The American Prospect: Anna Clark: 'Far From The Final Defeat in Michigan'

Source:The American Prospect- a pro-labor organizer in Michigan.

"The right-to-work bill may now be law, but organizers are already planning the next move. 

Protester Paula Merwin, of Leslie, Michigan, stands with an American flag outside the George W. Romney State Building, where Governor Snyder has an office, Tuesday, December 11, 2012. The crowd is protesting right-to-work legislation passed last week. Michigan could become the 24th state with a right-to-work law next week. Rules required a five-day wait before the House and Senate vote on each other's bills; lawmakers are scheduled to reconvene Tuesday and Snyder has pledged to sign the bills into law. 

In Michigan, the birthplace of the labor movement, this week's abrupt passage of a "right-to-work" law incited the largest protest in Lansing's history: at least 12,500 people, wearing red, chanting, singing, drumming, committing civil disobedience, and otherwise battling to be heard as lawmakers in a lame-duck session overhauled the state's labor laws without public input or committee meetings. State house Democrats' attempts to pass amendments that would, for example, put right-to-work up for a public vote or eliminate the $1 million appropriation seemingly designed so that the law withstands the threat of voter referendum, all failed. That $1 million appropriation is supposed to go toward educating workers and union about life under right-to-work, and, in the budget-strained state, it's not clear what the source of the money will be.

Barely two hours after it left the House, and just days after it got on the agenda, Republican Governor Rick Snyder signed the bill. The overhaul will affect both public and private employees (police and fire excepted). Once the law takes effect in the spring, Michigan will become the 24th right-to-work state, and the second in the past decade. The only other states to pass right-to-work in the last 25 years? Oklahoma did it in 2001, and Indiana in 2011, becoming the first state in the Rust Belt to do so.

In Michigan on Tuesday, the display of public dissent prompted authorities to close the Capitol when they said it reached its 2,000-person capacity. Several Lansing streets were shut to traffic and some police wore riot gear. Two school districts closed for the day because of teachers and other workers joining in the demonstrations. Former Democratic Rep. Mark Schauer, a member of Laborers union Local 355, was among those hit with pepper spray as he led protestors outside the Capitol. Ironically, a rallying point for protesters was the Romney building-named for George Romney, the father of Mitt and the former governor who, in 1965, helped craft the very labor laws that right-to-work undercuts. The Romney building houses Snyder's office, and stands as a reminder of legislation that Governor Romney and bipartisan lawmakers passed that provided full collective bargaining rights to public employees and improved bargaining rights for private employees.

Now that Michigan, with its symbolic power as the home of the United Auto Workers, has become a right-to-work state, what's next for workers concerned about fair wages and fair working conditions? What is the long view of organizers here?

Those I spoke with say there is no substitute for votes. They are acutely aware that right-to-work passed in part because of unprecedented Republican and Tea Party wins in 2010-they took control of Michigan's House, Senate, Supreme Court, and the offices of the governor, attorney general, and secretary of state. Redistricting followed, putting progressive leaders in Michigan at an even greater disadvantage. The 2012 election saw some Democratic gains, however; enough for the GOP to decide to use the lame-duck session to move swiftly not only on right-to-work but on other controversial measures too, including serious limits to reproductive rights.

"The Obama campaign did a good job of training organizers in 2008, but people didn't seem to realize that in politics, you don't just win once, but you have to keep winning," said Chris Savage of Eclectablog, a popular progressive site with a Michigan focus. We talked as he was driving to Lansing to join the demonstrations on Tuesday. "The upshot is that we lost everything in 2010, and we need to start seriously looking at 2014. We need to harness the emotions people are feeling right now and do more work."

When I asked Sarah Schillio, a legislative aide for Representative Jeff Irwin, a Democrat from Ann Arbor, what the best thing for Michigan people concerned about right-to-work to do, she said, "they should vote. That is literally the only thing that can happen."

But how to keep voters motivated when the next major election is nearly two years out? Savage hopes local organizers start building local wins that can keep momentum going. More concretely, he said organizers have a lot to learn from the excellent coordination of conservative groups, like the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a think tank in Michigan.

"They waited a long time for their day in the sun, and when it came, they were ready to go," Savage said. "We won't be successful unless we learn from that. We can't come into power and spend 6 or 12 months hemming and hawing about what we're going to do next."

Coalition building is the other major strategy for Michigan organizers. Too often, environmental groups fought for environmental issues, labor for labor issues, women's rights activists for women's rights-and little to no energy has been spent on common cause. This week's right-to-work protests brought diverse activists and citizens together in an all-too-rare way. That collective power needs to be carried forward for exponential political influence.

One such effort at collaboration is We Are Michigan. It describes itself on its website as "a coalition of faith, community, labor and progressive groups united by a common commitment to strengthening Michigan's middle class." The labor organizer I spoke to from the coalition said that it launched days ago, specifically as a response to the right-to-work threat. It focused first on facilitating the "Day of Action" in Lansing on Tuesday. Created on December 9, its Facebook page had 56,500 "likes" by December 11.

The labor organizer I spoke with said right-to-work is not a "final defeat" for Michigan, and that activists are considering a number of responses, both legal and political. While the appropriation money in the right-to-work bill is getting a lot of attention as a savvy move by lawmakers to ensure that it cannot be overturned by voters, the organizer I spoke with said this isn't quite true-right-to-work could still be overturned, not as a referendum but as a ballot initiative to "approve or reject" the law. This would mean, though, that it has to meet the higher threshold of turning in petitions with enough signatures to equal 8 percent of the turnout in Michigan's last gubernatorial election-more than 258,000 signatures. Organizers will have 90 days to do it, starting after the legislature adjourns. If they are successful, right-to-work would then go to a state-wide vote.

A short-term tactic? Building union membership to help mitigate the threat of devastation from right-to-work, which will go into effect in April. Free riders who don't pay union dues but get the benefits of labor wins are a real problem that won't go away with an uptick in membership; this is part of why right-to-work is nonsensical in the first place, which Rich Yeselson wrote about beautifully. But more workers who are aware of their stake in collective bargaining, the better.

With the long view in mind, Savage said that he "thinks it's important not to waste the next two years," particularly with the heightened motivation and alarm felt this week by Michigan workers.

"I'm not a fan of fear and anger as a motivating tactic, but in the short run it can be effective," Savage said. "We just have to figure out a way to turn that into something positive for the long term."

Even as We Are Michigan considers large-scale responses, the labor organizer I spoke with detailed small actions as particularly powerful, including Michiganders and their allies nationally making intentional choices to put their money toward businesses and organizations that support labor rights.

"People need to stay involved, and talk to their friends and family," he said. "While the outcome of today is not great for middle class people, the future depends on what we do tomorrow."

From The American Prospect

Salon: Alex Halperin: 'McDonald’s Pay Chasm": $8.25/Hour to $8.75 Million/Year'

Source:Salon Magazine writer Alex Halperin.

