Katrina vanden Heuvel | The Nation

In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama announced what Robert Kuttner, co-editor of The American Prospect, describes as maybe “the most fateful political and economic development of the election year”—the formation of an interagency task force to finally investigate the mortgage and lending practices that led to the collapse of the economy and trillions of dollars in lost wealth, with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman named as co-chair.

It remains to be seen whether Schneiderman will be given the extensive resources and manpower he needs to conduct a thorough and aggressive investigation, or if the Wall Street faction within the Administration will stonewall the process. But I’m confident in this: Schneiderman is the right man for the job, and he’s not about to let himself be co-opted for the president’s re-election bid. Throughout his career he’s been a steadfast champion of causes because they are right, not because they are popular or politically expedient. He’s been successful because he works to move voters closer to his positions, and sets a course toward a better future and better possibilities. If he’s being obstructed, he’ll let people know.

Already, Schneiderman and a few other State Attorneys General have protected the people’s interests by drawing a firm line during negotiations between the federal government, the bankers and their fellow attorneys general on a foreclosure settlement. When most were ready to cave and grant the Big Banks wide immunity—putting their egregious and likely fraudulent behavior into a sealed box never to be examined—Schneiderman refused to sign on, even when he was kicked out of the negotiations. Although no deal is yet finalized, early indications are that it will be a far better one for the public than anyone anticipated, leaving the bulk of bad behavior on the table for possible prosecution (including the securitization and peddling of toxic mortgages, mortgage origination fraud, foreclosure mills and other acts of malfeasance.)

In covering (and working as an editor with) Schneiderman over the years, I’ve grown to admire him as someone who fights for what he calls “transformational politics,” which he described in the pages of The Nation in 2008 this way: “Transformational politics is the work we do today to ensure that the deal we can get on gun control or immigration reform in a year—or five years, or twenty years—will be better than the deal we can get today. Transformational politics requires us to challenge the way people think about issues, opening their minds to better possibilities.… History teaches that the overwhelming majority of elected officials follow movement builders outside government when it comes to the new and risky.”

Schneiderman didn’t settle for a bad deal on foreclosures—he held out for a better one and when outside pressure came to bear on his colleagues they were forced to open their eyes to better possibilities.

That’s one of the reasons why there is such value in having Schneiderman on the inside leading this investigation. He recognizes that it’s popular pressure that has created this “accountability moment,” and he’s sure to make sure that others on the task force see it as well. As he explained on Up with Chris Hayes on Sunday, “This is not just about the president. This is about the American people having risen up over the past year. The political atmosphere right now is so different than it was when I started [addressing] this conflict over giving the banks a [liability] release over a year ago. And that’s not because of me, that’s because of the grassroots uprising that’s taken place across this country.”

The task force has already announced eleven subpoenas, and Schneiderman expects in the next few weeks to see more subpoenas, more agencies taking action, and cases filed. He anticipates “concrete results” in the next six to eight months. He’s confident that he has the resources, the jurisdiction since so many agencies are involved—including the US Attorneys’ offices, the IRS and the CFPB—and the will.

His goal is the same one he’s had leading investigations in New York: “Accountability for those who blew up the economy, relief for those who were harmed, and also just to stop these guys from rewriting history—because [it was] reckless deregulation that caused this crisis,” he told Nation editor-at-large Chris Hayes.

Schneiderman understands he will need mobilization from the outside to make sure his fight on the inside reaches its potential. Then maybe we will finally see some accountability and restitution for the economic destruction caused by greed, recklessness and outright fraud.

I don’t know how Occupy Wall Street will impact the 2012 election, but one thing seems pretty clear: it’s changed the national conversation.

A few short months ago, the corporate media and inside-the-Beltway chatter was all debt and deficits, all the time.

Occupy changed that. It reset the media narrative so it’s more aligned with the true crises of our times—income inequality, downward mobility and economic fairness. It’s also renewed attention to corporate accountability and the corrosive role of corporate money in politics.

Just look at the media’s use of the words “inequality” and “greed” post-Occupy. As Peter Dreier notes, a Lexis/Nexis search shows that US newspapers published 409 stories with the word “inequality” in October 2010. Through September 2011, the number of stories about “inequality” remained roughly the same. But in October 2011, when OWS erupted across the country and overseas, the frequency skyrocketed to 1,269 stories.

You can see a similar pattern with stories on “greed.” Between October 2010 and September 2011, “greed” stories fluctuated between 452 and 728. But in October of that year newspapers stories on greed jumped to 2,285.

And the “Occupy Effect” continues. As of mid-January there were 455 mentions of “inequality” in US newspaper articles, and 549 mentions of “greed.” So just halfway through the month, the figures had already reached the total monthly usage pre-Occupy.

