Winning Progressive

For this weekend’s reading list, we have articles about linguist Noam Chomsky, progressives and the Democratic Party, immigration reform, climate change’s impacts on the Western US, and taxpayer subsidies to corporations.

Happy Birthday, Noam Chomsky – in honor of his 84th birthday, an essay about noted linguist Noam Chomsky’s contribution to the field

How to Save the Democratic Party - a thought-provoking, though ultimately misguided, essay questioning whether progressives should still view the Democratic Party as their political home.  The responses to the essay from leading progressives such as Keith Ellison are definitely worth a read.

What’s Next for Immigration Reform? – an interview with the National Council of La Raza about the lessons of the 2012 election and what the next steps on immigration reform should be.

Will the West Survive? – a reporter travels throughout the US West to assess how the extreme heat and drought accompanying climate change are already changing life in that region of the country.

As Companies Seek Tax Deals, Governments Pay High Price - a three-part New York Times investigative report about the more than $80 billion in subsidies that state and local government provide to corporations in a desperate and often failed attempt to promote job growth and economic development.

10 years ago this month our nation lost some inspiring fighters for progressive values when Senator Paul Wellstone (D-MN), his wife Sheila, his daughter Marcia, three campaign staffers, and their two pilots died in a plane crash on a cold, dreary day in Minnesota.  Ardent supporters of working people, labor unions, social justice, and the belief that government can and must be used to improve the lives of everyday people, the loss of Paul and Sheila was truly heart wrenching.  But we also know that Paul and Sheila would have believed that the best way to honor their legacy would be to carry on the fight for the progressive values that they, and we, hold dear.

In honor of Paul, Sheila, and their legacy, below is the post that we wrote on the eight anniversary of Paul’s death, and which still holds true today.  We also urge our readers to share a tribute to the Wellstones at the memorial page that has been set up by Wellstone Action.  And please check out this tribute to Paul and Sheila written by WP contributor Joanne Boyer, who included a profile of Paul in her book Wisdom of Progressive Voices.

In Memory of Paul Wellstone

We here at Winning Progressive are not the type to have political heroes.  While there are many political candidates that we proudly support because they share the views we believe in or because they are significantly better than the alternative, we realize that all politicians are humans and, therefore, flawed.  In addition, politicians work in a system that is flooded with well-funded interests and that requires compromise to get things done.  As such, we realize that we can often only get progress out if we politically force our elected officials to aggressively support our interests.  In short, even our favorite political leaders are bound to let us down on occasion, just as we are sometimes let down by our friends or relatives.  Therefore, even as we strongly support various candidates, we recognize that raising a politician to hero status places unrealistic expectations on that person.

Having said that, there are some political leaders who we hold in especially high esteem.  On such leader is Paul Wellstone, the former Democratic U.S. Senator from Minnesota, who tragically died eight years ago today.  Senator Wellstone was first elected in 1990, and quickly became a leading progressive in the Senate for his willingness to strongly and eloquently stand up for progressive causes even when they were not politically popular.  Senator Wellstone was re-elected in 1996, and died eleven days before election day in 2002 when he was running for a third term.

Senator Wellstone holds a place close to our hearts because of his willingness to proudly stand up for the under-represented and to stay true to his progressive values even at the risk of losing votes, and for the time and dedication he put into building a true grassroots campaign model that continues to this day with trainings run by Wellstone Action, which works to develop future progressive leaders.  At a time when the Senate and House are increasingly dominated by massive amounts of corporate cash and politicians who rely mainly on television advertising for their campaigns, the values and tactics of Senator Wellstone are sorely missed to this day.

We’d like to close with the below video of Senator Wellstone announcing his opposition to the Iraq War in October 2002.  Only a couple weeks before his death, Senator Wellstone gave this speech in the midst of a tough re-election campaign and at a time when the proposal to invade Iraq had strong public support.  Senator Wellstone could have easily gone with the political winds (as many Democrats who should have known better did) and voted for the Iraq War.  Instead, he stood up for his beliefs and cast his vote against the war.

