The Notion

Beer is Nice but Equal Protection's Better

By Laura Flanders

The National Council of La Raza, a top Latino civil rights group, is taking a shot at RNC chair Michael Steele and several prominent GOP figures for skipping its ongoing annual conference while Democrats are basking in the contrast. Having nominated the first Latina to the Supreme Court and sending no end of speakers to the La Raza conference, they're in like Flynn with Latino voters, they hope.

But things are not so simple. The day after the La Raza affair there was another gathering in NY, to which Latinos came out. That was to protest at the Council on Foreign Relations  -- where Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano was talking up the Administration's anti-terror policy.

A slew of human rights and immigrant-rights organizations, including many Latinos, called the protest because -- for all the nice talk -- the administration's immigration policy has actually put more, not less power in the hands of law enforcement and done little so far to stop abusive raids and deadly detention practises.

Armed federal immigration agents are still illegally pushing and shoving their way into homes and taking people away, breaking up families, on suspicion and Latinos are getting the lion's share of the grief. The Cardozo school of law reports there have been hundreds of predawn raids in just two states (New York and New Jersey) in violation of agency rules as well as the Constitution. And that's not just happening under the big bad Bush crackers-down. It's happening under Napolitano and Obama.

The demonstration by the immigration groups outside the Council in New York is a wake up call. Obama allies and voters, like many of those gathered outside Wednesday, aren't happy.

A Latina on the Supreme Court's great. And a love fest at La Raza's lovely. But just as in the case of the wrongful-arrest of Harvard Professor Skip Gates, a beer in the White House is no fix for what ails us. 

There's still a  problem of inequality and discrimination in America and it isn't solvable by improving our personal (or political) relations. At the end of the day policy -- like policy governing policing and immigration -- is where the action needs to be. If Obama and the Dems are going to applaud themselves for "being on the right side of history" they need to back up their words with real work.

Again, beer and a chat is nice. But ensuring equal protection is better.  ICE and police who abuse power need to be reined in at once.

The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv which broadcasts weekdays on satellite TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415 Free Speech TV) on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv or GritLaura on Twitter.com.
 

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July 30, 2009

Dean Slams Senate Finance Committee

By Ari Berman

Howard Dean guest hosted Countdown with Keith Olbermann at an opportune time last night, following reports that the Senate Finance Committee--helmed by Montana Democrat Max Baucus--is preparing to exclude a public option from its long-awaited healthcare bill.

"What if the Senate Finance Committee has already done the Republicans' dirty work for them?" Dean asked rhetorically at the beginning of show.

Dean has just authored a book on healthcare reform--detailing why America needs a public option--and knows quite a bit about the subject from his years as a doctor and governor of Vermont. He called Baucus's reported bill the "so-called compromise."

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July 29, 2009

The Birthers of a Nation

By Leslie Savan

The long hunt for the new leader of the Republican Party has at last come to an end, and the winner isn't Rush Limbaugh, Mitt Romney, or even Sarah Palin, but this woman in a red T-shirt:

If you're going to lead a low-tech lynch mob, you've got to be able to get that Gilbert Gottfried screech into your voice like the Lady in Red does when she says, "I want my country back!" That's leadership for you, ever so much more forceful than poor Delaware Rep. Mike Castle, a GOP moderate (one of eight who voted for the House climate change bill), who seems to be ducking a personal Oxbow Incident by meekly asking the crowd if they'd like him to "lead" the Pledge of Allegiance. By then the crowd is already on its feet, one hand on their hearts and the other on an imaginary holster, insisting, like their dimestore-flag-waving leader, that they "don't want this flag to change!"

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July 24, 2009

Skip Gates and the Post-Racial Project

By Melissa Harris-Lacewell

Over the past several days a strange characterization of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has emerged. Many are portraying him as a radical who easily and inappropriately appeals to race as an excuse and explanation. This image of Gates is inaccurate. In fact, more than any other black intellectual in the country Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was an apolitical figure. This is neither a criticism nor an accolade, simply an observation.

Gates is the director of the nation's preeminent institute for African American studies, but he is no race warrior seeking to right the racial injustices of the world. He is more a collector of black talent, intellect, art, and achievement. In this sense Gates embodies a kind of post-racialism: he celebrates and studies blackness, but does not attach a specific political agenda to race. For those who yearn for a post-racial America where all groups are equal recognized for their achievements, but where all people are free to be distinct individuals, there are few better models than Professor Gates.

Gates is largely responsible for the institutional investment in African American studies made by premier universities over the past two decades. Student activists and faculty advocates led the massive black studies movement of the 1960s; a movement that created substantial changes in course offerings, faculty recruitment, administrative structures, and student retention at many state universities. But the country's most privileged institutions remained largely untouched by this populist era of race and ethnic studies.

