paid signature gatherers to put the referendum on the ballot, public opinion flipped to 55% opposing an increase in such a tax. 

As a result, the council was told by supporters of the head tax that it would have taken several million to counter the corporate-sponsored referendum. Councilmember Lisa Herbold framed the tax as an unwinnable fight saying, “The opposition has unlimited resources and … the margin simply is too great to overcome…” She and other reluctant councilmembers voted to overturn the tax on big businesses, 7-2. 

From talking to referendum supporters, it seemed the main problem the council faced was a lack of trust in how the money would be spent, which is the classic conservative argument against any progressive measure. However, the latest Elway poll shows that the public seems to have drifted back to their original feelings since it revealed that 56% of the public supports a Large Business Tax for developing more affordable housing with only 40% opposed. 

 

This Election Comes Down To Trust

It is difficult to determine what the new council will look like because the Chamber IE  and its allied IEs are immensely outspending the candidates they are trying to defeat. It comes down to the voters deciding who to vote for, based on what they know about the candidates. Unfortunately, most of their information is being provided by the side with the largest media budget and now paid canvassers. 

For the first time in Seattle’s council elections, paid canvassers are being used to doorbell for a candidate, rather than rely on volunteers who believe in a candidate’s values. As of 2 weeks ago, CASE spent a half a million dollars paying for canvassers to support five of its candidates. That amount could easily be doubled before election day, given the hundreds of thousands of dollars CASE and its allies have in the bank ready to be used. 

On a side note, if I was on the council, to allow greater transparency in electioneering, I would introduce legislation that requires all paid canvassers to wear a very visible name tag saying, “I’M A PAID CANVASSER”.  Since this approach would not inhibit free speech, I believe it would be upheld in the courts if challenged.

This election is important, not just for who gets elected, but for how the use of wealth, both from individuals and corporations, is distorting our democracy. We can see how it is occurring on the national level, but it has now seeped down to local elections. I encourage voters to become familiar with what the council has done to date and to determine for themselves if the kind of legislation I listed at the front of this piece is helping Seattle move in the right direction. I think so and you may as well. 

Arts and Culture Issues Take The Stage for Seattle City Council Candidates

Written by: Nick Licata

All seven Seattle City Council District election candidates have been invited to a
Cultural Sector Candidate

Monday, October 7, 6-8:30 p.m. at Seattle’s Town Hall, 1119 8th Ave

It is Free and Open to the public, doors open at 6 PM, the program begins at 6:30 PM with
closed-captioning provided.

Candidates Confirmed to Attend:
District 1: Lisa Herbold, Phillip Tavel
District 2: Tammy Morales, (Mark Solomon not   attending)
District 3: Kshama Sawant, Egan Orion
District 4: Alex Pedersen, Shaun Scott
District 5: No confirmation received from either candidate as of Oct 1
District 6: Dan Strauss, Heidi Wills
District 7: Andrew Lewis, Jim Pugel

Seattle’s council candidates have been struggling with a number of critical issues like homelessness, transportation congestion, and affordable housing zoning, to name just a few. But, far too often there is one issue that is only hastily touched on. That is the role that culture and arts play in our daily life in providing us the comfort, creativity, and enjoyment we need to sustain our resolve to tackle these other issues.

Everyone who values or engages with arts, science and heritage organizations in Seattle are encouraged to attend, to meet the candidates and hear their platforms. Arts organizations from every district will be attending. The following lead arts organizations from each district solicited attendance at the forum. They will introduce the candidates from the seven races. There will be time for short candidate statements and a brief, moderated Q&A with each candidate.

Seattle’s Youth Poet Laureate, seventeen-year-old Wei-Wei Lee who attends Nathan Hale High School, will close the Culture Forum with a poem. She was selected by poets from Seattle Arts & Lectures. BTW, Wei-Wei works with the City’s Civic Poet Anastacia Renee and will be reading at the upcoming Capitol Hill Lit Crawl which takes place Thursday, October 24, 2019, from 6 pm–9 pm, involving over 80 Pacific Northwest readers and artists.

District Arts Organization Captains/partners:

District 1: Zo Dunbar, Totem Star (Youth Performing Arts)

District 2: Donte Felder, ORCA K-8 (Theater Education). Beth Takekawa of Wing Luke may be a be co-captain, not confirmed.

District 3: Sharon Williams, CD Forum for Arts and Ideas (Arts & Humanities)

District 4: Julianna Ross, Sandpoint Arts and Cultural Exchange (Multi-disciplinary)

District 5: Kathleen White, Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra, (Youth Arts      Education/Music)

District 6: Alejandro Grahal, Woodland Park Zoo; Selby, Moisture Festival;

District 7: Ariel Bradler, TPS (Theatre Advocacy), and Bob Davidson, Seattle Aquarium, and Ellen Walker, Pacific NW Ballet (Dance)

The Cultural Sector Candidate Forum is hosted by Inspire Washington, a newly launched cultural sector non-profit that serves as a statewide force for advocacy and awareness of the cultural sector. The co-hosts of the Forum are KNKX and Town Hall with Woodland Park Seattle, Seattle Aquarium and Pacific Science Center as co-sponsors.

KNKX News Director, Florangela Davila will moderate the forum. Inspire Washington’s Executive Director, Manny Cawaling, will kick-off the event with a brief overview of the important issues facing cultural sector organizations in Seattle. Cawaling says, “The arts and cultural sector in this community and our state critically support our economy. Every person who attends a cultural event in Washington spends an average of $32 around the event, and the cultural sector employs almost 180,000 people. We account for 7.8% of the state’s GDP and move and inspire thousands of people.”

One final note. It is important to keep in mind that the Seattle City Council has often taken the lead in promoting cultural and artistic activities in Seattle. For instance, currently, Councilmember Lisa Herbold’s council committee has oversight on the arts.

An important development underway came out of a briefing in her committee on the Office of Arts and Culture’s efforts to create a Public Development Authority (PDA) to preserve cultural space in Seattle. Check out the briefing on the Seattle Channel. The agenda with materials is linked here. A Council vote will be needed next year to create a PDA, consequently, it’s important to have sympathetic councilmembers on the council. The cultural forum could provide an indication of which ones could be.

Debating Climate Change Has Limits – Let’s Start Talking About the Weather

Written by Nick Licata

This piece also appears on Medium for easier reading and submitting comments


 

In a debate, one side wins and the other side loses. How many debates end with the losing side agreeing that they were wrong? It doesn’t happen. And that is why the climate change debate is not converting deniers into believers. Each side on this issue is focused on rolling over the opposition.

The recent national student walkout from schools to draw attention to climate change is certainly converting more youth and the college-educated people to become believers. But protesting as an organizing tactic has limited effectiveness, a strategy must employ multiple tactics to win over deniers or doubters. And, there are many. According to a recent poll taken by the Climate Mobilization Project, while 36% of the public believe that Climate Change is a serious problem, 36% of the population also believe it is a minor problem or is not worried at all. Consequently, we need to think about how to reach those folks and the other 28% who do not believe it is a serious problem.

One approach that should be pursued is to focus on something that is more mundane and not as catastrophic as earth’s destruction, let’s try talking about the weather. That is not an attempt to diminish the importance of climate change. Instead, it lends itself to having a discussion, not a debate, because everyone talks about the weather, republicans and democrats alike. And it impacts all of us. So, where does that discussion begin?

The starting point is recognizing that extreme weather is becoming more frequent. The statistics are there. For instance, in January 2017, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said 2016 was the hottest year on record. It was the third year in a row to set a record for average surface temperatures, a continuation of a long-term warming trend.

But just laying out facts, particularly if they are not tied to personal experience, don’t carry much weight. Studies have shown that our beliefs more often stem from our personal experiences than from abstract concepts. Climate change believers need to talk to those who have had their job or quality of life negatively impacted by extreme weather conditions. Here are just two examples of how that can be done.

Montana has voted only once for democratic president since 1980, Bill Clinton’s first race in 1992. Barak Obama lost by 2% in his first race while Hillary Clinton lost to Trump by over 20%. However, during this same period, they have been represented more years in congress by democrat than republican senators.

This pattern indicates that Montana voters may not strictly adhere to the republican stance in denying climate change. Their democratic Senator Jon Tester addressed a Bozeman community gathering of 200 people in February 2017, consisting mostly of farmers and ranchers, to describe how climate change has resulted in Montana having less water availability, increased weed growth, intensified and more frequent drought.

By grounding the issue of how extreme weather conditions are impacting their jobs and daily lives, the denial of climate change begins to weaken. For instance, rancher Erik Kalsta who attended the meeting was quoted by the Bozeman Daily Chronicle as saying that he doesn’t feel that successful agricultural producers are totally in denial — they may not like the term, but they respond to the changes.

While Montana is a rural state with only 3 electoral votes, Florida is now one of the most urbanized states with 29 electors. Although registered Democrats have always outnumbered republicans, in the last 13 presidential elections, the Democrats won only five, including Barak Obama’s two victories. In the last 2 president races, the winner won by .9%  and 1.2%. This state could go to either party in 2020.

Florida has been identified as the most vulnerable state to climate change damage resulting from flooding and massive storms. In the last three years, Hurricane Irma in 2017 and Hurricane Michael in 2018 have battered Florida’s southeast and northwest, for a combined $13 billion in property damage insurance claims, excluding flood damage not covered by homeowners’ insurance. Regardless of party affiliation, residents and businesses were devastated in Florida’s republican oriented panhandle and the democratic leaning Miami-Dade region. Those losses do not begin to measure the displacement that occurred with each storm. Irma alone prompted evacuation orders for 6.5 million people in Florida, the largest evacuation in modern U.S. history.

People want immediate solutions, but they also do not want to keep paying more and more for catastrophes that can be avoided. The deniers argue that the weather always changes, so there is nothing to be done. Or they argue, it’s part of a historical regular cycle. They are falling into the same abstract talk that has burdened climate change believers; they are not recognizing that most non-engaged people are more concerned about how their lives are being directly impacted now and not how they have been in the distant past or will be in the distant future.

The dominant political response from both parties has been to provide financial assistance to the weather victims and to offer proposed adjustments in their physical infrastructures to limit damage in the future. Both approaches are expensive and will continue to grow in costs as increased massive storms and rising incidents of floods and drought become a reality as projected by scientists. The question of who pays for these additional costs, allows the discussion of climate change to move to identify who can do something now to reduce future massive costs going to taxpayers. And, that comes down to replacing carbon-based energy sources with renewable energy sources.

By addressing how to mitigate both the destruction of personal property and the taxpayer burden for covering those losses, a discussion can lead to figuring out who is benefiting by stalling or opposing this mitigation. The answer becomes readily apparent: those who have financial investments in the old technology that is dependent on carbon fuels, which hard data show has contributed to extreme weather conditions. Shouldn’t our political leaders be addressing the broader community’s interest in protecting their jobs and homes, than be concerned about protecting the status quo of those who are protecting their own interests first?

This is a message that could resonate with a broad swath of voters from republican states like Montana to purple states like Florida. It begins with a discussion about the weather, not a megaphone announcing impending doom.

We can do something about the weather! The question that needs to be asked by those who are ambivalent about the seriousness of climate change is, do you want to continue to live with more disruptions in your life?  Do you want your future to continue to be uncertain and pay more taxes for a never-ending stream of measures trying to reduce future damages? If not, then the other option is to recognize that we can create a better, more livable environment by altering our technology to lessen our carbon emissions. All that is stopping us from taking that approach is the will power to demand action from our government to represent the needs of the majority of people, not the minority who financially benefit from inaction.

Profiles in Courage – U.K. Conservatives Have It, U.S. Republicans Don’t

Written by: Nick Licata


 

As a Senator, John F. Kennedy authored Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage in 1957 to highlight the integrity by eight United States Senators who did what they felt was best for the nation not their party and they suffered accordingly.

This week Conservative Party members in Britain’s Parliament demonstrated that type of unique political courage. They voted to stop their party leader, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, from leaving the European Union without a deal governing future relations.

They did so, against the express wishes of their party and PM Johnson, whose followers in retaliation have vowed to kick these dissidents out of the party and bar them from running in the next election. In response to the vote, PM Johnson has proposed calling for a general election on October 15.

As reported in the New York Times, these Conservative rebels took this highly unusual break from their Party’s leadership because they believed Johnson’s actions on Brexit would severely damage the British economy and set “fire to their vision of a big-tent party with priorities beyond Brexit.”

Under the parliamentary system, you cannot run for public office from a political party unless you have that party’s approval, unlike in the U.S. where just about anyone can run as a Republican or Democrat, even if they don’t have the approval of the party. In other words, the Conservative parliamentarians knew that they would very likely lose their seat without the party’s endorsement.

Now think of what is happening with the Republicans in Congress under President Donald Trump. He has demanded loyalty from them and has threatened retaliation against those who publicly criticize him. They do not need his approval to run as a Republican for Congress, but his 80 percent-plus approval rating among Republicans has intimidated any effective opposition to his executive orders and policies that threaten our democratic society.

In May 2019, Justin Amash became the only Republican Congressman to call for Trump’s impeachment for obstructing justice. No other Republican in Congress has joined him.

Other conservatives and republicans have come out in opposition to Trump, but they are either former elected officials, like conservative radio personality Joe Walsh, or journalists like David Brooks and Bill Kristol. They are not sacrificing any public office. However, there are sixteen current Republicans in Congress who do not intend on running for reelection in 2020. Could this be an indication that they would rather drop out than fight Trump and his followers?

The significant difference between Johnson and Trump is that Johnson, first of all, was not elected into office by the general public, but rather achieved his position as a vote of just conservative party members. Second, and just as importantly, there was a national issue that had to be immediately dealt with.

When Johnson took the unusual step of dramatically limiting the time that parliament could meet and debate any Brexit legislation, he forced members of his own party to recognize that something had to be done within days. There have been no comparative single crises with Trump.

Although his actions ignore the norms of acceptable democratic process like Johnson’s did, they consist of a steady stream of actions with long term impacts that often are initially stifled through our court system. So, there are no impending crises that need to be addressed within days.

Nevertheless, Republicans face the same two major problems with Trump that the conservatives in Britain faced with Johnson: potential national economic damage and a shrinking voter base.

The first stems from tariff wars being conducted solely by the President and an astronomical growth in national debt that shows no slowing down. The second is the continued reliance on an increasingly narrow slice of the population. Although not easily seen as grounds for impeachment, they are clearly transforming the Republican Party into a personality-driven movement promoting ethnic nationalism at the expense of protecting our general welfare and respecting basic democratic rights.

Which brings us back to the issue of courage. Democracies cannot be sustained on obsequious behavior by politicians whose first concern is to protect their job. It will eventually result either in authoritarian behavior from the top or group think from below. It takes courage to recognize these trends and for elected officials to stop them from growing like cancer in our society.

The Profiles in Courage chapter on Republican Senator Edmund G. Ross, from Kansas, always stuck in my mind. He cast the deciding vote for acquitting Democratic President Andrew Johnson for impeachment. Ross lost his bid for re-election two years later and none of the other Republicans who voted for acquittal were voted back to congress.

Now, Johnson was not a good president, his policies did not protect the rights of black citizens following the civil war, but the grounds of impeachment were so flimsy that afterward even some of those most in favor of impeachment realized it would have been a mistake.

It took courage to recognize that maintaining an orderly democracy overrules allegiance to a political party. This past week a select group of British conservative parliamentarians came to that realization. The question is how long it will take for Republicans in Congress to get the courage to reach that same conclusion?

Seattle’s Medic One

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“Seattle’s Medic One: How We Don’t Die” by Dr. Richard Rapport can be read as an informative account of Seattle’s pioneering public health services, a demonstration of using creative thinking to overcome insurmountable obstacles, and — in a political climate where the word “socialism” frightens some — an example of what a socialized health care service for everyone could look like.

Rapport focuses on three key players who envisioned, organized and sustained Medic One. Len Cobb, director of Harborview Medical Center’s division of cardiology, initiated the emergency care service after reading about patients in Belfast, Ireland, who had survived cardiac arrest before even arriving at the hospital; first responders brought the emergency room to patients rather than the other way around.

Dr. Cobb saw the fire department as an existing system capable of addressing health emergencies where they happened, and Seattle Fire Chief Gordon Vickery directed resources to provide training and equipment to a select group of firefighters who would become the best-trained medics in the nation.

Rounding out the trio was emergency room director Dr. Michael K. Copass, who during 35 years at Harborview “made absolutely certain that all patients, no matter what was wrong with them, where they came from, what shade of skin they had, what kind of insurance they had or didn’t, or what language they spoke, were cared for perfectly.”

Dr. Kathleen Jobe, now an associate professor of emergency medicine at the University of Washington, sums up the three men’s contributions this way: “Len Cobb had the idea for Medic One, and Vickery helped it get going, but Mike Copass built it.” Rapport adds one more credit: “The ambitious firefighters who became the early paramedics are another major reason that Medic One succeeded in Seattle.”

Before Medic One, Seattle firefighters had responded to thousands of medical emergencies. But residents needed a faster and more effective life-saving service regardless of their location or ability to pay, and there needed to be an equitable way to cover the costs of this new service. These are similar to the challenges many currently face when it comes to obtaining health care coverage.

When Cobb asked Vickery if he would expand firefighters’ services to include paramedic treatment to victims of heart attacks before transporting them to the emergency room, Vickery supportive. He enlisted the city government’s cooperation with Dr. Cobb and Harborview’s staff to train 19 enthusiastic firefighters in managing cardiac health emergencies. In 1970, Seattle rolled out its first Mobile Intensive Coronary Care Unit.

Rapport’s narrative of Medic One’s successful adaptation of existing resources to save lives shows one workable approach to designing and executing a comprehensive delivery system for all, not just for those who can pay for it. This accomplishment was made possible through government, nonprofits and private businesses working together, in a spirit of cooperation Rapport attributes to public health officials and departments being “relieved of McCarthy-era risks of having the communist stigma nailed to them.”

Finding funding was another issue. When planning for Medic One began in 1969, Seattle’s economy was in decline and the unemployment rate was more than 10 percent. Rapport notes that “competing forces were after every cent that could be squeezed from the city budget.”

But at the same time, technological improvements and improved building codes meant fire crews departed their stations less frequently to fight big city fires. And there was a bipartisan recognition that the effort would require tax increases. “One reason that King County Medic One has always been funded by a special levy rather than individual insurance is to guarantee that all citizens are protected,” says Rapport. Since the levy was introduced, it has failed just once, showing that “the citizens of Seattle found a way to pay for keeping people from dying.” It’s a story that could guide today’s debate on creating a more universally accessible health care system.


What happened at Woodstock?

Written by: Nick Licata


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Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane at Woodstock

 I usually devote Urban Politics to politics, social movements, and book reviews. This is a slight deviation in that it is a personal story of a particular peak moment in the counter-culture social movement of the ’60s. I hope you enjoy this little time capsule.

           
            Fifty years ago, this week, close to 500,000 youth attended Woodstock. Each of us could tell a story of what happened there. This is mine.
            After hitchhiking a couple of thousand miles around New England and Canada for the month of July 1969, I returned back to Bowling Green, Ohio, dead tired. I was met by friends on the BG State University campus. They invited me to join them to attend a concert. Where was it and how much did it cost? It was in New York state, where I had just come from. But I was more disheartened by its exorbitant cost. Having just spent my entire savings of $30 on my thirty-day road trip I was flat broke and could not afford the $24 gate payment, even if it was for a three-day music festival.
            Not a problem said Tom Hine, editor of the college newspaper, waving a press pass in front of me. We could get in free. So, I jumped in a car with three others and headed east. Once in the car, I asked what is this concert called? Woodstock came to the reply. It meant nothing to me nor anyone else. It was just a place, a misnomer at that since the concert was actually held in Bethel. Woodstock was 42 miles away. That small-town experienced a miles-long traffic jam with folks planning on attending a concert. They were all turned away by police at the edge of town.
            Late Thursday evening we found ourselves driving five miles an hour slowly down a narrow, one-lane road clogged with cars snaking through the rolling wooded countryside dotted by pastures of grazing land and tilled fields. The sun had set, we were at a standstill, and there was no sight of any concert. We pulled the car over to sleep on the side of the road and planned on finishing our journey the next morning.
            I left the others behind in the car to scout around, checking out encampments that had sprung up in the darkness. Spotting an unadorned canvass tent about the size of a two-car garage, I poked my head inside. Not a person around, just the stern face of Chairman Mao plastered on the front page of some revolutionary newspapers piled in endless stacks spread out across the tent.
            I knew from my previous rounds of visiting a dozen campuses that year, who they belonged to; perhaps not the specific name of the group, but one of those sprouting up at the time pledging allegiance to the chairman. They were dedicated to working for the toiling masses and avoided any unnecessary pleasures that might steer them off that course.
            Although they were not a fun-loving crowd to hang with, there were mounds of evidence that they had landed in the midst of what was to be the nation’s largest celebration of music and marijuana.  Surrounded by hundreds of thousands of half-naked, young bodies swaying and chanting to music over a 3 day weekend, how could they possibly hope to sit down and form collective study groups to discuss how liberalism was the enemy of the people and overthrowing Capitalism should be their calling.
           I don’t think they had much success. I never witnessed any study sessions. But that night I was grateful for their optimism because Mao provided me with a nice bed. I curled up on a pile of their papers and slept peacefully until morning when I rejoined the others to continue our journey.
            We continued creeping along beside an endless stream of college kids drifting down the bucolic country road. Waving our press pass out the window, we were able to cut to the front of the line and park a hundred yards from a huge wooden stage under construction at the bottom of a grand semicircular sloping meadow. Two seven-story high wooden towers, mounted by the biggest outdoor speakers I had ever seen, flanked the platform.
            Construction workers, or rather kids in jeans, were frantically erecting a security fence that stretched from both sides of the stage. It looked like a fragile defense against the sea of bodies pouring over the ridge and down the vast grassy slope from all directions. I felt as if Moses had freed his people from the boredom of Ohio and such places, and now they had arrived at a promised land of endless music and entertainment.
            As the day wore on, the fence continued to reach out but not as fast as the crowd grew. I sat on the ridge musing how this frail demarcation between free access and paid admission was going to encircle the ever-expanding population, like a pair of arms trying to encircle an expanding balloon. By the afternoon, some anonymous voice boomed cheerfully over the sound system, just hours before the concert began, “It’s now a free concert!” As if they had a choice.
            Richie Havens, who never reached the prominence he should have, opened the concert strumming his guitar, with no backup. When he sang the Beatles playful tune, “With a Little Help from my Friends”, I thought this was what Woodstock was all about — creating a kaleidoscope of people coming together and celebrating life.
            This great gathering brought on a sense of freedom from life’s chores and an invitation to just relax for a time and imagine a better future without the Vietnam War and the racism that had led to Martin Luther King Jr being killed the year before. The Woodstock Nation of peace and love had been born.
            However, it was a birth without much advance planning. It seemed most of us had left home with only the vaguest idea of what we would do upon our arrival. Bringing provisions or sleeping bags was an afterthought. I ran into one girl from BGSU who found herself thereafter simply being asked by a car idling outside her dorm if she knew of anyone who wanted to go to a concert. Grabbing her purse and camera from her room, she jumped in the car, and after an eight-hour drive down Route 6, found herself at the Woodstock festival.
            Friday night, Tom and his girlfriend, Elise slept, in the front seat of his aging Pontiac. Fred Zackel, our fellow traveler and journalist, and I traded off between settling in the backseat and the trunk. We brought nothing to eat, not even a sandwich. What were we thinking?
            Apparently, the concert promoters weren’t thinking either, since they provided only a paltry number of food booths. With so few food venues, many of us had to scavenge for food among the other concertgoers. After spending hours doing just that, I rejoined our camp after nightfall, carrying a watermelon, a gift from some generous hippies. We ended our first-day eating watermelon and listening to folksinger Joan Baez sing about labor activist Joe Hill.
            Saturday morning brought heavy humidity, warm rain, and oozing mud. Decorum, if it ever applied to this group, soon washed away. Strangers were hugging, sharing food and joints, and to my surprise, feeling free enough to shed their clothes in public. Standing in front of me in an open field a young college couple calmly took off their t-shirts and pulled their jeans down, then plunged into a muddy pond, joining other naked bodies. I thought about joining the fun, but lacking a towel and being doggedly practical, I took a pass, not wanting to spend the rest of the day filled with mud.
            In a cluster of a half million young people, I thought I’d run into at least a dozen folks I knew, but I didn’t, except for Louise Conn, a fellow BGSU graduate and our student council chaplain who read Winnie the Pooh at the council meetings. After I had been elected the student body president, I politely converted the position of chaplain to one of the poets, reasoning that the position was intended to lift everyone’s spirits, regardless of their faith.
            I assumed I’d never see Louise after graduation. But here we were, carefree, happy, and sharing a joint, high above the stage on the ridge behind the largest mass of bodies I’ve ever seen. Canned Heat came up and started playing “Goin’ up the Country.” Its strong driving beat filled the air like a mad piper’s tune. In response, the entire Aquarian tribe before we stood up and began dancing. Louise grabbed my hand and said we had to go down and stand next to the stage.
            As Canned Heat played on, we descended the knoll, dancing and twirling around gyrating bodies. Unfortunately, in the frenzy, my sandals fell off and Louise’s hand slipped away. I searched for my sandals in the torrent of jumping legs, flying arms, swaying torsos, all spinning to the beat of “On the Road Again.” Miraculously I found the sandals, but I never saw Louise again.
            Despite the apparent chaos of the gathering, an implicit bond of celebration kept folks in a cooperative mood. That day, the Cultural Revolution’s music drowned out calls for a violent revolution. Woodstock itself was the most successful political expression of the sixties. It wasn’t a protest against anything in particular. Rather, it was a shout out against the status quo by celebrating a culture of peace, a message attracting more people than any single prior rally.
            The media assumed that a gathering of hundreds of thousands of youths smoking cannabis, dropping acid, and going naked, couldn’t lead to anything good. There was only one New York Times reporter at Woodstock. He later told another writer how his editors wanted him to emphasize how the event was teetering on a social catastrophe and to downplay the level of cooperation among the thousands of strangers who for three days gathered with no formal supervision. I never saw a single police officer the whole time there.
            In contrast, less than four months later, a one-day outdoor concert, held at the Altamont Speedway, in California, that attracted close to 300,000, did not have the same peaceful outcome. Street hardened Hell’s Angels provided limited assistance and security for $500 of free beer.  Alcohol consumption fueled multiple fistfights and property damage at Altamont.
            The crowd got so uncontrollable that the Grateful Dead refused to go on stage and perform. Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane was punched in the head and knocked unconscious by an Angel during their band’s set. Whereas at Woodstock, hippies led by a free-spirited character called Wavy Gravy provided security, and the performers were not in fear of their lives. Clearly, just bringing youth together around music was not enough to result in a blissful event.
           At Woodstock, there was a shared set of values, reflected in its promotional material and setting. Unlike Altamont’s rock and roll concert in a racetrack, Woodstock was advertised as “Three Days of Peace and Music” in the countryside. There were a few drug overdoses, one resulting in death, and two non-drug related accidental deaths; similarly, Altamont experienced three accidental deaths, but with a smaller audience and over a single day.
            However, given that half a million people came together at Woodstock for a weekend with minimal infrastructure and police presence, it was a miracle there were so few incidents. I like to think that Woodstock was the embodiment of the peace and love ethos that permeated the sixties.
           The Woodstock books and movies, magazine articles, and academic reflections would all come later; but for those three days in the summer of 1969, it felt as if youth shared a belief that they could both enjoy life and change the world; social justice at home and abroad was important, and doing something about it was possible.
           Columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. from the Miami Herald, put it nicely this past week, “…what drew the Woodstock generation together was ultimately not anger but hope that yet tugs at the imagination, the hope of a better, fairer, cleaner, saner more peaceful world.” All we had to do was sustain that hope for the rest of our lives.

Trumpian Tactics Shape Progressive Seattle’s Local Elections

Written by: Nick Licata


 

President Donald Trump attacks four women in congress as a wild socialist “squad” intent on destroying America if they stay in office. One would be surprised to see similar tactics pop up in the progressive enclave of Seattle, but they have. And, they are being pursued by a group that describes themselves as “progressive, pragmatists”.

The People for Seattle, formed by former City Councilmember Tim Burgess, considers city council candidates a serious threat to Seattle’s peace and safety because they support policies like safe drug consumption sites, traffic congestion pricing, restrictions on rent increases, higher taxes on the largest corporations and are not eliminating homelessness.

Who are these People for Seattle? They are “decent” people. They are not in the streets waving hatred slogans. Many have been civic leaders, promoting new downtown development and safer single-family neighborhoods. But they apparently fear five candidates, one male, and four women. Zachary DeWolf is the male, he’s gay, on the Seattle school board, and a tenant rights advocate. Two of the women are of color and all have been very supportive of organized labor. I believe their critics fear that change will happen, too fast and too substantive to their liking.

It is the kind of change that recognizes that more public and private financing is necessary to deal with our current health crises stemming from a growing homeless population as a result of ever-increasing rents. Better oversight is needed of our police force to assure that force is applied fairly across all races. A better economic climate must be pursued, for starting new businesses and to also allow employees to earn a decent living.

People for Seattle’s mailed campaign flyers are out-right indecent. Despite claiming that they oppose these candidates because they “seek to deepen divisions instead of seeking common ground” in fact this is exactly what this group is doing. Veteran Seattle P.I. columnist Joel Connelly wrote “lots of folks are surprised at getting nasty, negative, consultant-crafted direct-mail hit pieces from People for Seattle. The group is not boosting candidates of promise so much as slinging mud.”

A flyer against candidate Emily Myers ran a photo of a homeless encampment with the heading of “More of the Same”  and the caption “if you like extremist (councilmember ) Kshama Sawant, then you’ll love Emily Myers.” Kshama is an avowed and proud socialist, Emily is not a socialist. She was a delegate to the King County Labor Council from her union of graduate students. Burgess’s group would seem to consider organized labor a socialist conspiracy.

Alex Pederson, whom Myers is running against, received the endorsement of People for Seattle but has disavowed the mailer, posting “negative mail or negative ads from independent expenditures (I.E.s) are unnecessary and unwelcome. I believe all the candidates can and should simply speak for themselves.”

Another attack flyer on candidate Tammy Morales, accused her of supporting a “job-killing head tax”, even though only the top 3% of the largest businesses would have paid into it for building more affordable housing. A company’s cost would have amounted to an increase of one penny per hour in paid wages.

Their attacks have taken on a fever pitch against incumbent Councilmember Lisa Herbold, who was my past staff lead on many of the most progressive city policies passed while I was on the council. According to the last filing posted on the city’s website, about half of the Burgess group’s attack money is going to defeat Herbold, with less than 1% of their money raised from within her District 1. Isn’t that undermining the district election initiative to make council members more accountable to geographic districts?

An attack flyer accused her of being another Sawant and also for having “dreamed up the job-killing head tax.” Erica Barnett who blogs as C is for Crank, posted a photo of giant spray-painted tags on the viaduct’s remaining pillars saying, “Lisa Herbold Policies Kill!” Erica noted that “It’s ironic that an ex-council member who frequently bemoans the lack of “civility” in Seattle politics may be largely responsible for one of the nastiest local campaign seasons in memory.”  Their inflammatory use of  “killing” in today’s toxic political environment, which Trump initiated, leads to this type of chilling and threatening graffiti. Are Seattle’s moderate liberals and conservatives, now adopting Trumpian hyper-vitriolic and mean-spirited messaging for campaigns?

The final irony buried in this group’s effort to stop the supposed socialist drift of the city council because it is accused of taxing businesses too much. The critics ignore that the council passed the original employee hours tax, which has seen been branded by the opposition as a  “head tax”, back in 2006. Councilmember Jan Drago sponsored the legislation, with Richard Conlin, Richard McIver, Jean Godden, and me voting in favor. Tim Burgess had not been elected to the council yet. Its proceeds had to be used ”strictly for transportation purposes.” It was repealed in 2010, largely because businesses complained of the convoluted paperwork involved, not its financial burden. At that time, neither Drago nor any councilmember who voted to adopt that tax was labeled as a socialist!

Providing Links to all the Major Presidential Candidate Websites

While the televised debate among the Democrat Presidential Candidates has dominated the public’s attention, what has been missing is a detailed comparison of what they are actually presenting to the public in more than 2 minutes or fewer sound bites. I set off to compare their messages as presented in their campaign websites. I was in for a surprise.

I could not find a website that listed each of the Presidential Candidate’s 2020 Websites. Not the Library of Congress, the National Democratic Committee, Ballotpedia, or Wikipedia were hosting this information, although the last two sites do list the candidates and provide very good information on them. However, having a third-party present information about a candidate is not the same as evaluating what the candidate’s campaign presentation to the public. For this reason, my website http://www.becomingacitizenactivist.org/blog/ is presenting that information and it is also presented in this edition of Urban Politics.

Besides listing the links to their websites, Twitter feeds and Facebook pages, I also include a quick snapshot of what each candidate has within their “issues” section. I have limited the list of candidates who have scored at or above .4 percent of support according to the amalgamation of polls that RealClear Politics collected as of July 8th, which is shown below

[Image from RealClearPolitics]

 

While there may be additional polls taken after that date, this poll most likely will represent the relative position of the candidates up to their next group debate, to be on July 30 and 31 on CNN. I also made an exception by including the newest candidate, billionaire Tom Steyer. Despite not being part of the debates, I expect that with the money he is currently pouring into TV ads he will pull up to the .4% of support in a short period of time.

I have the candidates listed alphabetically rather than how they poll since their relative positions will most likely move about as they and their campaigns grow stronger or weaker. Under each of them, I have included a clip from their introductory statement on their “issues” page and the number of separate issues that they list and address. I also noted if they used two words: “middle class” and “workers”. Although just using those words does not fairly represent the depth and breadth with which they address issues affecting those groups,  their use may have provided a glimpse of how the candidate wanted to overtly recognize some targeted voters.

I would have liked to list all of the issues each candidate addresses, but that would be too overwhelming to digest for most of us. I did note which candidates did not mention two words that have come to capture the bulk of the media’s attention: climate change and migration. Again, not including those specific words is not an indication that those issues were not addressed, but it may signal a more nuanced approach that the candidate is pursuing.

Because I’m concerned with the shape that our democracy is in, I also noted if each candidate directly addressed that topic. And given that the Latino vote is a growing influence, I noted which candidates provided a Spanish translation for their website; all did with the exception of Democrats Yang and Steyer, and Republican William Weld. I included Republicans Donald Trump and William Weld’s websites because I believe one must listen to and learn from your opponent. What are they saying about the issues and who are they addressing? So, I hope both Democrats and Republicans find this issue of UP educational.

THE DEMOCRAT CANDIDATES

The website data briefly summarized after each candidate’s entry was taken between the dates of July 12 and 14, 2019. The candidates will likely update their websites as their campaign progress, but my summaries will not be updated unless specifically noted. Best to visit a candidate’s website for the most up to date information.

Bennet, Michael – United States Senator from Colorado

[Website] [Twitter] [Facebook]

Campaign Contact Form

Bennet’s Candidate’s Issues Page is titled “Vision”.  Lists his issues into 3 categories: Drive Economic Opportunity, Restore American Values, and Fix Our Broken Politics.
Lead-in statement: “America calls itself the land of opportunity. It doesn’t feel that way today. Wages are stagnant, costs are rising, and economic inequality in our country is only growing worse.”
On Middle Class & Workers: “Michael’s plan to overhaul and expand the Child Tax Credit, called the American Family Act, will help middle-class families. make it easier for workers to  bargain for better pay”
On Democracy: “Democracy cannot function with a lack of economic mobility for a majority of people.”
Use of Spanish – The site has been translated into Spanish

Biden, Joe – Former U.S. Vice President

[Website] [Twitter] [Facebook]

Greg Shultz – Campaign Manager

Biden’s Candidate Issues Page is titled “Joe’s Vision” – 8 issues listed; Climate change & immigration identified as major issues.
Lead-in statement: “America is an idea” Ironically this was what Senator Lindsey Graham was reported to have said to President Trump during an all-Republican meeting in the White House when Trump started going down the white nationalist road.
On Middle Class & Workers: “We need to rebuild the middle class, and this time makes sure everybody—regardless of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or disability—gets a fair shot.” Biden headlines “middle class” several times in his material.“Restoring the basic bargain for American workers.”
On Democracy: Make sure our democracy includes everyone. He refers to democracy several times.
Use of Spanish – The site has been translated into Spanish

Booker, Cory – U.S. Senator from New Jersey 2013-Present

[Website] [Twitter] [Facebook]

Addisu Demissie – Campaign Manager

Booker’s Candidate Issues Page is titled – “Issues” – He lists 15 issues under 3 general areas: Justice, Opportunity and American Leadership, which includes immigration and climate change within them.
Lead-in statement: “Right now, people fear that the lines that divide us are stronger than the ties that bind us—but Cory is running for president to change that. The answer to our common pain is to reignite our sense of common purpose to build a more fair and just nation for everyone.”
On Middle Class & Workers: Make it easier for workers to join a union and strengthen the rights of workers. No mention of middle class  but he does use the term “hard-working Americans.”
On Democracy: “Cory will fight to protect and expand every American’s right to take part in our democracy.”
Use of Spanish – The site has been translated into Spanish

Bullock, Steve – 24th Governor of Montana

[Website] [Twitter] [Facebook]

Campaign Contact Form
Bullock Candidate’s Issues Page – Doesn’t have one, but he does have a page titled ‘ “One Big Plan”, which is “taking on the toxic influence of money in politics a national priority.” Climate Change is mentioned but nothing noticeable about migration.
Lead-in statement: Our nation is founded on the basic idea that every American’s voice matters.”
On Middle Class & Workers:  “We can… protect worker rights and retirement security.” The term “middle class” was not found.
On Democracy: The word “democracy” did not appear in any noticeable way.
Use of Spanish – The site has been translated into Spanish

Buttigieg, Pete – Mayor of South Bend, Indiana 2011-Present

[Website] [Twitter] [Facebook]

Mike Schmuhl – Campaign Manager

Buttigieg Candidate’s Issues Page is titled – “Issues”  He lists 27 issues under these three categories Freedom, Security, and Democracy. Some issues support very specific legislation. Immigration and climate change are mentioned.
Lead statement: “This moment demands that our policies reflect a deep understanding of Americans’ everyday lives and embody our country’s highest values — values like Freedom, Security, and Democracy.”
On Middle Class & Workers: Pass a new Wagner Act to support the role of organized labor and defend the right of workers to organize. No mention of “middle class”
On Democracy: Pete believes in our democratic republic, but knows that our government has not been nearly democratic or accountable enough.
Use of Spanish – The site has been translated into Spanish

Castro, Julian  –  16th United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development

[Website] [Twitter] [Facebook]

Contact email
Candidate’s Issues Page is titled “issues” – 5 proposals listed
Lead statement: “there is nothing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” Both immigration and climate change are mentioned.
On Middle Class & Workers: He worked to lift people from poverty into middle-class. Did not find the term “workers”, although he talks of low-income families.
On Democracy: The word “democracy” did not appear in any noticeable way.
Use of Spanish – The site has been translated into Spanish

Gabbard, Tulsi – U.S. House Rep from Hawaii 2013-Present

[Website] [Twitter] [Facebook]

No Campaign Manager is known at this time.