As we work to push our representatives to support our progressive values, we could do a lot worse than urging them to follow the example set by Senator Wellstone.

The importance of a functioning, more progressive U.S. Senate has been starkly demonstrated over the last three-and-a-half years.  While significant progressive victories have been achieved during President Obama’s first term, far too often progressive goals on job creation, health care reform, Wall Street reform, climate change, etc. were stymied or watered down in a U.S. Senate that is clearly broken.

The problem in the Senate is two-fold.  First, Senate Republicans have carried out a strategy of historically unprecedented obstructionism involving filibustering or threatening to filibuster virtually every major piece of legislation and most nominees (for example even President Obama’s non-controversial appellate judge nominees were held up by Senate Republicans by an average of 227 days). Contrary to common misconceptions, the Democrats had a filibuster proof majority for only 72 days during President Obama’s first term.  As such, virtually all legislation had to be crafted in ways that they would gain the support of all Democratic Senators and one or more Republicans which, of course, limited how progressive legislative proposals could be.

If the Democrats hold the Senate this November, the obstructionism problem can be largely addressed by reforming the filibuster rules.  Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has committed to filibuster reform in the new Senate, admitting that it was a mistake for him not to pursue such reform last time around.  As we’ve explained previously, filibuster reform should involve shifting the burden of maintaining the filibuster to the 40 Senators who are filibustering, speeding up the time in which a filibuster can be challenged, and ending filibusters of Presidential nominees.

A second problem with the Senate over the past three-and-a-half years is that a number of the Senators that made up the Democratic majority were far from progressive.  Basically any legislation that was proposed had to get the votes of Senators Joe Lieberman, Mary Landrieu, Ben Nelson, Mark Pryor, and Blanche Lincoln, none of whom could be considered progressive.

The good news is that we have a great opportunity at a far more progressive Democratic Senate caucus in 2013, with five races that should be of critical importance to progressives throughout the country.  The key to achieving that result, however, is for all of us progressives to get involved in making sure we win these races.  Below are links for getting involved by volunteering, contributing to their campaigns, and writing letters to the editor in support of these progressive candidates.

Tammy Baldwin - Wisconsin

* Campaign website   *Facebook page   * Contribute    * Volunteer    * Wisconsin newspapers

In Wisconsin, we have the opportunity to elect a strong progressive and the first openly-lesbian member of the U.S. Senate.  Rep. Baldwin is vice chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and has compiled a strongly progressive voting record in her seven terms in the House.  Rep. Baldwin voted against the Iraq War, opposed repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, is the lead House sponsor of the Buffett Rule to require millionaires and billionaires to pay more of their fair share, is a strong supporter of marriage equality and was lead sponsor of legislation ending Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, is a strong supporter of single payer health insurance and of including a public option in health care reform, and voted against the NDAA.  Rep. Baldwin would replace Sen. Herb Kohl who, while a decent Democrat, had a more moderate voting record than Rep. Baldwin does.

Sherrod Brown – Ohio

* Campaign website   * Facebook page   * Contribute   * Volunteer    * Ohio newspapers 

The only incumbent on our list, Senator Sherrod Brown has long been known as an economic populist and tireless advocate for middle class Americans.  Elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006 after serving in the House since 1993, Senator Brown has compiled a voting record that most any progressive should be proud of.  He is a strong advocate for protecting Social Security and Medicare, strengthening labor unions, and returning manufacturing jobs to the US.  Senator Brown voted against the Iraq War and was one of only 65 House members to oppose the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996.  He is leading the charge in the Senate to overturn Citizens United and has voted numerous times to preserve the estate tax and to end the capital gains tax loophole.  Re-electing Senator Brown can help show that a progressive economic populism presents a promising future for Democrats in the Midwest and elsewhere.