"Bloomberg has an article today highlighting the pay gap at McDonald's. The whole piece is worth a read but the beginning is particularly striking. It highlights Chicago man Tyree Johnson, who holds positions at two different McDonald's. Between shifts he has to give himself a quick scrubbing in one of the restaurant's bathrooms because he can't even show up for work at a McDonald's smelling like a McDonald's.

“I hate when my boss tells me she won’t give me a raise because she can smell me,” he said.

Johnson, 44, needs the two paychecks to pay rent for his apartment at a single-room occupancy hotel on the city’s north side. While he’s worked at McDonald’s stores for two decades, he still doesn’t get 40 hours a week and makes $8.25 an hour, minimum wage in Illinois.

This is life in one of America’s premier growth industries. Fast-food restaurants have added positions more than twice as fast as the U.S. average during the recovery that began in June 2009.

Johnson's circumstances look particularly grim when they're compared, as Bloomberg does, to the compensation enjoyed by executives whose pay gives a whole new meaning to "McJob."

Johnson would need about a million hours of work -- or more than a century on the clock -- to earn the $8.75 million that McDonald’s, based in the Chicago suburb of Oak Brook, paid then- CEO Jim Skinner last year.

... Twenty years ago, when Johnson first started at McDonald’s, the CEO’s compensation was about 230 times that of a full-time worker paid the federal minimum wage. The $8.75 million that Thompson’s predecessor as CEO, Skinner, made last year was 580 times, according to data compiled by Bloomberg." 

From Salon Magazine

AlterNet: Richard Eskow: 'Four Terrible Arguments For Raising The Medicare Age'

Source:The Zero Hour With Richard Eskow. And I'll leave it at that.

"It’s tempting to read these pieces by Matt Yglesias and Jonathan Chait and decide that, all things considered, liberals should at least consider raising the Medicare age to 67 as part of a budget compromise.

They shouldn’t. 

“This seems like a useful time for liberals to sort out the difference between budget ideas we don’t like and budget ideas we can’t or shouldn’t accept,” Chait writes. I couldn’t agree more. Put this one in the “can’t accept” column.

Here are four arguments for compromising on the Medicare age – and why they’re wrong.

Bad Reason #1: As a bone to throw to the right. 

“When the question comes to what concessions the Democrats are going to have to accept,” Chait writes, ” … raising the Medicare age seems like a sensible bone to throw the right.” That’s the first bad reason to compromise. Raising the Medicare age would increase the number of uninsured Americans, and would do so for people who need substantially more care than the average person.

It would also cost more money than it saves. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that its $5.7 billion in projected Federal savings would lead to an additional $11.4 billion in health spending elsewhere in the economy.

More uninsured Americans? Higher healthcare costs? That’s not bone. It’s meat. 

Bad Reason #2: To protect the Affordable Care Act.

“Raising the Medicare retirement age would help strengthen the fight to preserve the Affordable Care Act,” Chait writes. He argues that “a side effect of raising the Medicare retirement age would be that a large cohort of 65- and 66-year-olds would suddenly find themselves needing the Affordable Care Act to buy their health insurance.”

There’s something seriously wrong about the cost/benefit logic in Chait’s position, and the moral logic too. Do we really want to put a segment of our population in distress in order to provide artificial political support for a health reform law that needs substantial strengthening? 

Yes, says Chait, because “Republicans attacking the Affordable Care Act would no longer be attacking the usual band of very poor or desperate people they can afford to ignore but a significant chunk of middle-class voters who have grown accustomed to the assumption that they will be able to afford health care.”

That’s a little like saying Democrats should cheerfully accept natural disasters because they build support for FEMA.

Bad Reason #3: Because Medicare has symbolic value.

Medicare “has weirdly disproportionate symbolic power,” Chait writes, “both among Republicans in Congress and establishmentarian fiscal scolds.” 

Yes, it does – and conservatives have consistently been more effective than liberals in reframing both the terms of debate and the public’s perception of the economy.  Here we go again: By cutting Medicare, Democrats would be “acknowledging” – falsely – that it’s a burden on society, an ineffective program, and a drain on economic growth.

Medicare’s “symbolic power” is an argument for strengthening it, not cutting it.

Chait goes on to say that “Mitch McConnell and Erskine Bowles alike would regard raising the retirement age as a sign of serious belt-tightening and the ‘structural reforms’ conservatives say they need.”

Yes, and so would our sadly misinformed mainstream media. We have to change that perception, not reinforce it. Yet a deal this kind would reinforce their misleading narrative, further undermining public support for the social contract we need to defend. 

Bad Reason #4: The Affordable Care Act will protect most of the 65 and 66 year olds affected by the change.

“Strengthening the political coalition for universal coverage seems like a helpful side benefit” to a Medicare age deal, says Chait. What universal coverage?

Remember when a lot of liberals, including Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein, were saying that Hillary Clinton’s 2008 health plan (now the Affordable Care Act) will provide something like universal coverage? I said it would leave at least 15 million people uninsured. I was wrong: The CBO concluded that 25 million people will be left uninsured under the Affordable Care Act. (That figure was later raised to 28 million after the Supreme Court overthrew the bill’s Medicare provisions.)

A lot of people will be unable to afford private health insurance under the Act, even with subsidies. (I was also shouted down back then for saying that the subsidies would be unreachable for a lot of middle class families.)

People who are making the argument for the Medicare age as a “compromise” seem to have also forgotten that the Act allows insurers to charge as much as three times in premiums for covering older (and therefore costlier) enrollees.  This “significant chunk” of middle class voters wouldn’t find itself fighting for an Act that requires them to buy that insurance.

They’d be hit with a tax penalty instead – and still be uninsured.

Style Council

And yet Matt Yglesias writes that it would be “foolish to categorically rule … out” increasing the Medicare age.

“There’s no need for the ritual scourging,” Yglesias adds, linking to a piece by David Dayen which takes Chait to the woodshed.  ”Ritual scourging,” like “ideological inflexibility” and “reflexive hostility,” is a phrase which means “a strong argument against a position I support.”

Yglesias’ position is unclear.  At first he defends Chait’s position, at least in principle. Then he says that “people will disagree” about whether or not the Affordable Care Act is an acceptable substitute for Medicare, “but we can all see why theObama administration would be inclined to think that it is the case.”

Yes, people will disagree. But does Yglesias disagree? It’s unclear.  And yes, we can see why the Obama Administration might be biased toward the idea. But is it a good or bad one?

By contrast, an earlier Yglesias piece about the Medicare age lays out much (though not all) of what’s wrong with the idea of raising it, and makes his position perfectly clear: It’s a bad idea.

Getting It Right

In that earlier piece, Yglesias makes one of the clearest, most concise arguments I’ve seen yet for the approach I and others favor.

“Rather than shrinking Medicare,” he writes, “we ought to be taking advantage of the program’s lower costs. One way to do that would be to lower the retirement age—potentially all the way down to zero—and bring more people into the program. That would reduce system-wide costs but require higher taxes or bigger deficits.”

That’s exactly right, and any self-described “deficit hawk” who doesn’t embrace should be called out for hypocrisy – even if that amounts to a “ritual scourging.”