Candidate’s Issues Page is titled – “Vision” – No listing of issues, rather she has several paragraphs that describe her vision of America. “Join me in ushering in a new century free from the fear of nuclear war. A world where there is real peace, where our people have time to pursue happiness rather than being forced to work constantly just to survive, where parents have time to spend with their children, and we build strong communities that care for each other and the planet.”
On Middle Class & Workers: Did not find mention of “middle class” or “workers”
On Democracy: The word “democracy” did not appear in any noticeable way.
Use of Spanish – The site has been translated into Spanish

Gillibrand, Kirsten – United States Senator from New York

[Website] [Twitter] [Facebook]

No Campaign Manager or contact form is known at this time
Candidate’s Issues Page is – “Issues”  all information placed in 6 categories
Lead statement: “Taking on big fights takes bravery.”
On Middle Class & Workers: our economy has been a tilted playing field in favor of the wealthiest Americans and corporate special interests, while middle- and working-class families struggle to make ends meet.
On Democracy: The word “democracy” did not appear in any noticeable way.
Use of Spanish – The site has been translated into Spanish

Harris, Kamala – U.S. Senator from California 2017-Present

[Website] [Twitter] [Facebook]

Juan Rodriguez – Campaign Manager

Candidate’s Issues Page is – “Our America” – : 13 issues listed
Lead statement: “Kamala has been a fearless advocate for the voiceless and vulnerable throughout her career. As president, she will fight to restore truth and justice in America and build an economy that works for everyone.
On Middle Class & Workers: mentioned under Economic Justice, “Kamala’s first priority as president will be to give working and middle-class families an overdue income boost.”
On Democracy: The word “democracy” did not appear in any noticeable way.
Use of Spanish – The site has been translated into Spanish

Inslee, Jay – Governor of Washington

[Website] [Twitter] [Facebook]

Aisling Kerins – Campaign Manager

Candidate’s Issues Page is  – Issues presented in 7 categories, five of which have to do with climate change
Lead statement: “As Americans, this is our moment to act on climate change and to invest in a clean energy economy that will grow millions of jobs in communities across the country.”
On Middle Class & Workers: Did not find the words “middle class” or  “workers” did not appear in any noticeable way.
On Democracy: The word “democracy” did not appear in any noticeable way.
Use of Spanish – The site has been translated into Spanish

Klobuchar, Amy – U.S. Senator from Minnesota 2007-Present

[Website] [Twitter] [Facebook]

Justin Buoen – Campaign Manager

Candidate’s Issues Page is –  “Issues”
Lead statement: No lead in a statement, just five issues listed: Health Care, Safer World, Shared Prosperity & Economic Justice, Strong Democracy, Climate,  for a total of 18 issues, the most under Shared Prosperity & Economic Justice. She mentions both immigration and climate change.
On Middle Class & Workers: She would make “it easier — and not harder — for workers to join unions.” No mention of the middle class but she does support small business owners and entrepreneurs.
On Democracy: “The right to vote is the bedrock of our democracy,”
Use of Spanish – The site has been translated into Spanish

O’Rourke, Beto – Former member of U.S. House 2013-2019

[Website] [Twitter] [Facebook]

Jen O’Malley Dillon – Campaign Manager

Candidate’s Issues Page is  – “Issues”  Lists 13 issues including immigration & climate change
Lead statement: “The challenges we face are the greatest in living memory. We can only meet them if we build a movement that includes all of us.”
On Middle Class & Workers: Did not find mention of middle class or workers
On Democracy: Your contribution …ensures that our democracy is once again powered by people, and only people.
Use of Spanish – The site has been translated into Spanish

Sanders, Bernard – U.S. Senator from Vermont 2007-Present

[Website] [Twitter] [Facebook]

Faiz Shakir – Campaign Manager

Candidate’s Issues Page – “Issues” – 24 issues listed; Climate change & immigration identified as major issues.
Lead statement: I’m running for president so that, when we are in the White House, the movement we build together can achieve economic, racial, social and environmental justice for all.
On Middle Class & Workers:
No noticeable use of the phrase “middle class”
“Fight for Fair Trade and Workers”
On Democracy: No noticeable use of the word democracy
Use of Spanish – The site has been translated into Spanish

Steyer, Tom – American Philanthropist

  • No campaign manager or contact form to report at this time.
Candidate’s Issues Page – None Provided
Lead statement:  On the main page “There’s nothing more powerful than the unified voice of the American people.”
On Middle Class & Workers: Did not find mention of either term.
On Democracy: Did not find mention of democracy.
Use of Spanish – No translations available in Spanish

Warren, Elizabeth – U.S. Senator from Massachusetts 2013-Present

[Website] [Twitter] [Facebook]

Roger Lau – Campaign Manager

Candidate’s Issues Page – 5 Issues (Immigration and Climate Change do not receive their own section, but are mentioned within others)

Lead statement: “This is the fight of our lives. The fight to build an America that works for everyone, not just the wealthy and the well-connected. It’s time for big, structural changes to put economic power back in the hands of the American people. That means putting power back in the hands of workers and unions.”
On Middle Class & Workers: Rebuild the Middle Class / putting power back in the hands of workers
On Democracy: “Strengthen our Democracy”
Use of Spanish – The site has been translated into Spanish

Yang, Andrew – Entrepreneur

[Website] [Twitter] [Facebook]

Zach Graumann – Campaign Manager

Candidate’s Issues Page is  – “Policy” 106 issues listed
The lead statement is: “Mr. Yang has the most detailed and comprehensive set of policy proposals we have ever seen at this stage in the campaign.” Democratic Party Leadership in Iowa
On Middle Class & Workers: No mention of “middle class” or workers
On Democracy:  He supports Democracy Dollars –“It has been used in Seattle to great effect, and we can take their program national to move towards publicly funded elections.”
Use of Spanish – No translations available in SpanishTHE REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES

Trump, Donald – Current U.S. President
[Website] [Twitter] [Facebook]

Brad Parscale – Campaign Manager

Candidate’s Issues Page – “Promises Kept” – 14 issues listed;
immigration identified as a major issue “President Trump enforced immigration laws to protect American communities and American jobs.”
No direct mention of climate change, but under his sidebar listing recent accomplishments it says: “President Trump Withdraws the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord
Lead statement: “Making America Great Again – President Donald J. Trump Accomplishments”
On Middle Class & Workers: 
“More than 4.8 million workers received increased wages or bonuses (3.7% of all private workers).”
No notifiable use of the word “middle class”.
On Democracy: No notifiable use of the word “democracy.”
Use of Spanish – The site has been translated in Spanish
Pushing signing up for SMS and Email notices.Weld, William – Former Governor of Massachusetts
[Website] [Twitter] [Facebook]

Jennifer Horn – Campaign Manager

Candidate’s Issues Page – No Issues Page; No mention of immigration or climate change, or for that matter any issue.
Lead statement: “American Has a Choice” lead statement for his website
On Middle Class & Workers: No mention
On Democracy: from his press release on Mueller report: “Confidence in our leaders and in our institutions is at the heart of our democracy.
Use of Spanish – No translations available in SpanishMy take away from reviewing the websites.

The following comments are focused on the “Issues Page” for each candidate.

William Weld and Tom Steyer do not have an issues page, which is surprising in that Weld could have an open field in the Republican primary to tap into any party members who are dissatisfied with Trump. And, Steyer could afford a very robust website identifying the various issues that he has or could talk about on his info-commercials which have been running for months. This lack of an issues page on their websites could indicate a poorly organized campaign, a hesitancy to detail any solutions or just not pursuing a serious campaign effort.

Two other candidates, Steve Bullock, and Tulsi Gabbard have avoided listing issues and have chosen to present a broader statement on their beliefs. Bullock presents One Big Plan and Gabbard writes about her Vision for America.

If there was enough time available and a broadly accessible platform, the breadth and depth of issues covered by the Democratic candidates could really contribute to a greater national dialogue on various solutions that our country faces. Unfortunately, these efforts are pushed aside by all the mainline media’s focus on a candidate’s image and their highlighted talking points. However, there are a number of some interesting proposals buried in the various issue pages.

Andrew Yang gets the prize for the largest number of suggested innovative solutions, which includes providing Free Marriage Counseling for All, the use of Democracy Dollars and his most known proposal to provide a Universal Basic Income, a proposal first brought up in a presidential campaign by Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964.

William Weld, the Republican primary challenger to Donald Trump, gets the prize on the opposite end of the scale for not even having an issues page. Any issues he brings up must be picked up through his various TV interviews which he has posted on his website. Does he consider himself to even be a serious challenge to Trump?

Pete Buttigieg, to his credit, identifies some issues that the other candidates have either ignored or not directly addressed. He was the only candidate to mention domestic terrorism and link it to white supremacist violence and the need to increase federal resources for countering domestic terrorism. He also proposes passing a new Wagner Act to defend the right of workers to organize.

There are other candidates who also have identified unique or overlooked issues, too many to cover here. At this point in time, probably Warren and Sanders are seen by the public and democrats as addressing the most issues, partly because of how much media attention they have received and how long they have been covered by the media in the pre-campaign season talking about their differences from Trump.

Evaluating Candidates Websites’ Front-Page Message

In taking a glance at the democrat’s websites opening page and comparing it to Trump’s, I believe a subtle difference appears. Keep in mind that a statistically significant portion of viewers never gets beyond that first page.

Of the five leading Democrats in the polls, two of them ( Biden and Harris) just ask for money. There is no mention of joining them on any mission by submitting your email address.

Both Sanders and Warren, have a highlighted donation button but also ask for emails. Sanders message is that there is only one way to win against Trump “and the billionaire class” and that is being together, “tell Bernie you’re in.”
Presumably, that person will be part of something bigger.

Warren has a less motivational message, “Stay In Touch – Get the latest from the team straight to your inbox.” She will provide you with information.

Buttigieg has a modest donation button, but his page is dominated by the slogan: A fresh start for America” Solicitation for the email is “Join Team Pete”. You would be joining Pete to do something, but it’s not clear exactly what.

Trump is unique from all of the Democratic challengers. Although there is a highlighted contribution button, the only message on the first page is publicizing his campaign rallies and to register folks for free tickets (two per email address).  As president, he can travel to places on the public dollar. The question that needs to be asked and investigated is whether he is using public dollars to pay for his campaign events through covering travel costs if nothing else.

The Democratic candidates do not have the funds to fly around the country holding rallies and as individuals, with perhaps 3 exceptions, they are not likely to attract crowds that are consistently larger than Trumps. If they did try to hold a rally as an individual candidate and the crowd size was smaller than Trumps, he or she would be identified as a weaker figure than Trump.

The Democrats Need a Leader Who Places the Need for Unity Above Their Own Desire to Win

The way around this dilemma would be to have the democratic candidates working as a team, to hold rallies around national issues that they all agree on, such as overturning voter suppression legislation or gerrymandering. It would present a united democratic show of force and it is most likely that the crowds would be larger than any single candidate could attract. This strategy could succeed if the candidates work as a group and not as individuals.

The democratic party needs a leader to emerge from the pack of candidates who could say that they must unite now around some issues and use that cooperation to turn out people to rallies to both support and learn about how these issues are affecting their lives. Without such leadership, the democrats will continue to focus too narrowly on how each can win the primary, which will result in an ever-greater emphasis on the core body of democrat supporters and not on building a broader national movement!

How States Can Disregard SCOTUS’s Pro-Gerrymandering Decision

Written by: Nick Licata and Roger Scott


 

The Supreme Court gave the green light to 30 states (with 46% of the Congressional seats) to gerrymander Congressional and state legislative districts in 2021 as they draw district maps after the 2020 census  (Rucho Et Al. V. Common Cause).  Citizens in the other 20 states will receive some or full protection from partisan gerrymandering by either commissions or an independent demographer, in the case for Missouri. Citizens are deprived of their voting rights by gerrymandering because it locks domination of one party in a state for decades. In essence, politicians choose their voters instead of voters choosing their representatives.

In Maryland, Democrats in 2001 gerrymandered one district to increase their representation in Congress by one district.  In 2018, they won seven out of the eight seats.  Republicans in North Carolina instructed map makers to draw districts so that Republicans would win 10 out of 13 seats in spite of how many votes Republicans receive.  In 2018 Democrats received 48% and Republicans 50% of the total votes for Congress but won only three out 13 seats in Congress.  The table below lists the states in which the number of seats elected by one party was disproportionate to the total votes for Democrat candidates secured in that state, excluding independents.

  2018 House of Representatives Election results
Total # districts Total % Democratic vote in State # Democratic districts won Democratic districts won representing % of total D vote. % Difference in Democratic representation mostly due to gerrymandering
North Carolina 13 49% 3 23% negative 26%
Maryland 8 67% 7 88% positive 21%
Wisconsin 8 54% 3 38% negative 16%
Texas 36 48% 13 36% negative 12%
Kentucky 6 40% 1 17% negative 23%
Ohio 18 48% 4 22% negative 26%
Total House Districts 89 31 35%

Data compiled from various sources by the authors.

From a review of the table, it is evident that the Republicans have used modern technology to finely tune gerrymandering by concentrating the voters of the party out of power in the fewest districts.  The result is convoluted district boundaries and supermajority state legislatures that can overturn governor vetoes and maintaining one-party power after each census by gerrymandered districts. The president of the Brennan Center for Justice Michael Waldman noted that highly precise gerrymanders dilute the voting strength of an emerging nonwhite majority.

Citizens can trump the SCOTUS gerrymandering decision by organizing in the states. Former Attorney General Eric Holder, through his organization the Nation­al Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), is pursuing such a strategy. He described his reason to a Mother Jones reporter this summer, “This is a recognition on the part of the Democratic Party, on the part of progressives, that we need to focus on state and local elections to a much greater degree than we have in the past.”

Specifically, there are two distinct paths to fight gerrymandering at the state level.

First, they can use the initiative process to amend the state constitution and second make appeals to their state supreme court.  In 2018 the voters passed state constitutional amendments to establish independent redistricting commissions in Colorado, Michigan, and Ohio; an advisory commission in Utah; and an independent demographer in Missouri.  In 2019 another three states, New Hampshire, Virginia, and Arkansas will likely authorize constitutional amendments to establish independent commissions.  A citizen group in Oklahoma is working on an independent commission and plans on implementation in 2021.

These commissions can draw new state legislative and congressional boundaries from the 2020 census, since the census data is scheduled to be released to the states by March 31, 2021, and by that time the commissions should have been established.

Most independent commissions consist of a set proportion of Democrats, Republicans, and independents that draw district lines under a transparent process involving all parts of the state.  Lines must be drawn with criteria such as compactness, contiguity, respect of political boundaries and preservation of communities of interest.

In 2018, except for Utah, voters approved independent commissions with large majorities. By including a robust number of independents on proposed commissions, frustrated independents form coalitions with members of the out party to pass initiatives with large majorities. The record shows that states with an initiative process can create an independent commission in state constitutions regardless if they are red, blue or purple states.

These ten states have initiative power but currently have no protection against gerrymandering: Massachusetts, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming. Reformers could organize initiatives in these states to accomplish Virginia and New Hampshire’s successful effort to get their state legislatures to authorize commissions.

Citizen efforts in these states could use the support of presidential candidates, national public interest organizations and party national committees to help them launch initiatives to create independent commissions. And for the 21 states (39% of members of the US House of Representatives) that do not have initiatives, citizens there could use those allies to elect new representatives who would vote for a constitutional amendment that would allow citizen introduced initiatives.

The second path is for citizens to bypass their state legislature if it is hostile to the two above approaches for establishing a redistricting commission. In these instances, they need to challenge gerrymandered districts up to their state supreme court on the grounds that they violate their state constitution.

Most states include language that is similar to that found in the Pennsylvania constitution which says, that “elections shall be free and equal” and no one shall “interfere to prevent the free exercise of the right of suffrage.” The Pennsylvania Supreme Court based its anti-gerrymandering decision on this language League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania v. Pennsylvania and the US Supreme Court’s majority agreed with them. But Pennsylvania’s court decision was possible because new justices were elected to their state supreme court, demonstrating that elections to state court positions are too critical to ignore.

The following states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Texas, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio), which have been heavily gerrymandered, all have crucial state Supreme Court elections up in 2020. Even though some of them have created commissions it is necessary to protect their existence and performance by electing justices who will deflect challenges to those commission’s proper functions.

Also, only Kentucky has a state supreme court justice position up for election this November 2019. It is a nonpartisan race between Court of Appeals Judge Christopher Shea Nickell and Republican State Senator Whitney Westerfield. However, being a Republican running as an impartial judge may be difficult for voters to believe and could provide an opening for the public to choose a justice that would oppose gerrymandering. This is particularly true in Kentucky, where the latest poll from Morning Consult, shows that their strongly partisan Senator Mitch McConnell received a whopping 50 percent unfavorable rating.

The bottom line is that State Supreme Courts, if they wish, can redraw their congressional and state district maps in adherence to their state constitution, despite the SCOTUS decision.

The above strategies can achieve a win for public accountability.  Now we need to demand all presidential candidates support these efforts, for the good of all citizens not those of any particular party.  This is an urgent matter since the states will redraw districts in 2021 or early 2022 and most of those will stick for a decade. The Supreme Court’s decision to allow states to continue gerrymandering, can and must be rebuffed at the state level.

Public Golf Courses can benefit the public without being eliminated

Written by: Nick Licata


 

A recent released city study and comments from Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan have stirred up a conversation about whether our public golf courses should be eliminated. 

The City of Seattle Parks Department commissioned Lund Consulting to prepare a strategic business plan to guide the future of Seattle’s public golf courses. Justifying the report, Mayor Durkan said, “It would be a breach of our duty to the people of Seattle not to be really looking at what is the best use of those golf courses, from everything to continuing as golf courses, to finding a way to use part of them as parks, to use part of them for affordable housing.”

What followed was an intense debate between those who believe that parkland devoted to golf courses should be used for other purposes to benefit the public and those who believe the golf courses already serve a public purpose.

The first group is generally referred to as urbanists. The second group doesn’t have as clean a handle to describe their vision. While urbanists argue for greater urban density to address critical issues like climate change and traffic congestion, the second group argues for preserving a sense of neighborhood communities; their critics call them NIMBYs, their supporters refer to them as park and community advocates. Let’s just refer to the two sides as urbanists versus park advocates, albeit those titles do not capture the full extent of their concerns.

One urbanist approach is presented by Nolan Gray in City Lab in an article  Dead Golf Courses Are the New NIMBY Battlefield.  Since golf’s popularity is waning, he asks why can’t their vast amounts of underutilized land be developed? He notes that “In a Kansas City suburb, one golf course is set to be converted into an industrial park. On another golf course in suburban Jacksonville, plans are underway for mixed-use retail, office, and hotel development.” But he also suggests even other park users would be possible.

Another writer Mike Eliason in his article Unlike Seattle, Golf Really Is Dying, which appears in the Urbanist, focuses specifically on how golf is dying in Seattle. He notes that “golf green fees are falling like a rock, 16% in just two years” from 2015 to2017. But making statistical projections from just a couple of years is fool’s gold. Looking at those same 2 years, Seattle Times columnist Gene Balk writes in his piece, Bike Commuting is Down in Seattle, that the number of bike commuters who live in Seattle fell 26%, 16,000 to 12,000. Both downward trends were due to an excessive rainy 2017.

The park advocates’ position was probably best represented by a letter to the mayor by three former park superintendents, Kenneth Bounds, Holly Miller, and David Towne. As supporters of the mayor and of housing affordability, they made two suggestions. First, the city should support municipal golf courses’ non-operating costs from general tax support if the golfing fees fall short. Second, the mayor should not propose converting parkland to non-park uses since it would be inconsistent with Seattle’s livability goals, which would discourage businesses and people to locate, live and work in Seattle.

Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat in a column on Golf Courses vs Housing regarding I-42 pointed out, with the help of citizen activists like Joyce Moty, that the city has a law that does not allow taking parkland and using it for other purposes unless it is replaced with the parkland of similar quality and size. In other words, as attractive as building affordable housing would be on golf courses, the cost of obtaining the land, since it would have to be replaced by purchasing land elsewhere, would make it non-affordable. And the city does not currently own large parcels of land to give to the Parks Department without having to pay market value, as it would have to do with the utility-owned property.

I’m familiar with Initiative 42, which the council unanimously adopted as Ordinance 118477, the year before I got on the city council. As the parks committee chair during my first term, citizens often reminded me of how it applied to attempts to sell parkland.

Although the council could overturn the initiative by a vote, that is not likely. The council unanimously adopted the initiative before it got on the ballot because they knew voters would pass it overwhelmingly. You could bet that if the council voted now to overturn I-42, the voters would release those councilmembers from their duties.

What caught my attention was that the Lund report only mentioned I-42 twice, and in a very inconsequential fashion: as part of park history and as a condition to take into account with regards to future changes. Neither citation was more than a line or two. I asked Kjris Lund, who wrote the report why that was. She told me that the city directed the report’s focus to be on the economics of the golf courses. She would have gladly dived into how I-42 could be addressed, but that was never intended by the city to be the focus.

The Parks Department also did not raise I-42 as a significant issue after the report came out.  Lund did meet with city department staff when her final draft came out and discussed the report’s major recommendations and findings. But I-42 did not play any significant role. And, neither the Mayor nor her office staff met with her after the report was released, although that could still happen.

So how come affordable housing has been mentioned when it appears that it was not studied as a replacement for the golf courses? My guess is that the mayor suggested providing affordable housing within parks as an idea rather than as a serious proposal.
The media then picked it up and amplified the concern of residents and park users. This approach does not lead to systemic changes. Rather, it makes a good point and stirs the pot, but doesn’t deliver a meal.

There is another report that is to be released analyzing the golf courses, but its scope is similar to the first one, in that it focuses on revenue, not on public services that could be better provided. This is a blind spot that results from city leaders so focused on balancing a budget, that they forget that their other mission is to provide good public services. That is part of the problem with the urbanists’ perspective.

For many of the urbanists, the golf courses 528 acres could be put to better use. The combined space of Seattle’s four golf courses is nearly as big as Seattle’s Discovery Park, or nearly 8 times the size of Seattle Center. But those comparisons are misleading. Discovery Park is designed to preserve a natural setting for passive use, not for active sports use. The Seattle Center is not park property, its function is to entertain and to produce revenue.

However, it’s not too late to explore how to best use the golf courses. While the national nonprofit First Tee youth program at Jefferson and Jackson teach children of low income and minority families how to golf, more needs to be done to open up the golf courses to the public. The Lund report’s Chapter 5 addresses this issue by describing a study of how seven Nordic and one Dutch golf course have accommodated multifunctional activities.

The services provided included conserving nature while still making the courses available to the public and creating areas for recreation and outdoor activities for a number of groups other than golf players. The study also showed that cooperation with the surrounding communities is a critical factor for achieving multifunctionality. Most importantly it found that “a multifunctional approach can be profitable for golf clubs while also strengthening their place and benefit in society through work on the environment and sustainable development.”

A key understanding of applying a multifunctional activity approach is that these activities do not need to occur simultaneously; they may be limited to seasons or occur at different times of the day. These practices are not limited to Scandinavia. The Old Course at St Andrews Scotland is an example of a revered course being made available to non-golfers.

What is missing from the public discussion right now, is how to begin exploring how golf courses are being used in other places that address the concerns that have been raised by Seattle’s users and residents. That needs to happen, and it was not directly asked of the consultants who are producing the golf studies. The mayor and the council could follow up on the last recommendation made in the Lund Report to conduct a risk analysis to allow non-golfers to use the golf courses at certain days and times.

The first step in that process is to recognize that parks, all parks, including golf courses, are there to provide a public benefit first and a revenue stream second. That may mean no longer expecting our municipal golf courses to carry an additional burden of contributing to the Park Fund to recover capital costs, one that our other park programs are not required to do so. This was the first of the 35 recommendations that were made in the Lund Report, delete the policy obligating golf to return 3% or 5% of their budget to this fund.

The approaching budget process, which will begin with the Mayor presenting the budget to the council in September is the perfect opportunity to devote funds to begin a new approach to using our golf courses, one that retains them and expands their use. It must happen in an atmosphere of cooperation in finding a way to meet the first recommendation of the Lund Report, which was to commit to golf as a recreational program offered by the City on par with other recreational offerings.

A New Democrat Attorney General drops charges against Republicans who poisoned Flint Michigan’s water. Why does that make sense?

Written by: Nick Licata


 

Did a Coverup of Who Caused Flint Michigan’s Contaminated Water Continue During its Investigation? 

For the first time in 16 years, Michigan elected a Democrat as their Attorney General and Dana Nessel’s first major decision was to dismiss all pending criminal charges against the state and city officials responsible for Flint Michigan’s polluted drinking water this past weekend. Mainstream media commentators were critical of her decision as well as Flint residents, who saw this move as further evidence that no justice would be pursued for the toxic water conditions which exposed up to 42,000 children under 2 years of age to lead poisoning. Nayyirah Shariff, a Flint resident who is the director of the grassroots group Flint Rising, told the Detroit Free Press reporter Paul Egan. that the announcement came as “a slap in the face to Flint residents” and “it doesn’t seem like justice is coming.”

But in reading through Egan’s article, additional pieces of this puzzling decision hinted that the coverup, by the accused officials, may actually have continued to the extent of endangering the investigation. In other words, there may be a legitimate reason for redoing the criminal charges. Although new cases will cost additional public money, Nessel says she made this decision precisely to save tax payer’s money from being wasted on faulty work by the former Republican State Attorney General, Bill Schuette. She said, his cases “have gone on for years and have cost the taxpayers of this state millions of dollars. It’s time for resolution and justice for the people of Flint.”

Schuette was overseeing the investigation and he has not been sympathetic to Flint residents in the past.  In 2017, he had been admonished by an Eastern District of United States of Michigan Judge for opposing the State of Michigan supplying bottled water to Flint residents who lack tap filters to protect them from the toxic drinking water. The judge suggested he had engaged in “superficial posturing” in being concerned about Flint’s water contamination.

That opinion of Schuette was mild in comparison to the findings of Solicitor General Fadwa Hammoud, who is currently handling the criminal cases and is the first Muslim Solicitor General in the US. She found that not all evidence was pursued by Schutte and his special prosecutor Todd Flood, who was a prominent donor to then-Republican Governor Rick Snyder. In addition, Schuette and Flood wrongly allowed private law firms representing Snyder and other defendants to have “a role in deciding what information would be turned over to law enforcement.”

This scenario closely follows the prior coverups that officials, who were being charged, carried out in order to keep Flint residents ignorant of their unhealthy drinking water. This episode is covered in detail by Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha’s book What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance and Hope American City. I reviewed it here.

As a pediatrician working at Flint’s Hurley Hospital, she intimately understood how public officials ignored the concerns of Flints residents, where 57 percent are black and only 37 percent white, and where a kid born in Flint will live 15 years less than one born in the neighboring communities.

The water problem began when Flint had to switch its water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River to lower its costs and government agencies were not properly checking for lead in the water supply. Marc Edwards, a self-described conservative Republican and civil-engineering professor from Virginia Tech, saw that even though the federal law required proper inspections, “The EPA and the states work hand in hand to bury problems.” And those EPA employees who did try to protect the public were punished. An EPA manager, who issued a report to his supervisors that he found high levels of lead in Flint’s water supply, was reprimanded and labeled “a rogue employee.”

The local county’s health-department representative was no better than the EPA, telling Dr. Hanna-Attisha that lead in the water was not a concern of theirs, only lead from paint chips and dust. However, something was obviously wrong. Just six months after the water switch, General Motors got a government waiver to go back to using Lake Huron water. The company noticed that its engine parts were being corroded after the switch.

The highest public official, Michigan’s Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, was at the heart of the problem by supporting a law that allowed him to appoint powerful emergency managers (EM) of cities whose budgets were deeply in debt. The EMs were accountable to the governor, not local governments, to pursue strong austerity measures. Because it was too costly, Flint’s EM rejected the city-council vote to go back to Detroit’s water supply due to consumer-health complaints.

Given Gov. Snyder’s role in allowing the Flint water crises to unfold without intervening, Solicitor General Hammoud was rightfully concerned how prior Attorney General Schuette’s special prosecutor Todd Flood let Snyder decide what information would be turned over to law enforcement. Just as Schuette had been accused by a federal judge as “superficial posturing” to appear to support Flint residents, the same deceptive practice may have been carried out again by him in cooperation with Gov. Snyder, by presenting a weak prosecution of those accused of propagating the Flint water crises.

As a Democratic Candidate for State Attorney General, Dana Nessel said she would “take a second look at the investigation, make certain that all of the people who have charges pending have been charged properly and look to see if there’s anyone who should have been charged, but who hasn’t been.” Upon dismissing the current charges, she repeated that sentiment by stating that she did not preclude recharging the original defendants or adding new ones.

The next step in pursuing a new set of charges against those responsible for Flint’s water contamination and health hazard will take place on June 28 in a Flint “community conversation” with Solicitor General Hammoud. She will explain Nessel’s decision and answer questions. Community activists are the ones who uncovered this travesty and demanded prosecution of those responsible. They will be present at the meeting and will hold Hammoud and Nessel to their promise to seek justice and not abandon it.

SDS’s Imploded 50 Years Ago – A Triumph of Extremism

Written by: Nick Licata


Fifty years ago, this June, the Students for a Democratic Society held its last United National Convention. It was torn apart by ideologically driven factions, each claiming to have the only correct approach for saving America. Ironically, SDS was initiated by the anti-authoritarian, but socialist-oriented, League for Industrial Democracy. Al Haber, SDS’s first president, encouraged it to work with any group that was seeking social change.

It may be unpopular to say, but extremism from within SDS destroyed it, not the government or the rightwing. Sure, they would have liked to see that happen, but in the end, the leftist SDS leadership was demanding their supporters to conform to a party line as they  embraced rightwing Senator Barry Goldwater’s advice from 1964, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”

The potential to drift toward extremism is as possible today as it was in the 1960s. It may seem odd to look back fifty years at a student organization’s collapse as having any relevance to our major political parties today. But it is relevant to how the Democrats and Republicans craft their message and policies in the upcoming 2020 presidential and congressional elections. Candidates in each party are trying to rally their party’s core supporters in order to win primary elections. That is a necessary and important activity, however, it is a false assumption that it is okay to ignore those outside those targeted groups unless they accept a core party doctrine. Because then they will likely reject both the candidate and their party.

The following perspective is based on my experience from being in SDS and from being involved in today’s politics as an activist. Recommending that extremism be avoided is not heard often from the left or the right. But a little history shows how it can undermine a great cause or organization.

By the time of its implosion in 1969, SDS had become the broadest and largest US student movement organization following WWII. It excelled in promoting the free exchange of ideas and solutions. Kirkpatrick Sale wrote in his book SDS, that their “literature list had ninety-two papers and pamphlets (forty-nine by SDSers). These were distributed widely to SDS chapters. They probably produced more than any other student group had ever before.”

The organization was non-hierarchical, rotating elected leadership annually, with chapters independent of any central control and membership open to all.  Having five members paying a $5 membership was all that was needed to form a chapter, which did not have to adhere to a national political line or report its independent stands to a national office. You didn’t even have to be a paid member, like me, to be an SDS campus leader. By the summer National Convention of 1969, seven years after their 1962 National Convention, where only 35 members were present, convention attendance had swelled to well over a thousand. Despite such success, it was torn apart internally by its national leaders vying for control of SDS based on who had the most valid beliefs for determining its future.

In its last year, SDS leaders spurned a broader outreach to the extent that even members, including past presidents, were cast out if they failed to follow a particular political line.  As a result, SDS lost membership and leadership of the student protest movement. There is a cautionary tale here for both the Democrat and Republican Parties. The intensity and certainty in one’s beliefs is not a substitute for presenting programs based on rational decision-making that preserve our liberties. My experience in SDS provided me an insight into what went wrong and how their errors need not be repeated.

I was a campus SDS leader with a role far below the radar of the SDS national leaders but still visible enough to be land on the Congressional House on Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC) organizational chart, exhibit number 257, listing the most prominent SDS subversives. The SDS leadership had a far more accurate assessment of my importance.

I attended Bowling Green State University during the late ’60s. Like many state colleges in Ohio, at that time, it had a conservative student body. During the 1968 presidential election, a poll showed that BGSU students supported Richard Nixon over Hubert Humphrey 64 percent to 18 percent; even though Nixon only beat Humphrey by 1%. When George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of the American Nazi party, visited our campus in March 1967, he attracted an audience of close to three thousand who attentively listened to his message that he was fighting for the “White majority” in this country. On a campus that was a pretty big majority, only 1% of our student body were Black students.

Within this socially and politically conservative student culture, there still was a sense of rebellion among students like me who resented the student leaders. We felt ignored because we did not belong to the student organizations that influenced campus politics. Perhaps, this was similar to how conservative blue-collar workers felt in 2016;
being ignored by what some called “the elites” who were accused of controlling the federal government

I came across a document called the Port Huron Statement that was spreading among college campuses. Over 100,000 copies were printed and distributed by Students for a Democratic Society. It described a concept of “participatory democracy”, how citizens, including students, should have some meaningful say about how their government or work environment operated. I liked that idea. Why not have some control over your life?

I joined a handful of students in the fall of 1966 to start an SDS chapter in the hope of influencing campus and national policies. We barely knew each other and for the most part, we came from working-class families. The SDS national meeting that previous summer had focused on supporting local chapters’ efforts around issues, such as fighting for more relevant student “governments” and obtaining greater social freedoms on campus, while also opposing on-campus military recruiting and being drafted to fight in the Vietnam War.

I was surprised to find out that we were immediately accused by the College Administration and student government leaders of being unpatriotic, and possibly under the influence of the communists. Now, I had grown up reading about communists from John Birch pamphlets that were left at my dad’s barbershop by his customers. I always wanted to see what one looked like. Turns out they looked like me. Anyone could be a communist sympathizer if they didn’t watch out what they were asking for.

After being elected our SDS chapter’s president, our chapter worked with other campus groups to promote policies that the average student wanted but thought they could not get. As a result, an SDS member was elected Student Body President and a number of other SDS members were also elected to student government. Along with allies, we were able to get the student council, which still had a majority of conservative students, to establish a draft counseling service, dismantle campus restrictions on female students’ social behavior, pass a student bill of rights which overturned other university rules, and finally approved adding a black student as a voting representative on the council to give them a position of power to address racist policies on campus.

In the fall of 1968, I hitchhiked to other campuses in Ohio and on the east coast to see what other SDS chapters were up to. It was an eye-opening experience. The real difference I found from our chapter’s incremental approach of talking with other students on campus about our common problems became apparent when I visited the ivy league SDS campus chapters. Their members were from much wealthier parents than mine. The students I met were intellectually sophisticated, talking endlessly about the nature of class conflict and Marxism. Being a political science major, I had read my share of Karl’s works and was familiar with Marx’s analysis of capitalism and the inevitable working-class revolution. His ideas were worthy of exploring but I found that a number of chapters had approached Marxism almost as a religious dogma.  When I attended one of the last SDS National Council meetings held, during the Christmas break of 1968 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I encountered that orientation again.

Membership in SDS had exploded, which always had far fewer paid members than non-paying ones. One of the three top SDS elected national leaders, Robert Pardun, wrote in his bookPrairie Radical, that by December of 1967, “On most campuses there were often ten or more active SDS members who had not paid their dues for every member who had, and we estimated about 30,000 de facto members in some 250 chapters.” Others estimated that their numbers had reached 100,000 members and close to 400 chapters by the spring of 1969.

Despite having a constitution that said SDS “Membership is open to all who share the commitment of the organization to democracy as a means and a social goal” there was one particular group, the Progressive Labor Party, that set about to undermine that orientation. In 1965 they were just a small a tight-knit group; you had to be approved for membership by their leaders before being admitted. They advocated a Maoist type of communism, first supporting China but ultimately deciding that Albania was the best role model for America. Their immediate goal, however, was to take over SDS. They succeeded in doing that at the last legitimate SDS Convention, six months following the national SDS meeting I attended, where I encountered them for the first time.

How could such a small group, with such extremely anti-democratic views, take over a national organization that had advocated participatory democracy? The answer was that they won over converts through preaching that only they had the correct answers to creating a new political order. Over the three days of the SDS gathering, I saw how a strong, crystal clear belief system based on some simple and seemingly logical premises had the power to enlist those desperately wanting to overthrow a corrupted political and social system.

I had expected to find something more akin to the atmosphere that greeted me when I walked through the main hall of the college building hosting the SDS meeting. Upon entering I was met by a chaotic circus of competing ideas and slogans. Colorful posters hung on the brick walls with a cacophony of barkers, wearing buttons with every conceivable anti-war, pro-worker, anti-establishment, and pro-revolution slogan imaginable. They were hawking their displays of slim pamphlets and thick books, stacked on flimsy card tables. It was the movement’s version of a county fair to display competing ideas and promoting different approaches to create a new America and for some a new world.

This diversity reflected the grassroots non-voting membership which comprised easily two-thirds of the roughly 1,500 members attending that gathering. The three National Councils, which met before the National Convention in June 1969, were meant to discuss and vote on positions that would direct SDS’s national officers. I estimated that this direction would be coming from only a small percentage of the SDS members present since only the paid-up members could vote.

The council’s general assemblies were dominated by the two largest factions clashing, the PLP and RYM (Revolutionary Youth Movement), as they prepared for their ultimate match later in June at the National Convention. At this time, many SDS members were searching for a more comprehensive political philosophy and theory than what the Port Huron Statement had provided. Its bottom-up decision-making approach and encouragement of pursuing differing innovative solutions was found to be inadequate by PLP and RYM, who replaced it with a top-down authority structure requiring adherence to their own straitjacket beliefs.

More importantly, their basic pitch for SDS’s future was to reject liberalism, which was apparent when I  saw the front page of the SDS’s newspaper, the New Left Notes, that was issued for the National Council meeting. It featured a Picture of Chairman Mao with the headline “Combat Liberalism,” followed by an article declaring that liberalism “stands for unprincipled peace, thus giving rise to a decadent, philistine attitude and bring about political degeneration…” It could have been written by the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom campus group, as they also hated liberalism.

The council meeting’s final session came to a crashing end, with the main hall literally divided down the center aisle separating RYM and PLP followers chanting competing slogans: “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh” versus “Mao Mao Mao Tse-tung.”  It was the theater of the absurd; so distant from the real concerns of the tens of thousands of students who had sustained SDS as a movement leader.

The following SDS National Convention ended when PLP won a critical vote and RYM led a walkout of the convention, declaring that they were the legitimate SDS. Within months, the organization collapsed with no functioning SDS national office in touch with its hundreds of chapters.

The surge of campus organizing to fight the war and promote civil rights was immense before SDS’s demise. An Urban Research Corporation survey of student protestors at over two hundred universities and colleges during the first six months of 1969 found that over 200,000 students had participated in campus protests, many associated with local SDS chapters. But as the national organization began to apply class theory to every conflict, and after the national office split between RYM (which became the Weathermen) and PLP, fewer students joined, while many older members drifted away.

Without any national student organization to sustain such a wide and diverse protest movement, right-wing political organizations began to chip away at the progressive measures on campuses that SDS helped initiate. The Reagan era followed waving the banner of individual independence and liberty, which has since led to concentrating wealth into the hands of ever fewer people, and a steady attack on programs that protect personal rights.

The extremist beliefs that brought down SDS, occurred from within. They were not imposed on it by the government or right-wing groups. SDS’s demise occurred because its leadership embraced absolute truths; demanding that there was only one true path moving forward, and labeling those not adopting their vision as enemies. Compromises and reason were their poisons; they blurred that vision by challenging the officially pronounced premises and offering alternative ones.

This history may warm the hearts of conservatives who will gleefully see SDS’s destruction as the result of flying to close to a socialist sun, which blinded their logic and melted their wings. That perspective feeds upon the same diet of hubris that undermined SDS’s democratic foundation; the belief that your world view is the only correct one, such as considering that anything socialistic is bad.

For example, the repeated statements made by President Trump, his followers and a good portion of Republicans, would have the public believe that adopting democratic socialist programs would curtail our personal freedoms. By an imaginary leap in logic, they point to Venezuela’s dictatorial President Nicolas Maduro as the inevitable result. Rather they should look to their own libertarian Cato Institute to realize how ridiculous that assumption is. Cato Institute’s Human Freedom Index, which presents the state of human freedom in the world based on a broad measure that encompasses personal, civil, and economic freedom, gives the US a ranking of 17. There are a dozen countries with socialistic programs who score higher than us.

In fact, SDS’s implosion is more of a cautionary tale for the Republican Party than the Democratic Party. Because at this time the Republicans’ party is practicing the most extremist beliefs. This is most evident in the treatment of women, as the Republicans have allowed religious doctrines to abrogate personal freedoms. The founders of this nation, being very aware of the religious wars that had torn apart their homeland of England, incorporated the separation of church and state into our constitution.

The Republican Party’s base now consists of those who have no tolerance for a democracy that allows citizens to control their own bodies. Instead, they insist that their religious beliefs must dictate the most intimate personal decisions for everyone. So that now President Trump, who leads a democracy based on individual liberties, is accusing women of killing children because he needs the votes of religious fundamentalists, who refuse to acknowledge that the freedom from being controlled by religious doctrine is the basis of our democracy.

How is it that the Republican Party, which was born out of the desire to free black citizens from slavery, now is leading the charge to require all women to adhere to a dogma that many do not choose to follow? While both Democrats and Republicans could learn from SDS’s experience, that lesson is most immediately applicable to the practices being pursued by Republicans toward women. Their traditional conservative values are now being undermined by those within the party who are exhibiting the same behavior of promoting absolute truths that destroyed SDS in the 60s.

To quote Barry Goldwater again, he predicted this threat to the Republican Party over fifty years ago when he said. “Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, … it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise.”

When religious dogma trumps democratic values, America’s liberties are far more threatened than any bread and butter socialized services that the radical right so loudly accuses of endangering our freedom.

Parts of this essay were incorporated in my book Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties.

Trump is not a Tyrant – he just admires them

Written by: Nick Licata


 

President Trump is not a tyrant, but he doesn’t shy away from admiring them. And, that should give one pause in feeling secure that our nation’s leader is committed to sustaining the world’s longest running democratic republic. For those who don’t see his lack of understanding how a democracy functions, they should consider his statements flattering those leaders who have corrupted or demolished their own democratic institutions, by denying open and unfettered public elections or not allowing media to distribute uncensored information.

For instance, Trump suggested that our country should form with Russia a “Cyber Security unit to guard against election hacking,” even though our intelligence services at that time said Russia, most likely on Putin’s orders, had been hacking of our elections in order to swing the election to someone whom they preferred. This accusation was later confirmed in Special Investigator Mueller’s report. Meanwhile, Putin has, in practice, ended free elections in Russia.

Trump flat out congratulated Chinese President Xi Jinping on his National Congress, which only meets for a week every year, allowing him to serve as president for life. He told the National Republican Congressional Committee at a spring dinner that he referred to Xi as “king” not president because of that change. “He liked that. I get along with him great.” Trump’s largess in bestowing admiration on anti-democratic leaders extends to even countries that are not world powers.

The New York Times (Feb 2, 2018) quoted Trump as saying Egyptian Pres Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is a “fantastic guy”, although El-Sisi got elected by jailing or threatening them with the prosecution, leaving only an obscure ardent supporter of his as an opponent. According to the NYT, “most other Western leaders have been largely silent.”

That same NYT edition showed Trump’s support for another national leader who has destroyed democracy in his country “Cambodia PM Hun Sen, who has ruled the country for 33 years has led a sweeping crackdown on opponents before elections this summer. Trump flashed a big thumbs-up as he posed for a photo with Mr. Hun Sen, who later praised the American president for what he called his lack of interest in human rights.”

Trump’s statements appear to spring from his belief that he shared with Fox News in an Interview when he said, “when it comes to foreign policy, I’m the only one that counts.” That does not sound like a Republican or a Democrat, but someone who thinks of himself as being above the process of reaching government decisions within a democratic republic. Trump’s off-hand comments are a warning sign that professors of government at Harvard University, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, have identified as what happened in Europe and Latin America when their democracies broke down.

They see the clearest warning sign of this downward spiral beginning with the ascent of anti-democratic politicians into mainstream politics. They refer to political scientist Juan J. Linz’s work in identifying the behavior of politicians who pushed Europe’s democracies into collapsing just before WWII, as consisting of three traits: “a failure to reject violence unambiguously, a readiness to curtail rivals’ civil liberties, and the denial of the legitimacy of elected governments.”

Levitsky and Ziblatt concluded that Trump exhibited all three. In his electoral campaign, he encouraged violence among supporters; pledged to prosecute Hillary Clinton and had his rallies chant “lock her up”; and threatened legal action against unfriendly media. What I find most disturbing, is when he questioned the legitimacy of our country’s election results, because he didn’t like them.