Mazie Hirono – Hawaii

* Campaign website   * Facebook page    * Contribute     * Volunteer    * Hawaii newspaper links

The Democratic candidate for US Senate in Hawaii is Mazie Hirono, who is currently a Congresswoman and member of the House Congressional Progressive Caucus.  Rep. Hirono was born in Fukushima, Japan and came to Hawaii at the age of five when her mother escaped an abusive marriage.    After attending the University of Hawaii and Georgetown University Law School, she served as a state representative from 1980 to 1994, and then as Lieutenant Governor from 1994 to 2002.  In 2006, Rep. Hirono was elected to Congress, where, according to the website Progressive Punch, she has the fourth most progressive voting record of any current representative.   Rep. Hirono supports single payer health insurance, the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, opposed the Iraq War from the very beginning, and has been a vocal advocate for “Pre-K” legislation that would provide federal financing and support for improving and expanding early childhood education.

Chris Murphy – Connecticut

* Campaign website   * Facebook page   * Contribute    * Volunteer    * Connecticut newspaper links

Perhaps the biggest improvement in the U.S. Senate can come in Connecticut, where Senator Joseph Lieberman is, thankfully, retiring, and can be replaced by Rep. Chris Murphy.   A self-described progressive, Rep. Murphy summarized his views as follows:

I am a progressive when it comes to my views on the war and when it comes to my views on the environment and health care. I believe in universal health care. I believe in a strong environment. I believe in a fair tax code that ends up with higher rates for the affluent. I believe we should get out of Afghanistan and Iraq. And I believe that I should argue very strongly for those things.

While in the House, Rep. Murphy supported public financing of campaigns, marriage equality, and climate legislation, was a leading voice in favor of including a public option in the health care reform law, and voted no on the NDAA,

Elizabeth Warren – U.S. Senate – Massachusetts

* campaign website   * Facebook page    * Contribute      * Volunteer    * Massachusetts newspaper links

In Massachusetts, we have the opportunity not only to pick up a seat from the Republicans, but also to elect to the U.S. Senate one of the strongest advocates middle and working class Americans have had in decades.  A law school professor, Ms. Warren has spent her career focusing on how financial interests are causing untold harm to the economic vibrancy of our middle class and on how we can fix that problem.  Perhaps her biggest achievement to date is the establishment of a strong and independent Consumer Financial Protect Bureau (“CFPB”), which is charged with helping  curb economic abuses by enforcing a wide array of consumer protections, including the new credit card industry reforms signed by President Obama, and consolidating enforcement of consumer protections that are currently handled by seven different agencies.  The CFPB’s goal is to make the pricing and risks of financial products offered by these entities much clearer and fairer to the American public so that payday lenders, etc. are no longer able to prey on the most financially vulnerable among us.  Now we need Ms. Warren in the Senate so that she can defend the CFPB against GOP attacks and fight for a fairer economy.

(By NCrissie B)

This three-part series invites you to develop your activism plan for the November election. Today we consider the importance of honest self-assessment in setting your goals. Next we’ll look at reverse planning, working from your objectives back to your starting point. Then we’ll conclude by discussing burnout and mutual support.

The Two Worst Plans: None and Not-You

An election campaign involves many people coordinating their efforts toward a common purpose. The Obama campaign have plans at both the national and state levels. As do your Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate and House, and your state legislature. As do your state Democratic Party and your local Democratic organizations, and progressive activist groups such as Democracy for America. In each of those plans, most of the work will be done by grassroots activists like you. That means you need a personal activism plan.

It’s been said the worst plan is no plan at all. While improvisation can be fun and exciting, it works well only in small groups and for brief projects. For more than a handful of people, or any project that extends over more than a few hours, ‘winging it’ leads to confusion, conflict, duplicated effort, and missed details that seemed trivial but rarely are.