What’s more, I would argue that deficits could go down under this scenario. The economy would expand more quickly, which is likely to put deficits in better balance as a percentage of the GDP.  We would also eliminate the tax breaks for employer-sponsored health insurance, which would provide another offset.

Yglesias also proposes reviving 2008′s “public option,” reminding us that the CBO said it would save $68 billion in subsidies while lowering out-of-pocket costs.  That’s another idea we’ve embraced as well.

Medicare works. It delivers good coverage, and it does so more cost-effectively. It should be strengthened, not weakened. It shouldn’t be “compromised” or sacrificed on the altar of lower expenditures, especially for an alternative that will actually cost more."

From the AlterNet

Salon: Michael Lind: 'Big Government Isn’t The Problem'

Source:Salon Magazine- for anyone whose new to America, who sees this image: left to right: U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, U.S President Barack Obama & U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts.

"Has the United States mutated from democracy into kludgeocracy? The term “kludgeocracy” is a coinage by Steven M. Teles, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and a leading public intellectual in his own right. In a new paper commissioned by my colleagues and me at the New America Foundation, Teles argues that the complexity of American government is a greater long-run threat than its size.

“You can’t solve a problem until you can name it,” Teles argues.  The term “kludge” originated in computer programming, and means “an inelegant patch put in place to be backward compatible with the rest of a system. When you add up enough kludges, you get a very complicated program, one that is hard to understand and subject to crashes.” This sounds very much like American government -- thus “kludgeocracy.”

Teles finds kludgeocracy everywhere he looks. Sometimes it takes the form of multiple, overlapping or contradictory programs to promote a single objective. For example, to promote the objective of retirement security, Social Security, a simple and straightforward program, must now compete with “401(k)s, IRAs, 529 plans and the rest of our crazy quilt of savings incentives.”

In other cases kludgeocracy results when multiple governments have overlapping jurisdiction, spawning confusion while minimizing accountability. Teles points to scholarship arguing that confusion about which level of government was in charge of the levees contributed to the catastrophic system failure that occurred during Hurricane Katrina.

The costs of kludgeocracy are substantial, including redundancy and the need for oversight of easily gamed, complex programs, to say nothing of the occasional catastrophic crash. Why, then, is Congress so enamored of addressing problems through complex, indirect measures? It was said of Lyndon Johnson, as a strategist, that he thought that the straightest line between two points was a curve.  Congress, under either party, seems to think that the simplest answer to any solution must be a Rube Goldberg machine, in which a candle burns a rope that releases an ax that cuts a string that drops a stone into a catapult to propel a gerbil onto a treadmill (my own example, off the top of my head). 

Why does the American political system produce so much kludge? There are several reasons, according to Teles. One is the great number of pressure points in America’s system of divided powers and checks and balances, which allows special interests to extort complicating concessions at every stage of a bill’s passage into law. Lack of consensus on which policies should be federal and which should be local is another kludge-o-genic factor.

In my view, the most important is what Teles calls “the desire to preserve the fiction of small government while also addressing public problems.” The bizarrely inefficient structure of the American welfare state makes this clear.

Social Security and Medicare are by far the most successful and popular elements of the middle-class welfare state in the U.S. (the cost problems that plague Medicare afflict the U.S. medical sector as a whole, not just its public part). They are simple, easy to understand, user-friendly and cheap to administer.

They are also exceptions to the rule. Most other major federal welfare policies in the U.S. are either unwieldy programs with costs shared among states and the federal government, like Medicaid, or “hidden welfare state” policies like employer-based health insurance and the child tax credit, which, because they take the form of tax breaks, do not show up as on-budget federal spending.  A purely federal Medicaid program, with no role for the states at all, would be far more efficient, as a task force headed by Paul Volcker and Richard Ravich has recommended, and as Greg Anrig and others, including one President Ronald Reagan, have suggested. And direct spending on healthcare and child allowances would be cheaper than policies run through the IRS, which is not designed to administer a welfare state, hidden or not." 

But direct, public, non-kludgey programs would be attacked by conservatives and libertarians as “big government,” which will lead to serfdom, national bankruptcy, the end of Western civilization and other horrible things. And so reformers in the U.S. have learned to try to disguise what are in truth big government initiatives, by hiding them in the tax code, or by pressuring the states to share part of their costs.

Inasmuch as the incentives that work on our elected representatives favor kludgeocracy, Teles suggests that the incentives can be changed — for example, by congressional rules or even judicial rulings limiting the ability of Congress to carry out policy by means of federal grants to the states, rather than direct federal programs, for example.

Even so, our elected leaders may not do the right thing unless they are shamed into it. The message of 21st century civic reformers needs to be that government should do fewer things, in a more simple, straightforward and, if necessary, overtly expensive way, rather than doing too many things while hiding their true costs by means of the most insanely complicated Rube Goldberg devices that the imagination can devise. Here Teles sees a role for “public intellectuals, bloggers, researchers, and entrepreneurial politicians ... Only, in short, when Americans give a name to their pain -- kludgeocracy — are we likely to get a government that is simpler, more effective, and better for democracy.” 

From Salon Magazine

The American Prospect: Steve Erickson: 'I Was a Teenage Conservative'

Source:American Prospect writer Steve Erickson.

"For a young Southern Californian coming of age in the early ’60s, the right with its emphasis on individual freedom was enormously appealing. What better way to rebel against liberal smugness? Then, the right betrayed itself. 

Barry Goldwater was my first political hero. The most antiauthoritarian figure in mainstream American politics, who said what he thought without giving a damn, he looked and sounded as Western as Arizona, the state he represented in the Senate. Goldwater and John Kennedy hatched plans in the White House-for what they assumed would be their upcoming presidential campaign against each other in 1964-to travel the country in the Arizonan's small plane that he flew himself, stopping off at airports in the middle of nowhere to debate one issue or another before taking off again. This two-fisted, free-flying persona made Goldwater the kind of politician that film director Howard Hawks might have come up with; by comparison, government couldn't help appearing soullessly oppressive. Great Society liberalism had become the norm by the mid-1960s, and this reinforced Goldwater's iconoclasm, striking a politically attuned, insistently nonconformist teenager as utopian, in the same way that Kennedy embodied idealism for so many others of my generation.

Utopia was in the air where I grew up, though I wouldn't have identified it as that any more than I could have told you who Howard Hawks was. L.A.'s San Fernando Valley was the no man's land between rural and suburban, between Wild West and space-age futurism. Ranches sprawled on the other side of the biggest road that ran near my house; three miles away, in the same part of the Valley that would become the porn capital of the world a couple of decades later, were makeshift frontier towns built for Westerns by the Hollywood studios. Overhead, the purple vapor trails of rocket tests streaked the skies. Kennedy's race to the moon built the modern Valley; every father of every kid I knew worked, as did my own dad, for the bursting aerospace industry--Lockheed, Hughes, North American, Rockwell. The progress that cut swaths through the Valley brought a disruption matched only by earthquakes. A new freeway (which eventually would be named after President Ronald Reagan) took our house, leaving just the swimming pool that was proof of my parents' upward mobility; the pool was given to the next-door neighbor whose house fell outside the freeway's path. This sort of upheaval was too common to be traumatizing. 