On the 2012 presidential election night, Trump tweeted minutes after the polls had closed on the West Coast, “This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!” He did so because he mistakenly assumed that Obama had won the election without the majority popular vote. Ironically, Trump won his presidential election without winning the popular vote, but he made no mention of that fact. Instead, he fabricated an unsubstantiated accusation that there were millions of illegal votes cast for Democratic Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton, something that even Trump’s foremost media ally, Fox Network, has not even attempted to prove. He reverted to this visceral response when the polls indicated that he might lose the 2016 election to Hilary, claiming that it would have been rigged if she had won.

He ran his billion-dollar business as a family operation and continues to have that close-knit family orientation in running the White House. That may be fine for a business or maybe even for the inner workings of an administration’s office staff, but to carry that mentality to how the nation’s government should operate, reveals either ignorance or outright hostility to our basic democratic institutions.

That attitude emerged early in his first term. After the first 100 days in office, he blamed the constitutional checks and balances built into US governance for his legislation stalling. “It’s a very rough system,” he said. “It’s an archaic system … It’s really a bad thing for the country.”
Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny – Twenty Lessons of the Twentieth Century, lists one of the lessons to learn and practice to avoid the collapse of a democratic society is to defend the institutions which keep it alive, like a critical media and an independent judicial system. He concludes that  “Institutions don’t protect themselves. They go down like dominoes unless each is defended from the beginning.” Those who may hold the title of president or control a country called democratic, are in fact tyrants or dictators if they work to undermine and ultimately extinguish those institutions. We should not admire or flatter them.

The Green New Deal Died in Congress – Because the Dems did not have 2 Key Allies

Written by: Nick Licata


 

Without the support of farmers and unions, the GND will remain a list of talking points for politicians. The Democrats made a serious error releasing their 14-page non-binding House Resolution 109 without those groups taking a lead in its rollout.
One of the more comprehensive and balanced reviews of the GND’ broad and worthy goals, is from John de Graaf in his The Promise of the Green New Deal published in the Front Porch Republic ( frontporchrepublic.com/2019/03/the-promise-of-the-green-new-deal/ ). Among the many points, he makes is the critical need to bring aboard farmers, who are one of the Republican Party’s core constituencies.
Like de Graaf, Raj Patel and Jim Goodman in their piece A Green New Deal for Agriculture in the Jacobin Magazine, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/04/green-new-deal-agriculture-farm-workers, see President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal serving as a model of how a coalition including farmers and rural voters is needed to move progressive legislation forward. In particular, it can break the power of the current conservative cultural block that defines the climate debate.
Unions are the other main ally that would be in pushing for the GND since they have the most to gain or lose from government policies impacting their work environment. Union members have been a core Democratic constituency, but one that the Republicans have slowly been siphoning away. Trump’s wins in the industrial states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin reflect that continued encroachment.
These writers are following the first rule of defeating an entrenched opposition, you must crack their forces before attempting a frontal assault. As Raj Patel and Jim Goodman put it, GND advocates must “unpick the alliances that the current bloc works to maintain, to find the fault lines that can pry that bloc apart.” Unfortunately, congressional Democrats failed to follow that rule and it seems that Democratic presidential candidates are doing so as well. Washington State Governor Inslee, running as the climate change presidential candidate, missed an opportunity to reach out to rural voters when he launched his first campaign video and did not have either farmers or labor spokespeople talking about the importance of climate change.

Political allies need to be at the table when designing and announcing new programs or visionary statements. If they are not sitting at the table, they could be tossing tomatoes at these efforts or just remain silent. This was evident from the main organizations representing these two constituents in responding to the launch of the GND; at best it was muted and at times hostile.
Leaders of the American Farm Bureau criticized the proposal as misguided and uninformed when the GND was released and soon afterward, the National Farmers Union, a more liberal group representing large farm organizations, said the Green New Deal did not recognize “the essential contribution of rural America.”

Meanwhile, the conservative-leaning Laborers’ International Union of North America, or LIUNA, denounced the Green New Deal the day it was introduced; there has been only one major union, the large east coast based 32BJ SEIU, that has strongly backed the Green New Deal. Meanwhile, most labor organizations have stayed quiet or been skeptically critical.
Initiating this grand new venture with two key groups sitting by the wayside at best is not a way to build a successful movement for change. What is most discouraging, is that it did not have to be this way. The gap between the perception of GND’s potentially negative impact and the resolution’s wording supporting both farmer and union objectives could have been bridged if these groups had participated in some fashion with writing the resolution.

The GND’s language recognizes the needs of both rural and urban workers and assures them that the transition to a sustainable economy that does not destroy our physical environment has their best interests in mind.

For farmers, it states, that the government will work collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector as much as is technologically feasible, by supporting family farming and investing in sustainable farming and land use practices that increase soil health.

For labor in general, the government would back “create millions of good, high-wage jobs and ensure prosperity and economic security for all people of the United States.” and create “high-quality union jobs that pay prevailing wages, hires local workers, offers training and advancement opportunities, and guarantees wage and benefit parity for workers affected by the transition.” Who could disagree with such lofty goals, unless you don’t support sustainable farming or providing union jobs?

So how could such a positive program be so rejected or ignored? The answer is not so much as to what was in the GND resolution, so much as a lack of strategy in reaching out to a broader slice of the public through enlisting the active involvement of those constituencies who are targeted by the Republicans to oppose it: rural voters and blue-collar workers.

The Congressional Democrats cannot wait for another vote to pass a newer version of the GND. One will not pass with the current makeup of Congress. Any legislative victories will have to come after the elections in 2020 which will determine the future of the Senate and the Presidency. Until then, the Democrats must focus more on organizing public sentiment than even getting green candidates elected because without strong grassroots support for the principles outlined in the GND, those green candidates will not be winning in swing districts and the Republicans will retain control of the Senate.

The way forward is for Congressional Democrats to hold a series of coordinated public forums in each region of the nation to discuss and to even debate GND’s message. Without creating an opportunity for an open discussion in all parts of the nation, rural and urban areas, those critiquing the GND as a fantasy or as irresponsible will continue to make headway.
When the vast majority of Democratic Senators voted Present, with even a few voting No, rather than Yes to the GND resolution, it was clear that they did so because of a fear of voter backlash.

They legitimately accused the Republicans of not holding open committee meetings with experts brought in, but that is an insider’s complaint. The public doesn’t care about such procedures. Farmers and urban workers want to know how their lives are going to be affected.

It is incumbent that Democrats recognize that need, not through just giving speeches or posting position papers on the internet, but through going into communities, along with allies from the farming and labor communities to directly address the concerns of those who voted for Trump out of a fear that their livelihood would be negatively impacted if we did something to improve our environment. Those who believe that climate change is a real threat to the welfare of our nation’s health and economy must present a simple message: we cannot turn back the clock, but we can take charge of our future.

Low-Income Motor Home Park Residents Evicted but keeping together

Written By: Nick Licata


 

A year ago, in March 2018, three young female filmmakers (ages 13 – 15) made a short film to call attention to how their largely Hispanic low-income community in the Firs Motor-Home Park in SeaTac was being threatened with demolition.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Wh8SgblKXM&feature=youtu.be]

The owner planned on building a hotel and apartments on the park and evict the 170-some residents, including 90 children. Most of them attend the Madrona Elementary school across the street, which has over 50% of Latino students, and all who attend are eligible for the low-income 100% free lunch program. It’s a school that will help open the doors for more opportunities to them since it provides a dual language program and assists their children with special needs.

To keep the community together and their children attending this school, State Representative Mia Gregerson and Tenants Union organizers, helped the community raise money from the film and from many other activities to force the owner to either change his plans or provide sufficient funds for the residents to find a new location for the entire community. In particular, they wanted to create a nonprofit or community-ownership model for the park that promotes community control and self-determination while preserving affordable housing for all of SeaTac residents.

After the community concluded an 18-hour negotiating session last week, the Firs Home Owners Association agreed to each of the 42 households in the park receiving $10,000 to help their transition to a new home. They also can remain in the park free of rent for at least a year, while the new development begins to take shape on paper.

While the settlement was the best they could achieve, the community released a statement saying, “It is an injustice that our landlord is allowed to close our park and profit from destroying our homes without giving a fair compensation. The same injustice has befallen countless communities and will happen again to families just like ours.” The number of mobile home communities is being reduced as land values go up and the land that these communities occupy is being developed for greater profits. Motor-home parks Bow Lake (457 spaces) and Angle Lake (64 spaces) currently face that risk.

The Firs HOA says it wishes to keep South King County as a place where low-income families can live with dignity. They state, “We are not asking for charity or for a gift of public funds. Instead, we are working together to create conditions of possibility so that low-income, working, and immigrant families can enjoy the stability and dignity of homeownership.”

Unfortunately, this is not an easy task. Representative Gregerson recognizes that “The policies in government are not set up to help large communities who are identified in the system as being low income or very low income.”  From her own experience, she has found that these communities have different needs from working with older white adults. “They make decisions differently and the amount of “spare” time is different.” Complicating the process is that financial institutions and nonprofits don’t know how to “pre-qualify” people these communities in the traditional way, despite their collective value being worth millions of dollars when pooled together.

Rep. Gregerson perceptively notes that there is an underlying structural condition in our country that has resulted in the scales of justice being distorted by the influence of money as manifested in the growing power of corporations. One of the major principles, but not the only one, governing our democracy is the protection of wealth, i.e. property. But the growth of money’s influence as Rep. Gregerson reasons is why the argument that Corporations are NOT people is a good fight and worth fighting.

There is also a countervailing principle of our democracy is to protect the common welfare of all within our country. It was that principle that was smothered in the treatment of the Firs Motor-Home Park when one person’s financial interests outweighed the living conditions of 42 low-income households. Those involved in the negotiations said that the Firs owners, Mr. Park, rarely showed his face to come to a meeting; he just paid the lawyers’ fees and waited it out. Mr. Park is not a bad person. His relationship with the residents of the park was apparently non-controversial but when he was charged with being insensitive to the loss of their homes, he replied “I feel badly but cannot give charity,” he said in an interview. “I’m a businessman.”

That statement gets to the crux of not only the Firs crises but the crises that affect mobile-home park residents, or tenants in apartment buildings. Neither group owns the land they live on; like so many fallen leaves they are tossed about by the winds of the market place which determines the highest value that land can bring.

The Firs community now plans on using the time and money they received in the settlement to seed a housing project for all of them. But they cannot do it alone. They need public support to find a location and create a residential model, such as a land trust, to keep their community together. For these reasons, they have asked that the $2.5 million allocations in the Housing Trust Fund that had been set aside last year to assist them, be extended for another year; and that it be expanded to allow for the purchase of a new property and the development of affordable housing there.

If you wish to support their effort, please call your state legislators 1-800-562.6000 and the Senate Ways and Means Committee (360) 786-7644. Ask them to re-appropriate the $2.5 million Housing Trust Fund allocation in its proposed Capital Budget for the Firs Mobile Home Park community. That will allow them to rebuild at a new location, which will help address South King County’s vanishing affordable housing.

Capital City & Gentrification by Samuel Stein

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Gentrification is a natural byproduct of capital investments guiding urban development

“Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State” by Samuel Stein (Verso)

Urban planners are either praised or criticized for designing our cities. Planner Samuel Stein’s Capital City – Gentrification and the Real Estate State, falls in the second camp, accusing planners of being unwitting advocates for capitalism. Even though planners see themselves as protectors of the common good, Stein says they hurt most people by “turning everyone’s space into someone’s profit.” 

            According to Stein government planning is tied to private real estate interests; we are at that point in history where the bulk of private capital flows from investing in manufacturing to land. The result is a “Real Estate State” that facilitates this transition, not only in the United States but throughout the world. He documents how real estate now “makes up 60% of the world’s assets, and the vast majority of that wealth – roughly 75 percent – is in housing.”

            This trend did not begin overnight. Surprisingly, he blames President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation establishing the Federal Housing  Administration to standardize, regulate and insure home mortgages. Although it attempted to be progressive, the FHA adopted real estate industry “best practices”  that made segregation and suburbanization the US de facto housing policy; over time he says, “Black, immigrant and racially mixed neighborhoods were shut out of the finance system.” 

            Stein argues that property investments shadowed two Federal programs, redlining and urban renewal. “Municipal investment followed real estate investment” as it went from a secondary source to a primary source of urban capital accumulation. As a result, government encouraged gentrification as much as developers, despite attempts to wring concessions from developers. Programs marketed as neighborhood revitalization often resulted in physical displacement and social disruption of the urban working class. And planners, by not challenging land’s status as a commodity, promote public improvements that only deliver disruptive private investment opportunities.

            Reflecting conservatives’ critiques of government interference in the market economy, Stein relentlessly attacks government incentives to promote affordable housing as ineffective, like offering privately owned public spaces or higher buildings, or requiring a percentage of affordable housing in new developments. However, he identifies the culprit as the capitalist economy, not misguided liberal bureaucrats, because urban planners assume that developers must receive a profit as a necessary element of good planning. Gentrification results as the rental costs for all properties near subsidized private development increases because those lands are more valuable for building higher priced housing units on them. 

            Although he devotes a couple of pages listing studies that argue gentrification results are not bad for poor people nor cause much displacement, Stein does not dispute their findings. Instead, he moves on to mock the “hand-wringing wing” of developers who are in a quandary of how to deal with gentrification and still promote growth. 

            Stein does provide two well researched chapters exemplifying how manufacturing is not the leading force in urban politics and that “In most cities and towns, real estate rules.” A chapter on New York city catalogues its struggle with providing affordable housing and another chapter tells the story of  how urban luxury developer Donald Trump’s presidency  “is a product and embodiment of real estate capital’s global ascendency.”

            The book ends with Stein trying to identify a plan for moving forward. It’s the weakest section of Capital City because his path to the future is vague at best. He admits that among radicals, like himself, there is little agreement “about the precise nature of a “good city”. Although the radical planers have a strong sense of what is wrong today, he sees no “silver bullet” programs for unmaking the real estate state.

            His most articulated proposals for describing “what we are fighting for” 

are extensions of programs already in existence, such as incentivizing additional housing in wealthy white neighborhoods rather than poorer working-class neighborhoods inhabited by minority groups or expanding rent control to cover more housing or creating more community land trusts. He recommends overcoming major opposition to them by organizing a political movement to “fight for an anti-capitalist city.”  This is hardly a deliverable strategy for change in the short run. 

            Capital City ultimately becomes an academic exercise providing useful information on how gentrification begins and is sustained but fails to go beyond a call to arms for using that information strategically. 

Mississippians are Organizing to Get Government Accountability

Written By: Nick Licata

Not all deep red southern states are alike.

    Virginia over the past several years has become more purple while Mississippi has remained deep red. Democrats won more legislative and congressional seats in Virginia. As I pointed out in my last piece, that trend was kicked off by a successful constitutional based lawsuit against the racially based gerrymandering that the Virginia legislature had created. Court cases are one of the three primary tools available to make government’s more accountable.
Unlike Virginia, there is no court ruling pending nor cases filed challenging Mississippi’s gerrymandered state or federal district boundaries. A seasoned research and legal staff are required to file effective lawsuits against a state legislature’s gerrymandering. In Virginia’s case the fair redistricting advocacy groupThe Princeton Gerrymandering Project provided relevant data analysis, which specializes election and political law, and Kevin Hamilton, a litigator from the law firm Perkins Coie, brought the case representing the interests of African-American voters.
They are not involved with Mississippi’s situation. And the other the most likely institution in Mississippi to have available legal staff would be the ACLU. However, Mississippi’s ACLU has focused on directly stopping excessive force abuses against the black community; they filed a federal class-action lawsuit against county deputies who used unconstitutional tactics to target black people. As a result, the courts are not currently looking at any cases that would overturn Mississippi’s racially biased gerrymandered districts.
Mississippi allows citizen-initiated constitutional amendments, but none is currently being planned around redistricting or expanding voter access. Past progressive initiative efforts have failed at the polls. In 2001, a vote to change the state flag by eliminating the Confederate emblem was rejected by nearly two-thirds of voters. Reflecting that same conservative culture, another amendment in 2011 requiring a strict Voter ID law passed. However, that year an amendment supporting an extreme anti-abortion failed. And although the last citizen-initiated promoting greater government accountability, in this case by increasing funding for public education, failed in 2015, it almost passed.
A recent survey indicates that these last two election results reflect a growing dissatisfaction by Mississippi’s citizens with their state legislature’s extreme conservative policies. In January of this year, a survey conducted by the Institute for Civic and Professional Engagement at Millsaps College and Chism Strategies found that the disapproval rating for the Mississippi Legislature’s work was nearly twice as high as its approval rating (46% to 24%). The public’s attitude appears to be swinging toward a rejection of a rigid ideology, as U.S. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, who ran as a strong Trump supporter against the moderate Democrat Mike Espy, had a 50% disapproval rate of her work in the Senate but only 38% in support of it.
That survey also showed strong support for funding public services that the Republican-controlled state legislature has opposed. It reported that “A majority of Mississippi voters (65%) say that funding for the state’s public schools is too low, cutting across lines of party, race, gender, educational attainment, and age. Likewise, over 75% support providing for a 3% pay raise for Mississippi public school teachers.”
Brad Chism, the president of Chism Strategies released a statement saying, “This information is not filtered through special interests—it comes straight from a representative sample of voters across the state.” Unlike a number of other surveys that appear to have a particular political bent, this survey’s results, analysis, and crosstabs were publicly released.
The road to achieving greater government accountability now is dependent upon electing officials who recognize the need for better public services. Still, just presenting good candidates is not enough. This past November Mississippi saw two strong and articulate democratic candidates running for the U.S. Senate defeated.
Democratic U.S. Senate Candidate Mike Espy came within 8 points of beating Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith for an open seat, which was the closest U.S. Senate election in Mississippi in the last 30 years. Espy ran as a moderate and Hyde-Smith as a strong Trump supporter. Meanwhile, the Democratic leader in Mississippi’s statehouse, David Baria, lost to the incumbent Republican Sen. Roger Wicker by 20 points.
Baria’s race is typical of how well Democrats do against Republicans in Mississippi, which has been described by analysists as one of the least elastic states in the country, largely because of its demographics. Although at 37%, Mississippi has the highest percentage of black residents of any state and 75% are Democrats or lean that way, the white voters are almost as strongly Republican at 65%, but they make up 61% of the population, leaving relatively few swing voters.
Overall Mississippi is mostly Christian, largely rural and is among the least-educated states. President Trump does well with voters who fall into these categories, but he only got 1% higher of the white voter turn out than McCann did in 2016. Meanwhile, Obama got a 10% greater black turnout than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. So, Espy, a black liberal candidate, turned out more of the Democratic base and didn’t generate any measurable increase in conservative white voters. If a Democrat can keep his or her base while also appealing to independents and those that lean Republican, that person could win.
Baria, who is white, supporting gun control and reproductive rights, was more progressive than Espy. Baria’s Republican opponent Wicker was slightly more moderate than Espy’s opponent Hyde-Smith. The total turnout of Baria’s race was 17% lower than Espy’s, with Baria receiving 66,000 fewer votes than Espy. Nevertheless, Espy’s vote tally was short by that number of votes to win his election. The results would indicate that a moderate Democrat could come closer to beating a Trump Republican by appealing to more cross over voters, but that candidate still needs to get out more voters who support progressive positions if they expect to win. It is a delicate and difficult balance to achieve.
Democratic Rep. Jay Hughes, running for lieutenant governor, is walking that tight-rope. He announced his campaign as a “people-powered, grassroots campaign about inclusion, not exclusion.” His opponent is Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, who enjoys a net approval rating of +30%, attracting both Democrats and black voters. His current popularity is higher than any other candidate running for one of Mississippi’s 7 executive offices. Hughes needs to hold onto his base and still attract Hosemann’s support. Hughes has done so by attracting many conservative white working-class families from smaller towns and rural areas as he emphasizes the need for funding for better education and roads, that surveys reveal voters want better funded.
The problem that Hughes faces, and one that other Democrats in Mississippi and other deeply red states confront, is how to keep the support of progressives who could sit out a race if a candidate does not support a woman’s right to have an abortion for instance. As a current state legislator, Hughes recently voted for an anti-abortion measure similar to the one that was defeated at the polls. He understandably explained his vote as one that was necessary to retain his seat and make him a competitive candidate for lieutenant governor, but it could also result in a lower turnout from his voter base.
Another strong democratic candidate, Jennifer Riley-Collins, is running for the vacant Attorney General position. As a retired decorated army colonel with 20 years of military service and an active in the religious community, she can also attract traditional republican leaning voters. However, she is the current Executive Director of Mississippi’s ACLU and has represented it in opposing state laws that violated an individual’s civil rights. As Attorney General, she would now have to defend those laws. She says that if elected she is committed to “represent the legal interest of the State of Mississippi.” And she strongly states, “My commitment to serve and protect all Mississippians fully qualifies me for the position.”  She has several popular Republican opponents and any of them are expected to outspend her in the general election.
The best chance that the Democrats have for capturing a state-wide office is with the current Attorney General Jim Hood, who is running for the vacant Governor’s seat. He has been the only statewide elected Democrat in Mississippi for some time. Like, Rep. Jay Hughes, he has support among white working-class families, particularly from rural areas, which is critical since Mississippi’s only urban center is the Greater Jackson area, and has a population of less than 600,000 in a state with a total population just shy of 3 million.
Hood’s opponent is Republican Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, who has big financial backers but polls only 47 percent with those leaning Republican while Hood scores an approval of 46 percent, and with independent voters Hood leads Reeves by 13 points. But like all of the other Democrat candidates, campaigning on some liberal social policies are constrained by the need to retain the support of those culturally conservative families.
Even with viable democratic candidates, the road to victory depends on getting out more voters and providing them good information on the issues. Espy’s campaign did that according to Beth Orlansky, the Advocacy Director for the Mississippi Center for Justice, saying “There was a groundswell of excitement to get registered and vote, Espy’s campaign energized people that hadn’t voted before. There still is an appetite for change.”
Mississippi Votes has a proven track record of turning out new voters, Izzy Bronstein, the Grassroots Organizer for Common Cause, said: “Mississippi Votes is one great organization getting out new voters.” Arekia Bennett, the Executive Director of Mississippi Votes, explains their strategy for particularly reaching young new voters: “Mississippi Votes is Millennial led and youth-centered — in an effort to stay true to that founding principle, we have campus ambassadors on 9 of the 17 colleges and universities throughout the state of Mississippi. It is our goal, by August, to have that same youth civic engagement programming in 5 high schools across the state.” Focusing on youth makes sense given the economic difficulty they are having. A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found Millennials born in the ’80s have a net worth 34% below what was expected.
But just getting them to vote would not be enough. Bennett explains that “Mississippi Votes does political education, voter registration, and conducts research that informs our organizing strategies in and with communities that have historically been disenfranchised and/or have a below average voter turnout rate during non-presidential elections.”
While Mississippi Votes has supported online voter registration, which appeals to youth, Mississippi still does not have Election Day registration, automatic voter registration, mail ballot delivery or campus vote centers. Adopting any of these measures would greatly contribute to increasing voter turnout for all residents. Mississippi residents are strongly behind making voting easier for them. The January Millsaps / Chism survey found 71% of Mississippians favored allowing for early voting in their Circuit Clerk’s offices 14 days before an election, something that is allowed in 38 other states. However, these measures will only be adopted when the Republican supermajority in each chamber can be reduced to at least a simple majority and the Governor is a Democrat so that a Democratic Governor’s veto of restrictive voting measures could not be overridden.
It will be a challenge to reduce the number of Republicans to the level that drops their seats below 60% in either chamber. The Democrats would have to win either 10 seats in the House or 5 seats in the Senate for that to happen. Without redistricting, the current gerrymandered state districts will be used, but that does not eliminate the possibility of flipping the necessary number of seats to deny the Republicans a supermajority in either chamber. It was done in Virginia under the same conditions, it can happen in Mississippi.

Electoral wins take grassroots organizing and good candidates. If Mississippi Votes can turn out the youth voters and others who have not registered to vote but want more government accountability, those wins are very possible. As the Millsaps / Chism state-wide survey showed, the populace wants to change. They need to believe that there is a chance for that happening. Local organizations like Mississippi Votes, One Voice, People’s Advocacy Institute and Fair Vote, need assistance from national groups like the NAACP, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC) and Common Cause. These groups must provide assistance if Mississippi’s state government is to have a bi-partisan distribution of power and finally provide greater accountability to its residents.
John Chappell, a young student volunteer in Mississippi Votes, bluntly summarized Mississippi’s challenge, “Our institutions aren’t going to save themselves. We need to deliberately push for more inclusive, more democratic governance. Our institutions rely on citizen participation, which means that everyone has to do their part.”

Virginia’s Approach to Government Accountability

Part II of Identifying a Winnable Southern State Strategy

Written by: Nick Licata


 

Despite the top three elected Virginia State Democrats generating national headlines for being accused of past racist or even criminal behavior, a movement to reform their democratic process continues to grow. These efforts can use three tools for making structural changes in government: the initiative process, court rulings and electing new public officials.

Virginia does not have the first option. Citizens can only vote on a specific institutional change when their General Assembly (their Senate and House chambers) brings a state constitutional amendment to a vote of the people. Virginia, like a number of other states, has a constitution that is very prescriptive. Consequently, what may be handled as a legislative solution becomes a constitutional amendment, which is a three-step process: it must be passed by two sessions of the General Assembly, followed by a vote of the populace. Despite an arduous journey, constitutional amendments are voted on regularly, most of which are non-controversial.

Their General Assembly completed its annual session in February. On the last day, they overwhelmingly approved a ground-breaking amendment to establish a bi-partisan Redistricting Commission to draw legislative and congressional maps. Next year’s General Assembly must vote on it again before it is placed on the ballot as a referendum during the November 2020 election.

The proposed commission will have 16-members, eight legislators (four Senators and four Delegates, with equal representation between the parties in each chamber) and eight citizen members (selected by a committee of retired circuit court judges from lists submitted by majority and minority party leadership in each chamber).  The Commission’s redistricting plan must then be approved, without any amendment, by a majority vote of their General Assembly’s two chambers and if passed cannot be vetoed by the Governor. The new boundaries would be in place for the 2021 state district and congressional races, which could shift the control of either chamber or both from the Republicans to the Democrats.

Brian Cannon, Executive Director of OneVirginia2021, was very enthusiastic about the proposed amendment, saying that “This is the most comprehensive reform ever passed through a state legislature.” OneVirginia2021 believed that powerful computerized mapping tools and detailed demographic data in the past had turned district boundary mapmaking into a weapon to keep the party in power from being elected out, as well as giving incumbents the advantage over outside challengers.

Although OneVirginia2021 has a budget under a half-million, with donations averaging $100, they have created 10 regional chapters and garnered over 1,000 core volunteers to collect 100,000 petition signers to support an independent redistricting commission, which would use a transparent process and clear rules that protect communities. They then laid out, in Brian’s words, “a close-to-perfect kind of plan that we thought they (the General Assembly) could use. It served as a marker, though we are far from perfect in what we got.”

Another grassroots organization, the New Virginia Majority, has also played an instrumental role in pushing for redistricting reforms. Jamaa Bickley King, the board chair of NVM has been quoted as saying “While various plans have been put forward, we at New Virginia Majority believe that the only way to remedy the blatant racial discrimination that took place is to ensure a new map maximizes the voting power of minority communities.” NVM hired a national data firm, TargetSmart, to construct a map that respected communities of color and communities of interest and introduced it to the General Assembly as an alternative redistricting map.

Although appreciative of what the General Assembly proposed, Tram Nguyen, Co-Executive Director of NVM, still has concerns, which she believes should be addressed in next year’s legislature’s session. They have introduced redistricting criteria legislation to provide clearer district guidelines and make-up of the commission. Nguyen says, “We must make sure the voices of racial and language minority populations are not ignored in this process.” These clarifications of the proposal would be administrative guidelines, and hence could be passed by the General Assembly without violating the rule denying any amendments being made to what was passed this year.

While both NVM and OneVirginia2021 pushed for an independent commission to draw the districts instead of legislators, they didn’t get that since legislators compose half of the commission membership. However, they strongly approved of commission’s transparency provisions. Those elements consist of requiring the commission to have open public meetings and to hold at least three public hearings in different parts of the Commonwealth and to have all records and documents associated with the Commission’s work be available to the public. These measures provide community organizations to mobilize residents to express their support or displeasure on the administrative rules that will guide the commission’s operations.

The Republican-controlled legislature was motivated to create the commission after they lost 15 house seats in the 2017 elections when they had said they expected to lose no more than five. They were facing a real possibility and still do, that the Democrats could control the General Assembly and use gerrymandering to their own advantage just as the Republicans had been doing.

Those electoral victories were due in large part to the efforts of the New Virginia Majority registering 140,000 new voters the prior year. By targeting low voter turnout communities, like people of color and young people, and lower income folks of all color, they helped overwhelming defeat the Republican-backed “Right-to-Work” constitutional amendment at the polls in 2016, winning the vote in every county. NVM continues to register voters and is expecting that their “get out the vote” effort will result in several hundred thousand new voters in 2020 when the constitutional amendment creating the redistricting commission comes on the ballot.

Winning elections is more than just increasing the number of voters, it’s about reflecting the public’s wishes. The desire for more accountability is a non-partisan issue. The Brennan Center for Justice reported that a poll taken last December by Virginia’s Wason Center for Public Policy found that 78% of Virginia voters support a constitutional amendment to create a non-partisan redistricting commission. But the message must be delivered with bipartisan support because past polling has shown that the public is suspicious of political parties using democratic “reforms” to promote their own advantage. Although an all citizen independent redistricting commission would probably receive the most public support, this one’s bi-partisan structure will likely be seen by voters as moving in the right direction, particularly if there are good administrative guidelines.

It is also critical that the public’s wishes be informed of their constitutional rights, which ultimately are determined by the courts. It’s about safeguarding our liberty. The initial force that made Virginia’s elections more accountable to all citizens resulted from a Federal Court ruling in 2016, which found that their Congressional boundaries were discriminatory against black communities. New boundaries used in the 2018 election resulted in 3 of the 11 seats in Congress flipping from Republican to Democrat. A separate court decision in 2017, came to that same conclusion for state house seats and over 20 house district boundaries were redrawn.

Democracies do not sleep. They are dynamic organizations, pushed by technical innovations, demographic fluctuation, and economic cycles. These all contribute to improving or hindering citizens access to the polls. For that reason, it is necessary to continually evaluate if voter access is being maximized. After redistricting, it is the next challenge that state governments must move onto. In Virginia’s last General Assembly session four automatic voter registration bills failed in committee, as did six no-excuse absentee voting – early voting bills and seven vote-by-mail ones. If the Democrats have a majority in either chamber, it will be incumbent upon them to take up and pass these measures where they can.

There is no final victory in keeping our democracy alive, there is only constant diligence to care for it, or else it will slip away.

Identifying a Winnable Southern State Strategy in 2019

Written By: Nick Licata

What does a win look like?

Seeing a win depends on who’s looking at it. I take the viewpoint of a Pragmatic Progressive. I define a pragmatist as someone who sees that a path forward consists of one step at a time, and that small steps are meaningless compromises if they are not followed up with another step, which goes forward with the same principles.

And what about being a Progressive? Historically the progressive movement grew out of the urban areas in the early 1900s. It pursued reforming government so that it would be more accountable for providing better environmental, social and economic conditions. Its message is the same today, although I would add safeguarding liberty. Promoting these objectives will attract people from across the political spectrum and improve everyone’s quality of life. That movement is afoot today in Virginia, Mississippi, and Louisiana in trying to achieve more accountable and representative state governments.

Why are 3 Southern States in Play this Year?

I found examples of progressive successes in these three states; the only state’s holding elections in 2019 for their state legislators. All of their state senators are up four-year terms, as are the representatives in Louisiana and Mississippi, while Virginia’s representatives will serve two-year terms. Mississippi and Louisiana’s Governors and all of their state-wide executive positions will also be voted on. The total of their legislators is only a fraction of the 5,000 state legislators who will be elected in the 2020 elections, nevertheless, they could shape the national 2020 elections by providing a winning strategy for promoting fair redistricting and greater voter access.

Many residents in these three states have limited access to the ballot box and live in gerrymandered voting districts that favor Republicans winning. Since they controlled the state governments, they were able to draw the state legislative boundaries to their advantage. If voter participation can be expanded in some of the most voting-restricted states in our nation, the path toward electoral wins in 2020 for more representative, responsive state governments will have begun.

At first glance, the political terrain of Virginia, Mississippi and Louisiana

is similar. In each, the Republicans control both legislative chambers, albeit they have only a one or two seat majority in Virginia’s legislatures, while in Louisiana and Mississippi they have supermajorities in both chambers. All had been required to receive advance federal approval to change their election laws under the Voting Rights Act because their racial minorities faced barriers to votingThat obligation in the Act was nullified when the Supreme Court ‘s five conservative justices ruled that racial discrimination was no longer a problem.

Limited Voter Access

None of these three states have any of the following practices that encourage voter participation: Election Day registration, automatic voter registration, mail ballot delivery or campus vote centers. Legislation to enact them has been consistently blocked by the Republicans.

In this year’s Mississippi House of Representatives four different bills, introduced by four different representatives, promoting automatic voter registration failed to even be considered in committee. In Virginia the response was the same, four automatic voter registration bills failed in committee, as did six no-excuse absentee voting — early voting bills and seven vote-by-mail ones. The same experience is expected in the Louisiana Legislature once it convenes in April.

One critical change that would increase voter turnout, particularly among youth, is to adopt automatic voter registration (AVR) when applying for a driver’s license for example. The nonprofit Center for American Progress released a study finding that the percentage of young voters dramatically increased in Oregon and California after they adopted AVR. As of the beginning of 2019, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, only seven states have AVR, none in the south. With a citizen’s grassroots movement, Virginia, Mississippi or Louisiana could join that list.

Gerrymandered Districts Have Led to One Party Rule

Achieving fair state and congressional district boundaries is the basis for having citizens being fairly represented in their state legislatures and Congress. That will likely not be achieved in Mississippi and Louisiana until the Democrats control at least one of their chambers. Republicans have controlled the state governments in all three states since 2010. As a result, they gerrymandered districts to their benefit, effectively barring Democratic and black community voters from being fairly represented in state government and Congress.

Before the Republican landslide that swept across the nation, halfway through President Obama’s first term, Democrats controlled both chambers from 1992 to 2009 in Louisiana and Mississippi. Since then Republicans have dominated both chambers. Party control over Virginia’s chambers has been more divided with the Democrats controlling both chambers only from 1992 to 1997, with the Republicans more often controlling one of the chambers and the governorship than the Democrats.

Although Virginia was considered one of the most gerrymandered states, thanks to citizen organizations, like OneVirginia2021 and New Virginia Majority, their state legislature passed a proposed constitutional amendment to create a bipartisan redistricting commission. More information on how that victory was accomplished is covered in my next piece in this series on Identifying a Winnable Southern State Strategy.

Three Paths to Stopping Gerrymandering

The Brennan Center for Justice, after interviewing a diverse group of more than 100 stakeholders using commissions for redistricting maps, concluded that commissions could significantly improve satisfaction across the stakeholder spectrum in achieving better representation than what is provided through legislatures gerrymandering districts. They did caution that commissions had to be structured to promote independence and incentivize discussion and compromise.

There are only 3 political paths that can lead to creating such commissions: by a direct vote of the populace, by order of the courts, or by electing representatives and a governor who agree to establish one. In most states, the governor can veto a legislature’s proposed redistricting plan. In Louisiana and Virginia, a governor’s veto applies to both state and congressional districts, while in Mississippi the governor can only veto plans for drawing congressional districts.

This introductory piece is followed by three more pieces describing how citizens are applying these strategies in Virginia, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Their efforts are not grabbing the national headlines since they are overshadowed by Congress’s battle with the President. However, they are laying the groundwork for a systematic alteration in each state’s democratic process so that more citizens have a hand in determining a better future for their families. And by example, they point the way for citizen groups in other states on how they could pursue these changes.

The Wall, The Democrats and The Art of Negotiating

Originally Published Jan. 9 on Medium by Nick Licata

Official White House photo

The first rule of successful negotiating is to do so from a position of strength. If you are not in that position, still declare that you are. If you are negotiating in the public arena, the general audience will not really know which side is stronger, if both are claiming to be such. And if the consequences of just the negotiations negatively impact the public’s welfare, it doesn’t take much brainpower to realize that the public just wants it to end. Who wins is not their major concern. A rising chorus of “please compromise” usually is the refrain to let them get back to leading normal lives. The details of that compromise are secondary to this primary concern.

This is the framework within which President Donald Trump and the Congressional Democratic leaders Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer find themselves in.

The second rule of successful negotiating is to not overplay your hand by assuming that your side has more “facts” than the other side has in proposing the right solution to the problem before them. This is a bigger danger for the side that actually does have more and better facts. That may sound counter-intuitive. If they have a better set of facts and they share them with the public, shouldn’t their side be able to sway public opinion to support their side of the negotiations?

That only holds true if both sides have the same size megaphone. If the side with the weaker facts can reach more people, they can blunt and most certainly muddy the factual basis of who is correct. And once they do that, the role of “facts” diminishes. This has been Trump’s consistent “modus operandi.”

And, it is the conundrum that the Congressional Democratic leadership find themselves wrapped in. The President has a bigger megaphone. House Speaker Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Schumer, retort to Trump’s televised address, was rational but also defensive. Worse they didn’t say the magic words “let’s compromise”, which Trump did. Even though the facts show that the Democrats already did when they voted at the end of last year to pass legislation, with both majority Republican and Democrat support, for funding a portion of the wall. Trump originally indicated he would be fine with the legislation. And then he rejected it.

What drives the Democrats, and even a trickle of Republicans, crazy is that Trump sends mixed messages and changes his mind in mid-course. Worse yet, he makes sweeping statements, that while they almost always contain a thread of truth, they present a blatantly false tapestry of reality. His national address justifying the wall was a classic example. He has said we are in an emergency situation, however, the number of people crossing into the US from Mexico is down 90% from 2000. How do you have an emergency when the apparent threat to our security has been shrinking not expanding?

Trump also claimed that “Every week, 300 of our citizens are killed by heroin alone, 90 percent of which floods across from our southern border.” The Drug Enforcement Administration says “only a small percentage” of heroin seized by the U.S. comes across on territory between ports of entry. They concluded that a border wall would NOT choke off most smuggling methods.

By repeating exaggerations and then abandoning them when challenged, Trump has been able to keep his opposition, and his allies, off balance. The result is that the political power to make final national decisions has devolved into his hands alone. Even his cabinet members have been corralled to stay within the boundaries of his ever-shifting fencing.

The Democrats have seized on Trump’s inconsistencies, thinking that they have struck a vein of unlimited gold nuggets. While exposing these mistakes, exaggerations or lies, every day of the week, the net effect has not been so dramatic. Trump’s national approval ratings hover around 40% with his Republican base seemingly stuck at over 75%. And he is counting on that trend continuing no matter how long the government is shut down. The Democrats are certain that while Trump has a hard core of supporters who may never abandon him, the Republican Congressional Members are more exposed, particularly in states and districts with more ethnically diverse and educated voters. And they are beginning to waver.

Now is the time for the Democrats to shape a message of “compromise” but without abandoning social justice principles. Right now they are in a stronger position than Trump or the Republicans. But if the shut down continues, political anger will rise and neither party will be spared. The path forward becomes uncertain, that is why timing is important.

What does a compromise look like? It must acknowledge that security is important. That is Trump’s go to message. Democrats need to grab it from him. But rather than approaching it as a more pro-wall or more anti-immigrant policy, which some Democrats fear a compromise might entail, the better approach is to attack the concept of Trump’s Wall as ineffective and wasteful government spending. This is an issue that cuts into the heart of the middle-class voters who are sympathetic to immigrants but are still fearful for their own families’ safety.

The Democratic leaders have often said they support greater border security, so that ground has already been paved. The Democrats just need to drive on it, right up to the middle of the debate. They need to champion security for everyone, including immigrants, who are often the victims from criminal elements in their own community, which plays off of Trump’s own statements of how immigrants are victims of crime.

The second prong of the Democrats response must be to call out the concrete or steel wall as a bumper sticker slogan, not a real solution that offers security. We need wise leaders who will not drain our tax dollars away from real and effective strategies. And there may indeed need to be funds available, as was agreed to in the past by the Democrats, to maintain certain physical barriers along the border. But that should only be done in conjunction with other more sophisticated security measures and with a better administrative system for handling the flow of immigrants wanting to enter our country.

This approach will attract the support of Congressional Republicans who are being beaten up by their own constituents wanting an end to the government shutdown. They will support something that works as a solution to addressing the border security issue and ends the shutdown.

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), a leading House tea party conservative has said in describing his party’s determination, “I think you can’t cave. That’s what the Democrats don’t understand — it’s all or nothing.” That is exactly what enrages the public because it’s just about who wins a bare-knuckle fight.

Now is the time for the Democrats to drive home a counter message by proposing a workable, cost-effective and humane solution. And it will be a win for everyone, not just one side.

Book Review of Generation Priced Out

0

Posted 12/5/2018

Book Review by Nick Licata


 

Cities with significant economic growth are seeing an increase in homelessness and working families pushed out of town. Seattle and San Francisco are primary examples, each with growing populations, jobs, and poverty. They also have progressive political cultures that have churned out innovative programs providing more affordable housing. But while progressive activists urge developers to build affordable housing, some see the need to incentivize housing development through zoning deregulation.

In his new book “Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America,” Randy Shaw strongly champions this approach. Shaw’s simply pushing for fewer restraints on the marketplace — as a longtime advocate for renters in San Francisco, he’s successfully lobbied for rent control. Despite operating the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, one of the nation’s most successful housing providers for very low-income people, he sees younger generations in search of affordable housing pushed out of the city.

Shaw argues that the causes of these ills are city zoning laws that bar multifamily projects from many neighborhoods and neighborhood activism, which he calls the “long-overlooked villain in cities pricing out the non-affluent.” Baby boomers, he argues, “have enjoyed soaring home values by preventing the construction of new housing in their communities.”

That’s a long way from a time when neighborhood activists saw themselves as being akin to author Jane Jacobs as they fought community-weakening real-estate-speculator developments. But Shaw notes that over time, single-family communities’ opposition to higher residential density — in the form of policies like restrictive height and density limits — has promoted inequality by keeping people of color and lower- and even middle-income families out of their neighborhood.