Yet I think there’s an even worse plan: a plan for Not-You. That Not-You plan may be brilliantly detailed, systematic, and comprehensive. Indeed they often are, and their only problem is their reliance on someone who is Not You. That other person that is Not You always prepares a shopping list and has the list at the store, has and uses an appointment calendar, knows how to do every task in the plan, follows through on every task once begun, and never gets tired or distracted. Alas, that is Not You.

A plan for Not-You can be worse than no plan at all, because others may be relying on Not-You to do the things You committed to do. The task that Not-You confidently took on becomes the task You don’t know how to do, or don’t like to do. That can leave others waiting for You to be Not-You … a wait that need not have happened had You not committed to be Not-You.

“Know Thyself”

Thus your personal activism plan should begin with an honest self-assessment. This is your personal plan, after all. It should fit You, rather than Not-You. So who are You?

• Strengths – What do you do well? Do you connect well with others on the telephone? Do you connect better face-to-face? Do you write well? Are you skilled at data-entry? Everyone has strengths. Make your list.
• Weaknesses – Everyone has strengths, but not everyone has every strength. That doesn’t mean you’re ‘bad’ or ‘inadequate.’ It means you should focus your efforts on the things you do well, and not commit to things you don’t do well. Do you get impatient on the phone? Do your thoughts always make more sense than the words that end up on the page? Again, make your list.
• Opportunities – Good luck has been described as the intersection of preparation and opportunity. You can’t predict every opportunity, but you can predict many of them. When and where will you get chances to apply your strengths? Are you in public often, such that wearing a campaign button would spark Fred Whispering conversations? Do you feel more energized in a group, such that a phone banking or canvassing party will bring out your best? Which opportunities can you create, maximize, or best prepare to seize? Once again, make your list.
• Threats – These are the events that derail your plans and, again, you can predict many of them. Will your work schedule or your children’s school and activity schedules get busier over the coming weeks? Do you have health issues? Which threats can you avoid, minimize, or best prepare to overcome? As before, make your list

“What were you thinking?!?”

Once you’ve listed your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, look at your list again. Imagine presenting it to your parents, spouse or partner, children, or friends who know you well. Would any of them ask: “What were you thinking?!? This is Not-You!!!”

If your personal activism plan will affect them, you should do more than imagine presenting it to them. You should include them in your planning process. They may see Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, or Threats you’ve overlooked. They’ll probably also feel better about supporting your efforts if they had at least some input. And if one of them says “What were you thinking?!? This is Not-You!!!” … listen with an open mind.

An honest self-assessment will help you commit to tasks that you will complete, done well and on time. Those successes will boost your confidence and others’ confidence in you. You’ll feel more engaged, and more willing to engage, because you will be working a plan developed … for You.

(Crossposted from Blogistan Polytechnic Institute (BPICampus.com))

By Josh Marks

Tuesday was National Voter Registration Day. We are now only 40 days to the most important election of our lifetime. This is not just about reelecting President Obama, but electing moderates and progressives at every level of government who will work with President Obama in a constructive way instead of obstructing everything and tearing down Obama.

Democrats need to retake control of the House of Representatives and keep control in the Senate. There are also important elections at the state, city and local level. President Obama not only needs a Congress that will work with him, but state governors as well (see Chris Christie, Bob McDonnell, Rick Scott and Scott Walker as examples of the types of failed leaders we need to kick to the curb across the country).  Not to mention the many important ballot measures such as California’s Clean Energy Jobs Act, Prop 39, which today received an endorsement from the Los Angeles Times; and Los Angeles County’s Measure J to start seven transit and eight highway improvement projects in five years by extending the half-cent transportation sales tax voters approved in 2008. Measure J is predicted to accelerate 250,000 jobs over the next decade. Winning Progressive has provided a comprehensive two part rundown of some of the most important state ballot initiatives. Click here for part 1 and click here for part 2.