As New York Times columnist Charles Blow puts it, “On this point, we must applaud the efforts of the Occupy Wall Street movement. It took income inequality and corporate responsibility out of the shadows and into the streets.”

Here are just some of the articles that reflect the impact of Occupy:

In November, Time magazine ran a cover story, “What Ever Happened To Upward Mobility?” Just this month, the New York Times ran a “dialogue” on “Mobility and Inequality in Today’s America,” as well as a front page story “Harder for Americans to Rise From Lower Rungs.” The Washington Post ran this terrific and humorous piece by Nation contributor Barbara Ehrenreich exploring the disconnect between the über-wealthy and the rest of us. Even Town & Country—the quintessential magazine of the 1 percent—ran “The Millionaires of Occupy Wall Street” this month, which worked hard to portray its crowd as sympathetic to Occupy.

Here’s more: Reuters recently announced a new “Income, Inequality & Access” beat in DC, and posted a great article on poverty-level wages in New York City. Tapping into people’s frustration with the hyper-conglomeratized banking industry, the New York Times ran a 2,500-word profile of a 130-year-old microbank in upstate New York that lends to people in the town with the greatest need, saving residents from losing their homes, and taking modest profits. (Imagine, a bank that puts the people it serves on equal footing with the profits it makes—revolutionary!)

When Occupy Wall Street contributed to the fierce backlash against proposed debit card fees, and the subsequent migration to community banks and credit unions, the media covered the protests at Bank of America and its Big Bank brethren. Now Occupy is being covered as part of the mobilization to get money out of politics, and along with the work of other groups, Occupy helped create the political climate that halted a weak settlement between the Obama administration, state attorneys general and the Big Banks that would have prevented a full and fair investigation into mortgage foreclosure fraud.

Public attention to these issues shows no signs of waning—in fact, just the opposite is true, it’s on the rise and Mitt Romney can’t stop it—no matter what he has to say to protesters, or how much he wants this conversation to be confined to “quiet rooms.” (Read: back-room deals between powerbrokers to preserve and protect the status quo.) Sarah Treuhaft, associate director at PolicyLink, says grassroots equity advocates who have been working on these issues for years are now much more confident to speak up about inequality. That makes sense, since according to the Pew Research Center, conflict between the rich and poor is now “the greatest source of tension in American society,” with two-thirds of Americans describing that conflict as “strong.” The New York Times credits Occupy with making Americans “more aware of the deep inequities in the economy and of the government’s responsibility to act.” President Obama certainly tapped into that trend, making economic inequality and fairness the centerpiece of his State of the Union address this week.

As Election 2012 gathers steam, the corporate media will no doubt fix on the hoopla of the horserace. Independent media has a vital role to play in ensuring that the real issues of our time which are now, at long last, front and center—thanks in no small part to Occupy—remain there.

On December 30, the Montana Supreme Court delivered a New Year’s gift to the nation, upholding a century-old ban on corporate political expenditures in state elections. The decision has gone underreported amidst the hoopla of the Republican primaries—even as Super PAC spending skyrockets and there is an emerging understanding of its corrosive impact—but the Montana case sets up the first direct challenge to the disastrous Citizens United decision as we approach its second anniversary.

Free Speech For People—a national nonpartisan campaign challenging the fabrication of corporate rights under the US Constitution—filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Montana case. It led a coalition that included the American Sustainable Business Council, a network of more than 70,000 businesses across the country; the American Independent Business Alliance; and a local supermarket business and nonprofit corporation.

Jeff Clements is the author of the coalition’s brief. Co-founder and general counsel of Free Speech, Clements did two stints as assistant attorney general in Massachusetts, litigating in the areas of civil rights, environmental protection, healthcare, insurance and financial services, antitrust and consumer protection, and taking on the tobacco industry. He’s also the author of a new book, Corporations Are Not People: Why They Have More Rights Than You Do and What You Can Do About It. This is a book that anyone who cares about taking back our democracy of, by and for the people must check out.

Clements tells a vivid story of how some of the largest corporations organized to take over our government and Constitution, culminating with the Citizens United decision. He also lays out a vision of how we can return democracy to the people.

As Bill Moyers notes in the book’s Foreword, this isn’t the first time a Supreme Court has served as a “procorporate conservative fortress”: in 1905 it killed a New York state law limiting working hours, and a prohibition against child labor about a decade later; it ruled against a minimum wage law in 1923, and early New Deal recovery acts in 1935 and 1936.

“But in the face of such discouragement, embattled citizens refused to give up,” writes Moyers. “Every day citizens researched the issues, organized public events to educate their neighbors, held rallies, made speeches, petitioned and canvassed, marched and exhorted. They would elect the twentieth century-governments that restored ‘the general welfare’ as a pillar of American democracy.”