Shaw also details the ways various blue cities are approaching the challenge of providing more affordable housing; Seattle and Denver receive favorable recognition for building new housing. While the author concedes that housing costs in both cities have risen sharply in the past decade, he claims that the increase would have been even greater without an increased supply in housing.

But that’s difficult to measure.

In Seattle’s case, housing costs increased over the last three years at a higher rate than in other cities of comparable size. But while the cost of single-family homes over the summer fell faster in Seattle than anywhere else, the city’s housing costs remain some of the highest in the nation.

In other cities, like Austin, Texas; Boulder, Colorado; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Portland; and San Diego, Shaw identifies how urban politics are shifting to promote rather than oppose new housing. Millennials, in particular, are a new political force opposing the entitled boomers who have benefited from the neighborhood-preservation movement. Shaw sees “many boomers [blaming] young workers, particularly those in tech, for causing the housing crisis.”

In this generational struggle, boomers may mock millennials for squandering their money, but “their real goal is to derail a rising political movement that supports building urban housing for all income levels.”

Shaw wraps up his analysis by proposing 10 steps that cities should adapt to produce more affordable housing. Most are practical and noncontroversial: “Enable nonprofits to purchase small sites” and “Seek local and state funding for affordable housing.”

But the springboard for executing these strategies is to mobilize a new political force, led by an alignment of green groups and developers, to eliminate zoning practices that hinder greater residential density.

“Generation Priced Out” boldly challenges the progressive community to rethink how to achieve greater economic and racial diversity by providing more affordable housing. But there is still more data needed to substantiate the assumption that rezoning can do this. It may be too soon to crunch the numbers to determine what happens after upzoning low-density neighborhoods. Will the incentive to build more affordable housing cease when the demand for housing inevitably tapers off? Shaw’s book adds a thoughtful voice to the national discussion in addressing such questions.

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Keynote Address to the Seattle Real Change Newspaper

Originally Published September 24, 2018

Urban Politics – USA

By Nick Licata

Below is my keynote address to the Seattle Real Change newspaper, published by those who are either homeless or had been. Real Change is thought by many to be the most successful weekly newspaper published by the homeless in the country.

My talk ties the cause of homelessness to our current dominant national political philosophy that considers the freedom to accumulate wealth to be more legitimate than the freedom from want.

A video of my talk, taken by Mind Over Matters producer Mike McCormick can be seen here.

The news program Mind Over Matters has been on the non-profit radio station KEXP giving a forum to those not normally heard in corporate media. The station is cancelling MOM at the end of this year, 2018. For further information go to their MOM’s Facebook page.


Nick's Keynote

Nick Licata’s Keynote at the Real Change 24th Annual Breakfast

Sept 18, 2018, Seattle WA

 I wrote Becoming a Citizen Activist because I believe activism begins by noticing things which we had ignored or accepted as a given, that at some point just don’t seem right.

It’s asking ourselves, as Rosa Parks did, why am I sitting in the back of the bus, instead of the front?  Thoughts like those spark movements for change.

So, how do we spark that inquisitive mind? And then take the next step; by helping others also see it differently? In order, to make a better world.

I think it begins by questioning the status quo. Is it serving our needs, those of our neighbors or fellow citizens?

Let me define “citizen” at this point: It is anyone. Living here. And, contributing to our democratic society. It is not just a piece of paper.  Or, running through a gauntlet of bureaucratic red tape. And, having a big bank account, should not allow someone to cut into the front of the line for becoming Citizen. And certainly, it is not based on the color of one’s skin, or the religion they practice or not having a religion at all.

A quote, from of all people, the conservative Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, summed up what being an American is all about.

After President Trump, had finished railing, in the Oval Office, to a group of Republican leaders, sharing, what some seemed to be white nationalist thoughts, – who would have thought? Sen. Graham spoke up. He looked directly at President Trump told him bluntly, “America is an idea, not a race.”

And what is that idea? President Franklin D. Roosevelt, put it in real terms, in his 1941 State of Union address. He said, “The Republic grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights – among them the right of free speech, free press, and free worship.”

Then, he went on to say,  “As our nation has grown, as our economy has expanded, these political rights have proved inadequate to assure us equality. We have come to a clear realization, of the fact, that true individual freedom, cannot exist, without economic security and independence.”

He was adding a 4th freedom, “the freedom from want.” That speech became known as the 4 Freedoms Speech. Recognizing that last freedom is at the heart of our nation’s current political struggles.

It goes beyond debating how many beds we can afford to provide for homeless people. It goes beyond expressing sympathy for the most vulnerable among us. It comes down to Americans having to decide what kinds of freedoms are most important.

Is it the “freedom from want” OR the “freedom to accumulate wealth” – without restraint. Since 1977 we have seen 12% of the Nation’s Wealth, as measured by the GDP, transferred from middle class working families to the top 1% of our population. That trend cannot sustain a functioning, responsive democracy.

This is not a new debate in our country’s history, but it is now reaching a crescendo. And we see it playing out in our Supreme Court decisions. Unfortunately, we are relying on our court system, because the other 2 branches of government, under both parties, have already allowed for the highest concentration of wealth this nation has ever seen

In seeking a path forward, I’m not talking about socialism, I’m not talking about capitalism, and I’m not talking about class warfare.

I’m talking about, what a democratic society needs so that people do not give up hope in our system of government so that our citizens do not seek solace in cynicism or embrace the false security of believing in demagogues’ accusations on who is responsible for our problems.

Unfortunately we can see that happening, the first with the decline of voter turn out, from those who have the most to lose from an unrepresentative government and the second with the explosion of conspiracy theories, that blame the weak or those that have the least political power, and unfortunately they are too often echoed by the White House.

The effects of a shrinking middle class on the national stage are now well documented; to get by, people are working longer hours or multiple jobs, having poorer health and then when they are too old to find work, they are left with miniscule savings set-aside for retirement. For instance, the median savings for all U.S. families is just $5,000. And, according to a 2016 survey, 35 percent of all adults have only several hundred dollars in their savings accounts and they are still better off than 34 percent have zero savings.

Closer to home, here in Seattle, we are witnessing the decline of the middle class and the growth of the poverty class. It can happen to anyone who is barely able to pay for his or her basic necessities. According to the King County “All Home” website, the leading cause of someone becoming homeless is their loss of a job.

I consider the grand myth of homelessness to be the belief that it’s someone else’s problem. For too many people it only becomes their problem, when they find tent cities and campsites, sprouting up in neighborhoods that never saw before.

I travel around, visiting other cities, and let me tell you, Seattle is not alone in witnessing these hardships. We see poverty expanding because the dominant national political philosophy that says the freedom to protect marketplace investments is more legitimate than protecting the economic welfare of our citizens.

The response to this mindset is not simply spending more money to provide social services or even more affordable housing. Those are good things and they are needed.

But if you just go down that path, of only providing services and not altering our laws, you will end up arguing about the burden of taxes and the management of government. Which were raised as objections to pass a head tax on the largest Seattle businesses, in order to provide more affordable housing? Even though, less than 2% of Seattle Businesses would have paid any of it.

That is why we must go beyond just treating the damaging effects of that dominant philosophy. We must change the expectations that our fellow citizens have for our nation so that it is a society we want to live in. A society that provides the economic security that FDR referred to.  And the people in this room and thousands of others, beyond this hall, have shown that we can change our laws to create, not a perfect society, but one that is certainly a more just and an equitable one.

Seattle’s victories have been adopted by other cities, in both red and blue states. They have taken root because citizens realize that they have more in common in protecting public welfare than protecting the power and wealth of the few.

Seattle has begun that effort by adjusting the structure of our economy so that people will gain some stability in their lives so that they have an opportunity to reach the American dream of economic independence and not be dependent on government.

Let’s identify a few significant steps that Seattle has taken toward that goal  – in just 2 areas: improving working conditions and increasing rental security. Both have made Seattle more affordable to those who are in the middle to bottom half of the family incomes.

They are not final solutions, but they are real and long-lasting changes.

With regards to working conditions:

We set a national standard by gradually moving to a $15 minimum wage for all employees in Seattle. We listened to all sides, but we did not retreat from this objective. It did not happen overnight, but it was achieved. And as a result, thousands of lower paid; part-time workers can now better manage their financial burdens.

We also adopted one of the most progressive Paid Sick Leave ordinances in the nation, which allows sick employees to stay home or stay home to take care of their sick children, and still receive pay. Before this law was passed nearly 40% of the private-sector workforce, who are among the least economically secure, did not have this benefit. Illness forced them to take time away from work without pay and put them at the risk of losing their job.

We’ve passed a Wage Theft ordinance so that workers actually get paid for the work they are doing. Too often in the past, businesses would require extra work time, before or after an employee has punched in, without compensation.

Lastly, to ensure that our labor laws are enforced, the city established an Office of Labor Standards. Without enforcement, there is no change.

 

With regards to rental security:

Seattle City Council passed a law requiring rental property owners to assist financially strapped tenants to enroll in installment plans to pay the high upfront-costs for securing a rental unit. Earlier this year, the Federal Reserve announced that 46% of adults could not cover an emergency expense costing $400 without selling something or borrowing money. And the vast majority of these folks are renters.

A Rental Registration and Inspection Ordinance was established after an extensive public involvement to help write it. Inspectors will now make sure all registered rental properties comply with minimum housing and safety standards. This preserves the quality of life for renters in all neighborhoods.

Afterward, a Tenant Protection Law was enacted, to guarantee that rental units are fit for habitation before a landlord increases rents. According to the 2009 American Survey, approximately 10 percent of our rentals have moderate to severe physical problems. A housing code violation plus a rent increase now trigger this protection.

Lastly, to assure that renters’ interests are fairly represented, a City Renters Commission was established last year.  Formally and systematically hearing from renter’s representatives is critical to keeping Seattle affordable. Because rising rents have left Seattle with the 3rd largest homeless population in the U.S. according to Zillow.

Passing these laws shows that we are not helpless. We do not have to wait for Congress to act. Here in Seattle, and in other cities, there is an urban movement to provide for “a freedom from want” to stop more people from sliding into a state of homelessness.

It does take persistent work, innovative solutions, and a commitment to be engaged in our democracy. But, isn’t that why all of us are here: to be citizen activists and to assure that freedom rings – for all of us.

Thank you.

Convictions Will Not Alter Trump’s Reality

Originally Posted on 8/23/18
By Nick Licata


 

Convictions Will Not Alter Trump’s Reality

Convictions Will Not Alter Trumps Reality

            To understand President Trump, one must take him at his word, when he said, in effect if someone hits you, hit back harder. He is no President Obama, who whatever his shortcomings, was publically self-reflective in assessing his actions and even beliefs. For Trump, Obama’s approach represented weakness.
Trump derives his strength by avoiding any hesitancy in declaring the validity of his actions and beliefs. This is true even when this actions and policy positions lead down different paths because, at the moment when he speaks, he truly believes that they are valid.
Hence, his current attorneys do not want him to be interviewed by Special Investigator Mueller, because Trump’s public statements are a string of contradictions. His current personal attorney Rudy Giuliani correctly characterized this danger as a “perjury trap.” Any interview with Trump would challenge his ability to see the world other than how he sees it: one that shifts as circumstances change.
He and his supporters do not see this inconsistency as “lies”. They are simple truths at the moment they were spoken, and not necessarily before or afterward. Like all of us, his reality is influenced by his frame of mind. However, in his case, his self-confidence seems to allow him to believe that he is actually shaping the reality around him, even when it is inconsistent with evidence that can be seen by nonpartisans.
This reality gap was visually demonstrated his first week in office when he declared that the crowd size for his inauguration was the largest ever. The photo evidence proved him wrong. But he refused to believe the photos, continuing to argue, through his public servants,  that there were conditions that impacted the photos, which accounted for him not making an error.
Of course, that was minor stuff in comparison to where we are today, with his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen and former campaign manager Paul Manafort, both admitting or convicted of felonies. Trump, however, focused on a technical sliver of truth: he was not named in either conviction. However, the description of “individual-1” identified in Cohen’s plea agreement, was a federal candidate who directed him to make or oversee payments in 2016 to secure the silence of women poised to accuse that individual of having adulterous affairs with the candidate. Who could that possibly be? Whoever it was, that person may well have committed a federal crime.
Fox prime-time commentators Sean Hannity and Mark Levin, who reach 25% of all TV news viewers, encourage and support Trump’s alternative view of reality. Hours after the convictions were announced they argued that even if it was Trump, so what? There was no federal crime since he was not President at that time and he was just using his own funds for a non-campaign purpose. It was likened to settling a lawsuit from a disgruntled employee. Were Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal Trump employees? Check out Hannity & Levin’s exchange from Tuesday, August 21st.
Trump’s second truthful statement was that neither conviction mentioned collusion with Russia. This message was repeated throughout the day by Fox News commentators. However, the continual reference to Russian collusion is a misdirected focus. Interestingly, when Sean Hannity asked his guest commentator former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy how did the trials of Cohen and Manafort come about when Muller’s search was for Russian collusion. McCarthy told him that the Mueller’s main focus is obstruction of justice and that Russian collusion was just one thread of Mueller’s investigation. Trump denied Russian collusion multiple times after the convictions were announced, but made no mention of a possible obstruction of justice charge.
It’s apparent that no matter what future convictions may uncover, Trump will fight their revelations as phony and accuse Mueller of being out to get him. The enemy for him will continue to be the corrupt Democrats, and the fake news media, with the exception of Fox News. It’s not altogether a weak strategy, up until the Cohen and Manafort convictions, Trump’s constant attacks on Mueller’s investigation has lead to less than half of the public supporting it and two-thirds wanting it to end before the November elections.
Trump’s insistence that reality conforms to his perception, leads to the inevitable conclusion that even if the Democrats somehow won the House and impeach Trump, he would most likely conclude before any final vote was taken in the Senate, that Congress was rigged against him. He made a similar remark of the entire election process when as a candidate he was behind in the polls and it looked like he might lose.

            Despite being a pugnacious fighter, who enjoys taunting his opponents, he has another characteristic, which rallies his core supporters. He is a victim of The Deep State, the ever-present demon of the far-right, which secretly manipulates our nation’s future. Numerous polls indicate that it’s a belief that may be shared by up to a third of the nation.

            If Trump feels he can no longer tolerate the conspiracy of his enemies to oust him, he may well ignore the decisions of our democratic institutions and appeal to his core supporters to save our constitution from the evil deep state. That crisis may just force Republicans in Congress to publically object to his inability and disinterest in maintaining our democracy. If they don’t, then the foundations of our democratic society will have shifted off of their institutional base to one dependent on the beliefs and whims of whoever is “the leader”.

The Campaign for Abolishing ICE – Is it a Winnable Strategy?

Originally Posted on 7/12/18
By Nick Licata 


 

The Campaign for Abolishing ICE – Is it a Winnable Strategy?

Abolishing ICE

     What does a win look like for the Campaign to Abolish ICE? Let’s assume for the moment that it is to stop the agency’s increasingly brutal deportation raids because, as The Nation writer Sean McElwee said in a lead article, they have “become a genuine threat to democracy, and it is destroying thousands of lives.”

This is a view shared by a growing number of Democrats. Representative Mark Pocan, Democrat of Wisconsin, accuses ICE’s aggressive enforcement of immigration laws of “conducting raids at garden centers and meatpacking plants” and “breaking up families at churches and schools”. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, called to abolish ICE, and Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said that given Mr. Trump’s “deeply immoral actions,” the entire immigration system should be reformed. Representative Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash. joined Rep. Pocan in promising to introduce a bill to eliminate the agency.

The call to abolish ICE also gained momentum in the second week of July when well over 100 state and local elected officials from 20 states joined in calling for abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. Their released statement said “the lawless federal agency that, since its creation in 2002, has terrorized immigrants and separated families in the communities we live in and represent,” must be ended as soon as possible.

However, while the message of “Abolish ICE” is powerful, it also can be easily misconstrued to mean a decline in public safety. The critical question to ask, and one that must be discussed, is how does this strong campaign slogan affect the fall congressional elections? In other words, will a campaign to eliminate ICE turn out more Democrats or Republicans?

The underlying lesson that needs to be remembered is that mobilizing popular opinion is not the same as mobilizing voters. That was proven most painfully when Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College vote.

That same lesson played out with the Occupy Wall Street movement’s eventual loss of political influence. Their goals initially had more popular support than the Tea Party’s, but John Wellington Ennis, documentary filmmaker of PAY 2 PLAY, points out that the Occupy movement “viewed officeholders as courtesans for the corporate class” and hence rejected electoral politics, while “the Tea Party turned outraged at the government into electoral gains”, admittedly with the help of corporate money. The bottom line is that the Occupy Movement rejected working within the Democratic Party, while the Tea Party chose to work within the Republican Party, and take it over.

The call to abolish ICE can motivate the Democratic Party’s base, and even a significant portion of the independents, to turn out to vote in the fall. The proponents point out that a clear message of abolishing ICE is less murky and less definitive than simply arguing to reform ICE. There does seem to be fertile ground for believing that. According to a January 2018 poll by New Post-ABC, half of independents and 6 in 10 Democrats feel strongly that immigrants strengthen our country. That same poll found that more than half the country strongly opposes the idea of building a wall.

But politics is like a game of chess, in that a winner prepares for possible future moves by the opponent. The Republicans have already said they intend to use the abolish ICE campaign to mobilize their base. Vice President Mike Pence has said that abolishing ICE would lead to more human trafficking, violent crime and the proliferation of drugs and gangs. This is in direct reference to the ICE office of Homeland Security Investigations, which actually has more employees than the high profile ICE Office of Enforcement and Removal Operations whose abhorrent behavior in separating children from their parents had lead its critics to call for abolishing ICE.

The HIS office pursues criminals and terrorists involved in drug trafficking, weapons smuggling, human trafficking, cybercrime, financial crimes, and identity fraud. Eliminating this office is the Achilles heel of the abolish ICE campaign. How would anyone defend not pursuing criminal and terrorists? So while those championing the abolition of ICE begin their campaign by focusing on the abuses of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, the right-wing will focus on how the left supports dropping drug trafficking, weapons smuggling, human trafficking, etc. Pence’s response was just the first missive.

The bill being proposed by Rep. Jayapal would create a commission to look at transitioning some ICE functions to a new agency that would presumably include HIS’s work. This, in fact, is what 19 ICE investigators requested in a letter sent in June to Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary. The investigators did not call for the abolition of ICE, as some claim, but rather for separating the investigations division from the immigration enforcement arm so that jurisdictions would no longer refuse to work with them because of the perceived connection to immigration enforcement, which had hindered their ability to investigate cases. But creating a commission would take time and the message of abolishing ICE ignores that subtle proposal. In other words, the campaign is immediately put on the defensive of trying to explain what they mean by abolishing ICE. Long explanations bore and confuse voters; it puts a candidate in a weak position to win an election.

The poll cited earlier supports the argument that a big campaign to abolish ICE could energize conservative voters more than liberal voters particularly if the Republicans accuse liberals, progressives and Democrats as being weak in protecting the public’s safety. The findings showed there is slightly more support than opposition to the federal crackdown on undocumented immigrants. Republicans broadly support the crackdown. Independents lean against it and while more than two-thirds of Democrats say that the crackdown is a bad thing, nearly a quarter say it’s good.

I see these results pointing to greater motivation to support ICE’s enforcement activities from Trump supporters than motivation from the liberals to oppose them. The desire for safety from dangerous immigrants, unrealistic as it is given reliable statistics, is so great that 22 % of those who disapprove strongly of Trump’s job as president say that the crackdown on undocumented immigrants is a good thing. And that is based on just concerns about “undocumented” immigrants. The Republicans will focus on how investigations of those involved with drug trafficking, weapons smuggling, human trafficking, and cybercrime would be eliminated. It’s easy to project how a critical portion of the voting public will swing against a candidate that appears to eliminate this protection.

The moral high ground of protecting the welfare of immigrant families may quickly erode if one’s personal safety is being sacrificed. And that is exactly what the Abolish the ICE Campaign will discover in parts of the country that are not solidly liberal. The result could easily lead to both congressional chambers remaining under Republican control as a critical portion of independents and soft Democrats wish to minimize their public safety threat by retaining ICE’s enforcement against criminal elements.

A better approach in pursuing fair treatment of “undocumented” immigrants is to build on the proposal being made by the ICE investigators to separate the investigations division from the immigration enforcement arm. Remove it from ICE. That would lay bare ICE’s enforcement mechanism and avoid a convoluted explanation for defending ICE’s abolition or transformation into a new agency.

This is admittedly an incremental change, but a winnable one; and, one that opens the door for further changes. It puts the Republican’s on the defensive because then they have to explain why these offices should not be separated when ICE’s own officers are saying that the current arrangement endangers public safety.
Most importantly it improves the chances for the Democrats regaining control of one of the chambers.
Don’t aim for the sky without keeping your eye on the ball. It’s not a home-run, but it’s better than striking out. The strategy is to keep in the game.

 

I am a Trump Addict – And so are Others

Originally Published – 5/28/18

By Nick Licata


 

Dear Urban Politics Reader,
The political environment in many of our cities, large and small, has been impacted by President Trump administration’s policies. Consequently, I feel it is useful to comment on and distribute information on the administration’s policies. 

Trump Addict

I am a Trump Addict –And so are others           

Addictions sap away your ability to lead a normal life and over time you need stronger doses to get your rush. The nation is currently in an opioid addiction epidemic that cuts across party lines. But the bigger addiction that has swept the country is with Donald Trump. And it too cuts across the political spectrum. It is not limited to the 80% of the white evangelists who are committed to him hell or high water, it seems just as firmly anchored within the liberal community. Let me describe my experience.

I have voted in every presidential election for the last 50 years. Afterward, I read about his policies, what he said in speeches and said in interviews. Regardless of the political party, each would give a rational explanation for what they were doing; so rational, as to be boring. As a result, like many others, I drifted away from watching the evening TV news. I am now addicted to watching it because Donald Trump became president. Like a locomotive crashing into a granite mountainside, my boring, orderly world of normality was demolished.

Like the vast majority of Americans, I was lulled into being satisfied by a proper decorum that had framed political discussions for the last couple of generations. Then Trump came along and ridiculed both the Democrats and Republicans in a manner that he sharpened as a reality TV host; making seemingly off-hand outlandish statements and ridiculing “losers”. If you could prove you were not a loser then you could be his apprentice, as a number of his former Republican competitors did after he won the Republican nomination. Trump’s America is now divided into two groups, the apprentices and the losers; Trumpeters are the designated apprentices and the rest of us are losers.

While the losers are focused on exposing every single Trump lie, misstatement, and exaggeration, all dutifully recorded by journalists in a collection of over 3,000 Trump statements since election day, the top Trumpeters are quietly dismantling protections that past administrations had instituted: providing safer drinking water supplies, protecting national forests and parks from mining, protecting access to voting in elections, protecting students from being scammed by for-profit colleges, prohibiting needlessly higher prescribed medication costs, and a host of other laws that allowed a better quality of life than in the past. But addicts don’t notice the diminishing quality of their life if they get their fix.

It doesn’t seem to matter to either the conservative evangelist or the liberal professional that Trump’s Make America Great Again means we are now back to a culture of “Buyer Beware” where each of us is now free to seek out a better life without government protections, i.e. interference.

And why aren’t we able to grasp the details of what is happening around us? I suspect it is because many are like me, glued to our TV watching and listening to the knights of the political roundtables as they endlessly analyze what Trump’s tweets reveal, what his press secretary’s answers reveal, what each and every utterance by his cabinet members and advisors may reveal.

Admittedly, there is something in these erudite explorations that really hooks me, and seemingly many others as well given the skyrocketing viewer ratings for MSNBC and the CNN. Not to mention Trumpeter Fox News, which has the largest audience. Our addiction to Trump may be compelled by our growing dependency to know how will this all end? Who will go to jail? Will anyone go to jail? Who actually helped the Russians influence our national election? How many songbirds will it take to nudge Congress to take some definitive action?

I sense a national yearning for some closure, to break from our Trump addiction, some way to pull us away from the tube. Perhaps the sideshows, like Stormy Daniels’ licentious tale, will all be linked through some overarching scheme that Special Counsel Robert Mueller will finally expose. Until that happens, the story continues to grow more convoluted and more gripping than the Game of Thrones. Are we all just waiting for winter to come?

As each day begins I realize we are in a national reality show, even when the TV is turned off. And yet, it is too hard to walk away from it without grabbing the remote. What did Trump tweet today?


 

Nick Licata is the author of “Becoming a Citizen Activist” and founding board chair of Local Progress. Read his essays at becomingacitizenactivist.org

 

Netflix Series on Rajneeshpuram

Originally Published March 23, 2018 

UP – USA – Netflix Series on Rajneeshpuram

By Nick Licata

Paradise Lost as Guru Flees

The Strange Tale of a Paradise Lost

            This month, March 2018, Netflix began a six-part documentary “Wild Wild Country” about Guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his Oregon Commune, Rajneeshpuram that flourished for about four years before it collapsed in October of 1985. Bhagwan was arrested that fall with some of his closest followers while boarding a rented jet on a North Carolina airstrip to escape federal prosecution.

Before then he and his commune were often in the news for their contentious relationship with the small town of Antelope, and later with the state and federal governments as well. The leaders of Rajneeshpuram were accused of violating everything from not having proper building permits to propagating germ warfare on Antelope’s residents.

As soon as I read that the Bhagwan had fled Rajneeshpuram, I sensed that the nations largest and most well known commune was about to implode. Having studied social movements while receiving my MA in sociology, I dropped everything and raced down to Oregon to witness the final days of this grand experiment.

I found a culture of such total commitment to the idea and practice of leading a new life through embracing a Guru’s vision, that individual deviation from it was unthinkable. My following story describes how his followers dealt with the Bhagwan vanishing overnight. Up to that point their reason for being in Rajneeshpuram, which literally was in one of the most isolated areas in Oregon, was the Bhagwan’s presence.

I do not go into the details of Rajneeshpuram’s elaborate history involving sex parties, armed guards, attempted assassinations or the invitation of some 3,000 homeless people onto the commune. Wild Wild Country covers those events, providing views that are both supportive and critical of Bhagwan and Rajneeshpuram. While these events make for great story telling, I was seeking a different story; how seemingly rational people could become so enthralled in following a leader, that they dismissed the reality of the outside world until it crashed down on them.

Paradise Lost as Guru Flees  – “It’s all a joke.”

            Upon arriving in Portland I called Paul, an old acquaintance. He gave me advice about visiting Rajneeshpuram, the commune in Eastern Oregon founded by the Guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Paul is a sannyasin, else known as a Rajneeshee — a follower of the Bhagwan.  As a professional engineer, he designed the commune’s million dollar buildings. But he chose to live in his hometown of Portland working for an engineering firm rather than live and work in Rajneeshpuram.

“You should have come earlier, when the Bhagwan was talking every day, “he said in reference to the Bhagwan having broken his three and a half years of public silence to answer questions from the public. “Now that he’s gone, there isn’t much happening. He is the whole trip. Without him, it’s lost its meaning,” he said quietly and with a bit of melancholy in his voice. After a long pause he asked, “So, why go there?”

“I want to visit the place before it disappears,” I said half joking. Publicity surrounding the Bhagwan’s arrest for attempting to flee the country from a federal indictment had the press speculating on an immediate exodus if he didn’t return. Little did I or anyone else know that two weeks after my visit the Bhagwan would plea bargain with the Feds and leave the country vowing never to return. Soon after, the mayor of Rajneeshpuram would declare the commune finished and all of its assets up for sale.

Prior to arriving in Portland, I had decided to take a break from work and see for myself how people lived in America’s largest commune. And, if they would want it to continue should the Bhagwan not return. I knew religious communes had come and gone in this country. But previous groups, like the Shakers in the early nineteenth century or the Reverend Jones followers who went to South America to found Jonestown, led austere or ascetic lives. They withdrew from the temptations of the world.

This group was led by someone calling himself “the guru of the rich” and attracted many worldly professionals who, like my friend Paul, were successful in their occupations–they were not social dropouts.

The Bhagwan claims to merge eastern mysticism with western materialism. He preaches the enjoyment of life now–there is no God. With a meditation, people could feel good about making money. Unlike past isolationist groups the Rajneeshees embrace the world like the Calvinists embraced financial success during the Reformation: to conquer the world, not retreat from it; although, Rajneeshpuram itself is isolated.

Four hours after leaving Portland, I came across a small patch of buildings lost among the barren hills. It’s the town of Antelope, made famous by its stormy relationship with the commune. Almost four years ago, the first Rajneesh followers purchased the overgrazed Big Muddy Ranch previously owned by John Wayne, located twenty miles outside of town. I had always thought that Antelope had been physically taken over by the commune. But, miles of narrow winding roads separate the two.

As the number of sannyasins increased and talk spread about building a world center for their cult — the Bhagwan had envisioned one hundred thousand followers living at the commune–the locals became alarmed. Soon they were opposing the issuance of land use permits on the ranch. The sannyasins fought back by creating a new city, Rajneeshpuram, which incorporated about five percent of the ranch. Big Muddy became Rancho Rajneesh. And, as sannyasins replaced the locals who were leaving in fright or disgust, the town of Antelope became the town of Rajneesh.

Rancho Rajneesh is huge, about twice the size of San Francesco. As I entered the ranch guard towers began to appear alongside the county dirt road that slices through the ranch. Images of guards with Uzi machine guns, like those I’d seen on TV surrounding the guru, flashed across my mind. I could see them peering at me. I imagined that they saw themselves as an island in a sea of hostility. For the last fifteen miles, most of the road signs had been heavily pot marked with bullet holes.

I smiled, waved and tried to look nonchalant at the man and woman entrance guards. They smiled and waved back – no guns appeared. Behind the last guard post there was fenced entrance to the town with a paved parking lot, as immaculate as any at Disneyland, spread out before a modern single story frame building. It’s the Welcome Center, known as Mirdad. Inside there was a bustle of activity as visitors registered, most were Rajneeshees visiting from one of the other 300 communes located around the world.

I filled out the various forms. Yes, I would allow my luggage to be searched for guns and drugs, and yes, I would allow my picture to be taken. A sannyasin appeared with a German shepherd and asked me to lead him to my auto. The dog sniffed inside for any illegal smokes. A quick patting down of my body was the last little formality. Their determined effort to keep drugs out provides protection from having hostile state officials, like the Attorney General, bust the commune for the possession of illegal drugs.

Friends cautioned me that even if I could get into the commune, they would charge outrageous prices for accommodations. As it turns out, the commune’s vice president announced just the week before that they would be “throwing the doors and windows open” to encourage tourism. It didn’t appear that the word had gotten out yet, considering that I was the only non-sannyasin visitor aside from a handful of journalists. But instead of paying the usual $65 a night at the hotel ranch, I landed a one-room mountain cabin in the Walt Whitman grove for $20 a night including three vegetarian meals a day and free transportation.

There are no private autos on the streets. The commune purchased eighty school buses to make the Rajneesh Buddafield Transport, the fourth largest bus system in Oregon. There are also a number of new Cutlass Oldsmobiles driven by commune leaders. It must be municipal policy to “Buy American”.

I took a bus to the sprawling ranch hotel, which is built around a couple of landscaped courtyards. In the lobby, furnished with ferns and framed colored photos of the Bhagwan, I met Marcel Bruuns of TROS, Netherland’s largest TV network. This is his second trip to the commune. In the summer he had the opportunity to interview the Bhagwan for an hour. He gave me his impressions:

“I tell you, I’ve been a journalist for over twenty years traveling the world over meeting leaders and revolutionaries. I’ve never met anyone like this Rajneesh. He looks at you and you feel that he is someone special. I could not trip him up. It was maddening.”

“What do you think will happen now that he has been arrested? How strongly attached are they to him?” I asked.

“They will follow him wherever he goes–even in death,” Marcel said looking at them walking all around us. I felt uneasy. “This could be another Jonestown. You should have seen how they cried when the news clips showed their guru in handcuffs,” he went on. “You know he is not a pacifist. He does not teach turning the other cheek like Christ.”

I surveyed the lobby. Everyone but us was dressed in red. I felt conspicuous. I should have brought my pink tie. I quickly ran through my mind a possible Jonestown scenario and then discounted it. Since the Bhagwan’s beliefs are not predicated on an afterlife, there seemed to be little incentive for suicide.

Just then a crowd gathered around the lobby TV to watch videotapes of last night’s news on the Bhagwan. There is no local radio or TV station to provide live coverage. I sat next to a sannyasin, Ma Anand Prashant. She is in her early thirties, has dark brown wavy hair and is of slight build. This is her fourth visit to the commune from her home in Perth, Australia. Like other foreign visitors, she tries to stay as long as her passport will allow her.

She is on the Rajneesh Humanities Trust program. For $400 a month She gets room and board. About a thousand of the Bhagwan’s followers are in the program at any one time. They cane from around the world. I soon discovered I was just as likely to hear a sannyasin speaking German or Dutch as English.

“He’s so darling, so cute,” Prashant says of the Bhagwan as he is shown being led handcuffed by Federal Marshalls. Her comment seemed a bit slight for a guru or holy man. I couldn’t imagine Sister Angeline, my old Catholic high school teacher, describing the Pope as cute. Others looked distressed as they saw the screen but no one cried or seemed visibly upset. From previous news accounts, I half expected to hear grumblings about “how come the guru split without saying good-bye to anyone?” But I never heard a critical word or intonation regarding his abrupt departure (he left within an hour of hearing of his imminent arrest). Rather, Prashant sums up the prevailing attitude: “This is all so exciting. There are always surprises here!”

Getting hungry, both Prashant and I went to the cafeteria, Magdalena. Many of the buildings have names plucked from Judeo-Christian, Classical Greek and Buddhist literature. The Bhagwan liberally pays homage to anyone before him who might have had some spiritual advice. Having once been a philosophy professor and a member of his national debate team, he chops and slices through past religions like a Cuisinart. The resulting mixture has taken him over three hundred books to explain.

“Everyone eats here. There are no separate kitchens in our own living quarters,” Prashant explained as our bus pulled up to Magdalena. It reminded me of my high school cafeteria–nothing fancy, just functional and clean. Five hundred could easily eat together. Like others, we deposited our coats and shoulder bags on racks outside the entrance. We then filed past a couple, of commune members; one sprayed our hands with alcohol to kill germs. The other checked to see that everyone entering either has a Mala (a necklace with a picture of the guru dangling from it) or a plastic visitor’s I.D. bracelet.

I showed my bracelet and walked by one of several tables that have huge stainless steel pots containing the vegetarian meal for the evening. Most of the food was grown on the farm and then prepared at Magdalena. It was better than typical cafeteria food–it actually tasted good. And beverages were served freely, including beer on tap.

Ma Prashant filled me in on the commune’s tumultuous happenings over the past summer. In July, the Bhagwan spoke publicly for the first time in almost 4 years. Up to that time, his personal secretary, Ma Prem Sheela, had been the only person to speak to and for him. In effect, she was in charge of the commune’s daily activities. While the Bhagwan remained silent and content in his daily drive through the commune in one of his Rolls Royce’s, Sheela was running a $100 million corporation and battling hostile public officials.

In September, Sheela and twenty of her supporters fled to Europe. The Bhagwan and Sheela then proceeded to trade accusations. Sheela accused him of not being the slightest bit interested in enlightenment but being more interested in his fleet of ninety Rolls Royces and other riches.

The guru, in turn, accused her of numerous crimes including the attempted poisoning of his personal doctor, Swami Devaraj. He also accused her of becoming power hungry and setting up a fascist state at the commune. Two weeks after she left, the Bhagwan had the Rajneesh Bible, compiled by Sheela, publicly burned as he declared his religion to be dead. He said she tried to create a religion where there should have been none, in effect, creating a church with herself in administrative control.

In an interview he gave from his jail cell in North Carolina while I was visiting his commune, he said, “The moment I came out of silence, I finished that religion. I am not a leader; I am a friend and a guide.” Previously he had also said that he offered no creeds, dogmas or doctrines. He just gave advice. He may also be just smart. Oregon’s Attorney General, Dave Frohnmayer, filed a suit to have the municipality of Rashneeshpuram declared unconstitutional for co-mingling of church and state activities. With the commune up for sale, the Rajneeshees argued that the suit was no longer relevant. But Frohnmayer successfully argued before a Federal District court that the Rajneeshees are “no more entitled to sell a city than it is for them to own a city.”

I asked Prashant what she thought of Sheela. “I love Sheela. She did treat us like kids and we didn’t have to think. We worked a lot, twelve to fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. It was exhausting. Although once the Bhagwan started talking, we would attend his discourse every other morning, where he answered questions for a couple of hours,” she said. “Other than work there wasn’t much time for recreation.” she added with a small smile. But then she enjoyed the work, or meditation as the Bhagwan calls it. At Rajneeshpuram, to work is to meditate.

“And how is it with Sheela gone? Have things improved?” I asked.

“Oh, we still work every day. But it’s different now. We have moral responsibility. I guess it’s better now, too. She’s done what she could do,” she said, referring to the incredible amount of construction and farming that occurred in the three and a half years that Sheela ran the commune.

Once a semiarid land, Rancho Rajneesh now has one thousand acres of prop land, over sixty acres of vegetables, and greenhouses producing four hundred tons of produce a year. All of this productivity is supported by a new irrigation system. The urban setting grew from a house and a barn to over $50 million in buildings including townhouses, meeting halls, school buildings, machine shops, and a shopping mall complete with a disco and ice cream parlor. An electrical substation, a sewer system and a water system were built to provide modern urban comforts.

It was this burgeoning metropolis in the middle of sagebrush gullies and desert mesas that aroused the animosity of one thousand Friends of Oregon, an old conservation group originally based in Western Oregon. Eastern Oregon residents seeking a means for ridding themselves of the Rajneeshees revitalized it. They brought suit alleging that Rajneeshpuram’s urban development conflicted with state land use laws and damaged the environment.

If this suit or the other one involving constitutional violations are upheld, all of the capital improvements are worthless since they can only be used in a municipality. The commune would then sell for only a fraction of its value. Ironically, the Rajneeshees are now fighting to save the municipal status of Rajneeshpuram so it can be sold. Rumor has it that the State might purchase it in the end for a prison site.

Sannyasins are eager to show visitors that the thousand Friends of Oregon were wrong: they point out that their urban development has not damaged the environment. All products made on the ranch are recycled for future use and the extensive bus system cuts down on air pollution. To make the brown hills greener, twenty-three thousand trees had just been purchased. And since they had stopped the main creek’s erosion through forming reservoirs and planting wild grass, the number of bird species has increased by fifty percent. It appears that indeed the land has benefited since the days of being overgrazed by the previous owners.

We took a bus from Magdalena to Rajneesh Mandir, a giant two-acre assembly hall capable of holding 15,000 people. Originally built as a greenhouse, when it was converted to a meeting hall the commune found it embroiled in another land use struggle. County authorities argued that their building permit only allowed an agricultural related structure, such as a greenhouse, because the ranch was designated as a farm. Rajneeshpuram was enjoined from erecting any more buildings until the court could resolve the issue. As we drove past townhouses and other buildings, I was impressed how much had been accomplished. In the outside world, improving cities, let alone building new ones, is usually dependent on federal block grant funds. And then again, having two thousand people working twelve hours a day for three years does keep labor costs down.

That evening there was to be a special meeting of all commune members to listen to the most recent news on the Bhagwan’s arrest. We arrived early and walked up to the door. A guard motioned that we were not allowed in just yet. We sat on the outside stairs next to another sannyasin waiting.

He turned to Prashant and said, “I don’t see why they can’t let us in. They’re not doing anything inside.” Prashant smiled at him and quietly said, “They have to learn new ways, now that Sheela is gone. They’ll learn that there is no longer any need for so much control.”

Hundreds of followers began arriving at Mandir by bus. The doors were finally opened and a sea of red sannyasins quietly entered. Swami Dvaraji had just returned from Charlotte, North Carolina, where he had been arrested with the Bhagwan. Tall, blond and handsome, he reminded me of a Southern California beach boy. He spoke softly and told a number of funny stories about the arrest: “They had us in so many chains and led us past so many locked doors, you could just see how happy they were to get us. Like they were saying to themselves, ‘Oh boy we got them now and they aren’t ever going to get away.”‘ The crowd roared with laughter.

After he talked, a large screen hung from the ceiling replayed coverage from local TV stations on the Bhagwan’s arrest. There was no other news; but any coverage on the Bhagwan’s arrest was shown. A disc jockey in Charlotte, North Carolina played a new song he had written: “Don’t you take my Curt from me.” The audience regaled in laughter. Another clipping showed a woman bicycling on the ranch while the voice-over told of sannyasins exiting the commune – even more laughter. I joined in. The thought of someone bicycling out of the ranch on miles of gravel roads stretched the imagination.

The levity with which all of the news was received revealed a side of the commune that I wasn’t expecting, although I suspected that they had a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor when I saw their first road sign outside of town:

“Soft shoulders, Blind curves, Steep grade, Big trucks. Good luck!” I had also spotted an official city council agenda at the Welcome Center, which had “joke” as the second item and another “joke” at the conclusion of the meeting. I showed up to listen to the jokes. Enlightened consciousness notwithstanding, the jokes were bad.

The Bhagwan urges his followers to pull others towards them through an infectious happiness. He writes in his magazine, Truth and Celebration: “You just dance and sing and enjoy, and soon they will be taken over. That’s how we are going to take over the whole of America!”

Those words were written in happier days. After the Bhagwan settled with the Feds, he urged his non-American followers to leave the States. And he compared the U.S. to the Soviet Union, which he had previously declared the greatest evil in the world. No longer was “this is the only country that had any hope for humanity” as he described the U.S.- the summer before his arrest.

The next day I talked to Ma Apara, who used to be an account executive at an insurance brokerage in the posh seaside town of Laguna Beach, California, and now headed up the Rajneesh Insurance Agency. Like most members of the commune, she was well educated (one survey concluded eighty percent of the sannyasins had college degrees), white (I estimated less than five percent were nonwhite) and female (looking around, I judged sixty percent were female).