According to the National Voter Registration Day website, 3,144 volunteers have registered 175,430 voters with 238 of 1,206 organizations reporting so far. That is great. That is democracy in action. That is how we defeat Republican voter suppression efforts and attempts by right-wing billionaires like Sheldon Adelson to buy this election for Mitt Romney.

Are you registered to vote? If you aren’t, there is still time. Click here to register.

If you think your vote doesn’t matter then you are wrong. People are dying around the world for the precious right to vote. It is not something to take for granted. You say there isn’t a difference between the Democrats and Republicans? Wrong again. There is a mountain of difference between Obama and Romney. How did supporting Ralph Nader (including me) over Al Gore work out? Do you think Gore would have been exactly like Bush and done nothing about climate change, put two wars on a credit card and blow Bill Clinton’s budget surplus to pass tax cuts for the rich and create record deficits? How different would America and the world look like right now if Gore had won that election over Bush?

Let’s not have regrets. Let’s reelect Barack Obama and moderates and progressives who will work with him to solve our many challenges.

If you still need convincing, there is an organization called Our Time that is mobilizing to register young Americans to vote through online social media channels and by harnessing the power of the entertainment industry community. Their goal is to register at least one million young Americans to vote in this election through their free online voter registration tool. Here is Steve Carell with a serious threat for you if you don’t register to vote:

(By Joanne Boyer, cross-posted at Wisdom Voices)

For activist, author, and blogger David Swanson, it really is about the never-ending struggle for social and economic justice; the same battle that has been fought since time began.  And for him, “success” or “defeat” cannot be defined by one election or one Supreme Court ruling.  For Swanson, “victory” may be generations away, but that does not deter him from keeping the activism fires burning via every avenue he can find.

“I don’t necessarily tell people not to lose hope,” Swanson said in a recent interview with Wisdom Voices.  “I think there’s a problem with having a dependency on hope. I don’t go through these cycles of being hopeful and then being despondent. I actually enjoy activism. I don’t think activism is something temporary that we do it once and then everything will be fixed and then we stop.  I think it’s permanent and it should be permanent.  Activism is more enjoyable than sitting home and griping.  It provides me a way to enjoy living every day.”

Based in Charlottesville, Virginia, Swanson is a prolific writer and author of several books, the most recent being:

• The Military Industrial Complex at 50 (2012)
• When the World Outlawed War (2011)
• War Is A Lie (2010)
• Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union (2009)

Information on his books and other articles can be found at his web site:  www.davidswanson.org.

Activism has been rooted in almost all of Swanson’s adult life.  He holds a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications director, with jobs including press secretary for Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign, media coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, and three years as communications coordinator for ACORN.  John Nichols of The Nation magazine once said:  “David Swanson will be remembered and well recognized as the citizen who held up a lamp in the darkness and cried, as did good Tom Paine: ‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again.’ ”

“The most important work I think is educational,” Swanson said.  “By that I mean activism has to take a kind of broad term organizational effort.  It’s not in passing a particular bill or electing a particular person.  Setbacks shouldn’t get us down.  If all of our hopes lie in (President) Obama turning out to be better than he claimed to be or all of our hopes are in un-electing (Wisconsin Governor Scott) Walker, we’re setting ourselves up for defeat because we can lose a particular battle and because elections can be the wrong place to be putting our emphasis to begin with. I think we should be putting about 95 percent of our efforts into educating and organizing and mobilizing non-violent struggle and maybe 5 percent into elections.

“But that doesn’t mean I’m not disturbed about what’s going on in our country today.  I’m extremely disturbed that the primary business of our government has been mass murder and the preparation for mass murder. And we’ve given presidents powers that kings never had, and most of us will be completely oblivious to that fact as we grill out and shoot off fireworks on another 4^th of July.

“And I find it extremely disturbing that we are ruining our earth’s atmosphere for our children and grandchildren. I think we either go down fighting or we win by reversing these trends.  But to sit back and watch TV, and say we can’t do anything or we lost an election seems to me immoral. Maybe that’s because I really do enjoy activism.