My mother loved Goldwater, too. She took me to a Goldwater rally at the Los Angeles Convention Center, and on the morning of the '64 election, I recall her peering through my bedroom door, gently trying to prepare her sensitive teenage son for the likelihood that our man Barry probably wasn't going to make it that day. An outspoken liberal in her youth, she was the more ideological of my parents, both of whom grew up Franklin Roosevelt Democrats. In the election of 1948, she missed being old enough to vote by 11 days; my father voted for Harry Truman. Though he remained a Democrat in name, he never voted Democratic again. In the next election, both my parents cast their ballots for the Republican nominee, Dwight Eisenhower, after which began the rightward political trajectory of so many New Deal children, which would accelerate in response to the tumult of the '60s. In my father's case, this evolution accompanied the economic ascension that went with swimming pools built and forsaken, while my mother shared with many Americans an alarm that Soviet communism was winning the Cold War, sabotaging democracy and free enterprise. My fascination with politics derived from an interest in the drama of American history; by the time I was 12, I was writing stories about Abraham Lincoln and Nathan Hale (an enthusiasm for patriots making the ultimate sacrifice may be discerned here). I could recite the Gettysburg Address and name all the presidents of the United States in order and the opponents they defeated. Enthralled by Thomas Jefferson's maxim that "government is best which governs least" (lately there's some question whether he said this), I believed that the Bill of Rights is the greatest political document ever written, and I still believe it today, even as I take greater note over the years that it was written less as an addendum to the Constitution than as a rebuttal, by the Constitution's greatest skeptic, its so-called father, James Madison.

Since the liberalism of the time was as smug as the conservatism of the future would be sanctimonious, I was secretly pleased when a history teacher in high school called my opinions "dangerous." What teenager doesn't want to be dangerous, especially when he's so undangerous in so many other ways? The conservatism I embraced was a whole greater than the sum of the parts, the emphasis on individual freedom trumping stuff that I considered to be fine print. While I never liked the sound of a welfare state, I was enough of a softy to have balked at denying help to people who needed it; to the extent that I understood it, the idea that arose from the Great Crash of 1929-that there should be a division between commercial banks and investment banks, without which the great crash of 2008 later became possible-sounded perfectly sensible and, if anything, like a conservative idea. I didn't really know what the Tennessee Valley Authority was or what it meant that Goldwater mused openly about selling it off. Goldwater mused openly about a lot of things that I took with a nuclear silo worth of salt. When he made jokes about lobbing missiles into the men's room in the Kremlin, I thought it was funny, something that now mortifies me; I was too immature to understand that a presidential campaign might be better off with a little less humor out of Dr. Strangelove, that election year's most talked-about film. I never believed that Goldwater was going to start a war, as suggested by an infamous Democratic television ad of a small girl plucking a daisy while counting down to Armageddon, because I didn't think he was crazy. I had more faith in his prudence than he gave anyone reason to have.

While my hero worship remained unabated, I was troubled that summer of '64. Liberals recoiled when Goldwater declared at the Republican Convention in San Francisco that "extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice," but I understood the statement on its face; Tom Paine and Patrick Henry, not to mention Jefferson, said the same thing, more or less. If I was barely savvy enough, however, to comprehend Goldwater's provocation, the mob fury that gripped the convention was harder to ignore. Rendered in images all the more unseemly by the crude black and white of television, the delegates cascaded verbal abuse at Goldwater's defeated rival for the nomination, New York's moderate governor, Nelson Rockefeller. More instinctually than I could articulate, I had the feeling maybe these were people I wouldn't want to be in the same room with. No ideology holds the patent on rage, and in the years to come, scenes as ugly were played out by the political left. But though I was still too young to fathom what was meant by the better angels of our nature, I did experience my first sense of political alienation, and it was from those who I thought were on my side.

Meanwhile, a month before the convention, on the momentum of Kennedy's martyrdom, the Senate passed the Civil Rights Act. This was the single most momentous piece of legislation since the same institution approved the 13th Amendment ending slavery a century before. Twenty-nine senators voted against the law; Goldwater was one of them. Following World War II, Goldwater had desegregated the Arizona National Guard that he founded and was a forceful proponent for integrating the nation's military forces as well. In the Senate he had supported every previous civil-rights bill, including the '64 bill in an earlier, less expansive form. I understood the constitutional rationale behind Goldwater's vote, which was that the government shouldn't have the power to dictate the conduct of a private business. Even at the age of 14, however, I had the unambiguous impression of some bigger picture being missed. While I didn't question Goldwater's motives, the motives on the convention floor that summer were transparent: There was little doubt that much of Goldwater's support was racist and that much of what was being expressed on the floor was white wrath. I'm keenly cognizant of how self-serving it is to overstate this now. I was a naïve white kid with half a century between then and this article to cover my tracks. So let's say that the rightness of the cause of racial justice was too manifest, too bright a line for one not to finally choose a side. In contrast with black people being hosed down on TV and beset by vicious dogs and vicious sticks swung by vicious cops, rhetoric about states' rights sounded hollow.

Politics is always personal. It would be disingenuous to suggest that the changes I was going through, especially at the ages of 18 and 19, were entirely philosophical. Suffice it to say that when I glanced back over my shoulder at my first 17 years, I didn't much like what I saw-someone rigid and judgmental, with politics to match. None of this examination took place inside the hermetic seal of my own thinking and feeling; a cultural explosion rocked the decade around me. The facts of the civil-rights movement became as inexorable to me as worries about democracy and totalitarianism. The national dilemma of race, and that dilemma's resolution, became crucial to my evolving patriotism; not having had a single acquaintance before college who was African American, now I was living with African Americans in the college dormitory. Jeffersonian individualism remained my ideal, but there were more and more examples of how sometimes only the dreaded federal government had the power to protect the freedom of the individual from states and localities. Over and over, the notion that government necessarily becomes more responsive and better suited to protecting liberty the farther down the line from federalism it gets was proved irrefutably false.

By the end of the '60s, it was clear that the conservatism I so ardently adopted was wrong about the two great issues of the day, civil rights being the first. 

The other was a war in Southeast Asia that no military or political figure was capable of explaining, a war for which every guy I knew was fodder. One night in 1969, three weeks before Christmas, a great raffle was held in Washington, D.C., in which my fate was drawn from a glass jar. All men of draft age received a number that would determine how soon, if ever, they would be called up for service and combat. Mine was 345, a very good number as numbers went in a situation that nonetheless underscored the absurdity of the lottery and the war itself. The proposition of bolstering an inept and crooked Indochinese country for the sake of American national security was one that few in the country accepted any longer, and when four students were murdered by the National Guard on a campus in Ohio the following spring during a demonstration against the war, what died as well was the last semblance of support for the war and an ideology that justified it. To a Jeffersonian, the brandishing of state power in order to conscript people to fight in a faithless conflagration and then to oppress the right of assembly stipulated by the First Amendment was repellent.