We had breakfast in the Zorba the Buddha Rajneesh Restaurant, an elegantly furnished restaurant, which I would have expected to find in Bellevue, Washington or Laguna Beach, California rather than in Rajneeshpuram, Oregon. After the waiter sprayed our hands with alcohol (a precaution to stop any spread of AIDS) and took our order, I asked her how she or anyone on the commune was assigned work.

“On the ranch there is a department, like an employment bureau, which reviews your skills and qualifications and then assigns you to a job. I had experience servicing large commercial accounts so I ended up here,” she explained.

Intrigued by the array of businesses on the ranch, I asked her who is actually in charge of the overall commune.

“There are about fifteen to twenty different corporations. The biggest is the Rajneesh Investment Corporation which owns title to most of the property in Rajneeshpuram,” she replied.

“But how are decisions made?” I asked still trying to comprehend the maze of interlocking corporations, which are all under the umbrella of the commune.

She told me: “Each corporation makes their decisions separately.

There is no conflict between them and because we’re all under the guidance of the Bhagwan we live in harmony.”

I had a difficult time understanding how someone who could

rationally outline the insurance needs of a one-hundred million dollar operation could go on to talk about a community of heavenly bliss running the business. She assured me that there wasn’t even a coordinating committee among all the corporations. They carry on business transactions like other businesses. The restaurant buys its vegetables from the farm. The various corporations rent their autos from the auto leasing company. And so on.

“But if they are so independent why are they all called Rajneesh something or other?” I persisted in airing my doubts.

“It’s just like if everyone in Kent, Washington decided they liked them name Joe and named their stores Joe’s TV, Joe’s Supermarket, Joe’s Insurance Agency. They just like the name Joe, but that’s all there is to it,” she said laughing.

The Bhagwan is just a good old Joe. Everybody loves the guy and names everything after him. In fact, Joe (i.e., the Bhagwan) doesn’t own one nickel in his own name. Ma Apara said that the Bhagwan holds no official positions, in any of the corporations. Even his Rolls Royces aren’t really his–they belong to the Rajneesh Investment Corporation.

“We are not his followers so much as his friends,” she said. But then she explained that the word sannyasin is a Sanskrit word to describe a follower of a master. I have the feeling that I’m at the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Things aren’t really what they seem or claim to be.

“Is it out of friendship that folks work twelve hours a day, seven days a week,” I asked, wondering how many people I knew would freely contribute such labor. Political campaigns came to mind, but then the mobilization of thousands of volunteers is usually only for a few hours of doorbelling, not months or years of twelve-hour workdays.

“Look, this is a meditation center. Work is a form of meditation. If you’re not involved in meditation, this place is pretty boring,” she said matter-of-factly. I looked around the barren grounds and agreed. If you had not already become part of this community of believers, there would be nothing to keep you here.

Before leaving the commune I talked to two female sannyasins, Ma Prem Sunshine and Ma Ananda Sarita, who ran the Rajneeshpuram Chamber of Commerce. Sunshine is glad that Sheela is gone. “She tried to make a religion. I’m against isms and institutionalizing a movement. When that happens it inevitably becomes exploitive. We listen to Rajneesh and giggle a lot,” she said.

I thought about what Ma Prashant had said the day before: “We do as he says. These are the best of times, because we know now that we are his disciples.” There is quite a draw to the Bhagwan whether one calls it religion or not. If there is no religion, there certainly is adulation of the guru and subservience to his wishes. I thought about all of his followers wearing red clothes and dangling his photo from around their necks. Not even the Moral Majority folks wear medallions of Jerry Falwell. The irony of such behavior is that the Bhagwan’s philosophy expounds the virtues of the individual. Beware of Socialism is the title of one of his books displayed at Mirdad. On the liner jacket he is quoted: “The individual cannot be sacrificed for anything.”

I asked Sunshine what she thought about the recent events. She explained, “It’s a great sensational story. The television stations are playing to their Christian audiences. The Bhagwan is the false prophet to them. And Reagan is taking advantage of it. People can say, ‘They did get the Guru this year.”‘

As she talked I noted that most of the chamber of commerce staff were women. I asked her if women dominated the commune’s management.

“Under Sheela eighty percent of our managers were women, but that is changing. Now, it’s about seventy percent,” she said. “The Bhagwan was concerned about tidiness and cleanliness, so he felt that warren would provide better managers. Bhagwan says that women are more nurturing and they are also perfect nags,” she says smiling.

Managers were called “Moms” when Sheela was in charge; they became “coordinators” after she left. It was through the Moms that Sheela wielded her influence. When leaving, she asked the Moms to depart with her. Most refused.

Ma Anand Sarita was one of the first sannyasins to move to the ranch with Sheela to help found the commune. Sarita is from Riverside, California and she would look perfect in a Southern California setting with her long straight hair and strong angular features. And yet, she hasn’t been back to Riverside since she left. Like many other Americans I talked to on the ranch, he had been with the Bhagwan in India.

For the first year and a half at Rajneeshpuram, Sarita was Sheela’s housekeeper. Now, she’s responsible for the commune’s public relations. Since she knew Sheela so well, I asked her opinion about the rift between the Bhagwan and Sheela.

“I feel that things are one-hundred percent better now that Sheela is gone. She became corrupted by power and made a mess of things,” she said and then repeated what others have said about not wanting a religion to be established.

From everything that Sarita and others have said, Sheela derived

her power totally from the Bhagwan. If she became corrupted by the power bestowed upon her by him, I wondered what good was his spiritual guidance? It’s a question that the public has resoundingly decided without a doubt: “Yes, this man is a huckster.”

For sannyasins living at the commune a corruptible Bhagwan is an unfathomable one. He is the teacher and they are his students. You may not always understand your teacher, but you trust that he has more knowledge than you. And like a teacher, he is always testing them, like having them dress in red. He wanted his followers to stand out, to experience a new way of relating to the world. And then one day he called a halt to the test.

Sarita told me how the Bhagwan made changes all the time: “He told us that we needn’t wear red one morning at his public discourse. I was there and he said it almost as an afterthought, like it hit him just at that moment.”

After Sheela left, Bhagwan started to make some other major changes. He asked his followers to put away their guns, which were always evident when he appeared in public. He also sought to make peace with the residents of Antelope by requesting his followers not to vote in the next election and thereby relinquish control of the town.

I asked her what it meant to be a sannyasin. She said the word originally stood for someone renouncing the world in search of a higher spiritual existence. A person would walk away from family and friends, don an orange robe and seek alms with a wooden bowl. The Bhagwan however preaches that poverty is not a piety. Consequently, the Bhagwan coined the term neo-sannyasin to describe someone who lives in the world to the fullest and who is not burdened or corrupted by it. Sheela was someone who became corrupted because she took it too seriously, according to Sarita. On the other hand, the Bhagwan retains a carefree detachment reminiscent of the literary character, Zorba the Greek. Sannyasins call the Bhagwan, Zorba the Buddha.

It must have been this detachment that allowed the Bhagwan to leave Rajneeshpuram, Oregon and the U.S. without fighting the charges against him. And yet, the week before he left, the Bhagwan said over national television, “I am absolutely certain about being victorious in the courts of America…so I am not going to leave this country. I am going to fight for American constitution.”

On the day I arrived in Rajneeshpuram, Ma Prem Anuradha, the president of the Rajneesh Commune, expressed a similar attitude in the commune’s newspaper, Rajneesh Times: “I certainly don’t think it’s the end of Bhagwan or of the commune.” Swami Dhyan John, president of the Rajneesh Corporation, said in the same article: “This commune is the major expression of Bhagwan on this planet. To me, there are only two things of great value on the planet. One is him, and the other is this commune. He’s gone, the commune remains-¬and it remains strong and solid. We have enough money to keep this community running. The cash flow situation is good and getting better.”

The commune had attracted fifteen thousand visitors, mostly sannyasins, that past summer to celebrate one of the four celebrations held each year at the ranch. These events provide a huge influx of dollars. At the same time, the commune has been trying to encourage non-Rajneeshee tourism on a more continuous basis.

And yet, while talking with the various residents during my visit, like Sarita, they hedged their bets. I expressed my concern to her that the impressive physical improvements and the sophisticated organization of Rajneeshpuram would be for nothing if the commune were to disband. She disagreed. For her and many of the other disciples, proximity to the Bhagwan overshadowed any collective worth of the commune without him.

I wanted Sarita’s own opinion about the future. I was tired of listening to her repeat a variation of whatever the Bhagwan wants is fine with me. I asked her if the commune should continue. Since it is such remarkable example of a community working together, shouldn’t it exist to serve as an example of the Bhagwan’s teachings? If she said yes, then I felt that she and others would be placing themselves on an equal footing with the Bhagwan by giving the commune some value outside of his mere presence. Sarita looked hard at me, almost as if she sensed a debating trap, and slowly said with the confident voice of a teacher repeating instructions to a student, “I don’t think of the word should.”

Her words captured the paradox of this place: the commune was not really a community. The residents had no desire to determine their own future. The apparent equality among all sannyasins–in their outer garments and in their shared living spaces–palls under the influence wielded by the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and those nearest to him like Sheela. The whole issue of whether they are a religion is irrelevant. They don’t need a church when they have a guru.

Power flows from the top down. That’s why a Sheela can one day be the holy interpreter and the next day a fallen angel. Those closest to the Bhagwan, who is seen as the ultimate truth, determine what is right. I found no group process, which could weigh various opinions to reach a final decision.

Rajneeshpuram had a city council that took votes. It had a land use planning commission, which made sensible growth plans for the ranch. It had corporations that operated efficiently and made profits. Individuals, who not only dressed alike, which was a superfluous element in their beliefs, but sought the ultimate truth from one person and only one person, ran all of these organizations.

At each morning’s satsang, the commune meditation session, the sannyasins gather and bow before a picture of the guru repeating aloud three phrases in Hindi:

 

I go to the feet of the awakened one, the awakened consciousness.

I go to the feet of the commune of the awakened one.

I go to the feet of the ultimate truth of the awakened one.

 

The morning after such a satsang, the mayor of Rajneeshpuram declared, “The property is available. Rancho Rajneesh is for sale.” In light of the Bhagwan leaving, he said it was almost a “non-decision.”

On leaving the ranch I looked back across the valley and felt a sense of awe at the physical improvements that had been made and at the level of cooperation that had been achieved by so many people. But I had this feeling that they were all playing minor roles in the Bhagwan’s play.

The Bhagwan may start a commune somewhere else. Many of the Rajneeshpuram residents will probably follow him to the new place. Others will either drift off’ to other Rajneesh communes or fall away from the religion altogether. The physical legacy of Rajneeshpuram will probably be transformed into some type of state institute or corporate venture. The spiritual legacy will be tied to the Bhagwan.

But the legacy of the commune — “a self-sufficient community where people can at last live in unity…a living example to America and the world” – as their press release said, will be shallow if not largely forgotten one. However as the Bhagwan said his was “the only religion with a sense of humor,” so the collapse of Rajneeshpuram might be seen by the Sannyasins in that fashion. Sheela had said “I think life is a joke for Rajneeshees. Entire life is a joke. This commune is a joke.”


Post Note: Sheela was arrested and later convicted for her part in a conspiracy to poison 751 people with salmonella to suppress voter turnout in their local county election. Bhagwan pleaded guilty to immigration fraud and returned to India, where he died in 1990. There are still thousands of Rajneesh followers worldwide.

 

 

Can Promoting a Beautiful America Unite this Nation?

 

Originally Posted in Urban Politics – US – 3/5/18
By Nick Licata 

Can Promoting a Beautiful America Unite this Nation?

This nation’s politics have become ever more divisive as we have entered the twenty-first century. It did not begin with Donald Trump being elected President. According to the most recent poll taken by Pew Research Center last year, fewer Americans hold a mix of conservative and liberal views today than they did a generation ago. The trend has grown so great that as of 2017 Republicans and Democrats are now further apart ideologically than at any point in more than two decades.

There have been a number of proposals for closing this gap, but the most innovative one that I’ve come across is the And Beauty For All campaign. Many of its basic ideas harken back to City Beautiful Movement and the Country Life Movement, which promoted beauty campaigns like this one in the first two decades of the last century. John de Graaf, who initiated the current effort, has been studying those past movements as well as Lyndon Johnson’s beautification campaign of the 1960s. He concludes that Johnson’s efforts, in particular, offers a record of bi-partisan success in Congress that may allow the And Beauty For All campaign to break our current gridlock in D.C.
De Graff, and hundreds of others, from architects to urban planners, to small farmers, environmental leaders, real estate professionals, diversity advocates, university provosts and recreation leaders are supporting his campaign because they believe that preserving our country’s beauty can bring Americans of all political persuasions together to restore our environment and revitalize our cities and towns. De Graaf will be presenting this month at their Energy, Environment & Natural Resources (EENR) Committee standing committee during NLC’s annual Congressional City Conference in Washington D.C.
There have been a number of proposals for closing this gap, but the most innovative one that I’ve come across is the And Beauty For All campaign. Many of its basic ideas harken back to City Beautiful Movement and the Country Life Movement, which promoted beauty campaigns like this one in the first two decades of the last century. John de Graaf, who initiated the current effort, has been studying those past movements as well as Lyndon Johnson’s beautification campaign of the 1960s. He concludes that Johnson’s efforts, in particular, offers a record of bi-partisan success in Congress that may allow the And Beauty For All campaign to break our current gridlock in D.C.

The essay below was first posted in the National League of Cities’s blog Cities Speak by Bob Sampayan, Mayor of Vallejo, California; John de Graaf, Outreach Director for the And Beauty For All campaign, and me describing why cities across the country should be joining the And Beauty For All campaign.

Can Promoting a Beautiful America Unite this Nation

America’s Infrastructure Should Be Beautiful

“If anything can save the world,” North Face and Esprit founder Doug Tompkins once said, “I’d put my money on beauty.”

This year, as part of a new campaign, called And Beauty For All, we’re challenging NLC and its member communities to put that hypothesis to the test.

We believe that, as our cities work on the theme of infrastructure development in 2018, a comprehensive vision is essential. To that end, And Beauty For All seeks to bring Americans together to restore our environment and revitalize our cities and towns.

Infrastructure development must be about more than the speed at which residents get from place to place and the prospect of short-term economic growth. It should improve opportunities for healthy activities, allow greater access to nature and green space, be sustainable over the longer run, and build a sense of community connection. Beauty is a focus that includes each of these considerations.

True beauty is life-enhancing. It calls us to awe and stewardship and demands that we reproduce it in art, in design. It softens us, makes us kinder and less aggressive, awakens generosity in our hearts, and as Harvard philosopher Elaine Scarry argues convincingly, moves us toward justice. The words “fair” as in beautiful and as in just, come from the same root.

Hermann Knoflacher the lead designer of Vienna, Austria’s remarkable public transportation system, argues that beauty stirs pro-environmental behavior: when Vienna added separate paths and greenery alongside traffic-filled streets, its residents were willing to walk three times as far to use public transit instead of driving, or simply to cycle or walk where they needed to go. Their stress levels dropped sharply.

When Vienna beautified its Metro stations, making them varied and artful, ridership doubled, and unexpectedly, crime around the stations was cut in half. “Beauty produces energy in people like a battery,” says Knoflacher.

Beauty was once very much a part of the American dialogue and tradition. It animated the urban parks of Frederick Law Olmsted, the City Beautiful Movement of the early 1900s, and the urban dreams of Jane Addams, Lewis Mumford, and Jane Jacobs. It was prominent in the arts and building projects of Franklin Roosevelt’s WPA. And it was the heart of Lyndon Johnson’s efforts to revitalize American cities in the 1960s

Johnson wished to unify America—polarized then as now, especially by race and inequality—around stewardship of its immense beauty and the promotion of beautiful urban design, and he was clear: the beauty he dreamed of was not meant to be a luxury for the fortunate, but a birthright for every American.

Thomas Jefferson, Johnson reminded Congress, had written that communities “should be planned with an eye to the effect made upon the human spirit by being continually surrounded with a maximum of beauty.” Every aspect of urban planning, Johnson said, should center on beauty and community. He proposed a major investment in open space to “create small parks, squares, pedestrian malls, and playgrounds.”

Beauty provides objective material value as well as subjective pleasure. Tacoma, Washington, was once declared “the worst city on the West Coast,” by the Washington Post. But the February 2018 issue of SUNSET magazine includes it among the five best cities to live in the West — because it converted ugly, polluted shoreline properties into parks, and aggressively cleaned up hazardous waste sites, attracting $350 million of new investment.

Since then, Tacoma has gone on a beauty binge. In 2014, voters approved a $198 million park bond, likely the largest per capita park bond in US history. The goal of the new bond was to bring greater environmental justice and fairness, with parks in every neighborhood, improving access and health for children and the elderly. A comprehensive study by Earth Economics, an ecosystems services firm, found widespread benefits that far exceeded the cost of the investments.

Vallejo, California, is also actively involved in beautification. The revitalization of our downtown includes an emphasis on public art, a Second Friday Art Walk, and a self-guided Art & Architecture Walk. With a significant grant from the State of California, Vallejo youth are planting trees in the less advantaged neighborhoods.

We hold an annual “Visions of the Wild” festival to connect our residents, and especially our children, more closely with parks and nature. Local nonprofits and government agencies are restoring wetlands, managing citizen science projects, and engaging with an exciting new project called Resilient by Design, which focuses on solutions to climate change and sea level rise.

This year, many American cities will celebrate And Beauty for All Day on or around October 2, the 50th anniversary of Lyndon Johnson’s signing of four major “beauty” bills—the Redwoods and North Cascades National Parks Acts, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and the National Scenic Trails System Act. As we reflect on these momentous bills, we’ll also promote urban nature, beautiful infrastructure, clean urban waterways, and urban trails, especially in our least affluent communities, projects that inspire healthier, more sustainable and more socially-connected living.

We don’t need to re-invent the wheel. We almost got there 50 years ago. When we think of new infrastructure, beauty should be at the top of our thoughts. We invite all cities to join the And Beauty for All campaign.


 

For more information, contact John de Graaf: jodg@comcast.net

 

Why Trump Ignores Russian Interference

Originally Published February 20, 2018, in Urban Politics – US
by Nick Licata, author of Becoming a Citizen Activist

Columnist Thomas Friedman, who is not associated with any political party, wrote an op-ed column in the NYT February 18, 2018, which offers an incisive insight on President Donald Trump’s reluctance to acknowledge a Russian threat to our electoral system.

Below I provide a short summary of Friedman’s main argument and supplement it with other reporting that has received less coverage to explain Trump’s behavior.

Trump_Ignores

Why Trump Ignores Russian Interference

Columnist Thomas Friedman, who is not associated with any political party, wrote an op-ed column in the NYT February 18, 2018, which offers an incisive insight on President Donald Trump’s reluctance to acknowledge a Russian threat to our electoral system.

The following commentary provides a short summary of Friedman’s main argument and I supplement it with other reporting that has received less coverage to explain Trump’s behavior.

Thomas Friedman in his NYT op-ed Whatever Trump Is Hiding Is Hurting All of Us Now, begins his piece with “Our democracy is in serious danger.” I have heard that, as many others have, on more than one occasion under other presidents. So it is a little bit like hearing the sky is falling. One should always consider that tone of urgency with some reflection.

Friedman ignores a multitude of issues, like climate change, deporting immigrant children, voter suppression, and the list could go on, which alarm those who believe that the public good is being sacrificed to benefit specific financial entities or dogma driven groups. Rather he focuses on an issue that MSNBC and CNN, the NYT and the Washington Post, have devoted much of their investigatory work on: Russian meddling in our democratic elections with the intent to weaken our ability to obstruct their own foreign policy objectives.

Unfortunately that is proving to be true with the recently released Intelligence Community Assessment report (drafted and coordinated among the CIA, FBI and the NSA), which so clearly demonstrates its existence that U.S. national security adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster said it provided “really incontrovertible” evidence that Russia interfered. However, as the most recent polls show, over 80% of Republicans still believe Trump is doing a good job, which would indicate that at least a third of the population either doesn’t care what the Russians are doing, or more likely believe Trump when he calls fear of Russian interference a phony diversion instigated by the Democrats and the Deep State, i.e. bureaucrats who are not loyal Americans or at least not loyal to the president.

Friedman is a three time Pulitzer Prize winner and has taken positions that are at odds with many liberals, such as supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq and defending Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon as a form of “educating” Israel’s opponents. So his criticism of Trump does not emanate from a liberal philosophy but rather from a belief that Trump’s is “unwilling or unable to defend America against a Russian campaign to divide and undermine our democracy.”

Setting aside that Trump may be a fool, Friedman identifies two possible explanations for his unwillingness to criticize Russia for corrupting our elections. First, Trump could be compromised due to Russian information on him that could result in a criminal conviction as the result of his “real estate empire having taken large amounts of money from shady oligarchs linked to the Kremlin — so much that they literally own him.” Remember how Trump said that if Mueller investigated his or his families financial dealings that would be crossing a red line? Could he have thrown a bigger spotlight on this potential conflict of interest?

What we know is that in 2008, Donald Trump Jr. attended a real estate conference, where he stated that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”  A series of studies by the Financial Times show how funds from Russian oligarchs bailed Trump out after the period of his seventh bankruptcy and the cancellation of all his US bank lines of credit.

According to KOS journalist Mark Sumner in summarizing Human rights lawyer Scott Horton’s analysis of these Financial Times reports, Trump is put “at the middle of a money laundering scheme, in which his real estate deals were used to hide not just an infusion of capital from Russia and former Soviet states, but to launder hundreds of millions looted by oligarchs. All Trump had to do was close his eyes to the source of the money, and suddenly empty apartments were going for top dollar.” Sumner concluded that Trump may have been actively involved with and working for Russian sources, or he could have just looked the other way about any deal, so long as it generated some funds to salvage his real-estate empire that was unable to raise money from American banks.

The second explanation for Trump being beholden to the Russians has been rumored to result from him being engaged in sexual misbehavior while he was in Moscow running the Miss Universe contest, which Russian intelligence has on tape and he doesn’t want released. Russia’s decision to begin their attack on our elections began in April of 2014, a year after Trump held his Miss Universe contest in Russia. The timing might invite some speculation on connecting the two.

Ironically, it’s hard to imagine how much more damaging to Trump such a revelation would be, given his current state of affairs. Trump’s longtime personal lawyer has recently admitted paying $130,000 to porn star Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 election for remaining silent about her sexual relationship with Trump, while he was married to Melania. And after Stormy’s story broke, former Playmate of the Year Karen McDougal claimed she had a nine-month affair with Trump, again while he was married.  Russia exposing additional infidelities would not seem to bother Trump’s Christian base of supporters, since they appear to accept him as he is and forgive him.

However, as Friedman concludes, whatever it is that motivates Trump to not only to resist mounting a proper defense of our democracy from Russia and to undermine the F.B.I. and Justice Department who are investigating his presidential campaign, his behavior is not that of a president sworn to protect our nation. As Friedman says, if he were acting as leader “He would educate the public on the scale of the problem; he would bring together all the stakeholders — state and local election authorities, the federal government, both parties and all the owners of social networks that the Russians used to carry out their interference — to mount an effective defense.”

Instead, Trump shot off a tweet storm over the weekend from his elegant Mar-a-Lago private club that riled Fox News host Shepard Smith, who chastised Trump for failing to address or promise ways to hinder Russia from meddling in future United States elections. Smith stated: “The president’s spokespersons have been on television denouncing the meddling, the president has not. Not once, not on camera, not on Twitter, not anywhere.”

If Fox News hosts begin to see a lack of presidential leadership could they begin to echo Friedman’s conclusion that “The biggest threat to the integrity of our democracy today is in the Oval Office.”

 


 

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WEBSITE OF FRIEDMAN’S ARTICLE

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/18/opinion/trump-russia-putin.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion-columnists&action=click&contentCollection=columnists&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=5&pgtype=sectionfront

 

Beautiful Country Burn Again; Democracy, Rebellion and Revolution by Ben Fountain

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Writers deconstructing the 2016 election have their work cut out for them. But novelist Ben Fountain gets it right.

Writing a book about the 2016 election means inviting readers to a sumptuous buffet with too many delicacies to devour — some will be left untouched. That’s the predicament any writer faces in describing what the heck happened. So I was hesitant to review Ben Fountain’s “Beautiful Country Burn Again.” With so many political pundits already dissecting the mounds of data on that election, how could a novelist compete?

But I was not disappointed. Fountain brings a unique and thoughtful assessment to the subject matter. With fluid, captivating writing and hilarious quotes and descriptions, he details each candidate’s foibles, blithely ticking off each month of the campaign.

His sympathies are with the Bernie Sanders tribe, but Sanders is not presented as a charismatic leader. “Bernie’s oratory exists on much the same level as his clothes: nothing fancy, but they get the job done,” writes Fountain. “He picks his words like stepping over puddles.”

Meanwhile, Fountain points out Hillary Clinton’s hypocrisy when she tells a campaign rally in Davenport, Iowa, that “No bank is too big to fail, no executive too big to jail” by reminding readers that the Clintons “began steering their party toward the faith-based free-market orthodoxy of the ‘Chicago school’ of economics” in the early 1980s. Their effort paid off. After Bill Clinton left office, the power couple pocketed more than $125 million in speaking fees, mostly from large corporations, banks and investment firms. Of this, Fountain writes: “It’s no wonder that a collective howl rose across the land when Hillary told Diane Sawyer in an interview, ‘We came out of the White House not only dead broke but in debt …’”

Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas also receives blistering scorn. Fountain describes Cruz delivering speeches in “breathy tones of preacherly sanctimony” while suggesting that “[Cruz] gargles twice a day with a cocktail of high-fructose corn syrup and holy-roller snake oil.”

Fountain sharply defines candidate Donald Trump, too, explaining that Trump’s “challenge was to take Method acting to its extreme, cultivating the raw material of his personality into an ever more authentic performance of himself.” “Trump is more about art than the politics,” writes Fountain, who suggests Trump’s appeal is explained by the public essentially getting bored with the time-consuming business of voting, and exchanging it for entertainment. How else to account for huge Trump rallies like the one that drew 30,000 to an open-air football stadium on a blistering day in Alabama?

Fountain begins each chapter with a Book of Days section, a collection of political and cultural notes on events and statements that captured the zeitgeist of that month. At first I thought it was just too eclectic, but as the months rolled on, I sensed an underlying message.

That message holds the many moving parts of 2016’s politics together: This country is at a crossroads similar to the ones we faced during the Civil War and the Great Depression. The Trump election was a case of identity politics — white-identity politics over economic interests. From there, Fountain proposes two explanations for what happened.

The first is that identity politics is economic; freedom, for millions of Americans, is regarded as a finite resource, a pie to be divided up. The organizing principle is tied to race and gender, and boils down to understanding that profit is proportionate to freedom. If you can keep someone else down, there is more profit and freedom for you.

The second proposition flows from the first: “the less freedom you have, the more readily you’re subject to economic plunder,” a correlative of subjugation. Fountain sees that the rise of neoliberalism, championed by Bill Clinton, has led to greater “income inequality, stagnant wages, wholesale offshoring of American jobs and massive concentrations of wealth — and the outsized political influence that comes with it …”

It’s not a new message; many other writers have offered similar versions. But not only is Fountain more entertaining, he more clearly illustrates how a cultural undercurrent of divisive economic interests, which has caused this nation to go up in flames in the past, is once again driving a populist surge against the status quo.

Celebrating the Rag

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Celebrating the Rag


The Underground Press

(a book review of Celebrating The Rag)

By Nick Licata

September 19, 2017


 

From the mid-sixties through the mid-seventies, there was an explosion of independent, locally controlled print newspapers, collectively known as the underground press, aka alternative newspapers. The boomer generation remembers them, but the millennials and those coming afterward may not be aware of how they shaped this country’s politics and culture.

One of the earliest and most successful of those papers was Austin’s The Rag; publishing nearly 400 issues running 11 years from 1967 to 1977. Three former Rag Editors and writers, Thorne Dreyer, Alice Embree, and Richard Croxdale, have published Celebrating The Rag. Its collection of articles helps us understand how this nation shook off a bigoted culture that oppressed African Americans and other ethnic minorities, women, and gays. At any one time, there were over a hundred underground papers challenging the existing cultural values and political structures.

Dreyer, founding editor of The Rag, continues that tradition by editing The Rag Blog, an Internet newsmagazine, and hosting Rag Radio on KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run Austin community radio station. His interviews dive into progressive politics, culture, and history; you can find podcasts of all Rag Radio shows here.

The Rag was the sixth alternative paper to be part of the new Underground Press Syndicate (UGS), following the LA’s Free Press, New York’s East Village Other, the Berkeley Barb, Detroit’s Fifth Estate, and East Lansing’s The Paper. By 1971, according to a roster in Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book, there were 271 UPS-affiliated papers. The member papers operated independently from each other under various management structures and pursued a range of political perspectives. Nevertheless, they shared a common ethos that demanded accountability from government and all establishment institutions in order to advance social justice policies.

Celebrating The Rag’s articles vividly tell the stories of how their staff, writers, and readers continually supported the organizing efforts to oppose any institution that hampered the freedom of individuals to seek a productive life. The Rag’s own organizational structure reflected these values.

Bill Meacham, former Rag writer wrote that “… the Ragstaff operated as a participatory democracy. We had no designated leaders… “Although he allowed for how natural leaders did emerge, still “Anybody who showed up at the meetings (of the Rag) could speak up and have input to the content and direction of the newspaper.” Bottom line: “The lifestyle was about community and treating people well and living in such a way that everyone was included and nobody was ripped off.”

Early on this philosophy shaped the structure and content of the paper in acknowledging the feminist movement.  By the end of 1968, the paper was reporting on women’s national protests and conferences. And in the Seventies graphics and photographs of nude women tailed off as women took on the leadership of The Rag.

A 1971 article by Sue Hester protested being called a “chick”, which was a term long used at the paper, drew “more than the usual amount of discussion at our copy meeting…” according to former Ragstaffer Sharon Shelton-Colangelo. She notes that while other alternative papers “were being torn apart by gender divisions” Rag female staffers set up a reproductive rights referral service in the Rag offices. Women staffers also successfully lobbied the Austin City Council to provide rape and trauma counseling at the Brackenridge Hospital and recognize International Women’s Day.

While political activism of staff and writers were openly and proudly pursued at The Rag, as well as other underground papers, the role of electoral politics balanced between being reluctantly accepted as a useful tool and being scorned as a waste of time. Promoting demonstrations and lobbying for changing oppressive laws was part of every paper’s vernacular from their birth. Supporting candidates, however, was another matter.

For instance, when the paper’s editors expressed their support for Frances Farenthold’s campaign for the governorship of Texas in 1972, it was met by two questions: “Aren’t electoral politics bullshit?” And, “What good can come from liberal reforms?” The lead op-ed against such support concluded that “Under circumstances as they exist now in this country, taking the business of elections seriously is fostering falsehood and undermining radical consciousness.”

The editors responded at length to these criticisms, but in a nutshell, they argued that Farenthold’s program goes beyond the electoral process and as such liberal reforms are “a damn sight better than fascist repression.”  Nevertheless, they believed that while the revolution was inevitable the people should continue to struggle for the maximum benefits and gains, which are possible under capitalism.

What is refreshing in reading over these debates from over 40 years ago, is how these local discussions were shared nation-wide due to the network of alternative papers. Not coalescing around one solution, they provided a platform for debating what our democracy was about and if it could be saved.

In looking over the many articles in Celebrating The Rag what stands out is a culture of challenging the dominant status quo as the path forward in creating a better nation for everyone. The Rag, along with local Austin chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, in a seemingly innocuous manner broke through the dominant group think that, like a thick fog, hung over not only college campuses but all citizens.

And a battering ram was not used but rather a gentle nudge tipped over the cart of apples. It was called Gentle Thursday, held in the fall of 1966 as The Rag was getting started. It was organized “as a celebration of our belief that there is nothing wrong with fun.” Who could object? It encouraged students on the University of Texas, Austin campus, to look at their personal world differently, from a vantage point of saying “What could I do that is not within the usual expectations, but something that I and others will enjoy?” The poster that went up suggested, “you might even take flowers to your Math Professor, feel free to fly a kite on the main mall and at the very least wear brightly colored clothing.”

By simply breaking the everyday routine, it pushed back the curtain of conformity and released a sense of self and being alive. Knowing that you have the power to change your behavior to enjoy life is at the heart of every political movement.

This cultural shift became known as the counter-culture, it opened the eyes of those who benefited from the status quo to see how others were suffering under it. Long before President Donald Trump popularized Fake News through his constant stream of Twitter lies, there was News Black Outs, where the struggles of regular people were not important enough to receive the attention of the major media outlets. The Rag’s efforts to highlight these struggles were repeated through a national network of local underground papers. Not only did they highlight feminist issues, but those involving gays, Blacks and unions were also championed.

The Rag lamented how the Sexual Freedom League was kicked off University of Texas campus in 1966 because they wished to stimulate discussion of the various taboos and archaic laws involving sexual activity. Five years later in 1971 The Rag was promoting and celebrating Austin’s Gay Pride week, following up in 1974 by supporting the first statewide gay conference.

The Rag promoted Black Liberation and covered events that the mainstream media ignored, like the 41-year sentence of a prominent black activist, Martin Sostre in Buffalo NY, for selling heroin to a person, who later recanted that he had lied to frame Sostre.

The Rag shed light on labor struggles that the dominant newspapers like the Austin American didn’t find important. It informed the public of a critical NLRB ruling vindicating a strike by a predominantly Chicano union against the Longhorn Machine Works in Kyle, Texas. The company was ordered to bargain in good faith and restore lost benefits to the strikers.

While these are examples of issue-specific struggles to achieve social justice, the counterculture’s message of creating community ushered in the creation of consumer and worker cooperatives as an alternative to the hierarchical corporate model. In both instances, the customers or the workers had a say in how the organization was operated. Meacham, looking back on his experience at the paper, wrote, “Both co-ops and the Ragstaff operated as participatory democracies.” However, even co-ops came under scrutiny for their practices. The Rag covered a struggle in 1975 where the Minneapolis/St. Paul cooperative network of more than a dozen storefront food co-ops, bakeries, and other alternative collectives, came under attack from an organization  (The Co-op Organization –TCO) representing some 4 dozen co-op members and workers. They accused the co-op network of being a white, middle-class hippie trip and instead should be building solidarity with black and working class communities in preparation for revolution. The Rag noted that the issues raised by the TCO were important ones but that the tactics employed by the TCO, such as physically breaking up meetings, was destructive to the co-op movement.

Internal strife over ideological or gender divisions contributed to tense working conditions in many alternative organizations across the country and probably contributed to the demise of some of the alternative papers. Although The Rag did not fold until 1977, by 1975 most of the underground papers had disbanded. There were many reasons. Since many were very dependent on volunteers and low pay full time positions, the supply of willing labor may have just dried up.

Unfortunately, what is missing from Celebrating The Rag is a summary statement on why the paper stopped publishing. It might have helped shed some light on why this phenomenally successful paper, and others like it, did not survive. The rise of the underground press has been attributed to the introduction of cheap photo offset printing, which made publishing a paper accessible and affordable for many small groups. But new technology alone is not enough to make a movement; it takes spirit and a belief that things can be made better by organizing.

I don’t think the counter-culture lost its soul. Instead, it expanded far beyond its founding groups, so that the establishment adopted many of its objectives, such as achieving stronger civil rights protections and ending the Viet Nam War. But before that tipping point occurred, local authorities did resist and try to suppress them.

The Rag successfully legally challenged a ban from selling their paper on the UT Austin campus. The court system, however, ultimately was not friendly to freedom-of-speech rights. In 1973, the Supreme Court decision in Miller v. California re-enabled local obscenity prosecutions, which allowed local police and prosecutors to attack the local head shops that often stocked underground papers. While right-wing extremists did not permanently close down the underground press offices through violence, the local authorities were able to harass and shut down their retail distribution network.

The legacy of the underground press was to question all authority and seek answers based on independently verifiable knowledge and not on what was being provided by those in power. The Rag exemplified a first-rate execution of that objective.

The challenge now is to determine how to keep that orientation alive and thriving. Perhaps community radios, which are found in many cities, like Austin’s KOOP, can provide a framework for sustaining such a progressive force. Other media outlets like blogs or podcasts have also begun to play such a role. It may be that the disastrous Trump Presidency will stimulate a creation of a UPS-like network among these outlets, playing a role similar to how the horrific Vietnam War prompted the creation of the underground press. What is certain is that citizen activists can change the world, they did it in the past and they can do it again.

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming a Citizen Activist; Stories, Strategies & Advice for Changing Our World, a former 5 term Seattle City Councilmember, and co-founder of an alternative paper The Seattle Sun (1974 to 1982). He can be reached at nick@becomingacitizenactivist.org  twitter @nickjlicata

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Democracy in Chains

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Democracy in Chains


 

Urban Politics – US 4/5/18

Radical Libertarians Redefine Our Democracy’s Ideals

A Book Review of Democracy in Chains
by Nick Licata

“Also released in my Urban Politics newsletter.” – Nick


 

Free market advocates push for eliminating government regulation of businesses, arguing that better public services will result. The ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan and the parking meter fiasco in Chicago, just to name a few recent examples, denude that argument and show the real harm this line of thinking brings about.
Rightfully, many writers have detailed how corporate lobbyists have pursued similar strategies for shrinking government, but far fewer explain the history of privatization and the undemocratic ideology that has driven it. Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, however, does just that.

MacLean, a professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, shows how a handful of economists, initially guided by James McGill Buchanan’s “public choice” theory, attracted immense financial support from key billionaires—most importantly Charles Koch.

Under Buchanan’s theory, for which he received a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1986, government actions that respond to the needs of the majority of voters cripple an efficient market. Put more bluntly in Buchanan’s The Calculus of Consent, simple majority voting “tended to result in overinvestment in the public sector.”

Without government interference, the market would be free to deal with all social problems. The wealthy minority would then have economic liberty and not be forced to pay for the needs of those who were not as productive. For Buchanan and his ilk, being poor was proof of not being productive. Influenced by this theory, these economists and a bunch of billionaires spearheaded the contemporary radical libertarian movement.

Koch is not the only billionaire involved here, but he is the wealthiest of the bunch. With yearly revenues of $115 billion, Koch Industries is the second largest privately held company in America. With that cash flow, he created or funded a string of organizations that employ scholars, politicians, and activists dedicated to “tearing [government] out at the root.” His State Policy Network of libertarian think tanks has a branch in every state to pursue that effort.

MacLean details the intricate web of donors, organizations, and academics funneling programmatic legislation throughout the country. The Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), to pick one big example, produces hundreds of “model laws” at state level. Nearly 20 percent of these proposals have been adopted. In 2011 alone, legislators in 41 states introduced more than 180 bills produced by ALEC to restrict who could vote and how.
Koch and Buchanan also target education. As MacLean explains, this focus began in earnest after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision made segregated public schools illegal. In response to the ruling, Buchanan advocated unlimited privatization of schools and supported ending Virginia’s constitutional guarantee of free public schools.

MacLean writes that Koch “encouraged states to slash their state’s public university budgets while simultaneously raising tuition, ending need-based scholarships and undermining support for the liberal arts curriculum.” Meanwhile, Buchanan argued that the public had to stop considering colleges and universities as public resources, saying “the student class has become parasites, who take from society without adding value.”

In the most harrowing moment of the book, MacLean quotes activist Murray Rothbard, who believed that radical libertarian ideas must be put to work. “We can learn a great deal from Lenin and the Leninists,” he said. He also told Koch to study Lenin’s strategies. Rothbard doesn’t call for armed revolution, but rather for creating a cadre of hardcore libertarian thinkers.

Though Russia’s democracy was corrupt then, Rothbard and those who supported him saw the US government as corrupt because its politicians adopted policies simply in the hopes of getting re-elected. For the radical libertarians, using a “government reform” message as Lenin did could help shrink government and thus restrict politicians from being captured by the interests of the majority of voters, who would have them interfere with the free market.

Democracy in Chains concludes that radical libertarians seek a return to oligarchy, in which both economic and effective political power is concentrated in the hands of the few. Their genius lies in repeatedly saying that government is broken so that “even those who supported liberal objectives lose confidence in government solutions.”

So, how do we save the future of our democracy? MacLean says we must take heed of a Koch maxim: “Playing it safe is slow suicide.”

Nick Licata is a former 5- term Seattle City Councilmember and the author of Becoming a Citizen Activist

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Democracy Speaks with Cindy Black

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Democracy Speaks with Cindy Black

 

My Book Review of ‘Reclaiming Gotham’ – how cities can close the wealth gap

Urban Politics – US – November 2, 2017

‘Reclaiming Gotham’: NYC a case study in a push for more affordable cities
by Nick Licata –  Special to The Seattle Times

Reclaiming Gotham by Gonzalez copy
Author Juan González uses New York City’s politics to illustrate how municipalities can take steps to make urban living more affordable for working families.You can read the book review on the Seattle Times website here. Or Below.

The core premise of Juan González’s book “Reclaiming Gotham: Bill de Blasio and the Movement to End America’s Tale of Two Cities” is that the nation’s wealth and income gap have resulted in too many city dwellers struggling to pay rent and other necessary expenses. He argues that municipal governments can take dramatic steps to make urban living more affordable for working families.

González uses New York City’s politics to illustrate how that can happen. Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York saw the economy boom, with developers replacing huge, rundown inner-city neighborhoods with much higher costing housing for the influx of largely younger, wealthier and whiter residents. At the same time, there were further reductions in public spending on social services.

The result was that many business owners prospered and the richest residents ended up getting even richer. From 2002 to 2012, the top 1 percent of residents went from taking in 27 percent of all income to 45 percent. Meanwhile, 21 percent of the city’s households earned less than the federal poverty level, and a third of renters were paying more than half of their income for housing.

In 2013, mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio, a former City Council member, won election, along with a slate of very progressive new city public officials. Sharing a philosophy that New York was dangerously out of balance in the distribution of incomes and wealth, they set about reversing that course.
González describes in fascinating detail not only how de Blasio beat the odds to win, but how he began to reshuffle the city’s priorities. His collection of programs provided universal prekindergarten to 70,000 children, paid sick leave for all employees, froze rent increases for tenants in rent-regulated private buildings, and initiated services or programs that saved residents from spending an estimated $21 billion.