Clements book, writes Moyers, describes “how to fight back”—as our forebears have done so many times before—in this case, through a constitutional amendment declaring what Clements calls “the simplest of propositions: corporations are not people.” (Clements also calls for corporate accountability, and corporate charter and election law reform, including increased public funding.)

“Citizens United is a corporate power case masquerading as a free speech case,” writes Clements. “We do not have to live with this. We can put the American project back together.”

Campaigns for constitutional amendments demand patience and a great deal of tenacity, since they must first secure supermajority support from both houses of Congress and then win ratification by three-quarters of the states. But as Maryland State Senator Jamin Raskin, professor of constitutional law and the First Amendment at American University’s Washington College of Law, says, “American citizens have repeatedly amended the Constitution to defend democracy when the Supreme Court acts in collusion with democracy’s enemies, whether they are slavemasters, imposing poll taxes on voters or the opponents of woman suffrage.”

It’s a long haul, and groups working towards that end—including Public Citizen, the Center for Media and Democracy, Move to Amend, Common Cause, People For the American Way and others—would be smart to agree on exactly what the amendment’s language is and make it simple, clear, and appealing. After all, it’s tough to organize a united front around the country when there are multiple versions of the same amendment.

Raskin and some of his colleagues in the Maryland General Assembly are sending a letter to Congress urging that it swiftly pass a constitutional amendment and send it out to the states for ratification. Lawmakers and activists will rally in front of the State House on Thursday to ask that every Assembly member sign on. The hope is that this effort will kick off a national movement at the state level to press the amendment case.

Other local jurisdictions are also pursuing that strategy, including the city councils of Los Angeles, Oakland, New York, Albany, Duluth and Boulder, which have all passed resolutions opposing Citizens United. In Congress, a number of representatives have introduced resolutions seeking a constitutional remedy, including: Donna Edwards; Senator Tom Udall and Representative Betty Sutton; Representative Ted Deutsch and Senator Bernie Sanders; Representative Jim McGovern; Representative John Yarmuth and Republican Representative Walter Jones; Representative Keith Ellison and others. Kudos to these senators and congressmen for their good proposals, and—as with the pro-democracy advocacy organizations—the more they are able to agree on the language of an amendment, the more easily citizens will be able to rally around it.

But as undisclosed corporate money continues to flood our elections and drown out the voices of ordinary Americans, it’s important to remember that we need to walk and chew gum at the same time, and not solely focus on the amendment fight. That means building on successful public campaign financing systems already on the books in places like Arizona, Connecticut, Maine and North Carolina, bringing those models to other states. In Congress, the Fair Elections Now Act would allow federal candidates to run for office without relying on Big Money as well—force Republicans and conservative Democrats to go on record opposing it, and if it eventually passes and the Supreme Court shoots it down that will only galvanize the public.

With the Montana Supreme Court decision and public anger toward a political and economic system devoted to serving the 1 percent, this is a moment to dig in and organize for a cleaner, more democratic way. On January 20 and 21 activists across the country are organizing to protest Citizens United and urge a constitutional amendment. Will you join in the effort?

Editor's note: This post has been updated to include the most recent legislative efforts to repeal Citizens United.

You can access all of The Nation's coverage of Citizens United by clicking here.

Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

Mitt Romney’s dead heat with Rick Santorum in the Iowa caucuses bolstered the media narrative that Mitt Romney may not be conservative enough for Republican primary voters. This characterization serves Romney well. His rivals carve up each other, hoping to emerge as the conservative “alternative” to Romney. And vast swaths of the media discount his reactionary views, anticipating his “pivot” to more moderate positions once the nomination is secured. In reality, Romney is a remarkably reactionary candidate, camouflaged in corporate pinstripes.

On social issues, Romney embraces all of the right’s litmus tests. He pledges to repeal President Obama’s health-care reform, even though it was modeled on the plan Romney signed as Massachusetts governor. He favors repealing Roe v. Wade, outlawing women’s right to choose. He supports an amendment to make same-sex marriage unconstitutional. He’s for building a fence on the US-Mexican border, opposes any path to legal status for the millions of undocumented immigrants in this country and rails against the Texas policy to offer in-state college tuition for the children of undocumented workers. Advised on legal matters by the reactionary crank Robert Bork, he repeatedly calls for more judges in the activist right-wing tradition of the gang of four—Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito.

On national security, he is far more bellicose than former ambassador Jon Huntsman and somewhat to the right of Newt Gingrich. He says he’d add 100,000 troops and hundreds of billions of dollars to the military budget. He promises war with Iran if it proceeds toward a nuclear weapon. He joins George W. Bush in claiming that waterboarding is not torture.

But it is on economic policy where Romney’s extremism is most apparent—the extremism of the 1 percent, reflecting the zealotry of a former corporate raider at Bain Capital who made his fortune preying on US companies.

Editor’s Note: Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.