The 1960s were a Rorschach decade. No interpretation of the era's inkblot is altogether wrong. Conservatism and liberalism were realigned in the process, creeds reassessed; liberal Democrats first escalated the Vietnam War, while some conservatives suggested that if this was an endeavor we couldn't win, we should withdraw. But while the likes of Goldwater raised ever more blunt questions about the war and the draft, the vast majority of self-identified conservatives supported the state. Up to a point, this was an understandable response to what many ordinary Americans perceived as growing turmoil; faced with chaos, people like my parents had different ideas than I of what was to be conserved. None of this, however, changed the fact that in its deceit about the war's unfolding and what was and wasn't at stake, the state itself bore accountability for much of this chaos, and in the conflict between freedom and order, while the Jeffersonian conservatism that I signed up for gave the benefit of the doubt to freedom, a new conservatism now chose order. This state-imposed order was manifested by duplicity in the form of government misinformation and intimidation and surveillance, as well as by an implicit lack of faith in America itself-in an American's right to know, in the American fabric's ability to weather such fraying of and even rips in the national life. "If it takes a bloodbath," Reagan said upon quelling a demonstration at the University of California, Berkeley, during his first term as California's governor, "let's get it over with," a battle cry that not long before would have confirmed everything about the state that conservatives feared.

Ronald Reagan was the conservative Jesus for whom Goldwater proved to be only John the Baptist. Reagan came to the attention of conservatives when he made a speech for Goldwater a week before the '64 election, advancing the case for Goldwater's candidacy more powerfully than Goldwater had. Over the next 16 years, Reagan became the personification of a hybrid conservatism forged by times that tested everything. This fusion crossed an eloquence on behalf of liberty with a new trust in the power of the state; deserting the ideal of individual freedom, now conservatives automatically registered protest against the war and on behalf of civil rights as leftist insurrection. While Reagan's election as president in 1980 appeared to be the apotheosis of what Goldwater started, in fact conservatism and the new president each were remaking themselves in the image of the other. Under Reagan the national debt and size of the federal government exploded; the Justice Department paid a purposely ominous attention to what adults read and watched; the war on drugs grew more ruthless; cynicism about science, particularly as it had to do with the environment, grew more pronounced; antagonism to the freedom of women to make choices about their bodies grew more vehement.

Most striking, three impulses distinguished the new right. The first was how the right's enmity toward centralized state power was matched by an adoration of centralized corporate power. This constituted an abandonment of the principle of a truly free marketplace-with entrepreneurship and the flourishing of small business becoming more constrained and difficult--

and the overarching principle of decentralization. The second impulse was the displacement of liberty as conservatism's core priority by a new priority, "values," by which the right invariably meant sexual behavior, predominantly the sexual behavior of women and homosexuals. The third new impulse was most profound. This was a reconceptualization of the republic as one in which citizens are bound not by a Constitution in which God isn't once mentioned, euphemized, or alluded to but by an unwritten Christian covenant that implicitly subjects free will to an organizing ethos that's unmistakably theocratic. What was a freedom movement became an authority/wealth/religious movement. The new conservatism now spoke of the Bill of Rights with thinly veiled contempt. Conservatism continued to pay lip service to freedom in the abstract even as the only freedoms in the specific that it defended with urgency were the right to make a profit and to own a gun. If the language of conservatism, as given voice by President Reagan, hadn't changed, its very essence had transformed, within two decades of Goldwater's defeated run for the presidency.

In college I had doubts about everything, and then doubts about the doubts. I didn't become a leftist: I wouldn't have contemplated for two seconds putting a poster of Mao on my wall any more than I would have put up one of Hitler, and I found a lot of the revolutionary sentiments in pop music that I otherwise loved simplistic or silly. Calling the United States "fascist" was outrageous and reckless, a neutering of the word's power by its careless use. I believed the testimony of history was that a managed capitalism made more people free and happy than did communism.

Some of the left-wing ideologues I knew reminded me of the right-wing ideologues I knew, including the one I had known best: me. The extent to which ideology hijacks independent thought, refracting an issue through the lens of an already-settled bias, was all the more disturbing for how long it took me to see it. Ideology is pathological: It provides a psychological structure posing as a theoretical one. This is why fervent communist intellectuals of the 1930s could become fervent anti-communist intellectuals of the 1950s-they didn't change at all. They became anti-communist communists. In our own day, Keith Olbermann is a left-wing version of Glenn Beck and vice versa; you can switch their soundtracks and notice no difference in body nuance or facial expression or voice inflection, because the inner emotional wiring is the same. The harder a line that ideology hews, the more that right and left have in common, sharing a penchant for rewriting the past to vindicate whatever version of the present each prefers to trust. Stalinists flatly deny that the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 ever happened, in the same way that leaders of the contemporary right recast American history in terms of a mind-set that regards information as an elite conspiracy, science as a plot against God, and the earth as a subversive entity.

Where this story leaves me at the end isn't really important, but since it began as my story, I should finish it. I'm keenly aware that my present identity as a political nomad may be no less about my ego than knee-jerk obstinacy was in my adolescence, that perhaps I repeat the pattern of my youth in reflexively staking out the vantage point of a contrarian. My politics were right when the country was left, and then moved left as the country moved right. The most flattering conclusion is that my previous life as a teenage right-winger inoculates me to ideology altogether. Consistency isn't always the hobgoblin of a small mind: Every amendment in the Bill of Rights can't be interpreted so broadly as to extrapolate from the fourth not simply a right to privacy but to an abortion, while at the same time the Second Amendment is strictly construed as being about a militia rather than the larger freedom of the citizenry not to be disarmed by the state. In turn, the Second Amendment can't be interpreted broadly, ignoring the actual language, while the other nine are interpreted narrowly. At a social gathering following 9/11, I was dismayed that friends to the left of me condemned what I considered George W. Bush's legitimate military action in Afghanistan, given the complicity of the Taliban in its alliance with al-Qaeda; the war against Iraq, on the other hand (having nothing to do with al-Qaeda or 9/11 or phantom weapons), made me angrier than anything that any American government has done.

I have my own kids now. Despite gratifying evidence that my 15-year-old son knows who the Koch brothers are, the allure of memorizing all the presidents in order escapes him. My seven-year-old, on the other hand, was reported by neighbors to be heard railing at her playmates, "And don't even get me started on Paul Ryan!" I honestly believe my children are best served by a free politics that needs two wings to stay airborne and a push-me/pull-you tension between what is a right and what is a privilege, what is entitled and what is not, what reasonably progresses and what responsibly conserves. As recently as five years ago, I voted for a Republican for statewide office, and 12 years ago in the California primary, I voted for a Republican for president. I'm sorry to say that I don't foresee doing it again. While the man in the middle clings to the vanity of fair-mindedness, contending that both sides are equally right and wrong, perfectly balanced by perspectives that are equally valid and flawed, conservatism has too irrevocably exhausted not just its philosophical credibility but any moral mandate. Run amok, the authoritarian, corporate, and theocratic impulses that were troubling a quarter-century ago have become appalling and indisputable.