Such efforts were not unique to New York. González describes candidates elected in cities like Pittsburgh; Austin, Texas; Seattle; Minneapolis; Philadelphia; San Francisco; and Richmond, California, who ran on platforms that rejected the dominant neoliberalism philosophy that “the private sector did things faster, better, and cheaper than public employees.” Raising the minimum wage and requiring paid sick leave for all employees often followed their elections. Many of these leaders were members of a national network of progressive municipal officials called Local Progress that shared information on legislation being introduced and passed in their respective cities.

However, “Reclaiming Gotham” is not blind to the opposition that such policies generate or to the shortcomings of the advocates themselves. Within New York, de Blasio faced a massive slowdown of police enforcement when department members accused him of creating an anti-police climate. More seriously, financial and real estate interests “spent nearly $20 million on media ads targeting the mayor between 2014 and 2016,” hoping to confine him to one term.

Meanwhile, state and federal prosecutors investigated his administration for illegal influence peddling. They ultimately found “no evidence of personal profit” by the mayor or his staff, and no criminal charges were filed. While his image took a hit, de Blasio won the Democratic primary easily and is expected to have another term. Other progressive politicians faced their own resistance from well-financed campaign opponents or saw their bases splintered on some issues.

González notes that because 80 percent of the country’s 75 largest cities have Democratic mayors, many promoting liberal programs, they can provide a bulwark for resisting President Donald Trump’s reactionary policies. By pushing the twin goals of equity in city services and effective municipal governance, politicians can alter the “Tale of Two Cities” from one where cities are divided rich and poor, white and nonwhite, to one of greater community.

What Happened to The Underground Press ?

Urban Politics – US   9/26/17
By Nick Licata – author of Becoming a Citizen Activist
www.becomingacitizenactivist.org

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The answer to that question is not simple but I do explore it in my book review of Celebrating The Rag, which extracts many articles from an era when Austin’s underground paper The Rag was published (1967 to 1977). The book provides a window into a time of counter-cultural revolution, where close to 300 underground, community run, newspapers shared a mission to disrupt the status quo. In doing so, they introduced new ways of looking at the world, and for the most part in a non-dogmatic way.
This book review ran on the Znet website ( https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/the-underground-press/) which describes itself as “A Community of People Committed to Social Change.”

From the mid-sixties through the mid-seventies, there was an explosion of independent, locally controlled print newspapers, collectively known as the underground press, aka alternative newspapers. The boomer generation remembers them, but the millennials and those coming afterwards may not be aware of how they shaped this country’s politics and culture.

One of the earliest and most successful of those papers was Austin’s The Rag; publishing nearly 400 issues running 11 years from 1967 to 1977. Three former Rag Editors and writers, Thorne Dreyer, Alice Embree and Richard Croxdale, have published Celebrating The Rag. Its collection of articles helps us understand how this nation shook off a bigoted culture that oppressed African Americans and other ethnic minorities, women and gays. At any one time there were over a hundred underground papers challenging the existing cultural values and political structures.

Dreyer, founding editor of The Rag, continues that tradition by editing The Rag Blog, an Internet newsmagazine, and hosting Rag Radio on KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run Austin community radio station. His interviews dive into progressive politics, culture, and history; you can find podcasts of all Rag Radio shows here.

The Rag was the sixth alternative paper to be part of the new Underground Press Syndicate (UGS), following the LA’s Free Press, New York’s East Village Other, the Berkeley Barb, Detroit’s Fifth Estate, and East Lansing’s The Paper. By 1971, according to a roster in Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book, there were 271 UPS-affiliated papers. The member papers operated independently from each other under various management structures and pursued a range of political perspectives. Nevertheless they shared a common ethos that demanded accountability from government and all establishment institutions in order to advance social justice policies.

Celebrating The Rag’s articles vividly tell the stories of how their staff, writers and readers continually supported the organizing efforts to oppose any institution that hampered the freedom of individuals to seek a productive life. The Rag’s own organizational structure reflected these values.

Bill Meacham, former Rag writer wrote that “… the Ragstaff operated as a participatory democracy. We had no designated leaders… “Although he allowed for how natural leaders did emerge, still “Anybody who showed up at the meetings (of the Rag) could speak up and have input to the content and direction of the newspaper.” Bottom line: “The lifestyle was about community and treating people well and living in such a way that everyone was included and nobody was ripped off.”

Early on this philosophy shaped the structure and content of the paper in acknowledging the feminist movement.  By the end of 1968 the paper was reporting on women’s national protests and conferences. And in the Seventies graphics and photographs of nude women tailed off as women took on leadership of The Rag.

A 1971 article by Sue Hester protested being called a “chick”, which was a term long used at the paper, drew “more than the usual amount of discussion at our copy meeting…” according to former Ragstaffer Sharon Shelton-Colangelo. She notes that while other alternative papers “were being torn apart by gender divisions” Rag female staffers set up a reproductive rights referral service in the Rag offices. Women staffers also successfully lobbied the Austin City Council to provide rape and trauma counseling at the Brackenridge Hospital and recognize International Women’s Day.

While political activism of staff and writers, was openly and proudly pursued at The Rag, as well as other underground papers, the role of electoral politics balanced between being reluctantly accepted as a useful tool and being scorned as a waste of time. Promoting demonstrations and lobbying for changing oppressive laws was part of the every paper’s vernacular from their birth. Supporting candidates however was another matter.

For instance when the paper’s editors expressed their support for Frances Farenthold’s campaign for the governorship of Texas in 1972, it was met by two questions: “Aren’t electoral politics bullshit?” And, “What good can come from liberal reforms?” The lead op-ed against such support concluded that “Under circumstances as they exist now in this country, taking the business of elections seriously is fostering falsehood and undermining radical consciousness.”

The editors responded at length to these criticisms, but in a nutshell they argued that Farenthold’s program goes beyond the electoral process and as such liberal reforms are “a damn sight better than fascist repression.”  Nevertheless, they believed that while revolution was inevitable the people should continue to struggle for the maximum benefits and gains, which are possible under capitalism.

What is refreshing in reading over these debates from over 40 years ago, is how these local discussions were shared nation-wide due to the network of alternative papers. Not coalescing around one solution, they provided a platform for debating what our democracy was about and if it could be saved.

In looking over the many articles in Celebrating The Rag what stands out is a culture of challenging the dominant status quo as the path forward in creating a better nation for everyone. The Rag, along with local Austin chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, in a seemingly innocuous manner broke through the dominant group think that, like a thick fog, hung over not only college campuses but all citizens.

And a battering ram was not use but rather a gentle nudge tipped over the cart of apples. It was called Gentle Thursday, held in the fall of 1966 as The Rag was getting started. It was organized “as a celebration of our belief that there is nothing wrong with fun.” Who could object? It encouraged students on the University of Texas, Austin campus, to look at their personal world differently, from a vantage point of saying “What could I do that is not within the usual expectations, but something that I and others will enjoy?” The poster that went up suggested “you might even take flowers to your Math Professor, feel free to fly a kite on the main mall and at the very least wear brightly colored clothing.”

By simply breaking the everyday routine, it pushed back the curtain of conformity and released a sense of self and being alive. Knowing that you have the power to change your behavior to enjoy life is at the heart of every political movement.

This cultural shift became known as the counter-culture, it opened the eyes of those who benefited from the status quo to see how others were suffering under it. Long before President Donald Trump popularized Fake News through his constant stream of Twitter lies, there was News Black Outs, where the struggles of regular people were not important enough to receive the attention of the major media outlets. The Rag’s efforts to highlight these struggles were repeated through a national network of local underground papers. Not only did they highlight feminist issues, but those involving gays, Blacks and unions were also championed.

The Rag lamented how the Sexual Freedom League was kicked off University of Texas campus in 1966, because they wished to stimulate discussion of the various taboos and archaic laws involving sexual activity. Five years later in 1971 The Rag was promoting and celebrating Austin’s Gay Pride week, following up in 1974 by supporting the first statewide gay conference.

The Rag promoted Black Liberation and covered events that the main stream media ignored, like the 41 year sentence of a prominent black activist, Martin Sostre in Buffalo NY, for selling heroin to a person, who later recanted that he had lied to frame Sostre.

The Rag shed light on labor struggles that the dominant newspapers like the Austin American didn’t find important. It informed the public of a critical NLRB ruling vindicating a strike by a predominantly Chicano union against the Longhorn Machine Works in Kyle, Texas. The company was ordered to bargain in good faith and restore lost benefits to the strikers.

While these are examples of issue specific struggles to achieve social justice, the counter-culture’s message of creating community ushered in the creation of consumer and worker cooperatives as an alternative to the hierarchical corporate model. In both instances, the customers or the workers had a say in how the organization was operated. Meacham, looking back on his experience at the paper, wrote, “Both co-ops and the Ragstaff operated as participatory democracies.” However, even co-ops came under scrutiny for their practices. The Rag covered a struggle in 1975 where the Minneapolis/St. Paul cooperative network of more than a dozen storefront food co-ops, bakeries, and other alternative collectives, came under attack from an organization  (The Co-op Organization –TCO) representing some 4 dozen co-op members and workers. They accused the co-op network of being a white, middle-class hippie trip and instead should be building solidarity with black and working class communities in preparation for revolution. The Rag noted that the issues raised by the TCO were important ones but that the tactics employed by the TCO, such as physically breaking up meetings, was destructive to the co-op movement.

Internal strife over ideological or gender divisions contributed to tense working conditions in many alternative organizations across the country and probably contributed to the demise of some of the alternative papers. Although The Rag did not fold until 1977, by 1975 most of the underground papers had disbanded. There were many reasons. Since many were very dependent on volunteers and low pay full time positions, the supply of willing labor may have just dried up.

Unfortunately, what is missing from Celebrating The Rag is a summary statement on why the paper stopped publishing. It might have helped shed some light on why this phenomenally successful paper, and others like it, did not survive. The rise of the underground press has been attributed to the introduction of cheap photo offset printing, which made publishing a paper accessible and affordable for many small groups. But new technology alone is not enough to make a movement; it takes spirit and a belief that things can be made better by organizing.

I don’t think the counter-culture lost its soul. Instead, it expanded far beyond its founding groups, so that the establishment adopted many of its objectives, such as achieving stronger civil rights protections and ending the Viet Nam War. But before that tipping point occurred, local authorities did resist and try to suppress them.

The Rag successfully legally challenged a ban from selling their paper on the UT Austin campus. The court system, however, ultimately was not friendly to freedom-of-speech rights. In 1973, the Supreme Court decision in Miller v. California re-enabled local obscenity prosecutions, which allowed local police and prosecutors to attack the local head shops that often stocked underground papers. While right-wing extremists did not permanently close down the underground press offices through violence, the local authorities were able to harass and shut down their retail distribution network.

The legacy of the underground press was to question all authority and seek answers based on independently verifiable knowledge and not on what was being provided by those in power. The Rag exemplified a first-rate execution of that objective.

The challenge now is to determine how to keep that orientation alive and thriving. Perhaps community radios, which are found in many cities, like Austin’s KOOP, can provide a framework for sustaining such a progressive force. Other media outlets like blogs or podcasts have also begun to play such a role. It may be that the disastrous Trump Presidency will stimulate a creation of a UPS-like network among these outlets, playing a role similar to how the horrific Vietnam War prompted the creation of the underground press. What is certain is that citizen activists can change the world, they did it in the past and they can do it again.

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming a Citizen Activist; Stories, Strategies & Advice for Changing Our World, a former 5 term Seattle City Councilmember, and co-founder of an alternative paper The Seattle Sun (1974 to 1982). He can be reached at nick@becomingacitizenactivist.org  twitter @nickjlicata

FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY & SOCIAL JUSTICE & STREETCARS

 

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Seattle City Council has begun the process for funding the construction and operation of a downtown streetcar project called the Center City Connector Streetcar, and referenced as the CCC. Initially the advocates argued that the CCC was a transportation solution for connecting the South Lake Union and the First Hill streetcars. However, it doesn’t make much sense for anyone to get on the First Hill streetcar at a Capitol Hill stop, like Denny and Broadway to get to SLU, when they could get there in a third of the time by just taking the number 12 bus to downtown, or another bus line at a different stop, and then board the SLU streetcar.

That detail has not deterred the Seattle Downtown (business) Association as its biggest promoter. They have been angling for a downtown streetcar for at least 10 years. As a councilmember during that entire time, I often hosted supporters in my office to listen how Seattle’s downtown could be more prosperous if we had a streetcar running right through downtown’s already congested streets.

The best argument for building the CCC might be that it will encourage shoppers to visit a number of retail establishments along the line, as long as it has enough stops, which would slow it down. Pioneer Square businesses owners also hoped it would deliver increased pedestrian traffic to them, which has clustered further north along First Avenue. However, this business development objective really makes the CCC an economic stimulus project not a transportation project. The advocates soft-peddle that rationale because the city needs federal transportation funding to build the CCC, and those funds are intended to serve transit needs.

WHO IS PAYING FOR THE CCC?

This conflict begged the question that the council needed to answer: What are the public costs and transit benefits for building and maintaining the CCC? To provide that answer, Councilmember Lisa Herbold amended Council Bill Number: 119008which accepted $50 million in federal dollars towards this project, by requiring our Seattle Dept. of Transportation (SDOT) to report to the council detailing the financial operating plan for the CCC, the projected performance measures and contingency plan for funding CCC should the additional federal $25 million that the city expects to receive did not materialize.

Even if those funds are received, the city is already prepared to spend $52 from our transit budget to build the CCC. What other transit needs will be sacrificed? For the SLU streetcar bus service hours were diverted from lower income families being served by bus routes in the Rainier Valley. This was a social justice issue that residents in the south end of Seattle raised and protested the cut in their bus routes.

An article in City Lab concluded, “Taxpayers are picking up most of the bill for the 21st century streetcar renaissance—money which could otherwise support more effective forms of public transportation.” Check it out here

FISCAL RISKS

Director of Transit & Mobility Andrew Glass Hastings delivered the required report 2 weeks ago to the Council. His revenue projections are more aspirational than rational. The bulk of the streetcar network’s operational income will come from ridership. The city’s transportation department wrote that the project would increase the entire streetcar network average daily streetcar ridership from approximately 6,000 today to an estimated 25,000 average daily riders by some unspecified date in the future. However their report shows that by 2025 their daily average riders will only represent 38% of the 25,000 target. Even if they meet 2025 goal, it appears to be unrealistic since it represents an increase of over 400%. Meanwhile, the SLU streetcar has experienced a decline in ridership of 32% since 2013 due to reduced congestion and improved bus service serving South Lake Union. Improved bus service is siphoning off riders from the SLU streetcar.

After reviewing SDOT’s report, the Council’s central staff continued to believe there is financial risk in the Center City Connector’s financial plan. Although, they added that much of this risk already existed with operating the South Lake Union Streetcar and First Hill Streetcar lines, and is not directly attributable to the CCC. In other words, the current streetcar system will continue to face the same financial problems it has now.

If the predicted ridership for the CCC follows the same course as what happened with the SLU line, which the city still has an outstanding loan of over $3 million to support SLU Streetcar operations, where will the additional revenue come from? The expectation is that both King County and Sound Transit will continue their annual subsidies for our two existing streetcar lines and will presumably also help subsidize CCC’s costs.

WHO WILL HELP SUBSIDIZE THE CITY’S STREETCAR NETWORK

For the SLU Streetcar, King County Metro provides an annual contribution that escalates to $1,550,000 in 2019, when the current operating agreement expires. SDOT anticipates that a future agreement will maintain this level of support. This subsidy will probably come by moving service hours that could be devoted to providing more reliable bus service to employees and shoppers coming into downtown rather than paying for a streetcar trying to move through downtown traffic that will not help anyone get to work on time.

For the FH Streetcar, Sound Transit provides a $5,000,000 annual contribution through 2023. SDOT anticipates that a future agreement will maintain this level of Sound Transit support; however, the voter-approved ST3 ballot measure did not include any funding for this purpose. Will the city then be on the hook?

The city council’s central staff also raised an intriguing scenario: the city could be exposed to a greater financial risk of losing Sound Transit funding in the future if the CCC is built because then the city will be operating one interconnected system. Sound Transit funded the FH Streetcar because it served a discreet function of providing access to downtown that was abandoned by Sound Transit when it did not build a First Hill station. However, when the CCC is complete it will be harder to characterize the First Hill segment as a discrete portion of the line that Sound Transit must maintain. If it does divest, the City will then have to pick up the $5 million annual tab.

SDOT’s report to the Council said any future funding shortfalls, like not getting the additional $25 in federal transportation funds that the city has applied for but has yet to receive, could be met by possible additional revenue sources like increased sponsorship and increased fares.

The promise of corporate sponsorships as a streetcar revenue source is like searching for the Holy Grail, it’s got to be out there somewhere. But not in Seattle. Sponsorships did not stop the SLU streetcar from going into the hole. No mention is made in the SDOT report on how much sponsorships currently contribute to either of the existing streetcar lines. For the year 2020, when the CCC is expected to be completed, annual operating costs are just over $16 million for all 3 lines and less than a million in sponsorship revenue is expected; no projection for future years is even attempted.

The one reason that the CCC is being pushed through right now is the lure of receiving free money, i.e. the $50 to $75 million that the feds will be giving to Seattle to build it. But free federal money is not always going to lead to the best solution to improving our urban environment.

Citizens in 1971 realized that when they rejected, by initiative, receiving millions in federal dollars for an urban renewal project that would replace 90 percent of the Pike Place Market with offices, hotels, and parking garages. They were not deterred by the city council voting unanimously to approve the renewal project and both daily newspapers supporting that decision.

WILL TRANSIT RIDERS BENEFIT?

Aside from the financial risk of building and maintaining the CCC, what will be the actual transit benefits? It’s already apparent that it will not serve working people trying to get to their jobs downtown, but will the CCC allow workers or shoppers to move more quickly through it? That’s doubtful. A robust network of bus routes 40, 62, and 70 already connects the ends of the two existing streetcars, along with Link light rail, which is faster than the CCC will ever be.

What makes the CCC particularly challenging is that it will be happening at the same time as the deep bore tunnel opens – closing the current bus tunnel to buses, and I-90 buses will be slowed by the second phase of Sound Transit construction on I-90. The cumulative impact will be more traffic diverting to 2nd and 4th avenues and very likely leading to gridlock.

SUMMARY

Budget Chair Councilmember Herbold considers SDOT’s report a non-answer to the Council’s questions of where the funds will come from. She concludes that unfortunately, the only realistic funding sources may be to cut other spending, such as roads, sidewalks, bike lanes, proactive landslide prevention, and transit. Read her newsletter to understand how $4 million of the city’s limited revenue stream from the Commercial Parking tax could be diverted for the next 20 years to pay for the CCC.

It is clear that the CCC streetcar is only a downtown circulator. Public transit is already good downtown it’s everywhere else in Seattle that commuters need more reliable and frequent bus service. Worse still, there is a fair chance that the CCC streetcar would make downtown circulation worse since it will be using limited right of way space that will be desperately needed for the additional busses that will be pushed out of the bus tunnel.

First Avenue should handle more public transit and shifting bus routes there would be much more cost-efficient than spending at least $60 million in local tax revenues for building a streetcar line. And, that’s assuming the feds cough up another $25 million, if SDOT’s ridership numbers are accurate, and that both King County and Sound Transit continue to subsidize our streetcar system. Not to mention any possible cost overruns.

Other cities have faced similar decisions. Many do succumb to the charm of streetcars as well as the influence of well-organized interest groups that would benefit from such grand public expenditures, such as developers, property owners along the lines, consultants and construction companies. However, just last year, Rhode Island leaders decided that the streetcar wasn’t the right answer for downtown Providence.  They redirected their federal funding for a streetcar into a bus-based project in the same downtown corridor with buses coming every 4-5 minutes. It would provide the same reliable service that a streetcar would but more importantly it would allow major bus lines to continue to serve those outside the downtown neighborhoods.

The Seattle City Council has been in the national forefront in recognizing that social justice issues must be addressed in our policies and projects. But sometimes they are difficult to apply to capital projects, particularly attractive ones like the proposed Center City Connector Streetcar. Nevertheless, in this instance there is a social justice issue that will impact the poor and the middle class. Will our public dollars be spent most efficiently on a project that does not increase the ease of getting to work downtown? There is scant evidence that laying down those rails will make Seattle any more livable or affordable for its residents.

THE SOLUTION

The Council could hold up any further expenditure on the CCC project, until an outside neutral party can determine if it will benefit residents and employees throughout the city by providing them better access to downtown. That motion could be made by 3 councilmembers introducing a Budget Proviso. However, they would need to do so by this coming Thursday. If they do, then this proposal could be discussed before the full council.

If this approach strikes you as a reasonable step in doing due diligence please let the councilmembers know by emailing citycouncil@seattle.gov and all councilmembers will receive your message.

The city council’s Budget Session I begins at – 10:30 a.m., or right after the Council Briefing meeting, this Monday to discuss SDOT’s budget. Questions about the CCC may be raised. Public testimony will be held just before the meeting begins. Watch the meeting live.

Becoming a Citizen Activist Live Webinar and PowerPoint

Have you recently become more politically engaged? Would you like to know how to make that engagement as effective as possible? Recently, Nick Licata was joined by Indivisible Plus WA and Whats Next for a live webinar about his experience as a citizen activist and what you can do today to be part of effective change in your community and country. Check out the live recording and download the PowerPoint, 7 Steps to Becoming a Citizen Activist below.

Download the Powerpoint here: Powerpoint Citizen’s 7 Steps V1

 

If Politicians Actually Want to Make Change, They Have to Think Like Organizers

Six Strategies

To empower your constituents and help get you the votes you need to pass progressive legislation

“What has fueled Seattle’s progressive victories, isn’t some mystery potion or innate Northwestern goodness, but the same hard work that has forced progress in other cities: grassroots organizing, tenacity, and political allies,”

This simple little pamphlet outlines the steps that council members can take to distribute the power they have as elected officials to their constituents to create a partnership with them for improving their lives.

To download this article as a PDF, click here.

First Step – Have them recognize that complaining is not a solution

How many times have you had constituents come into your office making legitimate complaints. You listen and nod in agreement. Then having felt that they have been heard they prepare to leave. DON’T LET THEM LEAVE YOUR OFFICE WITHOUT MAKING AN ASK.

The first step is to work with them to define a specific remedy. One that is not so distant in the future to be put off by endless studies. Ideally, it is something that can be accomplished within a week or two. It’s the first step in gaining momentum for making changes; by showing them that by working with you, they can taste success.

Second Step – Explain both the technical and social dynamics of city hall politics

Share with your constituent knowledge on how your city government works. Many citizens don’t understand the committee structure or the legislative process. As an elected citizen, you have learned these details. Tell them which relevant committees would address their issue. Describe the council members on that committee and recommend who they should approach with your help to sponsor or co-sponsor the legislation. In addition, if they have staff, or if the council has staff, let them know who they are and how they can be approached.

Describe how the committee chair votes. Let them know who the chair is close to on the council and in the community. These people will likely influence the chair; they need to be approached and convinced to help on the issue.

Work with your constituents to have their issue brought before the relevant committee. If your council has open committee meetings, which they should, then see that there is time to take testimony before the committee either in a public period of comment or as a guest to sit at the table with the council members to explain an issue from a community view. Prepare them before hand on how to present information and to bring no more than a 2-page handout.

Third Step – build momentum by finding allies

Encourage your constituents to reach out to bring in new allies as a way of increasing the chance of success. Start with those people they know, neighbors, workers, those from the same religious community and finally any citizens that may be serving on citizen advisory groups to the city. Even a simple petition, on paper or on line, shows that the issue has more than a handful of supporters.

If the issue is geographically based, work to approach the leadership of the local community council or religious organization. Even if just one of their board members is willing to sign up in support of the issue, it could open a conversation with other council members. Also, approach former elected officials to sign on, which may help garner media coverage.

If it is a non-geographically based issue, invite in a representative from a national interest group or union that is engaged in this issue. If they need money to cover their costs, use that as a focal point for holding events to build community and raise funds. Moreover, when they arrive offer to have them speak before a council committee and invite the media to cover it.

Approach neutral parties, like the League of Women Voters, or any other local civic group, to write a letter of support. The point is to show the opposition that the issue goes beyond the immediate advocating group.

Fourth Step – use facts and data, and question the reliability of opposition’s information

Using hard data gets the attention of the media and gives them something to include in their coverage. It also shores up support among those who are or favorably inclined but have doubts. Demonstrate that the advocates know their subject matter.

As an elected official, you should have access to information that community groups do not. Use that power of access to release statistics or data collected by various city departments. If they refuse to release that information, then the issue becomes “Why are they hiding this information?” It puts the opposition on the defense and forces them to account for their behavior.

If the opposition sites a survey to derail your effort, demand to see the entire survey instrument, all questions, responses and demographics collected. Again, if they refuse, then you raise the issue of a lack of openness and accountability – an excellent position to be in. Once you receive their information, look for inconsistencies and expose them. All surveys have multiple ways of being interpreted, pursue them.

Conduct your own opinion survey on the issue. You do not have to spend $10,000 for one. A reliable survey with a few questions can cost under a $1,000. Consider using university students and faculty to assist with one. Keep in mind, you just need one strong fact to stand out to derail the other side by forcing the media to include it in their coverage.

Fifth Step – Get the word out

Politicians have the ability to get media coverage. Use it! Don’t fear taking a strong stand, because most people will forget what you even said, but they will remember that you said something that was important because the media covered it.

If there are protests, talk to the media about why there are protests. Use the incident by pointing out how future protests could be avoided by taking certain actions.

Use all media tools. If you send out an e-newsletter, include information about the issues that your constituency is organizing around. You don’t have to say what you’ve done, say what you want done and how you are going to get there. Ask your constituents to re- tweet your points so that they reach as many people as possible.

Hold a forum in city hall on the issue at hand during lunch hour in the council chamber that is open to the public. Invite both sides on an issue, because it is more likely to get those on the council who are undecided to attend and it will garner more media coverage. If you cannot use city hall, find a community hall, church, library or even a tavern to hold a forum.

If you have surplus campaign funds because you are a sure winner, use your campaign material to educate the public on an issue.

Sixth Step – Encourage optimism by celebrating every win no matter how small and believing in democracy

Don’t dwell on the goals not achieved because you will never achieve all of them. Instead, with every struggle that you join your constituency on, make sure that you know what a minimum win looks like from the beginning. When that is achieved, celebrate it. Then remind folks that it is just one stage and that the next day or week the fun begins again in fighting for and winning the next battle.

Integrate cultural activities into every organizing effort, because people like to have fun and if it isn’t fun, it’s harder to grow your movement. Everyone loves a parade.

Encourage your constituents to listen to the opposition to understand where they are coming from. Knowing your opposition improves your insight into their strengths and weaknesses. And that makes you smarter, more confident and a more articulate proponent of democracy because you are practicing it.

Keep in mind that the greatest obstacle to achieving progress is cynicism – distrust in democracy and a democratic government. Those who want to shrink government speak of freedom and liberty but a weakened democracy cannot protect those freedoms.

To download this article as a PDF, click here.

Seven Steps to Becoming a Citizen Activist

Despite who is elected as President or elected to Congress or City Hall, each citizen has the ability and the tools to influence whether good or bad things happen. But you must be willing to do something about it.

To gain political power you don’t have to be a super hero or dedicate your life to activism. However, you should know what you want and how to get it.

This brochure briefly outlines the steps toward making effective change based on the more detailed lessons described in Becoming a Citizen Activist – Stories, Strategies and Advice for Changing Our World.

To download this article as a PDF, click here.

First
Complaining is therapeutic – not an action plan

When meeting with a public official you must explain the problem you want addressed and what you want that person to do. It should not be so general a request that the politician can nod and say he or she supports your goal and will work toward it. That is fine but not enough!

Make your ask for something specific and measurable. For instance, ask the politician to hold a press conference, issue a statement, hold a public hearing, be the main sponsor on a piece of legislation or work with you to write that legislation. All of these options must be tied to a specific time line. And one that is not so distant that it can be postponed indefinitely.

Present the problem and your request on no more than 2 pages, which should include your contact information.
When you leave it with them ask for a specific date when they can get back to you.

This is the first step in gaining momentum for making greater changes. Demonstrate that by working with you, they can taste their own success. If you can only meet with the public official’s staff, meet with that person and follow the same routine. However, also ask for confirmation that the politician has personally received your request.

Second
Know how government works

No matter whether it is a city, state or federal government there are basic structural and procedural features that they all share. Know what they are and how they work.

They all have issue committees and chairs of those committees. Determine in advance what committee will deal with your issue. You can do that by either looking at the committee title or looking at what issues it has dealt with. Almost all levels of government have this information on their websites.

Know who the committee chair is and members of the committee. Do research on them. What groups have endorsed them? You can find this out from looking at their past or current campaign websites. Find out if their campaign contribution donors are listed on any government websites. Find out if you know any of the groups or donors.

Know the schedule for introducing and passing legislation. For instance, how long does it take for a piece of legislation to be introduced before coming before the full deliberative body? Who has the authority to introduce it? How many sponsors are needed to move it forward?

Find a committee member who will work with your group on some level. Best if they can hold a hearing on your issue. But if not that, see if they will allow testimony before a committee meeting or at a committee meeting. Or at a minimum bring the issue up at the committee meeting to get it aired publicly.

Third
Build momentum by finding allies

You cannot win working alone. Strength comes from numbers. Reach out to individuals and groups to increase the chance of success. Start with people you know: neighbors, workers, those from a religious community and finally any citizens
that may be serving on citizen advisory groups to the city, state or congress. Providing

even a simple petition, on paper or on the Internet, shows that the issue has more than a handful of supporters.

If the issue is geographically based, approach the leadership of the local community council or religious organization. Even if just one of that organization’s board members is willing to sign in support of the issue, it will make an impression on a politician. Also, approach former elected officials to sign on, which may help garner media coverage.

If it is a non-geographically based issue, invite a representative from a national interest group or union to speak out. If they must travel to your city, see if you can cover their travel costs. Use that need as an opportunity to hold fundraising events and attract a broader base of support. If you have a noted speaker, request that they speak before a committee, a public forum or a hearing and invite the media to cover it.

Ask your supporters, including allied politicians, to contact potential sympathetic groups for a letter of support. The point is to show politicians and the public that the issue goes beyond the immediate advocating group from just one district or interest community.

Fourth
Use facts and question the reliability of the opposition’s

Using hard data gives the media something to include in their coverage. It also shores up support among those who may have doubts about the merit of an issue. Using facts demonstrates that the advocates know their subject matter.

Encourage supportive elected officials to share government reports from departments and drafts of legislation under consideration. If an agency refuses to release information, then the issue becomes “Why are they hiding this information?” It puts the opposition on the defense and forces them to account for their behavior.

If the opposition cites a survey to derail your effort, demand to see the entire survey instrument, all questions, responses and demographics collected. Again, if they refuse, attack their creditability because of their lack of openness and accountability. Once you receive their information, look for inconsistencies and expose them. All surveys have multiple ways of being interpreted, pursue them.

Conduct your own opinion survey on the issue. You do not have to spend $10,000

for one. A reliable survey with a couple of questions can cost under a $1,000. Consider using university students and faculty to assist with one. You just need one

strong fact to stand out to derail the other side by forcing the media to include it in their coverage.

Fifth
Get the word out

Even after you make a specific request and have strong allies, you still need to keep the public informed of your efforts and the relevance of the issue. Make a list of journalists and bloggers who might cover your issue. Personally contact them to tell them what you have accomplished, no matter how minor it may seem.

You want to show that the issue has the attention of a number of people and groups. And that it has momentum. Reporters want to see movement, something that is developing, and something that is changing the public discussion or could significantly change the political landscape.

If you hold a protest action, follow it up with having your participants post on Facebook and tweet with photos and comments. Make sure that your supporters share your group’s posts and retweet them. This requires having an email list serve to your supporters to remind them to spread the information among their friends and media contacts.

Hold an open forum on the issue at your place of worship after a service, at a public library community room or even at a city hall council chamber during lunch hour. Try to get a public official or sympathetic organization to host the event. Invite all public officials to attend, even if they do not speak their attendance will be recognized.

Sixth
Celebrate every win no matter how small

Don’t dwell on the goals not achieved because you will never achieve all of them. Instead, with every struggle make sure that you know what a minimum win looks like from the beginning. When that is achieved, celebrate it. Then remind supporters that it is just one victory and that the next day or week the fun begins again in fighting for and winning the next battle. A meaningful and joyful journey is the end objective, because there will always be something to work on.

Integrate cultural activities into every organizing effort, because people like to have fun and if it isn’t fun, it’s harder to grow your movement. Have a parade, a party, a dance or a movie; any opportunity to enjoy oneself with others keeps people engaged.

Make these activities open to everyone, because a growing supportive community achieves success far more than a stagnant or shrinking one.

Seventh
Believe in Democracy

If you don’t believe you have the power to change your life, it will not change. If you withdraw from participating in the democratic process, those that remain engaged are those that benefit most from the status quo and have the most to lose from any change. So, things are likely to remain the same.

As a result cynicism replaces hope, leading to distrust in democracy and a democratic government. If that happens, those who want to shrink a government that is accountable to the public, and replace it with a corporate or elitist model that is not open and accountable to all citizens will determine your future. That may be good for a business or closed special interest groups but not for the general public whose needs and rights can only be guaranteed when citizens participate in guiding their democratic institutions.

Always keep in mind that being a citizen is knowing that you have the opportunity to make a difference and then acting according to your needs.

 

To download this article as a PDF, click here.

Defunding the Dakota Access Pipeline City By City

President Trump faces a new challenge from city governments. These are the cities where many progressives live and feel powerless to challenge the Trump administration’s new anti-environmental policies. Their solution is to inventively use the tools that are available to them.

They are taking a lead in defunding the Dakota Access Pipeline by using tactics that Trump’s federal powers cannot quash as his administration is attempting to do with sanctuary cities protecting undocumented immigrants.

An effort is unfolding to go after the banks that are funding fossil fuel climate change. Each city has public funds that need to be deposited in a major bank to allow a daily shifting of revenues and expenses. They also have a need to deposit their pension funds in a bank. This is a local decision and not one the federal government could halt.

Some cities are focusing on divesting from Wells Fargo. According to the Securities and Exchange Commission the bank has supplied $347 million in credit to the companies building the pipeline and administers an additional $3.7-billion line of credit to help the project.

On February 7th, Seattle terminated its $3 billion relationship with Wells Fargo in large part because it has been funding the Dakota Access Pipeline. A few days afterward, Davis in California cut ties with Wells Fargo, as had Santa Monica just before it.

Very likely most big banks serve corporations that despoil the earth. However, cities should consider taking a useful tactic that unions applied for decades in successfully negotiating better wages and working conditions for autoworkers: they focused on just one company at a time not all of them at once. After they succeeded in bringing one of the big four auto companies to an agreement the other companies usually followed, knowing what they faced. The same tactic could be applied to divesting from banks by choosing to go after Wells Fargo first through identifying those cities that use its services. Another key targeted bank would be lined up after concessions have been wrung from Wells Fargo.

Attention is also being focused on public money held in pension funds for city employees. These funds seek stability. Divesting from fossil fuel investments not serves to help address climate change but it also is a more responsible approach to safeguarding pensions.

Seattle’s Pension Retirement Board began looking at what the possible consequences of divesting from fossil fuels would be after the city council adopted a resolution to support such an approach. A letter to the mayor, city council and the retirement board signed by local politicians, church and community groups was presented on the 15th of February, it asked the city to proceed with the following actions:

  1. Stop any new investments in the top 200 fossil fuel companies,
  2. Drop coal, oil and gas from its investment portfolio by divesting from the top 200 fossil fuel companies by 2020,
  3. Commit to reinvesting at least 5 percent of its portfolio into climate solutions defined as, but not limited to, renewable energy, energy efficiency, clean technology, community adaptation funds, transit, and clean energy access.

This approach makes financial sense. A report commissioned by 350.Seattle showed the City of Seattle losing over $65 million by remaining in fossil fuels in the last ten years. Meanwhile, the Gates Foundation has lost billions by remaining invested in fossil fuels in recent years. A combination of the Gates Foundation’s losses on fossil fuel investments and the public outcry for fossil fuel divestment resulted in them divesting 85% of their fossil fuel holdings from a starting point of $1.4 billion in 2014.

Community organizations, like DivestYourCity have begun to identify cities to join in withdrawing their business from banks funding the North Dakota Pipeline. Those in favor environmental protections, who live in cities and feel unsure how they can impact national policies that are beyond the control of their local governments, need to look at their own tool shed and see how previous uses of these tools, like the use of public funds, can be handled in a manner that can have a national impact.

This strategy augments resisting Trump Administration’s policies by pursuing actions that are beyond the reach of the federal government. Then, let President Trump spend his twitter time trying to resist it.

Don’t Let Trump Trash Our Culture

Our diversity in arts and culture must flourish for the next 4 years to keep our Democracy from drifting into a conformist nationalist template overlaid upon us by the federal government. America’s vibrant democracy is the direct result of encouraging all of our communities to express and celebrate their culture; cultural diversity has built a great nation.

That basic democratic principle may be compromised by the Trump administration if the report from The Hill is true: http://thehill.com/policy/finance/314991-trump-team-prepares-dramatic-cuts.

They reported that Trump’s administration is floating a plan to privatize the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEA/NEH).

CPB created the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and the National Public Radio (NPR) network consisting of more than 1,400 public radio and television stations.

A report outlining Trump’s main budget priorities is due within 45 days. It describes Trump’s blueprint to reduce federal spending by $10.5 trillion over 10 years.

This plan closely resembles the ideology espoused by the conservative Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has helped staff the Trump transition. It has published their own report for guiding the Federal budget in 2017 stating “government should not use its coercive power of taxation to compel taxpayers to support cultural organizations and activities.”

The Heritage Foundation also is a major funder of the American Legislative Exchange Council, (ALEC) dedicated to limited government, free markets and federalism, but apparently not in favor of public support for promoting our culture. That would be left to the free market, i.e. private money will pick and choose what type of art and culture will prosper and grow.

This is the time for citizens to become activists in opposing any Federal government attempt to halt public support for sustaining and promoting arts and culture. We do not have to wait until the dye is cast. We must cast one first.

Here are six strategies complimenting each other and building toward a national campaign to NOT privatize the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and NOT eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEA/NEH).

– The first action is to reach out to others in your neighborhood, your PTA, your school, your church, etc. and let them know of this possible threat and why you are concerned.

– Second, write a simple one-paragraph statement that you ask those above to email to all Congressional representatives, of course be open to amending it to get more people to participate.

– Third, create an email list of every artistic group (and their board members and staff if accessible), including individual musicians, poets, artists, art teachers, and performers. Reach out to them and ask them to help with the second task above. Do not limit your efforts just to your town or city, if you know people in other cities or states, let them know of your efforts and ask them to duplicate these strategies in their communities.

– Fourth, organize a cultural celebration or a panel discussion in your library or town hall to highlight the importance of publicly funding these 2 national institutions. Invite politicians, including your congressional representative, to attend. Work with community newsletters, community papers and radio stations to advertise the event.

– Fifth, conduct a survey of your city or county through the Internet or other means to measure public support for promoting local cultural and artistic activities. See if an elected official would sponsor the survey if not with funds then at least with an endorsement.

– Finally see if a councilmember would have a poem read at the start of their committee meeting to call attention to the importance of culture even within city hall. If there are no rules prohibiting it, why not try? In Seattle, I was able to have poetry read at the beginning of my committee meetings for the 18 years I served on the city council.

All of these activities must convey the singular message to Congress: our diversity of culture and art are important to not only sustaining vibrant communities within the US, but also to stop us from just looking just inward and ignoring the world around us to our disadvantage. Both NPR and NEA/NEH play critical roles in keeping our democracy an open one to all cultures and views; without that openness our nation becomes dependent on too narrow a set of beliefs and thus becomes brittle and weak in the face of new ones.

Visiting the Twin Cities – The Struggle for Justice in the Workplace

Talking to citizen activists & politicians in the Twin-Cities as they struggle to adopt Minimum Wage & Paid Sick Leave

I’m speaking on Tuesday, Sept 13th in Minneapolis and St Paul on how Becoming a Citizen Activist can guide strategic actions and mobilize support for progressive change. Please pass on these announcements to folks you know in the Twin Cities.

Announcements

Minneapolis Talk & Discussion

  • When: Tuesday, September 13th, 4pm
  • Where: The University of Minnesota Bookstore
    Coffman Memorial Union on the University of Minnesota campus
  • What: I’ll talk about Becoming a Citizen Activist and urge students to become citizen activists if they want to gain control over their future.
  • Who: I’ll be joined by 3 Minneapolis council members, Elizabeth Glidden, a Local Progress board member; Cam Gordon, Green Party member and advocate for $15 minimum wage; and, Alondra Cano, Associate Director for the Minnesota Immigrant Freedom Network.

St. Paul Talk & Discussion

  • When: Tuesday, 9/13, 7PM
  • Where: East Side Freedom Library, 1105 Greenbrier Street
  • What: I’ll talk about Becoming a Citizen Activist regarding Citizen Activism and the Struggle for Justice in the Workplace
  • Who: I’ll be joined by a panel of union leaders and local activists from the $15 NOW and Earned Sick and Safe Time campaigns.

Summary of the Minimum Wage & Paid Sick Leave Efforts in the Twin Cities

Minneapolis

Minimum Wage Legislation

Background:

Advocates for raising the minimum wage to $15 (lead by the groups 15 Now, Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en Lucha, Neighborhoods Organizing for Change) gathered enough valid signatures on a petition to send the issue to voters through a charter amendment. The need for increasing the minimum wage in Minneapolis is apparent in light of the fact 28% of its residents live in poverty. Those numbers are even higher for families of color, including 49% of Black households, 65% of American Indians, and 34% of Latinos. And polling showed 68 percent of 400 voters surveyed said they’d vote in favor of a $15 minimum wage.