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July 21, 2009

Misused TARP Funds Shocker

By Laura Flanders

Told to make more loans, TARP banks made fewer, gambled on the stock market and bought other banks. Will we "tell" them to go to their rooms? Or at least cut their allowance?

Just a few months ago, the Treasury Department stress tested the banks. The result was a call for massive new capital infusion -- for them, from us. 

Even then, academic studies were clear that the very same banks were making more than a buck. TARP recipients JP Morgan and Wells Fargo cut dividends to investors only once, and, well we all know what was happening at  Goldman. They were on track -- boy, were they on track -- to super-profits.

Now there's news -- from special inspector general Neil Barofsky, the overseer of the TARP bailouts.

Of 360 banks that got money through the end of January -- Barofsky reports that 110 invested at least some of it in the stock market, 52 repaid bad debts they'd taken out, and 15 used our funds to buy up other banks. And that's not even counting the millions they spent lobbying against bankruptcy reform or credit card regulation.

To make things right Barofsky's calling on the Treasury Department to require regular, detailed reporting from TARP recipients. Just in case you forgot, so far, the Treasury has refused to collect such information. In a written response, Geithner et al are still against it. "Officials have taken the view that the exact use of the federal aid cannot be tracked because money given to a bank is like water poured into an ocean. "

Oh, really? Well, that's a little different from how TARP was sold to us.

Back last fall, Hank Paulson, a former Goldman CEO, who once owned $700 million worth of the company's stock, told taxpayers that if we gave to the banks, they'd give back to us --in jobs, and loans, and new businesses on Main Street. (Even though CitiGroup were stating publicly their intention to reduce, not grow, lending.)

Would we have gone for that -- any of us -- if we'd been told it was to "pour money like water into an ocean?"

A very profitable, private ocean, at that. What do you think? 

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July 21, 2009

Sotomayor and the Politics of Public Humiliation

By Melissa Harris-Lacewell

One of the most enduring images of the Civil Rights Movement is of Elizabeth Eckford. She is being harassed and taunted by a group of white students, parents, and police on her way to desegregate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. On that morning Eckford missed connecting with the eight other African American students of the Little Rock Nine and their NAACP leader, Daisy Bates. Eckford was alone when the angry crowd surrounded and confronted her.

The photo is now iconic. Eckford's dignity, strength, and self-possession are stunning counterpoint to the contorted, hate-filled faces of those following her.

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July 17, 2009

Goldman Wins, Workers Lose

By Eyal Press

The conventional wisdom holds that Barack Obama's first term will be judged by whether he can revive the economy, which currently boasts an unemployment rate of 9.5 percent, a figure that excludes the large number of "marginally attached" people who have basically stopped searching for jobs and many others who are involuntarily stuck in part-time positions (the actual unemployment rate, by some estimates, is 16.4 percent).

But even if unemployment declines between now and 2012, there remains the question of whether Obama and the Democrats can reverse the staggering level of wealth and income inequality in America. Robert Reich has argued that Obama is passionate about this issue. That may be, but scolding bankers for taking home exorbitant salaries is one thing, passing serious regulation of the financial industry another. Goldman Sachs just reported record quarterly profits, JP Morgan $2.7 billion in profits; both will soon be showering their employees with massive bonuses. Meanwhile, as Paul Krugman notes in his latest column, "new regulations are still in the drawing-board stage."

For less lavishly compensated workers, it's another story, thanks to the half-dozen Democratic Senators who just dropped the card-check provision from legislation that might have made it easier to organize unions. Moderate Democrats apparently bought the argument that the card-check provision is undemocratic (having long been unconcerned that companies routinely use undemocratic methods to prevent workers from organizing unions). There are legitimate disagreements about how much the card-check provision would actually boost the rate of unionization in the private sector, which now stands at a paltry 7.6 percent. There are no disagreements that its defeat marked a victory for the business lobby, which campaigned strenuously against it for a reason not hard to guess: the fear that it might actually empower workers.

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July 17, 2009

Healthcare Debate Is Sicko

By Leslie Savan

What are you doing tonight, Max Baucus, Kent Conrad, Ben Nelson, and other Blue Dog Dems blocking real healthcare reform? If you can spare two hours, you ought to catch Michael Moore's newly hyperpertinent documentary Sicko on The Movie Channel at 8 p.m. Tonight doesn't work for you? You can also catch it on these dates.