Caught between know-nothingism and a faux populism that disguises a predisposition to favor the financially powerful against the disenfranchised, the new right is born of that awful howl that rose from the convention floor in San Francisco and so startled me. This is the ferocity that animates the right's most prominent spokesmen in politics and electronic discourse.

Some will argue it's gratuitous to characterize a movement in terms of its gratuitousness-debate audiences cheering executions and booing gay soldiers in Iraq. I don't think so anymore. 

At its most unforgiving, the incontrovertible id of today's conservatism insists that an American president is not really an American and not really the president and tries to reject not solely his ideas but also the very fact of him. Over the past four years, the right, exuding bad faith at best and collective psychosis at worst, has intended not merely to end a presidency but to discredit its existence. Even before conservatism betrayed itself so conspicuously I'm not sure my right-wing teenage self thought conservatism was about shipping 12 million Latinos out of the country or supposing that people stupid enough to get sick when they can't afford it should die. Pressed on the point, I should like to think that I would have allowed that being a country involves the sustenance of a social contract and the recognition that we're more than 300 million free agents who happen to be roaming the same piece of real estate.

As for Barry Goldwater, before his death he became an exile from the movement that once was his. Following his presidential run, he continued to strike positions in accordance with a Jeffersonian big-individual/-small-government code. He called for an end to the draft. He became an ardent environmentalist. He supported the Voting Rights Act. He promoted legalization of marijuana. He championed gay rights. He espoused abortion rights. He engineered President Richard Nixon's resignation for having used the levers of power to harass innocent Americans. He advocated (well, mused openly about, as was his wont) the nomination of black Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Jordan for vice president in 1976. He lobbied for the Supreme Court's first female justice. He blasted Reagan for the 1987 Iran-Contra scandal ("the goddamned stupidest foreign-policy blunder this country's ever made"). He admonished George H.W. Bush for running a shallow campaign against Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis in 1988. He endorsed Democratic congressional candidates in the early '90s. He defended President Bill Clinton from trumped-up Republican charges of corruption. His denunciations of the religious right grew more bitter ("Do not associate my name with anything you do-you're extremists, and you've hurt the Republican Party much more than the Democrats have"), and his consternation grew at how the rest of the party became caught in the undertow: "A lot of so-called conservatives today don't know what the word means," he told the Chicago Tribune in 1994. When Republican nominee Robert Dole went to get Goldwater's benediction during the 1996 campaign, hoping to shore up his conservative credentials while the news cameras rolled, Goldwater could be seen and heard by millions telling Dole, somewhat wryly, "We're the new liberals of the party. Can you imagine that?"-not what Dole had in mind. By the time he died in 1998, Republicans had begun a whispering campaign that Goldwater suffered from dementia. Speaking for the Arizona delegation at the Democratic Convention this past summer, Goldwater's granddaughter cast her state's votes for Barack Obama. 

From The American Prospect

The Nation: L.R. Runner: 'How to Save the Democratic Party'

Source:The Nation with a look at the U.S. Congress.

"The time has come for a showdown between the reformist and accommodationist wings of the party. 

The article below is not a Nation editorial or a solicited piece but a manifesto we received from an occasional contributor. We are publishing it in the hope of stirring discussion of one of the most important political issues of our time: how to transform what the author, who uses a pseudonym to avoid personalizing that issue, calls the “bipartisan” Democratic Party into an organization capable of bringing about desperately needed progressive change in America. You can read responses, including those from Keith Ellison, Dorian T. Warren, Benjamin Todd Jealous, and more, here. —The Editors

 

American progressives and principled liberals need to face an essential truth: the Democratic Party, as now constituted, is no longer an agency for realizing their ideals.

  

Consider the larger implications of the November 6 elections, which took place in economic and social conditions that should have produced landslide victories for even a moderately populist party. In the two most representative elections—the direct popular vote for the presidency and the House of Representatives—the Democratic Party won the former by less than 4 percent and lost the latter, as it did in 2010, to the most reactionary Republican Party in modern times.

The problem is not President Obama or any other individual leader but the Democratic Party itself. Much of its establishment, from Washington to most of the state capitals, has long since become a party of “bipartisan compromise” with an increasingly right-wing Republicanism, particularly on economic issues with great social consequences—as though America’s true course now lies midway between abolishing the achievements of the New Deal and Great Society and extending them fully in our times. Too many members of the party’s nationwide hierarchy are closer, ideologically and politically, to Wall Street than to Main Street—to the corporate, rich and powerful than to the stricken middle class, the increasingly impoverished working class (and the diminished and embattled unions that protect it), and the unemployed and perpetually poor. 

If more proof is needed, the Democratic Party has shown itself to be incapable of providing the moral imperatives, policy ideas, broad popular support or elected officials necessary to lead the nation out of its worst economic and social calamity in eighty years, now in its fifth year of millions of wrecked lives. Indeed, the party’s complicity in the crisis is only somewhat less than that of Republicans unconditionally devoted to only one human right: the unrestrained accumulation of corporate and private wealth. 

A new party—not a third party, but a real second party representing authentic alternatives, as befits a democracy—is therefore urgently needed. Fortunately, the nucleus of such a party already exists, however captive-like and timid, inside today’s Democratic Party. (The late Senator Paul Wellstone called it “the democratic wing of the Democratic Party.”) For this nucleus to grow, come to power and lead a new reformation of American capitalism, it must liberate itself by occupying and transforming the Democratic Party, as insurgents have done in other co-opted parties that outlived their historical mission—even if this means bipartisan Democrats leaving to become Republicans or go into the third-party wilderness.

* * *

The political bankruptcy of the Democratic Party, its historic achievements consigned to the distant past, is not a recent development. The party’s role in the making of the current crisis speaks for itself. For forty years—that is, under both Republican and Democratic presidents and Congresses—the nation’s wealth has been put into fewer and fewer hands (the richest 1 percent now possess more wealth than the less prosperous 90 percent), while ever more people have been relegated to poverty or rendered unable to maintain their hard-earned place in the middle class.

Hence today’s shameful American realities (and new exceptionalism): rates of family income inequality, child poverty, infant mortality and incarceration that are greater—and opportunities for quality education and upward social mobility that are less—than in almost any other modern democracy. The two defining tenets of the American dream are being lost, if they have not been lost already: that most children have a fair chance of achieving more than their parents did; and that determination and hard work will assure a successful and secure life.

Democratic loyalists blame Republicans for this national tragedy without acknowledging their own party’s responsibility. The policies that led to today’s crisis gained force with the Reagan administration, but crucial ones were incorporated into President Clinton’s centrist “third way” in the 1990s, a fateful revision of the Democratic mission adumbrated earlier by President Carter. Those degraded Democratic policies included reducing regulations on financial institutions; lowering taxes on corporations, investors and the wealthy; enacting “free trade” measures at the cost of American jobs; and fetishizing “fiscal responsibility” and balanced federal budgets (as though the US government is merely a big family household) to the detriment of social justice and investment in the nation’s infrastructure.