However, the city attorney determined that the petition did not fall into the narrow spectrum of city issues that can be decided by voters in Minneapolis according to the city charter. Thereafter the majority of the council and the mayor, up refused to place it on the ballot this November.

The advocates appealed their decision to the court and won a favorable decision to allow the charter amendment to go before the voters. In response the city then appealed the lower court’s decision to the State Supreme Court and won. Consequently the voters will not be voting this fall on raising the minimum wage to $15.

The Current Situation:

Minneapolis Council Member Lisa Bender (lisa.bender@minneapolismn.gov) co-authored a resolution requesting that their city council staff make a recommendation on the minimum wage issue by the second quarter of 2017. The Supreme Court did say that the Council could adopt a minimum wage through an ordinance. The advocates have said that their attention is now to focus on getting the council votes to pass such an ordinance, preferably this year.

Paid Sick Leave Legislation

The Current Situation:

Beginning July 1, 2017, employees will accrue sick and safe time. In the meantime their Council approved the creation of a Workplace Advisory Committee consisting of both business owners, employees and unions which among other responsibilities will be to “Prepare a two-year work plan that focuses on workplace issues, such as the implementation of the City of Minneapolis’ sick and safe time policy, and update such plan on an annual basis.”

St.Paul

Minimum Wage Legislation

Background:

St. Paul is more of a working class city with a smaller population and economic base than Minneapolis. Although raising the minimum wage would certainly benefit many people, perhaps even a higher percentage than in Minneapolis, no legislation or initiatives have been introduced.

The Current Situation:

Advocates for raising the minimum wage in St. Paul have first focused on passing paid sick leave. They have also monitored Minneapolis’s council work and now passage of their $15 minimum wage law on September 7, 2016.

Paid Sick Leave Legislation

Background:

On February 3, 2016 the Saint Paul City Council unanimously passed a resolution convening a task force to discuss the possibility of extending earned sick and safe time to all employees in Saint Paul. On July 19, 2016 the Human Rights and Equal Economic Opportunity Commission, without amendments, approved the Earned Sick and Safe Time Task Force Recommendations as well as a draft of the ordinance. Finally, on September 8, 2016 the council unanimously passed the Paid Sick Leave Legislation. You can locate the legislation at https://stpaul.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=2801386&GUID=D3340F14-A618-4A88-8D04-E820E6C352C7

The Department of Civil Rights will investigate complaints but will work proactively and collaboratively with employers. There is also a provision allowing workers to sue their employer if they felt they had been retaliated against for using sick leave or reporting a sick leave violation.

The Current Situation:

St. Paul is now the second city in Minnesota to require employers to give workers paid sick time, and some have said that it is a more inclusive and worker-friendly approach than Minneapolis’s version, which was approved in May 2016. A month later in June Chicago adopted a sick leave regulation. Duluth is currently looking into an ordinance.

45 Years Ago Today Attica Prisoners Rebelled

Remembering Attica’s Lessons

Forty-five years ago today, the inmates of New York’s Attica prison initiated the largest revolt of prisoners this nation had ever seen. In a fury of rage at their inhuman conditions they rebelled, beating the Correction Officer William Quinn in to death in taking control of the prison. However, shortly thereafter in a remarkable turnaround they developed a rational decision-making organization which did not seek their release but instead demanded decent conditions for their incarceration.

James Forman Jr. (Yale Law School professor) in the September 4, 2016 edition of the NYT Book Review summarizes Univ of Michigan History Professor Heather Ann Thompson’s book Blood In The Water – The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. The Attica “riots” are now only a vague memory to even those in the progressive movement. It is critical that we not forget what public policies eventually lead to the death of 39 prisoners and correction officers, apparently killed by New York’s untrained and unsupervised state troopers and national guardsmen in retaking the prison.

As described by Thompson, the prison’s 2,000 plus inmates with almost half from New York City were limited to one shower a week, one roll of toilet paper a month, and food rations costing the state only 63 cents per day. Prison mail was censored to the point that most letters in Spanish to the Puerto Rican prisoners were tossed since the censors could not read them. Black prisoners were singled out for daily harassment by the almost all-white staff. As L.D. Barkley, one of the prisoner leaders said during their occupation of the prison, “We are men. We are not beasts, and we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such.”

In the months preceding the uprising, the prisoners with the help of outside advocates lobbied for better living conditions with no avail. Then on September 9th, 1971 a group of prisoners overpowered a correction officer and all hell broke loose. After a few hours of bloody chaos, the prisoners organized a 4 day sustain effort to negotiate a series of demands from the state. Liberal Republican Gov. Nelson Rockefeller refused to personally participate in the negotiations and called them off on the 13th ordering the prison to be retaken by force. Thompson describes sadistic crimes that took place after the state officials had full control of the prison. To date, the New York state has refused to release thousands of boxes of crucial records.

Are we repeating these conditions today?

It is important to remember what caused Attica, because many prisons today once again rely more on punishment than on rehabilitation practices. This is ever more true in public prisons operated by private companies. Journalist Shane Bauer’s Mother Jones article “My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard” (August 2016 edition) ignited national outrage at the conditions in privately operated prisons.

The federal government recently announced that they would no longer follow this practice. However over 86 percent of prisoners are in state prisons and each state will have to make that decision. While efforts should be made to get the Department of Justice to conduct a massive review of state prisons operated by private companies that effort may well be slowed down by governors and state legislatures who would see it as interfering with state rights.

Rather than organize fifty different campaigns to influence each state government, it would be more effective and capture more media attention to focus on one non-federal entity: the National Governors Association. True there are more Republican Governors than Democrats. But Terry” McAuliffe, the Democratic Governor of Virginia, is the chair of the NGA. And he has a record of being supportive of restoring voting rights to ex-felons. In April of 2016, McAuliffe signed an executive order restoring voting rights to more than 200,000 ex-felons in Virginia., unfortunately it was overturned by the Virginia Supreme Court. Just as importantly another Democrat, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin, chairs NGA’s Health and Human Services Committee.

A strategy can be applied to the NGA that works in any legislative-type body in an open democratically run organization: you do not need a majority to bring an item forward for discussion. What you need is a few dedicated members willing to demand that an issue be brought before the body for discussion and investigation. The goal is to begin a process that allows those concerned to raise the issue publically and force the other members to address it publically. The goal is to highlight the issue and require the organization’s members to take a public stand after momentum has built up within and outside the organization. The mechanics of the decision-making process will vary with each entity, but every democratic organization has an opening for the minority to express its opinion and even effect the final outcome.

In this manner, only a handful of state-based organizations are needed to pressure their respective governor to bring forward this issue in the NGA, and particularly to lobby McAuliffe and Shumlin to hold a public workshop on this issue and to follow up by requesting that NGA contract with a neutral third party, preferably based at a university, to conduct a national review resulting in an evaluation of the prisoner conditions of privately run state prisons and the public cost the state incurs because of those conditions. That report then becomes a powerful key to opening the door for prison reform. It is not the end however; organizations will need to mobilize public opinion to convince state legislatures to use that key. If they do not, then make it a pivotal issue during their re-election campaign.

The conditions that led to the Attica upraising should never be tolerated again within any of our prisons. Focusing on eliminating privately run public prisons provides the best opportunity to get a victory and address the larger issue of improving prison conditions for all inmates. There is a way to win on this issue, but it will take thoughtful organizing.

(Photo: Associated Press)

WTO – The Battle in Seattle

By Nick Licata, former Seattle City Councilmember, who invited demonstrators to Seattle and marched with them; and, author of Becoming A Citizen Activist – Stories, Strategies and Advice for Changing Our World (released January 2016)


 

The freedom to dissent was tested as the US closed out the twentieth century with a demonstration that grabbed the world’s attention. Forty thousand citizens marched through Seattle’s downtown on November 30, 1999, to protest a meeting of the World Trade Organization Ministerial (WTO.) Having decided to hold its third biannual meeting in the US, over forty cities competed to host it. Seattle beat out the others by promising to spend over $9 million, almost twice as much as the nearest bid from Honolulu. The City Council wasn’t asked to approve the offer because the Seattle Host Organization, consisting of membership from the region’s major corporations and chaired by Microsoft’s Bill Gates, promised to pick up the tab, although they ended contributing far less.

This was to be the most important trade conference ever held in the US; the newly formed WTO was assuming powers that far outstripped its predecessors. In particular it would not only continue to regulate manufactured goods, but services, intellectual property, and agriculture would be added. More importantly, it would have the authority to require the elimination of local labor standards and environmental protections if they violated trade agreements. It was a wet dream for corporate leaders bent on expanding trade opportunities, and a nightmare for those defending worker rights and the environment. Without firing a shot, the world was seeing the formation of a new international power. The context for Seattle’s WTO meeting was set, it would not happen without vocal and visible dissent from those affected.

To publicize our own concerns with the WTO, I sponsored, and the council unanimously passed, resolution number 29926 in April, expressing the Council’s ability to regulate and pass laws regarding environmental protection and fair labor practices within its jurisdiction and that it opposed international agreements that could restrict that ability. It was a small attempt to support those opposing WTO’s growing power.

Just as delegates from the 130 countries and the several thousand media correspondents were preparing to attend, so were citizen activists. I met with Mike Dolan from Public Citizen; a Ralph Nader initiated organization, in the spring of 1999 to discuss how to create an open environment in which citizens could be heard. Dolan was building community support by acquiring venues to accommodate a huge number of open educational meetings. Meanwhile another organization from San Francisco, the International Forum on Globalization, organized two-day teach-in the pristine downtown Bennaroya Symphony Hall. Each day more than 2,500 attendees packed the hall to listen to an analysis of how WTO was reshaping the world around profits not human needs.

Opposition to the WTO came from three groupings distinguished by their tactics and objectives. By far the largest one was a precedent setting alliance between organized labor and environmental groups, referred to as the “Teamsters and turtles” coalition, due to hundreds of protestors appearing in sea turtle costumes to protest WTO’s rules harming sea life. Labor leaders, for their part, wanted any new WTO trade agreement to set minimum labor standards in factories around the world, so as not to drag down labor agreements in the US.

Although they tussled over whether saving jobs or the environment was more important, they recognized that they faced a common fate of being sacrificed on the alter-of-trade if they didn’t ultimately shrink WTO’s authority. Their tactic was to organize and lead tens of thousands of demonstrators in a permitted march into downtown. I participated, walking alongside AFL-CIO President Sweeny and Congressman Dennis Kucinich, and a number of other labor and Congressional leaders who were present.

The second group, numbering perhaps a thousand, came together under an umbrella group, the Direct Action Network (DAN) whose publicized objective was to use non- violent civil disobedience (calling for no property destruction) to stop the WTO from meeting. Their long-term goal was to create a mass movement to challenge global capital, “making radical change and social revolution.” Their actions evolved from independent affinity groups that had been training for months on their tactics. They arrived downtown hours before the mass march was to arrive. By forming large circles of protestors with arms interlocked with duct tape or bicycle locks, they successfully blocked major intersections. Delegates were unable to enter the Washington State Convention & Trade Center while buses and cars were suddenly diverted around the downtown retail core to avoid the protestors.

The third and smallest group, numbering a hundred at most, consisted of militant anarchists, referred to the black block. They systematically blockaded streets with newspaper boxes and smashed the windows of retail outlets owned by exploitive corporations. They also reached the downtown core before the mass march. The media showered this group with attention while ignoring the anti-WTO forums. Throwing a garbage can through a store window certainly is more eye- catching than a snapshot of a room full of people listening to a lecture. But I couldn’t help but ask, which is better suited for building a lasting informed social movement for change?

As November 30, 1999 approached, public officials had recognized there would be thousands of protestors. Even President Bill Clinton told the workers at a Harley Davidson factory before heading to Seattle, “Every group in the world with an ax to grind is going to Seattle. I told them all, I wanted them to come…. I want everybody to get this all out of their system…” Mayor Paul Schell, a former war protestor himself, said Seattle would welcome all who came to protest peacefully against WTO. And I got the City Council, through a resolution, to request that the Mayor help accommodate all visitors arriving for the Ministerial, by encouraging “…organizations who are serving demonstrators coming to our community to explore opportunities to ensure adequate lodgings and home stays.” It was going to be needed; Mike Dolan informed me that there were 750 Accredited Non-Governmental Organizations actively recruiting people to attend the WTO ministerial.

I had attended a number of meetings between our police leadership and leaders of the mainstream protestor groups, to see if they could agree promote on how to proceed with the demonstrations. Representatives from both sides were cautious and the meetings were inconclusive. The reality was that dissent would be taking many forms and no amount of volunteer parade marshals could keep folks walking in a straight line down the road. There was anger in the air that the City did not take into account.

Our police showed pictures to the councilmembers of what happened sixteen months earlier at the WTO’s second ministerial conference in Geneva, Switzerland. Five thousand protestors gathered there, firebombing three autos and damaging other cars and stores. The Seattle police were scared but the mainstream protest leaders assured them they would lead a peaceful march.

As I walked down first avenue with thousands other protestors from the huge AFL-CIO rally held about a mile north of downtown, I felt that we would show the world how much opposition there was to WTO’s plans. At the front of the march were labor leaders and Congressmen. When we reached the retail core, we were to proceed to a gathering spot and not continue to the Convention Center; however, some protestors emerged from the march and encouraged us to veer towards it. Confusion reigned and the march splintered into smaller streams of protestors. Meanwhile the DAN group blocked the main intersections and the black block faction attacked Starbuck and Nike stores, spraying graffiti on their windows that had not been smashed.

Perhaps stunned by the violence and not prepared for a strategic response the police initially failed to intervene with those smashing windows. The parades’ monitors took up protective positions outside some of the retail stores, fearing that the plate glass windows being shattered by handkerchief- masked anarchists would overshadow their own orderly protesting. Even as the police began using tear gas to break up DAN’s circles to allow the WTO delegates to enter the Convention Center, a couple of blocks away other protestors, many in costumes, chanted, waved signs and even danced in the streets. David Solnit, one of DAN’s organizers, described the scene as a festival of resistance, from which the labor leaders and congressional representatives quietly slipped away.

With the situation deemed dangerous for the upcoming visit of President Clinton, Mayor Schell declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew on most of downtown starting at 7:00 p.m. The police moved into the crowds in late afternoon using pepper spray, tear gas and rubber bullets to end the demonstrations and property damage. Several hundred protestors were pushed up into the dense residential Capitol Hill neighborhood abutting the Convention Center. Not confident of securing downtown for the next day, Mayor Schell issued another emergency order establishing a “no protest zone” — in 25 blocks of downtown. Governor Locke called in the National Guard, so that by daylight on Wednesday, troops lined its perimeter. Police then used tear gas to disperse any crowds; more than 500 people, including downtown residents and employees leaving work, were jailed that day for not clearing out from the heart of downtown Seattle. In the evening, hard- core protestors returned to shout and throw debris at the police, who responded with concussion grenades and large quantities of tear gas, fearing they would be overrun. The fire fighters’ union refused a request to turn their fire hoses on the protestors.

Although accusations were repeated in the media that firebombs and bags of urine were thrown at the officers, later investigations revealed them to be unfounded. Wednesday evening, the protestors and the police were once again in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, infuriating residents, as their main retail street became a battleground. Having lived on Capitol Hill for twenty-five years I walked the familiar streets talking to both police officers and protestors, in a vain attempt to lower the level of hostility. There was no room for any rationale dialogue in an atmosphere filled with fear and pepper gas. On Thursday, the President left and both the police and the protestors ratcheting down their confrontations while the WTO meeting petered out.

Did the massive and confrontational expression of citizen dissent achieve its objective? They did play the most visible role in stopping the WTO from reaching a new trade agreement. However, it was also widely acknowledged that intense divisions among its delegates contributed to that failure. It remains as the only one of nine WTO meetings held up to 2013 that did not issue a Ministerial Declaration, perhaps because it was the only one that experienced massive citizen opposition. Other WTO Ministerials were held in places that did not allow or severely restricted demonstrations, like Dubai and Singapore, or were in difficult places to reach with few accommodations like Cancun. And, those that were held in Geneva never saw as many protestors as appeared in Seattle.

Supporters of WTO and those critical of the protestors, accused political leaders of inviting trouble when they encouraged citizens to Seattle to demonstrate their opposition. They ignored the basic principle of our American democracy, a strong faith in the right to assemble and protest. Seattle, known as a tolerant city, was portrayed as naïve in expecting things to go peacefully. Perhaps, but more importantly, the City was not prepared for massive demonstrations. Review reports issued from the ACLU, the Police Department and the City Council all concluded that our police force was not properly trained for crowd control or for moving in quickly to isolate those destroying property.

While both DAN members and the police agreed in advance that their members would be arrested peacefully, the police relied on teargas and pepper spray to accomplish that task, which needlessly affected all those nearby. Perhaps the worse example of police response was their pursuit of protestors up to Capitol Hill where uninvolved residents, business owners and shoppers found themselves breathing in teargas or even arrested for being in the wrong spot while the police rounded up protestors. Those actions and the Mayor’s enactment of a no protest zone treated many citizens as criminals. Eight years later in January 2007, a federal jury found that the city had violated protesters’ Fourth Amendment constitutional rights by arresting them without probable cause or hard evidence.

Although the Council passed the Mayor’s emergency declarations, I and Councilmembers Peter Steinbrueck, and Richard Conlin voted against it. After WTO meeting ended the city council held two public hearings to allow citizens to air their grievances. The first evening went from 4 pm to 1 am and the second one took almost as long, with over three hundred people testifying. Their complaints were similar to the emails I received; a few blamed the protestors for all the trouble but most were critical of the police response.

“Mr. Licata, they are smashing up downtown, you’re personally responsible, since you supported them.”

“You welcomed the protestors, in Seattle 52 years, it’s become a sewer, why aren’t you in Westlake to quite these people down. Why wasn’t City prepared for anarchists? You expect taxpayers to pay for all this? I’d fine them, make them clean it up, and then cut their nuts off.”

“Yesterday Police let hooligans get away with too much. Today people with legitimate protests are being mistreated. Disgusted with situation.”

“I’m upset about Police actions downtown, throwing tear gas canisters at peaceful protestors all day; I’m a resident and taxpayer, and got a mouthful of it. I’m outraged that Police we pay to protect us would do this.”

“I was impartial about events before, but seeing what Mayor and SPD have done is wrong and illegal, going way too far, hope there are repercussions for Mayor and the Police Department.”

“The Police action on Capitol Hill last night, was like a military action, it was indiscriminate, no reason for it. Whoever authorized it should be fired.”

Police Chief Norm Stamper resigned soon after the protestors and the WTO delegates left town. Latter he said using tear gas was wrong and that there was a need to move away from paramilitary tactics in policing. Mayor Paul Schell lost his next election, failing to get past the primary, in part due to the WTO events.

The City Council formed a special WTO Accountability Review Committee, which convened three independent citizen panels and had staff review more than 14,000 documents accompanied by interviews with key individuals. The Council then passed three separate pieces of legislation. The first (Ordinance 120096) required every SPD peace officer to wear a nametag on the outermost layer of the peace officer’s uniform, since many accusations of police abuse could not be traced to any specific officer. The second (Resolution 30340) implemented a new process notifying the Council of any solicitation of major events and allowed them to formally review any requests made of the city. This would allow the City Council an opportunity to have a public process, if necessary, for evaluating the impact of a controversial gathering. Lastly, the procedures used to declare and/or terminate a civil emergency were modified to allow greater Council control over how long one would remain in force.

The WTO meeting came to be known at the Battle in Seattle. Were the protests a legitimate expression of concern for our citizens wanting to protect their jobs and quality of life? Or as critics charged, were they hooligans and anarchists intent on destroying our civil society? Observations from both the police and the media noted that the later group made up less than a half percent of all who protested.

Despite the critics who charged that Seattle’s reputation had been irreversibly damaged, overall holiday sales rose 6 percent in 1999 and Seattle has gone on to become one of the most economic prosperous cities in the country, while still promoting strong labor protection laws and environmental regulations.

All parties agreed that the public suddenly became aware of the WTO and its growing international power. Despite the media’s attention on the vandalizing of property, a month later, in January 2000, a Business Week opinion poll found that 52 percent of Americans sympathized with the WTO protestors in Seattle. What had been had been buried in the back pages of the business section had now emerged as an important topic of debate within our democracy. The massive turn out by thousands of protestors in Seattle proved the effectiveness of citizens exercising their right to publically and forcefully dissent to alter the course of their democracy when it threatens their livelihood and quality of life.

Nick Licata was on the Seattle City Council 18 years and the founding chair of Local Progress. The Nation named him Most Valuable Local Official in 2012.

Six colleges are using Becoming A Citizen Activist for classroom texts. Reviews of his book as well as his other writings are available on the website.

www.BecomingaCitizenActivist.org

Contact him at nick@becomingacitizenactivist.org

If Politicians Actually Want to Make Change, They Have to Think Like Organizers

This 8-page PDF brochure details “Six strategies to empower your constituents and help get you the votes you need to pass progressive legislation.”

>> Download the brochure <<.

Speaking at People’s Convention in Pittsburgh

by Rebecca Addison at Pittsburgh City Paper – July 6, 2016

In Seattle’s 2013 election, Nick Licata broke the city’s record for the most votes received citywide for a city councilor in a contested race. That same year he was named the country’s Most Valuable Local Official on The Nation’s list of most valuable progressives.

During his time on council, Licata sponsored and passed legislation like paid sick leave and supported a plan to raise Seattle’s minimum wage to $15 an hour, two social-justice objectives sought by activists around the country. At the end of last year, the veteran Seattle city councilor retired after 18 years in office.

That’s not the end of Licata’s social-justice crusade, however. This week he’ll visit Pittsburgh to attend two conventions on social-justice issues and share insights from his recently released book, Becoming a Citizen Activist.

Nick_Pittsburgh
During Donald Trump’s Pittsburgh visit in April, social-justice activists were protesting in full force.

“My primary mission right now,” says Licata, “is to work with both citizens and elected [officials] to recognize that no matter what happens after November, it’s critical that we maintain an activist space at the local level, because we’ve shown at the local level we can accomplish things, and we can continue to accomplish things no matter who is president.”

Pittsburgh and other cities haven’t seen as much progress on paid sick leave and the Fight for $15 as has Licata’s native Seattle. Pittsburgh City Council passed a paid-sick-leave bill last year, but a judge struck it down in December as unenforceable. And while the city and some employers have raised their minimum wage to $15 an hour, a mandatory minimum wage citywide is a ways away.

But Pittsburgh must be doing something right because it was selected to host those two social-justice conventions. The People’s Convention will bring more than 40 national activist organizations to the city, while the Local Progress Convening will see the arrival of hundreds of progressive municipal elected officials.

“Pittsburgh was identified as a place where [the] movement is very real,” says Erin Kramer, executive director of social-justice group One Pittsburgh. “There’s more workers organizing per capita in Pittsburgh than any other city in the country right now. There’s something happening in Pittsburgh right now, and folks want to come see it and learn from it.”

The pairing of the events isn’t an accident. They’re both sponsored by the Center for Popular Democracy, a group that works to build alliances between progressive organizations and politicians. Participants say collaboration between the two bodies is integral to ensuring progressive laws are passed and enacted.

“It is very important for elected officials who are trying to advance social change to have a direct understanding of the specific concerns of communities,” says Ana Maria Archila, co-executive director of Popular Democracy. “And it’s very important for community members to have relationships with elected officials. We know in the places where working families are winning we need both the pressure on the outside and the strategy on the inside.”

Jimmy John’s employee Chris Ellis has worked in the fast-food industry for more than two decades and has become a leader in the local Fight for $15. At the People’s Convention next week, he’ll have the opportunity to meet leaders from movements in other cities throughout the country.

“[I hope to learn] better organizing skills not just for the Fight for $15 movement but for all movements in general,” Ellis says. “I’m the type of person who sees myself trying to organize other fights, because once this fight is over, I’m looking for other fights.”

The interconnectedness of social-justice issues is widely recognized by activists. The People’s Convention will focus on topics like workers’ rights, health care, gun violence and education — issues that One Pittsburgh, which is part of the hosting committee, has been working on for more than a decade. The idea is to collaborate on these issues to build momentum and produce results.

“In Pittsburgh there’s lots of progressive work on half-a-dozen different issues at any given time, and increasingly those organizations are building partnerships with each other,” says Kramer, from One Pittsburgh. “We’ve been getting together to learn from each other and build our campaigns together. What I think folks are increasingly realizing is whether it’s housing, minimum wage or education justice, it’s really the same people who need to come together to build power to build a city that works for all of us.”

The event will develop strategies for appealing to lawmakers, but will also address barriers in cities where the majority of elected officials are already supportive of social-justice movements.

“Increasingly, we find ourselves literally preempted from solving problems at the local level by state legislatures that are unfriendly to the solutions we would propose,” says Kramer. “A good example is where we passed paid-sick-day legislation for tens of thousands of people in Pittsburgh and immediately it goes in front of the court because the restaurant association [the Pennsylvania Restaurant and Lodging Association] objects. The reason we don’t have a $15-an-hour minimum wage for the vast majority of Pennsylvanians is because you can’t do that at the city level.”

Combating these barriers that stifle progress at the municipal level — and particularly, developing strategies for fighting lawsuits against progressive laws — is something that will be discussed at the Local Progress convention this weekend as well.

“It’s the strategy,” says Licata, a Local Progress co-founder. “It’s smart on [the opposition’s] part, and I think that’s what we’ll see in other cities — corporate strategy to try to limit [these laws]. What I would like to see as we see more of these lawsuits being filed is Local Progress use our network to work on national strategies to fight these corporate challenges through the court system.”

To ensure laws fall within a city’s jurisdiction, Local Progress has also been holding workshops to examine the power that states hold over local municipalities. And they’re also looking into legislation that is being passed to further limit cities’ rights.

“As a rule of thumb, cities are creatures of the state,” says Licata. “Over half the states limit the authority of cities, and one of the ongoing battles we’re having that impacts local politics is the whole issue of states limiting citizens’ rights. We’ve been fighting on that. It’s a major concern.”

Ultimately, as a former activist turned politician turned activism author, Licata says the intersection of the two events and collaboration is important to ensuring that things like paid sick leave and a $15-an-hour minimum wage are realized.

“People at the People’s Convention and the politicians at Local Progress are literally the same people. A lot of the people at Local Progress were activists,” he says. “When someone gets elected to office, people who got the person elected to office think he or she will take care of the problems, and the person who gets elected thinks, ‘Oh, I have to act differently.’ But you have to continue organizing and use the power you get as an elected official to amplify your organizing.

“Government is a tool. It’s not an end-product. I think getting into office does give you more power, but you want to distribute that power so other people have access to power. The main ask of progressive politicians who want to build communities is to disperse the power that was given to them to as many people as possible.”

According to Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, who as city councilor joined Local Progress nearly a decade ago, the group can counterbalance those organizations that are trying to get conservative legislation passed.

“Certainly we’ve learned from other cities through these organizations,” says Peduto. “We hear a lot about ALEC [American Legislative Exchange Council] and how it is a network that is putting state legislatures into very conservative, Tea Party-type of policies, and it networks nationally. Well, this is the answer, and these organizations have become the network that helps progressive policies to work their way into implementation in city halls. And the fact that they chose Pittsburgh to do it shows that we are a part of that network and one of the areas that the rest of the country looks towards.”

Like Peduto, event organizer Popular Democracy hopes its network of activists and politicians will have the ability to shape the future of the country.

“It’s a really important moment politically because our nation is at a crossroads between the politics of hate and xenophobia and the politics of opportunity and interdependence,” says Popular Democracy’s Archila. “We are in the process of a presidential election where the issues that matter to the working-class community are really centrally positioned in the debate. How the solutions are advanced will depend on who is in motion. And we will have in Pittsburgh thousands of people who are in motion across the country and who are helping define the debate for what’s possible in their cities.”

The Boxer and the Preacher

We generally don’t think of boxing champion Muhammad Ali closely identified with Martin Luther King Jr.  Certainly, they were national figures admired by many for their leadership and the most visible black leaders of their time. They were also brave heroes by speaking out at a time when other national prominent figures were silent or whispering their doubts about the wisdom of pursuing the Vietnam War.

On April 4th 1967, King delivered his first public antiwar speech at New York’s Riverside Church. Two weeks later, boxing champion Muhammad Ali refused to be inducted into the U.S. Army in opposition to the war.

They both paid dearly for taking such a stand. At the time when they both stood up and declared that our democracy had gone astray and the injustices within our own nation could not be addressed without acknowledging that our nation was playing a similar role overseas. It was not a popular position and at that time it was considered blasphemous;  public support of the Vietnam War was at its peak — in the first three months of 1966, the war’s approval rating was over 50 percent, according to Gallup.

Ali was immediately stripped of his heavyweight title, which he had just won. Within two months he was convicted of draft evasion, sentenced to five years in prison, fined $10,000 and banned from boxing for three years. He was at the peak of his career, he could have gone quietly and worked out some arrangement with the military, but he was not going to be a tool. Instead, he became a hated public figure and spent the next four years of his life battling for his beliefs in the courts.

King received a rebuke from the press, with the New York Times claiming that King’s protest against the war was “wasteful and self-defeating” and likely to be disastrous for both his civil rights and his anti-war efforts.

The Washington Post said his usefulness to his cause, his country, and his people had been diminished, and those who had listened to him would never again be confident in his judgement. He did not spend his time in the courts, like Ali, but he was assassinated one year to the day after he gave that speech.

Now both have passed away and many will praise their fortitude in pursuing the principle of justice upon which our democracy was founded. Nevertheless, our praise will be shallow unless we recognize that to honor the bravery of the dead should encourage us to be brave ourselves in the pursuit of justice.

Council Dynamics on Monday’s Surprise Vote

full_city council

I’ve been to many council meetings over 18 years but yesterday’s full council meeting truly stands out as one for having a surprise ending.
 
Before jumping into how the councilmembers got to their final vote, it was evident that they all had done their homework. The debate was mature and rested entirely on understanding the practical consequences of their actions and the legal restraints that they were operating under. It was one of the best demonstrations one could imagine of how a legislative body should perform.
 
The history of the council supporting a new arena to be built in the SODO area has largely been framed within the context of balancing the public costs and benefits. Those benefits are not only measured in direct public financial subsidies against general economic gain, but also on the impact that project would have on the kind of jobs that would be eliminated and gained, and on the recognition that having a third professional sports team in Seattle would be greatly appreciated by many citizens. 
 
The vote was seemingly a trifle one. It would have simply been a filing with the City Clerk to vacate a public street, i.e. allow a private use of a public piece of property. This was something that had been seen as necessary condition by the proponents of building a new basketball/hockey arena in order to go forward with the project. So, voting against a street vacation was framed as a vote on whether the City should proceed with this project. That was the big picture. The devil of course always hides in the details.
 
By law when the city vacates a public street it must way the value of what the public benefits from giving up a public resource. Vacating this portion of Occidental Street would provide a public benefit of securing a professional basketball team, since a new arena could then be built in this location. The problem for the proponents was that there was no team waiting to come to Seattle. The NBA Commissioner outlined a process for providing Seattle a new team that would easily push that decision into 2018.  The developer and new owner of the proposed team Chris Hansen, only has until November of 2017 to obtain one, in order to meet the requirements set forth in a written agreement with the city, referred to as a Memorandum of Agreement (MOU).
 
If the council passed the legislation yesterday to vacate the street, Hansen would have gained another three and a half years to secure the team and preserved his right to obtain public financing. Without the street being vacated, it is highly unlikely that he will be able to secure a new team for Seattle by next November, hence a no vote was seen as a death knell for his proposed project. That did not eliminate him or another entrepreneur from attracting a team sometime afterwards, but both the SODO location and public financing would have to be renegotiated with the city – an arduous task.
 
Given that background, it was expected that the council would, perhaps reluctantly, agree to vacate the street. Mayor Murray had come out strongly in favor of that option and a prior vote in a council committee, which preceded the Full Council Committee’s meeting yesterday, had voted 4 to 1 (Sally Bagshaw dissenting) in favor of the legislation. The proponents only needed one more vote to pass it and three of the councilmembers (Debora Juarez, Lorena Gonzalez and Kshama Sawant) had not made their positions known. Lisa Herbold had already been critical of the proposed street vacation. (I should mention, as a former critic of the proposal, that I had no words with her or any of the councilmembers on this topic.)
 
The Full Council meeting on this matter began with Councilmember Tim Burgess proposing 3 cleanup amendments, which would make the arena operations accommodate other spectator events in that area and also address some traffic congestions issues: all solid, logical improvements that passed unanimously. These were necessary changes to assure that the other sport teams would not oppose sharing their turf, something that they had raised doubts about in the past. With this move, Burgess may have intended to eliminate one potential significant industry from stopping the legislation. It foreshadowed a victory around the corner for the arena folks.
 
Next, Councilmember Lisa Herbold offered her 3 amendments. The first was the most dangerous to the arena. She cleverly recognized that the MOU required Hansen to secure a team by November of 2017 otherwise it would expire. Her amendment tied the knot on the deal by, not necessarily denying the street vacation but by conditioning it to meet the requirements of the MOU: team was secured by that date, then the vacation would not take effect.
 
O’Brien smartly countered that passing the amendment would not allow for public funds, therefor passing it increased the chance that the arena would be built with private funds, assuming that Hansen did not ask for public funding as he has in the past. His argument played to the sentiment of most of the other councilmembers, who would prefer to have it built with private money and not publicly financed.
Herbold pointed out that public financing was not her main point, she countered that the public benefit is securing the team, without making that a requirement then the public benefit is not necessarily realized.
 
Her amendment went down 6 to 3 (Herbold, Bagshaw and Juarez being the yes votes.) Juarez had not spoken up so it was a bit of a surprise that she took this strong position. However, it was not certain by any means where she would go on the final vote. With only Herbold and Bagshaw expecting to vote no on the street vacation, it was highly unlikely that the councilmembers who voted against limiting the street vacation would then turn around and vote against approving the street vacation.
 
Herbold’s other two amendments, while offering some constraints on the arena project, passed without debate. Likewise an amendment from Lorena Gonzalez’s that safeguarded freedom of speech and assembly on the property of the vacated street also passed without debate. Gonzalez’s amendment was a very good one, but it could be assumed that it had met her major concerns so that she could vote in favor of the street vacation.
 
Bagshaw’s final statement in which she appealed to her colleagues to change their minds and vote against the street vacation, reminded me of the same pitch I had made to the other councilmembers in the past on other long shot efforts and I truly felt for her – an obvious hopeless pitch.
           
When Council President Bruce Harrell (who did a very fair and efficient chairing of the meeting) asked for the final wrap up statements from the other councilmembers, the absolutely best that opponents could count on was losing in a 5 to 4 vote to approve the legislation.
           
It was possible that Juarez might come out against it, given her vote to support Herbold’s amendment. And with a passionate speech she indeed voted against the legislation. Councilmember Kshama Sawant had been quiet during the debate, with the exception of asking some questions, so it was unclear where she would land. When she gave her final statement it continued in that vein until she concluded that she would vote against it. Suddenly the best scenario had played out – 4 votes against vacating the street.
           
All eyes then turned to councilmember Gonzalez. She had been attentive asked critical questions, had introduced a good amendment that passed, so she could have voted in favor of the legislation and justified it by showing that she had taken her job seriously. But then came the surprise. She continued to present her thoughts in a straightforward fashion (reminding me of Burgess’s style) and concluded that she would vote against the street vacation.
           
Everyone, let me repeat, everyone was shocked by the turn of events. Every sign that this legislation was going to pass had been signaled clearly, and yet somehow on the dais, and apparently not before hand, councilmembers were still deciding how to vote. It was a very democratic moment, one that we too often don’t enjoy witnessing.
           
Hansen will have to rethink his strategy and the Mayor has vowed to continue his efforts to bring a professional basketball team to Seattle, so the game is not over. But for one afternoon a legislative body had a thoughtful discussion on how much to bend the rules for those with the most money on the table.

A Progressive Democrat Joins the right-wing ALEC organization

By Seattle City Councilmember Nick Licata

From Democracy and Media’s PR Watch 7/30/15

http://www.prwatch.org/news/2015/07/12894/blowing-whistle-alecs-little-brother-acce

You’re Not In Kansas Anymore

It’s true. I plopped down my $50 and became a member of ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), dedicated to the three principles of limited government, free markets and federalism. This is the basis of a right-wing movement in America to repeal existing government legislation that promotes social justice and economic equity, and stop any future such legislation.

However, while these three words are blazoned across their brochures, the literature inside says, “The goal of ALEC is to foster efficient, effective, accountable and transparent government that respects hardworking people.” Heck, I’ve always campaigned supporting these goals and I don’t know anyone right or left who wouldn’t. So I was intrigued by how such commonly shared goals could lead to such divergent paths toward a more democratic America.

I know the shorthand explanation. Nick, don’t be gullible, the corporations run ALEC and their members are ignorant ideologues or, at best, are being honestly mislead by corporate propaganda. I had to meet these people. I’ve met ignorant ideologues on both sides of the political spectrum. Did the right wing have more of them because corporations spend gobs of money on deception?

There was one problem in finding out—ALEC is open only to state legislators or private-interest parties, i.e. corporations or business associations. Being neither, I wouldn’t be able to get into their conference. A break came last year when ALEC formed ACCE (the American City County Exchange) for city and county public officials. It was to take ALEC’s organizational approach of helping these elected representatives pass laws that could cut taxes, limit government and promote free markets (i.e. turn over government services and functions to businesses).

I had assumed that this was a closed association, and that I would be required to take an oath or be screened and approved for admission. There have been democratic state legislators who experienced difficulty in getting admitted into ALEC meetings. But in the end, they were admitted. Why? Because ALEC is a 501c3 organization, which means that it cannot discriminate based on political beliefs if it wants to retain its advantageous tax status. The door was open, all I had to do was step through it and pay the admission charge. There I found that things were not as open as it might have appeared, but I’ll deal with the mechanics of how ALEC/ACCE operate in a later posting.

When I started tweeting (@nickjlicata) and posting on Facebook during my three days attending the joint ALEC/ACCE conference, the initial responses I received were of shock and bewilderment. What was I doing there? It was said that I had crashed this event. But as I point out it’s not about crashing it, since they legally can’t stop an elected from attending. Nevertheless, it does take some nerve to enter into a conference where everyone there has an adamantly different worldview and most likely will see you as the enemy.
The challenge for me, and in a way it is for all of us, is to get around seeing individuals as enemies. Yes, we have different strategies for protecting our democracy but we must listen closely to the other side to understand just how they hope to accomplish that, even when it turns our stomach because we can see how it will most likely cripple our democracy. You cannot sharpen a blade without grinding it against a tough stone. We have to do the same with our minds. If they are not challenged they become mere echo chambers for slogans.

In the following posts, I will introduce the people and leaders I met. I will let you know what they said during the meetings and afterwards. I will describe how ALEC and ACCE operate and how they have begun to reshape this nation to conform to their vision. I will reveal the divisions that exist within them and how those conflicts present an internal challenge to achieving their own goals. And I will talk about how the corporate interests shape these organizations and also how the most conservative elected officials complain about how those same corporations are corrupt.


Meet the folks who want to tear down government

If yesterday’s far left wanted to overthrow the government, today’s far right would just as soon get rid of most of it. The term “far right” implies a small fringe group, wanting to shove most of the federal apparatus into the dustbin of history, as Marx would say. However ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), is not a small fringe group, they claim to have a quarter of all state legislators as members.

Who are these people? They are not like the Occupy Movement’s youth who pitched tents in parks. They are more like their parents, who stayed at home and watched TV. But make no mistake, they are organized and well funded to carry their ideas forward.

About a 1,000 ALEC delegates and lobbyists attended their largest meetings at the San Diego Hyatt last week. I eyeballed three separate clusters at different times at the conference and the highest percentage of people of color I could count was 8 percent. Women delegates faired better at 20 percent. A handful of youthful interns from the Heritage Foundation kept order, although there was no rowdiness.

ALEC created ACCE (the American City County Exchange) in 2014 as a separate organization for municipal officials. I assumed ALEC’s corporate members initiated ACCE. That may be too simplistic a view, at least from what ACCE’s founder and Director Jon Russell told me.

Russell is a councilmember from the township of Culpeper, Virginia, with a population just under 20,000, which is 52% white, and 32% black. It would seem to be a city in need of federal assistance. The last census showed males had a median income of $28,658 and 27% of the population was below the poverty line. Russell, a father of four children, is white, as are eight of all nine councilmembers there.

Despite the differences in our politics I found that we had a similar past in organizing. Both of us started national networks of municipal officials to promote our political views. Jon had connections with about 20 other local politicians from his conservative advocacy work, and I had a similar number from my progressive national work.

I helped launch Local Progress in 2012 by calling together about 30 politicians, community organizers and non-profits. The following year Russell walked into ALEC and told them he wanted to start a conservative national network of municipal officials to carry out ALEC’s mission. They hired him as director and devoted their ample resources to building it. When he won his seat on Culpeper’s town council he was able to continue working for ALEC since his elected position was only part time. Meanwhile, the non-profit Center for Popular Democracy agreed to host Local Progress. The members raised money to pay for a CPD staff person to act as a part-time director and I served as chair.

Today Local Progress has 370 elected officials as members, and ACCE has 312, but they also have over 200 private interest partners. If those businesses pay separately to join ACCE, that would give Russell’s group well over $200,000 in annual income just through corporate membership fees. Although we are currently limiting our membership to cities, ACCE includes counties. We have no membership fees and do not charge for attending our annual conferences, while their fee is $50 per elected official and they charge anywhere from $200 to $700 to attend their meetings, depending on when one registers.

Russell told me that they give out limited grants since many of their members are from smaller towns that do not have budgets to support attending such conferences. I suspect there are a large number of such grants or corporate scholarships provided to those that they would like to see attend.

Russell intends to double his membership every year and sees the potential to eventually exceed ALEC’s since there are thousands more local officials than state legislators. Given the funds being poured into ALEC by corporations and foundations like the Koch Institute, not to mention access to ALEC’s 40 plus staff, ACCE could become a major player in shaping municipal policies. Their presence may not grow in the larger democratic cities, but there are thousands of smaller cities that could feel their impact.