“We are in a struggle for our lives…a struggle that will not see victory come for generations. And we don’t have to be martyrs about it or somehow make ourselves victims about it, but it is something we have to understand will just go on. But even for people who have demanding day jobs, they are doing a ton of work for peace and justice. People do it in different ways; mine happens to be writing.”

And although the struggle for economic and social just has been a continuing and historic struggle, Swanson does sense something “different” about what’s happening today.

“Historically everyone has thought that their age was the crisis or turning point in history,” he said. “I think in a certain sense we are in a more dangerous time globally than we’ve seen before.  I say that in terms of the environmental devastation that is ruining our atmosphere and our ecosystem as well as in terms of our proliferation of weapons that can destroy life on earth.

“Those twin dangers are unprecedented in the military empire of the United States in terms of military spending and production and the number of bases and our presence in occupations around the world. No one has ever had an empire remotely resembling this. It is something we haven’t seen before and it’s incredibly dangerous and destructive environmentally as well as other terms.  For example, the U.S. military is our biggest consumer of oil and uses the highest percentage of oil that it fights wars for.  It’s an incredibly dangerous cycle.

“And, we are in a place in history that we’ve never been before in terms of our democracy. We’ve done away with more civil liberties, more checks and balances.  We have formally legalized a form of campaign bribery.  We have less control over our so called representatives in Washington.

“Granted, you can go back in history and find whole chunks of the populace who were forbidden from voting or were slaves or were shut out of the process, but there’s always been popular activism and popular media.  And that’s missing today. We are now in a place in which majority opinion is just ignored in Washington by both parties. We’ve never so empowered a set of parties and we’ve never so shut out popular opinion even as we continue to wage wars in the name of democracy.”

Swanson points to some positive developments such as the rise of the Internet to counter the corporate controlled main stream media. “If you poll the American people on what we actually want, if majority opinion really ruled, we’d be in a much better place than we’ve been in the past. But we have less activism today and much greater belief in the futile inability of activism. We have people believing they are a minority when they are a majority on positions such as taxing the rich, green energy, etc. We have people believing activism doesn’t work and so we should sit home and be miserable, and that’s a very dangerous trend.

“People want to understand how what they are doing can do some good. They’ve been taught that only elections matter or that the things we see daily are the only things that matter.  And then we give up. That’s the wrong frame of mind to be in. We have to tell people the good their work is doing…even if that good doesn’t show up for a long time and even with the fact that the government is trying to hide from us the way we influence it.

“There’s value in election campaigns if they build a movement, if they organize, if they educate, whether they elect an official or not.  It’s an added plus if they do.  But fundamentally we’re currently electing people in a pair of parties that have sold out and are doing the work of their funders.”

Swanson specifically pointed to the recent New York Times article that described the drone killings by President Obama.  “If somehow it had been revealed that Obama was really George W. Bush in disguise, we would have had millions of people surrounding and protesting at the White House.  Somehow, we’ve imagined that when Obama does this, he somehow is wringing his hands with guilt or that everyone tells themselves that secretly Obama means well.  Or that it’s our job to denounce Mitt Romney because some how he would be even worse.  And that’s fatal for us as a country.

“If you can’t object to giving someone arbitrary power to kill, if you can’t object to that because you can imagine someone else coming up will be even worse, then we’ve really tied both hands behind our back.”

The son of a man who studied to be a preacher, Swanson carries that fiery vocal force in his talks and conferences he leads or supports.  He was part of the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) at 50 conference in September 2011 and is one of the featured speakers at Peacestock 2012 at the Windbeam Farm in Hager City, Wisconsin.

“I’ve never understood there to be an alternative (to activism),” Swanson said. I would be miserable if I weren’t working a job to help save the world…if I were just working to make a buck.”