Thus did the Clinton administration—in keeping with its casual epitaph for the New Deal, “The era of big government is over”—contribute to today’s austerity-promoting, deficit-cutting consensus that gives priority to the concerns of investors over the needs of most Americans. Indeed, President Clinton and congressional Democrats made a special contribution to the “deficit crisis” by squandering the historic opportunity for a post–cold war demilitarization of US national security policy—first by expanding NATO toward Russia and then by bombing Serbia, a precedent for the costly bipartisan wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that followed.

* * *

The Democratic Party has been equally bipartisan—or accommodationist—since the economic crisis began in 2008. Consider the record:

§ It was not a transformed party that elected Barack Obama in 2008, but one that benefited from an extraordinary combination of millions of lost jobs and homes, a unique candidate and a weak Republican ticket. Indeed, during its eight years out of presidential power, the Democratic Party, laden with its own oligarchic funding and intimate Wall Street ties, had recruited so few new policy advocates that its young president surrounded himself with the same Clinton advisers who had contributed to the financial collapse at home and militarized policies abroad.

§ Neither those political retreads nor the larger Democratic hierarchy encouraged any populist or radical reform sentiments that Obama may have had, instead only reinforcing his penchant for “bipartisan compromise.” Whatever Obama’s achievements, they were offset by the lost opportunities: the bailout of Wall Street without holding its oligarchic banks and other economic predators responsible for the financial collapse—93 percent of income gains in 2009–10 benefited the top 1 percent of taxpayers—and without extending comparable assistance to millions of stricken homeowners (even leaving unused $300 billion allocated for that purpose); the failure to spend what was required to stimulate enough new jobs; healthcare legislation considerably less than the nation needed; and the decision to escalate the unwinnable US-led war in Afghanistan, the longest in American history.

§ More generally, instead of acting on popular expectations aroused by Obama’s election—perhaps even frightened by them—the Democratic establishment, especially in Congress, tried to occupy the political center, moving that accommodationist space further to the right than it had been in decades. As economic and social hardships grew across the country, powerful Democrats shunned—still in the name of “fiscal responsibility” and “investors”—almost everything populist in the party’s traditions, even abdicating the word “reform” to reactionary Republicans and virtually deleting nearly 50 million poor Americans from the bipartisan narrative of the crisis. (Like President Obama, his party establishment changed course, or at least its rhetoric, only in late 2011 and early 2012, when this seemed the only chance for electoral survival in November.)

§ Having unilaterally disarmed ideologically, and having failed to diminish either widespread deprivation or corporate power in America, the Democratic Party then squandered a textbook electoral opportunity. In 2010, when economic and social conditions also should have resulted in overwhelming Democratic victories, the party lost—to a Hoover-like Republican Party—control of the House and its effective majority in the Senate, even including the late Edward Kennedy’s iconic seat in Massachusetts. Tens of millions of Americans are still paying the price for that epic failure.

§ Both Obama and Congressional Democrats reacted to the 2010 electoral defeat not with a renewed commitment to the party’s populist traditions but with more capitulation, redoubling their pursuit of “bipartisan compromise”—including a “grand bargain”—from a position now of legislative weakness. Compromise meant yielding on one New Deal and Great Society principle after another, from progressive taxation, financial regulation, the minimum wage and jobs to the environment and entitlements, stopping only barely short of Medicare. In the process, mainstream Democrats acted like the “moderate Republicans” they had long since become and replaced.

§ In 2011, nonpoliticians gave the Democratic Party yet another chance, as the Occupy Wall Street movement spread across the nation. The Republican Party had eagerly gained energy and confidence from the Tea Party in 2009–10, but the Democratic establishment remained aloof from the more popular Occupy movement. Thus should have ended any lingering illusions that the Democratic hierarchy represents a party of the people, much less “the 99 percent.” Little wonder that voters gave neither party a commanding victory on November 6.

* * *

If the existing Democratic Party could not respond adequately to the nation’s most destructive economic and social crisis since the Great Depression, there is no reason to believe it can any longer produce alternatives to the decades of plutocratic policy-making that led to the calamity. This truth is illustrated by the two prevailing explanations of the party’s failures put forth by its own current and former adherents.

One explanation continues to blame only the Republicans, who are said to have “duped” Americans into voting against their own interests. With implied contempt for allegedly gullible voters, these Democratic apologists are in effect acknowledging the inability of many of their candidates to campaign persuasively. But how hard can it be, if Democrats really believe in the principles at stake, to explain compellingly what “less government”—budget cuts (federal, state and local), unregulated banks, and low taxes on high profits and income—would mean for most voters and their families, from education, jobs, retirement and healthcare to public security, transportation and the environment? Considering that nearly half of American households receive direct government benefits, and that virtually every American has benefited from government social policies, it’s hard only if Democrats do not really believe in these issues, as many apparently do not.

The other explanation insists that the Democratic Party has not capitulated enough. An influential group of disaffected Democrats, led by financial titans, highly placed columnists and other privileged insiders, has been clamoring for an avowedly “centrist” party based on still more “bipartisan compromise,” as though Democrats have been lacking in that regard. If the project, essentially a version of the “grand bargain,” succeeds in swaying the Democratic establishment (which may be its actual purpose), the result would be a democracy without any alternatives to government of, by and for the 1 percent—that is, no democracy at all.

The nation needs something fundamentally different. It needs an unapologetically partisan Democratic Party committed to adapting the populist, progressive and liberal principles of the New Deal and Great Society—simply put, modernizing economic development and growth, full employment, shared prosperity and social justice—to present-day America.

Many of today’s progressives look instead to grassroots movements. Such movements are important—they can inspire, prod and replenish the party, as some are now trying to do—but they cannot play the necessary role. In a country as vast and diverse as the United States, and in the American political system, only a nationwide party—again, not an ineffectual third party but an effective second one—can mobilize the support to elect a president and a Congress needed for transformational change. And then, crucially, because a party gets the officials it deserves, that victorious party must guard against unprincipled compromises by the president and other representatives it has elected. (For example, during and after the 2012 campaign, President Obama has promised a renewed effort to achieve a previously elusive compromise in the spirit of a “grand bargain,” which will almost certainly reduce spending on the nation’s vital human and structural needs.) 

Equally important, only such a renewed Democratic Party can transform the pyramid of conformist elites—educational, media, political and business—that underpins bipartisan consensus at the top. Such a party will do what today’s Democratic establishment no longer does: 

§ Open its policy ranks to progressive thinkers and ideas marginalized by the status quo centrism of even purportedly liberal universities, think tanks and media; 

§ Embrace nonconformist candidates and reform activists in state and local politics; 

§ Support and give a larger party role to trade unions and other rank-and-file movements across the country to ensure that the party’s populism is not just for but of the people; and 

§ Make common cause with the like-minded small parties that exist, sometimes on the ballot, in many states. 

A transformed Democratic Party brimming with such purpose, ideas and candidates can win the votes of millions of people alienated by both parties. Indeed, polls suggest that many of those voters (and nonvoters) are ready for such a party.