Throughout ACCE’s second annual gathering, I sat in a small room with two-dozen members, all white like myself and mostly men, discussing how to limit government’s influence. Russell told the group, “We are looking at our work as pioneers of the future, not prison guards of the past.” Their first publication outlining that future comes out later this year, to be followed by white papers on federalism & local control best practices.

ALEC where corporations are people too

Unlike other political organizations of locally elected public officials, corporations, business associations, and think tanks are full voting ALEC members, referred to as the private-interest partners.

From talking to one private-interest member, the cost of joining ALEC is just over $1,000 but to vote in one of ALEC’s task forces that make policies, the cost goes above $3,000. I suspect that a higher contribution allows for greater participation: sort of a pay-to-play model. However, no fee schedule was available. I believe that a dozen corporations paid $50,000 a piece to just sponsor ALEC’s conference, and that another 42 paid at least $10,000 for that privilege.

While I could not attend ALEC’s task force meetings where corporations vote, I saw how corporations participated in ACCE’s meeting. There were five private-sector representatives at the initial orientation meeting of 15 attendees: two represented tobacco interests, including one from RJ Reynolds Tobacco, two bail bond interests, and one from the Americans for Progressive Bag Alliance, the folks who fight plastic bag bans. Some weren’t actually from corporations but lawyers servicing those businesses. At no time did I count more than 7 private sector members at a meeting, and they were always out numbered two to one by the public sector members.

All ALEC task forces, and ACCE in this case, have two co-chairs, one from the private sector and one from the public sector. At our meeting, they were Nicholas Wachinski, an attorney and former director of the American Bail Coalition, and a self-declared Democrat. The other was Mayor John Harkins of Stratford, Connecticut, and former Connecticut House Republican Caucus Chairman.

Over the two days of ACCE meetings, there were never more than 30 people in attendance. Forty-two had registered for the ACCE conference, which was held simultaneously with the ALEC meeting, sharing breakfasts and lunch to hear national speakers.

The ACCE panels covered the following topics: streamlining the permitting process as proposed by one councilmember; increasing the use of PVC piping to replace metal piping pitched by a company selling that product; exploring the use of body cameras by the head of the police union, who made an even-handed presentation; the role of federalism as a defense of state preemption laws and stopping unfunded mandates by law professor Rob Natelson; and lobbyists presenting local free-market alternatives to payday loan companies being put out of business by federal consumer protection laws.

Some panels were just business reps pitching their products within the context of promoting more local control to get around federal regulations. However, in the case of preemption, it was a strategy for passing local right to work laws in states that didn’t have those restricting laws. This clearly promoted ALEC’s goal of overturning existing federal or state laws that provided worker or environmental protections in favor of letting the free market control local decision-making. One piece of advice that came from the attorney promoting his services for this approach: don’t mess with public employees right now, they’re too powerful. There are so many other pickings to go after, wait until you have enough political momentum to focus on them.

At the end of the two-day session the ACCE members broke into 4 small task forces to discuss and propose any resolutions for consideration. Two were brought forward and passed. One called for fair competition for city water projects, which was a way of allowing PVC pipes to be included in all bids. It was probably written with the help of the lobbyist promoting his client’s products.

The other motion encouraged ACCE members to push their state legislators to adopt Arizona’s legislation denying cities from passing any plastic bag bans. I pointed out to a member that this didn’t seem to be in alignment with federalism. He said that it was too confusing to have so many different local laws and this was a more pragmatic approach. Federalism went only so far.

Ironically, in the panel discussion on cities passing their own right to work laws, arguments were made that cities should be able to be exempt from state laws that allowed workers to organize for collective bargaining. In this instance, it didn’t matter if many cities had different rules within the same state. That proposal did not come up for a vote.

It takes a majority vote within both the private and public sectors to pass any legislation in ALEC or ACCE. If one sector disagrees with the proposal it does not pass. The public sector moves the motion and the votes are taken.

In this particular instance, the public officials spoke passionately in promoting the plastic bag bans. The corporate representatives were passive. They didn’t need to beat the drum. One public official emphatically said that she did not want local government to pay for inspectors to check on the thickness of bags. The resolution was packaged as protecting retailers and consumer choice and one amendment was added by another public official, “We believe that the free market is the best arbiter for container choice.” He could have added, “and for all other decisions.” (CMD has previously documented how public officials have been scripted by the ALEC private sector to take the lead in the debate over the bills sought by the private sector, as part of ALEC’s PR claims that the public sector is driving the legislation.)

ALEC’s Targets: Unions, the Supreme Court, Political Parties, & Bureaucrats

Unions are ALEC’s favorite whipping boy. When ALEC opened up their conference with Governor Scott Walker, he snapped that whip within his first few moments boasting “we took on the unions and won.” The crowd cheered. Even though union membership has been slashed by two-thirds from their peak in the mid-fifties, there are still enough left to be kicked around to show one’s allegiance to a free-market unfettered by over-paid complaining workers.

During one of ACCE panels a councilmember gave a thoughtful description of how a city’s permitting process could be streamlined, but then at the end he apologized for not laying off a bunch of city workers as it was part of a compromise to get his legislation passed.

While ALEC met inside the Hyatt in San Diego, several thousand union members and their supporters demonstrated outside opposing ALEC’s model legislation which would strip away the right of workers to organize and bargain for better working conditions. A councilmember speaking at our ACCE meeting chuckled after the sound of beating drums drifted up to the room. She smartly remarked, “We must be doing something right, if we can hear their drums.”

Later inside the elevator, several ACCE members chatted about how the demonstrators were bused in and they were just the same folks going to different sites. Another laughed and said that they were capitalists because they wanted jobs.

If the democrat dominated unions are scorned and dismissed as a nuisance, it’s the republican dominated SCOTUS (i.e. the Supreme Court) that is feared and loathed as an enemy of federalism and hence freedom. It seemed apparent to all present at ALEC that their recent decisions upholding gay marriage and the Affordability Care Act (aka Obamacare) trampled state sovereignty. That led to many a speaker on and off the stage to characterize SCOTUS as irrelevant and acting beyond its powers.

Gov. Mike Huckabee, renamed the Supreme Court the Extreme Court, telling an ALEC luncheon, that they “cannot make laws, they give thoughtful opinions, but they don’t have law making powers.” At another gathering, a speaker kept emphasizing how the court ‘s opinions – drawing out the last word so no one would miss her point, could be ignored since, “They don’t make laws, all they do is give opinions.”

Mark Meckler, the founder of the Tea Party Patriots and current President of Citizens for Self-Governance, argued for having a Convention of States to constitutionally limit the terms of the SCOTUS justices and possibly other federal judges.

Closer to home, at the ACCE meetings, the most apparent enemy to innovation were politicians’ own local city and county staffs and other politicians. It didn’t matter if they were Republicans or Conservatives.

Jon Russell, the director of ACCE, said the main purpose of their members was to rock the boat, get changes made. He told me how his own council was out of touch with the city’s substantial minority population, having only one black councilmember out of 9 when black residents made up close to a third of Culpeper’s population. He got the council elections moved, over opposition on the council but with the support of the local NAACP, from May to November in line with national elections in order to encourage more of the black community to vote.

A county commissioner in Indiana criticized the republican super majority controlled legislature for funding a rapid ride bus project through an income tax increase. He assured me that he opposed this mass transit project because of the funding not the project itself. He also shared with a small group of us that the Chamber was behind the income tax, because they didn’t want businesses to spend the money on the project and instead were willing to see their workers pay for it.

A Phoenix Councilmember complained to our ACCE meeting that city staff refused to give him information on how they handled the permit process. And, that other councilmembers, republicans and democrats alike, didn’t care to make any changes to speed up permitting because it would be too much work. He was surprised to find that even some businesses would just as soon keep the current practices because they didn’t want to fight the system.

Other examples continued throughout the ACCE conference: stubborn and incompetent government staff, lazy and even corrupt politicians regardless of party, although republicans came in for more berating because they should know better. Overall they were angry with the federal government, but often included the local ones they were supposed to be in charge of.

Next I’ll describe how the various clusters of fuming and frustrated ACCE & ALEC members create an organization that is both dynamic and riveted with contradictions.

Internal Divisions within ALEC

It is verifiable how large corporations push ALEC’s policies to allow them to maximize their profits while passing on the cost of mitigating any environmental damage they cause to the public sector. The same goes for the public picking up the tab for workers who need health care or housing because businesses do not pay wages that can sustain families. Nevertheless, there are deep anti-government currents within ALEC that are expressed more loudly by public officials (and think tank staff) than by the corporate representatives.

As I heard the speakers and saw the stacks of printed material available from the think tanks it was obvious that there are fissures within the ALEC membership on how they and corporations should relate to government. Most ALEC public sector members fall into one of three major factions: social conservatives and their closely aligned Christian conservatives; conservative Republican Party members; and libertarian conservatives and their closely aligned fiscal conservatives. The last group tends to be isolationists on foreign policy. Applause was light when Gov. Walker suggested to the lunch crowd that we “Put steel in front of our enemies as we go forward.”

But the divisions among the libertarian wing is minor in comparison to how both they and the social conservatives accuse mainstream Republicans of being sell outs to the system by being lax in pushing for “free market” solutions or reducing government. Mark Meckler, head of Citizens for Self-Governance, looked over a crowd of ALEC members and told them how he had never met so many liars as when he started lobbying state legislators to support a Convention of States.

The crowd gave a nervous chuckle and Meckler quickly assured them that he was sure not referring to anyone in the room. Some of those present were worried that a constitutional convention might go beyond requiring a balanced budget constitutional amendment and that it might drift into other areas far more radical. The bottom line is that the elected Republicans, who want to stay in office, will say they support something that they know they will only pursue if their constituents are behind it. That doesn’t cut it with the ideologues.

And, that is at the core of the tension within ALEC: those who really believe that government should shrink down to thimble size and those who know that at some point it just isn’t practical. The corporations that remain in ALEC support less government interference so they appear to be fine with the general concept (even though more than 100 corporations have dumped ALEC, as CMD has documented). So they may not publicly object to Texas Senator Ted Cruz accusing the federal government of having a tax structure that is purportedly leading this country toward a tyranny or West Virginia’s Solicitor General Elbert Lin telling the ALEC audience that EPA is abrogating state sovereignty.

At the end of the day, some of these public officials seemed to acknowledge that government serves some useful purpose. Some also see where it is incompetent or unresponsive, and they want taxes reduced. But what they don’t seem to see–and the corporations funding ALEC appear to be fine with that blind spot– is that too many corporations are not paying their fair share of taxes and some of them are also incompetent in providing services they take over from the government and services they provide to their customers.

Will ACCE become the ALEC for Cities and Counties?¬¬

In coming to the ALEC/ACCE conference my big question was, would the American City County Exchange (ACCE) be able to duplicate ALEC’s success in getting hundreds of bills passed around the country that cripple worker and environmental protections? Would it open the floodgates to corporate influence in shaping our urban political environment?

It seemed to me that ALEC may find success in suburban and smaller cities but not in the largest metropolitan areas. That’s because their demographic profile is like Congress’s: it’s primarily older white men, which is not the profile of our largest cities.

As of 2007 there were just over 19,000 municipal governments. Although 90% of them have populations under 25,000, the 100 cities with populations of more than 100,000 account for about 20% of the nation’s population. Those cities have significant minority populations. At least 35 of them have more than 33% black residents, and that is not counting the percentage of other minority groups.

That reality has led conservative state legislators to dice up state legislative districts to pack as many democrats into as few districts as possible, i.e. limiting the voter impact of the larger cities. Now that the Supreme Court has thrown out a challenge to creating nonpartisan commissions to draw those boundaries, ALEC and ACCE, in the name of protecting state sovereignty from SCOTUS, should be expected to redouble their efforts to fight these independent commissions that are designed to avoid gerrymandered districts.

While other major cities around the country have followed Seattle in raising the minimum wage, the right wing is pretty limited in what they can do to stop that effort – either within city councils or at the ballot box when proposed by initiative. As a result ACCE may continue to push laws and resolutions that make municipal governments cede their power to state legislatures. They can do this by stripping away the power of cities to control – or at least shape – their own economic environment. A perfect example: stopping cities from passing plastic bag bans by forcing them to go through the state legislature. This approach was deployed by ALEC for nearly two decades. Marching in lockstep with the legislative agenda of the NRA and the gun industry, ALEC peddled “preemption” of city laws through a claimed need for “consistency,” pitting rural gun owners against city efforts to control handgun crimes.

Although it wasn’t directly mentioned at this ACCE meeting, ALEC has long opposed paid sick leave or increasing the minimum wage, and ALEC has pushed Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s legislation to pre-empt paid sick leave in Milwaukee. ACCE has also embraced pre-emption in other areas while simultaneously pushing an effort by Brent Yessin, an attorney representing his organization My Check My Choice, to use counties to attack unions. This has resulted in a lawsuit about the legality of local bodies passing so-called “right to work” measures even though federal law expressly provides that certain union rules are governed by either federal or state laws.

It seems then ACCE’s primary mission will be to augment ALEC’s efforts to keep or gain control of the state legislatures. Consequently, progressive forces cannot assume that just passing good municipal legislation will be replicated in other states or that they are secure where they have been enacted.

With over 80% of the nation’s population living in urban areas, the debate will have to be framed around improving people’s lives, both socially and economically in that context. It is possible that by attacking “preemption” legislation coming from state legislatures dominated by ALEC and its funders, progressives may be able to reach out to those supporting federalism at the municipal level as a means for obtaining greater freedom– from prejudice and poverty.

Inside the conservative plan to take over city politics

By Nick Licata

First appeared in CrossCut 1/6/16

http://crosscut.com/2016/01/a-seattle-liberal-ventures-into-a-den-of-conservative-activism/

The conservative American Legislative Exchange Council is the most successful political force, left or right, producing state legislation in the country. A bar chart produced by Quorum, a third party data research firm, proudly displayed at ALEC’s annual Policy Conference early last month in Scottsdale, coldly revealed their power. Under their motto of “limited government, free markets and federalism,” ALEC members introduced and enacted more than half of all state legislation around the nation. But what most caught my attention was the 2-to-1 ratio that ALEC’s mostly Republican members held over Democrats in legislative successes.

Two years ago, ALEC started a municipal division called the American City and County Exchange to duplicate this conservative juggernaut’s success at the municipal level. They now claim to have over 300 members, although only a couple dozen showed up for last month’s meeting. Some of the members are business representatives, referred to as “private sector partners.” Business members have voting rights and hold one of ACCE’s co-chair positions, and no policy positions are taken without both groups approving, along with ALEC’s board.

This was the second ACCE meeting that I — a Seattle City Council member until last week — have attended. They certainly knew my progressive politics from my extensive blogging about the first visit that I posted on the Center for Media and Democracy’s PR Watch. I returned, in part, to see if, as their founder and director Jon Russell had told me, that some day his group will be bigger than ALEC.

When I asked Russell if he was disappointed with the turnout of only a couple dozen, he pointed out that most of their members pay their own way and, unlike ALEC, no scholarships are provided for ACCE attendees. Even so, he said, he is on track to double attendance every year.

Strangely, ALEC seems to have taken a lackadaisical attitude toward ACCE. Although the Legislative Exchange hired Russell to run the organization, Russell has no staff beyond an intern he’s been promised for next summer. Perhaps they were purposely playing poor for my benefit but ACCE’s event was relegated to a single side room, with faulty audio-visual equipment and a slap-dash feel to their panels with no placards or even projected titles and names of their speakers.

Nevertheless, if ALEC’s billionaire right-wing/libertarian backers decide to spread the gospel of federalism to cities, ACCE could become a national player in foiling any number of progressive municipal measures. Or it could initiate its own regressive ones. It’s a prospect that progressives, perhaps even in Seattle, should be wary of.

The federalist playbook —ALEC likes to emphasize the power of states and the limits, as it sees it, that should be placed on the federal government — was on display when two private sector partners spoke on an ACCE panel. Their pitch, warmly received by the audience, was that their members had to protect the free market from municipal governments arbitrarily passing environmental protection laws. They said local environmental measures should only be allowed where cities and counties had received authority to act on an issue, such as the use of plastic shopping bags, from their state government. It’s an approach we’ve seen in the Northwest, where, for instance, the Washington Legislature considered (but didn’t pass) measures that would have prohibited Seattle and other cities from implementing their bans on the giveaway of plastic shopping bags by most retailers.

Jacki Pick, executive vice president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, zeroed in on stopping cities from banning fracking. As the host of The Jacki Daily Show, she is a national figure promoting oil drilling, oil pipelines and fracking. She made no mention of the corporations benefiting from fracking. Instead, her point was how liberals were destroying job opportunities while they were increasing government payrolls. Her paranoia is in line with Republican Presidential Candidate Ted Cruz’s message that man-made climate change is a liberal plot to increase government power at the expense of working people.
A spokesman for the plastic industry on the panel attacked municipal plastic bag bans as harmful to local businesses. He said studies showed that communities lose up to 10 percent of their retail trade and the jobs that went with them. No data was shown to back up that claim.

At the heart of both panelists’ presentations was the loss of individual liberties through these intrusive government policies. This belief was echoed repeatedly throughout the conference as speaker after speaker reminded the audience of the Federalist Papers and how they formed the backbone of this nation’s constitution: a vastly overstated importance attributed to the writings of primarily two men, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. It was never mentioned that these “papers” were never adopted by any national gathering of the founders.

Given the panelists’ insistence on curbing local decision makers, I asked how ALEC/ACCE could promote federalism but not allow municipal governments to protect their residents. Trent England, of the Oklahoma Council for Public Affairs, said that liberals use a kind of jujitsu by arguing that conservatives were abandoning their belief in federalism in favor of individual business interests. England said local governments are creations of the state. And, under his view of constitutional federalism, it’s the states that are enshrined with real powers, as well as responsibilities for protection of liberties.
However when it came to workers rights, the attendees made a sharp exemption to states being the ultimate decider on individual rights. A model Local Right to Work Ordinance from ACCE was specifically pursued to allow counties in states with no such law to pass their own laws hindering the establishment of unions and preventing any requirement that workers join or pay dues for union representation.

Real social and economic problems expose how limited the federalist solutions would actually be in addressing urban issues. For instance, there was widespread recognition among even the most conservative attendees that this nation is in the grip of a drug and mental health crisis. I was surprised how many said that just jailing those taking drugs would not solve this tremendous problem. There were repeated calls for greater support for mental health facilities and drug treatment centers, including needle exchanges. Diversion from jail to treatment was a mantra. This approach is in total alignment with liberals wanting to halt the criminalization of many youth of color.

The second area was the strong cautionary note expressed by ACCE members during informal conversations about using TIF’s (tax incremental financing) to promote economic development. Under a TIF, a new business is attracted to a neighborhood that lacks jobs in exchange for receiving a tax benefit commensurate with the new taxes that they generate. ACCE members pointed out that TIF’s were shrinking their city’s tax base making it difficult to provide basic services to the new businesses and workers. One councilmember was aghast how the boundary of a TIF had been applied to an entire town in a desperate attempt to attract businesses. In the pursuit of cutting taxes they were financially strangling their own governments — the exact point made by progressives on the general use of business tax breaks, including the many enacted by Washington state.

Despite these few instances of alignment with the concerns of progressives in cities across the country, the greater push by the participants was to promote free market solutions by eliminating public regulations. That’s something that the Koch brothers, and other billionaires like them, have embraced as a way to keep their profits growing ever higher. But I wasn’t surrounded by billionaires, or even millionaires.

These were middle class, mostly white people, who were on a mission to save this nation from their own government, regardless of what corporations were doing. I could not grasp how they could rationalize ignoring the effects of policies serving billionaires rather than their communities or how they could miss that their policies were weakening democracy not saving it. I asked Russell, the founder of ACCE, “Doesn’t the concentration of wealth negatively effect the functioning of a free market economy? Shouldn’t a democracy protect its people from a distorted market place through government regulations?”

His answer was straightforward. “It’s not the government’s business. It shouldn’t be in the business of managing wealth.” Furthermore, he went on to say, it is a value judgment to say that concentrating wealth is a detriment to a free market.

And this logic leads back to their main tenet, which is the belief that federalism is the answer to what is wrong with this nation. As Russell explained it, the left doesn’t talk about federalism because progressives basically believe that government is good, and to accomplish greater good, government should grow. This is the antithesis of federalism, which, as he sees it, is based on individual responsibility.

“Government is not everything to all people,” he assured me with a smile. “If people don’t take care of themselves, well that’s a role for non-profits to address, not government.”
Much has been written how ALEC is a tool of a corporate strategy to protect their wealth and political influence. While that characterization can be documented, it overlooks the ideology that binds their membership together. And that belief system makes ALEC a formidable political force in this country; a belief that, at its most basic level, is a distrust of government and by extension distrust in democracy as a guarantor of individual liberties.

The right wing seeks to limit government because its followers fear government; it is the enemy. We need to address this dogma head on by reclaiming government as the voice of the people. If we do not, corporations will continue to blind voters to the corrupting power that companies exert over government, in part by funding ALEC — and now ACCE — to pursue their objectives at the municipal level. The only effective countervailing force will be electing leaders who will stand up to this

When I asked Oklahoma-based panelist England who he believes is the final arbitrator of which individual liberties should be protected, he had to admit, “The decider is ultimately the ballot box. The people decide through the democratic process.” Elections are critical because they decide who controls the most important institution in our democracy: the government.

We have seen how successful the billionaires and corporations can be in states. ACCE and its agenda must be confronted on the playing field of municipal elections. Otherwise, the right wing will ultimately head off the attempts in Seattle and other city governments to deal with the way those with money and power are controlling our democracy.

From the Cities a Progressive Movement Will Rise

By Seattle City Councilmember Nick Licata

First appeared in Huffington Post December 23, 2014

Progressives have been getting their asses kicked by conservatives, and it’s not pretty. The next few election cycles are going to matter a great deal, and if we don’t pull ourselves together we are only going to face more losses at the polls.

I do not know what is going to happen in the Presidential election in 2016, but I do know this: If we progressives don’t get back to the basics, to the nuts and bolts of arguing our side effectively and passing reform-minded legislation and winning elections, we will essentially be conceding the nation’s future to groups like the Tea Party.

It’s time we recognize that the right-wing free marketers have captured the nation’s zeitgeist. The plurality of people now say they favor so-called conservative values, i.e. freedom from government, over progressive values, i.e. freedom from want. Complain all you want about the downsides of this philosophy (there are many), and tell me that the Tea Party has been deviously funded and usurped by corporate America and the Koch Brothers (I agree), but the Tea Party movement’s message of freedom from big government resonated with the public, and they seized on that in enviable ways. The Tea Party went from disrupting Democratic town hall meetings over Obamacare to organizing a thorough takeover of government through the Republican Party. They won seats and they pressured center-right officials in the GOP to embrace the fringe. True, the wealthiest one-percent is funding the Tea Party movement in an overt effort to dismantle the public sector, but the Tea Party has also worked hard at organizing the vote. They did not abandon electoral politics for street demonstrations.

While Obama won the 2012 Presidential election, the Tea Party won more seats in Congress, and, aided by unfair gerrymandering, pressed their advantage in 2014. Tea Party organizers have outspent and out-organized progressives. In the 2012 congressional races, they targeted nine million voters who were undecided about Obama’s economic record. And they won.

How do we respond to all this? One thing that’s certain is that we can’t keep doing things the same way and expect different results. The only real way is by engaging in hard grassroots work: We need to rebuild the foundations of Progressivism with clearly defined goals that connect to regular people. We need to get back to the tradition of passing local progressive legislation. We can do this by strengthening the ties between our community based organizations outside of government with our allied elected officials inside government. This is the path of revitalizing our nation’s democracy through our cities, where labor and community-based organizations are working with local politicians to make dramatic improvements in people’s daily lives.

Local Progress, the nation’s largest collection of progressive elected representatives from cities and counties, is taking the lead. Launched just over two years ago, Local Progress has already been featured in The Nation, which delightfully called us “Pothole Progressives.” We have grown from fewer than fifty members to over three hundred members from forty states, one-third of whom attended its third annual meeting earlier this month in New York City, which featured an introductory speech by Mayor Bill de Blasio (“We all reference each other,” de Blasio noted, “We all build on each other’s work. Every time we succeed, it builds momentum for other cities.”). We attended wonky but inspirational lectures about the economy, social justice, livable cities, and effective government; we talked, and we learned.

Housing, sustainability, police-training and procedure reform – there is a lot going on at the local level. We are conditioned in this era to expect big change now, but that hasn’t worked for us, so why not try to build our successes more deliberately, so that our impact is something stronger than a media sound bite?

Local Progress operates as a national municipal policy network that helps city council members and mayors exchange information on how to pass legislation to improve the lives of their residents. Just as importantly, it is weaving into this network labor groups and activist organizations to turn out their members to support these efforts. Local Progress members have scored victories already, passing paid sick days, minimum wage and living wage legislation in over two dozen cities since its formation.

With over fifty percent of the population living in our biggest thirty-five metropolitan areas, it is critical to organize urban areas and pass legislation that demonstrates to the nation that progressive solutions strengthen our democracy. Moreover, we can’t sit around for the Presidential election in 2016 and hope for a strong progressive turnout; every year there are important council laws, elections and ballot issues that present that opportunity. We must demonstrate to the average citizen that change is possible now, in order to build momentum toward victories in future elections. Otherwise, we will only see further gains by those intent on dismantling a government by and for the people. It’s a downward slide that we can’t afford to have.

 

Every Politician Should Live in a Commune

by Nick Licata

First published by Communities Magazine on September 7, 2008 – Issue #140

http://www.ic.org/every-politician-should-live-in-a-commune/

Elected legislative bodies are un-intentional communities, whereas housing collectives and co-ops are intentional communities. Joining an elective body is like joining a club or community uninvited, and perhaps even unwanted— just the opposite of an intentional community, where people seek each other out and choose to live and support one another.
Nevertheless, after living in a collective for 25 years, I recommend that anyone joining a city council, state legislature, or Congress strongly consider living in an intentional community before entering the political fray.

Let me explain by way of example. I lived in the PRAG House collective in Seattle along with about a dozen others while I was both a citizen activist and an insurance broker. PRAG House was started by close friends of mine who had come together as graduate students in Sociology at the University of Washington to protest the Vietnam War in the early ’70s.

In the depth of a recession, when urban planners feared that inner city neighborhoods would become slums, housing prices slumped. Taking advantage of capitalism’s cyclical economic crash, my friends pooled their meager funds together and plunked down $4000 to buy a 37-room mansion in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. I joined them as soon as my girlfriend and I returned from our $5-a-day year abroad.

In the beginning we were a political collective in the fullest sense: we wanted to change the world by changing our environment and our lives. No processed foods entered the house, only one phone was allowed but no TV, we shared a ’54 Ford Pickup for local trips and also to haul our 30-pound metal milk canisters in from some farm over an hour’s drive each way come Sunday evening. We broke bread together, at first every day, then several days a week, and eventually once a week and so on. For years we ate only home-baked, and at first we even tried to grind our own wheat.

And although we did not pool our incomes, we did institute a limited income-sharing scheme whereby a small percentage of each person’s take-home pay was included in our monthly rent. The word rent itself is slightly misleading. After a couple of years, the house’s value began to rise and those who had provided the down payment were moving on.

As a collective, we faced a problem: what do to with a valuable asset that was increasing in value. No one wanted absentee owners; it was anathema to our values. We couldn’t agree on selling the house: how do you divide the amount by over two dozen people who had lived in the house over various periods of time and who had not all contributed equally to its operation? So we turned to the easiest solution: none of us would get the house and no one would ever get it. We placed it in a trust for perpetuity. In essence we rented the house from ourselves, since anyone living in the house helped operate the trust and once you moved on, you were no longer part of the trust.

And so the collective, PRAG House, which began in the summer of ’72, is still chugging along, albeit now with multiple TVs, computers, phones, and yes, even processed foods, although for the most part they are still organic. But the core principle of people choosing to live under one roof and to meet regularly to manage their collective environment remains the same.
This brings me back to politics, or more precisely the formal political structure of legislative bodies. Like PRAG House, they are a group of people living under the same roof for at least part of the day, meeting regularly to manage the collective environment of themselves and others who have elected them to this body. And while they do not choose each other to live under this common roof, they are forced, like those of us who lived in PRAG House, to arrange a common budget, manage resources, and make laws governing our social interactions.

Managing a collective’s many functions can be practical training for a legislator, but that is only the beginning. At the core of living in a collective are interpersonal relations—these are also at the core of practicing politics. There are three lessons that I have carried over from my collective experience into the City Hall Council Chambers.

FIRST LESSON: Learn to expect the unexpected and accept it, don’t fight it.
Once someone moved their possessions into PRAG House, they generally thought those things would be safe and last forever. Living in a collective is dynamic if not chaotic: things change. It may take someone a few months to a few years to learn this lesson. What has an esteemed value for someone may not have any value for another. The same is true in politics with regards to values.

Let me illustrate. Once someone moved into PRAG House, which would take a unanimous vote, they would attend their first house meeting all bubbly and looking forward to a long harmonious future. There is nothing more poisonous to a happy life than false expectations. In order to douse such a belief, we would ask them to go back to their room and bring down something special that they brought with them. After they returned with their precious object and talked about how important it was to them, it was handed to one of us. Holding the object high above our head, we then told them that we were now going to relieve them of the worry and future pain of discovering that someone had broken it, by smashing it now on the floor. We actually never did, but they got the point: nothing is going to last forever, and especially in this house.

I have seen those entering politics with a sense that their precious values were sure to overcome the misguided beliefs of others. When that expectation is not met, many a cheery soul has turned bitter and cold from disappointment. I went through my test when I was first elected to the Seattle City Council. Flush from victory at the polls, I was determined to change the world the following week, and what better cause to pursue than fighting the ruthless, cruel military dictatorship in Burma.

The Council had been approached before I was elected by activists to support a boycott of city contractors who where doing business in Burma. Nothing had happened. I arrived and announced that I would bring the issue forward through legislation. A few of the longer term Council Members smiled slightly as I explained my plan. It was now my moment to have my precious belief in international justice smashed on the floor. And it was. But I did not regret sharing it with the others. And I have since then shared other such values to see them also discarded. I have even learned to expect the un expected victory. In any case, I have come to appreciate the experience and the pleasure of sharing my values and have released my sense of ownership of them. If others reject them, that is their decision not mine.

SECOND LESSON: The more room you make for others, the more room there will be for you.

At our weekly house meetings, the usual topics of who wasn’t cleaning the kitchen, who was not doing house chores, and who was creating the most problems for others were the regular courses served at dinner. There were also proposals for doing new things, like holding a fundraiser for Central American refugees or saving a neighborhood tree from being cut down. More often than not, it was not the content of the discussion which created tensions, but the manner in which it was presented. Too often the most forceful speaker would dominate the discussion, but domination does not create acceptance. Resentments would grow, and ultimately the dominant personality would find him or herself vilified by others, if not openly, then behind his or her back.

From watching this pattern repeated, I found that if I wanted to get my way, I would offer a proposal and then step back to assess other house members’ reactions. By encouraging others to speak and be heard, I could focus on content and not on bruised feelings. Or if someone was pushing something that I did not want, I would encourage others to speak up and express their opinions, whatever they might be. And if two others were fighting over an issue, I found it best to not take sides, but rather encourage participation by others to diffuse the conflict.

It is almost reflexive for politicians to think about of how they are going be perceived in the public media. When we run for election, we must get our name out. We must obtain name familiarity. The desire to be known is equated with power, since name recognition generally means more votes, as long as it’s not based on criminal behavior. This orientation leads to wanting to grab the mic at events, to give longer speeches at meetings, to dominate debates on the dais. These are all behaviors that can easily overshadow other legislators, which feeds resentment and ultimately opposition.

Democracy is about making room for people to think and be heard. Whether a discussion takes place in a collective household or a city council, there needs to be room for it to take place. The more room there is, the greater the chance for common agreement. Dominant personalities do not like democracy because it favors the weak—not only because it allows them to speak, but because by definition there are more of them than those who are dominant.

LESSON THREE: Make allies, not enemies, by talking.

Taking the time to explain your intentions builds bridges; being silent about them builds walls. PRAG House, I’m sure, is no different from any other co-op or intentional community: unavoidable conflicts arise between house mates. There will be some folks who will never turn the TV off or close the entryway door quietly. In those instances, there may be no way other than a direct rebuking of their behavior. But more often than not, conflicts arose in PRAG House because of a difference in unspoken priorities. Talking openly about what you want avoids confusion and allows others to join you. Avoiding open discussions sows distrust in the community and reaps conflicts.

A classic example was how we treated our rural property. Shortly after buying the house, we came into possession of a 20- acre rural property which we tagged as Pragtree Farm. Our goal was to balance urban living with rural work by taking turns living at each property. The problem was that common goals were never agreed to. Everyone seemed to go about on some unspoken plan of their own. One batch of folks went out and planted strawberry fields, but they never tended them properly before returning to the city. The second seasonal shift came up and plowed the fields under, seeing that they were effectively abandoned. The result was zero production and a multitude of harvested bad will.

The City Council last year restricted a pot of money from being spent, in order to stop the Mayor from purchasing and installing some public safety cameras in three particular parks until the Council had reviewed and analyzed his request. The Mayor received complaints from some neighbors around one of those parks on Capitol Hill and, wanting to show that his office could respond, he installed some, drawing the funds from a pot of money that did not fall under the Council’s restrictions. Although he had not technically violated the agreement, by failing to discuss his decision to proceed with the cameras he violated the spirit of the Council’s request and subsequently was accused of breaking their trust in him.

There is no meter on talk, but it does take nerve to speak up when you feel that others will react strongly. I have to keep reminding myself that talking openly and directly about my concerns, rather than being silent and just acting on them, is the only way to success. My experiences in PRAG House have shown me that the way to make allies and not enemies on the Council is to sit across the table and tell my fellow Council Members what I think and not leave them guessing.

These three lessons come to mind when reflecting on my collective living experience as I wheel and deal with other elected officials. In both worlds it comes down not only to treating people as if they were part of my community, but discerning how to keep them in it as well. In community there is strength, whether it is in a co-op house or a legislative body.

Nick’s Essays

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  • August 17, 2016
  • July 8, 2016
  • June 6, 2016
  • April 24, 2016
  • April 24, 2016
  • April 24, 2016
  • April 22, 2016
  • September 26, 2017

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In the Cities

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Run your City for $15,000 a Year, No Desk or Staff Needed

Last week I spent a few days in Indianapolis talking to their city council members and constituents. I was there as the keynote speaker for Butler University’s traditional Peace Week and talk about citizen activism.

Indianapolis is the archetype example of what those who want to shrink government looks like. They have a combined city/county government that spreads out over 300 square miles with a population of 850,000. They elect their mayor and 25 councilmembers from districts.

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Learn How to Change Our World

 

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What You’ll Learn to Become an Active Citizen

You don’t have to be a Marvel comic book superhero to change the world. You don’t even have to be a saint, a revolutionary, a political leader, or a community organizer. You just have to be aware of your surroundings and of the opportunities to improve your life and those of others.

Certainly if you are driven to improve the world, this book should help you evaluate various strategies and tactics to employ. I reference what I’ve learned from my experience and that of others. It will hopefully help you go from wanting change to initiating change. The lessons that follow should help you minimize the risk of failure and maximize success in taking on that effort.

However, the theme here is that every citizen should have the power to meaningfully participate in a democracy. Too often citizens defer to politicians, as if they are the only ones who should exercise power. You don’t need to start a movement to challenge the status quo, but you do have the power to question it.

Ultimately, change begins with you. You have to help yourself create your own future. If you don’t, someone else will.

Changemakers Love the Book

[text-with-icon icon_type=”image_icon” icon=”steadysets-icon-bucket” color=”Extra-Color-3″ icon_image=”2681″]”Nick Licata is a treasure. In Becoming a Citizen Activist he shares the wisdom he has acquired through five decades of struggle to make the world a better place. Rich with uncanny insight, and the right combination of realism and optimism, Licata has produced a book that should be mandatory reading for those seeking justice in this world. He shows that we can hold the power to make social change in our hands, if we use it and use it effectively.”


Robert W. McChesney, co-author People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy
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[text-with-icon icon_type=”image_icon” icon=”steadysets-icon-bucket” color=”Extra-Color-3″ icon_image=”2628″]”Becoming a Citizen Activist is a timely antidote to our poisoned democracy. At a time when corporations are treated as supercitizens while most individuals think of themselves only as taxpayers, Licata shares inspiring stories about the power of people and valuable advice for taking back our government.”


Jim Diers, author of Neighbor Power
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[text-with-icon icon_type=”image_icon” icon=”steadysets-icon-bucket” color=”Extra-Color-3″ icon_image=”2632″]”Becoming a Citizen Activist is a wonderful compilation of specific anecdotes of successful social justice struggles led by ordinary people, practical tips for fighting for your cause, and compelling insights into power, politics and the medley of strategies that make change happen. No matter who you are, you’ll finish the book and be inspired to head straight out to better your community and our world.”


Pramila Jayapal, Washington State Senator and founder and former Executive Director of OneAmerica.
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[text-with-icon icon_type=”image_icon” icon=”steadysets-icon-bucket” color=”Extra-Color-3″ icon_image=”2624″]”Nick Licata’s book shows how ordinary citizens can find their voices to actually change policy – and how elected leaders can help them create these changes. It’s very valuable guide for anyone working in their communities.”


Paul Loeb, author Soul of a Citizen and The Impossible Will Take a Little While
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[text-with-icon icon_type=”image_icon” icon=”steadysets-icon-bucket” color=”Extra-Color-3″ icon_image=”2683″]”Nick Licata has delivered a powerful book about becoming a citizen activist. As someone who spent most of my adult life in elected office, it is refreshing to see someone from the ‘inside’ opening the playbook for those seeking civic change and social justice. Too many times we want the home run, when getting solid hits is the most effective way of enacting change. Nick has been extremely effective over his career by building coalitions and doing the background work that produces results. Sharing his wisdom is not likely to win friends within the halls of government, but I think it will help balance the scale for those working in the trenches.”


Jim Hunt, former president of the National League of Cities and founder of Amazing Cities
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[text-with-icon icon_type=”image_icon” icon=”steadysets-icon-bucket” color=”Extra-Color-3″ icon_image=”2684″]”Nick Licata is a rare combination of things: a thinker who knows grassroots activism, an idealist who can pragmatically wield power, and a politician who knows how to change culture. His compact book distills a career of great citizenship into simple lessons and memorable stories. I hope it inspires a new generation to become activists, in and out of office.”


Eric Liu, founder and CEO of Citizen University
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[text-with-icon icon_type=”image_icon” icon=”steadysets-icon-bucket” color=”Extra-Color-3″ icon_image=”2685″]”Nick Licata has been a critical and creative force in the movement of municipalities to lead on progressive public policy change. With this book, he offers an essential resource for citizens working to confront injustice. Licata draws on local struggles and personal anecdotes to illustrate the power of individuals to achieve progressive victories. His book provides practical strategies and tactics to mobilize the public and hold politicians accountable to the communities they represent. This is an important contribution to grassroots efforts to build a dynamic, and fair, democracy.”


Andrew Friedman – Founder and Co-Director of the Center for Popular Democracy
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[text-with-icon icon_type=”image_icon” icon=”steadysets-icon-bucket” color=”Extra-Color-3″ icon_image=”2686″]”Becoming a Citizen Activist provides inspiration and nuggets of practical advice for anyone who wants to fight city hall and build a better world.”


Wendy Wendlandt, Political Director, The Public Interest Network and Chair of the board, WashPIRG, the Washington Public Interest Research Group
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[text-with-icon icon_type=”image_icon” icon=”steadysets-icon-bucket” color=”Extra-Color-3″ icon_image=”2687″]”Nick Licata knows that democracy isn’t a spectator sport and that the voices of real people are needed to build the best nation possible. Through stories of successful campaigns, practical tips, and the sharing of hard won lessons, Becoming A Citizen Activist guides the reader in how they can be a part of making democracy work for everyone. An inspiring, must-read book for anyone who has ever dreamed of a better world.”


Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, Founder and Executive Director of MomsRising
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[text-with-icon icon_type=”image_icon” icon=”steadysets-icon-bucket” color=”Extra-Color-3″ icon_image=”2789″]”Nick Licata’s new book, Becoming a Citizen Activist – Stories, Strategies and Advice on how to Change Our World, brings a new perspective to the category of activism books.  As both an activist and an elected official, Nick shares lessons learned and best practices.  His essays on listening, learning, and then taking action are well worth reading, and enjoyable to boot!  Too often, inexperienced activists start with the action that should have been the last resort, leaving them no place to go if they don’t achieve success, and often alienating potential allies in the process.  Nick shows us how to start smart, to build allies, to listen to the other parties, and to ultimately effect positive change in our world.  As a leader who has lobbied and been lobbied, he knows what works, and what fails.  Nick Licata is a true progressive success story.  He is national leader, a local icon, and highly successful citizen activist.”


Barbara Moore, Ex. Director of the National Municipal Democrats Organization
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What the Critics Are Saying

“Becoming a Citizen Activist” includes advice on protests as well, by comparing the Occupy movement to the Tea Party movement. It carefully analyzes what made the Occupy movement fizzle out and what made the Tea Party movement solidify in Congress. As it turns out, activists can learn from both movements in order to strengthen their own.

– The Epoch Times

Order “Becoming a Citizen Activist”

On bookshelves now!

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Join the Citizen Activist Network

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A Little Bit About Nick

Nick Licata is from a working class family, where neither parent graduated from high school. Licata, who couldn’t read until the age of nine, was the first of his relatives to attend college.

He led the local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at Bowling Green State University and subsequently was elected student body president. He became a Seattle City Councilmember despite being significantly outspent, with the majority of the council, the mayor, and both daily newspapers supporting his opponent. He was elected to five terms to the council and became its president.

In 2012 he was named by The Nation as Progressive Municipal Official of the Year and twice named Best Local Politician by the Seattle Weekly.  He was an acknowledged leader in passing Paid Sick & Safe Leave, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and legalizing marijuana.

He initiated the founding of Local Progress; the national municipal policy network and served as its first chairman. In 2003, Licata authored the children’s novel, “Princess Bianca and the Vandals”.

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