We know it's extra hard for lawmakers like yourselves to sit for two hours and watch the 2007 Oscar-nominated expose without squirming, if only because corporate and rightwing propagandists have successfully painted Moore as anathema to mainstream thought and any public option as "rationed" care with commie bureaucrats standing between you and your blah blah blah. You've been brainwashed to think this way because, as Wendell Potter, former head of PR for the insurance company CIGNA, explained to Bill Moyers the other night, flacks like him specifically targeted Democratic centrists like you:

BILL MOYERS (reading from an industry memo): And there was a political strategy. "Position Sicko as a threat to Democrats' larger agenda." What does that mean?

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July 16, 2009

England's Green and Pleasant Land

By Maria Margaronis

Britain's Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband (the former Nation intern who said that we need a mass movement to push for action on the environment), has just published a hugely ambitious plan to cut Britain's carbon emissions by 34% in the next decade, working towards 80% by 2050. The target is non-negotiable; it was voted into law last year. But until now, nobody had a clear idea of how we were going to get there.

Miliband's plan is based, as he puts it, on "green hope, not green despair." Its first step is to return control of the power grid to the government, which will allocate connections to producers of renewable energy. Forty percent of Britain's electricity will come from wind, tidal and nuclear sources--and the nuclear share will fall from 13% to 8%, in spite of lobbying by the Confederation of British Industry. The government itself will be put on a tight carbon budget; energy companies will have to invest in home insulation; there will be subsidies for low carbon vehicles. Energy prices will increase, but with Britain's North Sea oil and gas running down that would happen anyway. Miliband predicts the creation of 400,000 new green jobs; Prime Minister Gordon Brown has hailed his plan as the engine that will drive economic recovery. Two hundred years ago Britain gave birth to the industrial revolution's dark satanic mills; the hope is that our boffins can now lead the world to a clean green Jerusalem.

Of course there are fudges, caveats and plenty of stumbling blocks. The government plans to go ahead with new coal-fired plants on the gamble that carbon capture technology will be viable in the next few years; it also intends to press on with the controversial third runway at London's Heathrow Airport. Miliband is right to say that going green shouldn't mean wearing sackcloth and ashes, but there is political expedience as well as class solidarity in his support for cheap air travel for working people. The projected increase in wind-generated power will mean more giant turbines towering over rural landscapes and bitter arguments over where they should go. The Severn Barrage, which would harness the tides between England and Wales, is opposed by many of the big conservation groups. And the whole plan's sheer ambition and expense is daunting--though climate scientists say it doesn't go nearly far enough.

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July 16, 2009

Of Breadlines & Banks

By Laura Flanders

President Obama was elected with a large enough mandate for fundamental change that he could forge a fresh social compact, lock in place a new set of mutual obligations and rewrite the relationship between the state and the populace.

Sasha Abramsky's comments in his book Breadline USA: The Hidden Scandal of American Hunger and How to Fix It (which I'm paraphrasing there) would be striking enough on any day. The need for change is obvious. In 2008 the official poverty line stood at a shameful $10,590 for a single person and $21,203 for a family of four. And according to the Census 37 million Americans were living at or below those numbers. In 2008, 28.4 million Americans were receiving food stamps, a number that's risen 19 percent since today's recession started.

The need for change is obvious, and last November, the appetite for it became palpable. "President Barack Obama's election was an astounding transformative moment," writes Abramsky. "Tens of millions of voters, from the most liberal to the most conservative regions of the country, stood up and said no more to the divisive greed-driven policies and priorities of the recent past."

But then there's this, from today's news. Analysts report that the Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs, a major recipient of government cash, has earned a staggering $2 billion in the last three months. The bank's stock value has soared 68 percent and the Wall Street Journal predicts that it's on track to pay out as much as $20 billion this year, in compensation and benefits to its employees --  or about $700,000 per person.

As formerly homeless mom, Franceska Dillella told GRITtv today -- poor Americans, like those in her New York shelter, celebrated on election night. But well-connected Goldman didn't just get hugs or hope when they fell on hard times: Goldman received $13 billion from the Bush bailout of the failed insurance giant AIG and $28 billion more in low-interest loans -- plus insurance worth untold billions more -- thereafter.  Now the bank's repaid that loan and bounced back: how? The Times says Goldman "Brilliantly" capitalized on chaos--making a fortune trading bonds and buying and selling volatile currencies in a shifting market, and making out from gambling on commodities like oil -- raising prices for everyone.

Back to Abramsky.  In Breadline USA Sasha writes that if Obama rewrites the social contract and all the rest, he might be able contain the calamity of the 2008 economic collapse. "But if he fails that calamity will haunt the next several decades..."

What's more too big to fail: The banks or the country?

The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv which broadcasts weekdays on satellite TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415 Free Speech TV) on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv or GritLaura on Twitter.com.

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July 14, 2009