In short, the time has come for a showdown—if necessary, even a parting of ways—between the reformist and accommodationist wings of the Democratic Party. This should be done democratically, with an open discussion of the fundamental issues, and every party official and member given a chance to choose. The initiative could come from below, from local officials and rank-and-file Democrats, or from above, from the party’s democratic wing in Congress—or even from President Obama himself in his second term, in order to realize his original promise.

Given the national crisis still savaging American lives, and calling upon their best traditions, rededicated Democrats have every chance of winning this historic struggle for the soul and future of their party. Indeed, they begin from a position of strength: the Progressive Caucus is the largest Democratic group in the current Congress. And it will be supplemented in the next one by the contingent of new progressives elected in November.

* * *

The reckoning must be carried out based on six fundamental principles that will guide the campaigning and policy-making of a renewed Democratic Party. All of them once inspired a great democratic reformation, and they can do so again if adapted to our present needs.

1. The overriding purpose of government of, by and for the people is to assure all citizens not an equal but a fair opportunity (since there is no equality of birth, circumstances or ability) to realize their hopes and potential. This means a fair opportunity to acquire a good education, achieve a vocation and commensurate prosperity, raise a family in decent housing, and experience life in the best possible health. Whenever and wherever the private sector does not provide these basic human rights, a truly representative democratic government must do so. The goal, in short, is not “big government” or “less government,” but government adequate to meet these obligations.

2. The principle of fairness applies particularly to the economy, which underlies so many other rights. A democratic capitalist economy should exist for the people, not the people for financial and other predatory institutions. Equally true, the vaunted “free market” scarcely exists in the modern world—and where it does, it usually results in corruption and excessively concentrated power. Democracy requires instead a fair market for all its economic participants: individuals; small, medium and large businesses; and labor. This too can be assured only by representative government, through direct and indirect regulations.

3. A government committed to social and economic fairness requires tax revenue for this purpose. The rich, the less affluent and the poor all benefit from government expenditures. (They use the same roads, drink the same water, breathe the same air and require the same public security.) Indeed, some government provisions benefit the well-off disproportionately, as with air-travel safety and high-speed trains. Taxation is therefore not merely a fiscal category but an expression of social fairness, which means it must be progressive and without the devices that enable the wealthy to pay at lower rates than their servants, and employers than their employees.

4. All of these fairness provisions require government regulations, agencies and administrative procedures. At the same time, the transformed Democratic Party understands that some of its past programs may have bequeathed a bureaucracy that has outlived its utility and even become an obstacle to free, fair pursuits. The party therefore also resolves to establish a professional review of all such agencies and procedures and to abolish or revise those that no longer serve a public good.

5. No American reformation, or general well-being, is possible—politically or financially—without the demilitarization of foreign and national security policy. Policies that rely increasingly on swollen military budgets, troop deployments, NATO warplanes, drones and large nuclear stockpiles, often animated by unworthy imperial motives, have squandered American lives, wealth and good will abroad—with few, if any, real gains in national security. We need a new conception of national security—one maximizing diplomatic rather than military approaches—that corresponds to our new times, real needs and American values.

6. The transformed Democratic Party also understands that none of these principles or reforms will be possible without radically reducing the growing role of corporate and private wealth in American elections, in which the party has also been deeply complicit. Billions of dollars have profoundly undermined the first principle of democratic government of, by and for the people, and this is where equality is both possible and necessary. Real democracy requires elections with a maximum of voters and a minimum of influence-seeking money. Therefore, the party resolves to pursue every means to restore the essential practice of elections uncorrupted by financial power and of policy-making independent of paid lobbyists.

* * *

Many Democrats who share these principles may say that it is politically dangerous or impossible to re-create the party by drawing such divisive lines within it. Let them consider the damage already done to America, and to the Democratic Party itself, by a party that can no longer repair the nation. Let them consider the instances in history when principled insurgents recast their parties and led them to great achievements. Let them even remember how today’s right-wing Republicans fought, unwavering in their principles, to occupy and control their party.

Or let them simply heed the timeless imperative of historic change: “If not now, when? If not us, who?” 

From The Nation

CBPP: Michael Leachman: 'Fact Sheet: Reducing Federal Deficits Without a Significant Revenue Increase Would Shift Substantial Costs to States'

Source:Center For Budget & Policy Priorities- with a look at the Federal deficit.

"If it fails to include significant new revenues, a major legislative package to shrink federal deficits would almost certainly make substantial cuts in federal funds that support states and localities.  These cuts likely would force states and localities to reduce the quality and reach of their basic public systems — schools, clean water facilities, and law enforcement activities, for example — or to raise new revenue or cut other programs to continue meeting these needs.  Either way, the result would be a large cost shift from the federal government to states and localities.  By contrast, if Congress adopts a balanced deficit-reduction plan that includes significant new revenues, the resulting cost shift to states and localities almost certainly will be smaller.

States Provide Services That Are National Priorities

States and localities provide public services that address national priorities.  For example, they educate the nation’s children and build and repair the nation’s roads, bridges, airports, and public transit systems.  They also undertake a wide range of other important functions, including protecting waterways from sewage contamination, protecting public safety, reducing homelessness, revitalizing run-down neighborhoods, providing technical job skills training to community college students and others, and responding after disasters.  Some 87 percent of the nation’s public employees — teachers, police officers, child abuse case workers, road construction engineers, and many others — work for state or local governments.

States, Weakened by the Recession, Cannot Absorb Large New Cost Shifts

State revenues for these services were deeply damaged by the recent recession, the worst for state finances in 70 years.  Since the recession hit, states have closed budget shortfalls totaling well over half a trillion dollars.  In the last four years, states and localities have shed more than 600,000 jobs.  While state revenues are beginning to recover, they remain about 6 percent below pre-recession levels after adjusting for inflation.  It will be several years more before states recover fully.

With their own budgets so seriously damaged, states cannot absorb massive new cost shifts from the federal government.  Significant federal funding cuts would force states to lay off still more people and to cut spending for schools, roads, or other public services in others ways or else raise substantial new revenue in-state to continue addressing these needs.  Either way, the result would be a large cost shift from the federal government to states and localities, a cost shift that would hit states hard at a time when their budgets already are deeply wounded.

Federal Deficit Reduction That Does Not Include Significant Revenue Likely Would Shift Substantial Costs to States

Many federal policy makers agree in broad terms that, as they seek to reduce the deficit, cuts in Social Security and Medicare that affect current beneficiaries should be limited and defense spending should not be cut much, if at all, below the spending caps imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act.  If the savings from Social Security, Medicare, and defense — which together account for well over half of non-interest federal spending — are limited and the deficit plan does not include significant revenues, federal support for programs operated by state and local governments will stand out as one of the few remaining sources of large potential savings.

That’s because a large part of the federal budget outside of Social Security, Medicare, defense, and interest payments on the national debt — 41 percent of what’s left — consists of grants to states and localities.  Hence, if significant new revenue isn’t included, a major legislative package to shrink federal deficits almost certainly will cut deeply into state and local aid, shifting to the states more of the costs for educating children and providing other public services." 

From CBPP