The Notion

Here Come the Unions

By Esther Kaplan

View a slideshow of images from the showdown in Chicago here.

On Tuesday morning, in Chicago, the unions came to town. It was the final day of the rolling protest dubbed The Showdown in Chicago, a confrontation with the American Bankers Association, whose members had gathered for their annual meeting. With a crowd estimated at 5,000, it was without a doubt the largest demonstration against Wall Street's ravages since the economy crashed a year ago.

From the desperate manufacturing sector came members of the Sheet Metal Workers and the Machinists and the Steelworkers. From the collapsed housing market came the Carpenters and the Painters and the Insulators. There were laid off workers from shuttered factories – Republic Doors and Windows, whose battle over severance pay was captured in Michael Moore's new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, and Quad City Die Casting, whose hundred employees all lost their jobs with far less fanfare last month. Pulling up the rear, a large contingent of garment workers from Hart Marx, suit makers to the president, who successfully fought off a shutdown threatened by creditor Wells Fargo, saving some 3,500 jobs. And, of course, a vast purple army from the Service Employees Union, SEIU.

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October 27, 2009

How Many Experts Declared Public Option Dead?

By Ari Melber

As the Senate moves towards including some form of public option in health care reform, it is worth remembering all the Washington "experts" who already declared the public option dead.

The list is long, distinguished, sometimes surprising and, thanks to the open source web, the list is growing. A diarist at DailyKos, "BrookylnBadBoy," just began counting. It ranges from bearish Senators (Kent Conrad) to Republican operatives (Brad Blakeman, Dana Perino) to sympathetic progressives (Nate Silver, Jane Hamsher) to, naturally, a long list of professional pundits (Klein, Gergen, Cillizza, Brooks, O'Donnell, Krauthammer, O'Reilly). You can add to your own nominations over at "Daily Kos," or here in our comments section.

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October 27, 2009

Bankers and Their Victims

By Esther Kaplan

Day two of the Showdown in Chicago, a three-day-long protest against big banks, began a bit dismally for The Nation. An email from American Bankers Association spokesman John Hall informed us that our press credentials had been revoked. The reason? Because we'd arrived early to cover a protest outside the ABA's annual meeting at the Sheraton Hotel the night before, he told us, ABA officials believed us to be "moles for the protesters."

Alas. That meant I wouldn't have the chance to hear how there's a silver lining to every recession -- I'm sorry, recovery -- through such workshops as "Strategies for Acquiring Troubled Banks" (this is, after all, the first year since 1992 when more than a hundred have failed in a single year) and "NonInterest Income," no doubt rich with tips on how to increase revenue through hiking fees on checking accounts, credit cards, and overdraft protection. Nor could I learn how to roll back socialism in "Unwinding Government Intervention," or sort through the puzzling link between record unemployment and depressed spending in "The Impact of the Recession on Consumer Preferences and Behavior." Worst of all, I'd miss Newt Gingrich's keynote speech in which, it was promised, he would "strike an optimistic tone."

It turns out Newt didn't exactly have his finger on the pulse, anyway.

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October 26, 2009

Bombings in Baghdad Threaten DC's Security.

By Laura Flanders

The 'Beneath the Presidency' Routine

By Adam Howard

The far right's latest attack line on President Obama is not as subtle as they think it is. By calling his administration's war of words with Fox News "beneath the presidency" --conservatives hope to add fuel to the fire of a potent and potentially racist, ideological effort to delegitimize the president. They've employed this tactic earlier but less histrionically when Obama became the first sitting president to appear on The Tonight Show and again when he courted the 2016 Olympics for Chicago, but it's really taken off with regards to the Fox News fight.

Whether you believe the president is right or wrong to challenge Fox News (I happen to agree with Slate's Jacob Weisberg, I believe he's right), it's pretty petty and profoundly ironic that the very people who excused George W. Bush's frequent malapropisms, carefree warmaking and authorization of torture as bold leadership now hope to marginalize Obama for publicly rebuking Fox News. As Amanda Terkel of Think Progress points out:

Bush also called a New York Times reporter "a major league asshole" -- and never apologized. In fact, Bush never gave the NYT a single interview throughout his presidency. The White House frequently went after NBC News, and Perino has admitted that they essentially froze out MSNBC "towards the end."

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October 25, 2009

Anger, At Last

By Esther Kaplan

In a brightly lit basement room at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Chicago tonight, Angel Seda was leading seven hundred people in a chant. "Tell me what you want, what you really want," he called. Hundreds of voices shouted back, "Our homes back!" "Tell me what you need, what you really need." "CFPA!"

CFPA?

Yep, you heard right, hundreds of people were chanting for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency,  a new oversight body Barack Obama has proposed that could ban such disastrous practices as no-doc mortgages, payday loans, and no-warning overdraft fees on checking accounts. (A bill to create the agency made it through the House Financial Services Committee last week).  Wonky, sure, but vital, too, and it was both hilarious and inspiring to see a roomful of Iowa farmers and Kansas retirees and preachers and teachers and utility workers jumping to their feet at the sound of those magic letters. One woman from Wichita, Arnetta Jefferson, told me she herself was facing the loss of her home and described "house after house after house empty" in her community, all from foreclosures. "I'm tired of it," she said. CFPA! CFPA! CFPA!

It's been a year since the stock market crashed and Congress approved a $700 billion bailout for the very banks that made it happen, but populist anger has finally found its expression this week in Chicago.

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October 26, 2009

Palin: Rogue or Rouge?

By Betsy Reed

Failed GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, whose new memoir, set to be released on Nov. 17, emphasizes her supposedly "maverick" tendencies with its title Going Rogue, has just dipped her toe into New York State politics. By endorsing a right-wing third party candidate, Doug Hoffman of the Conservative Party, in the Nov. 3 special election for the state's 23rd Congressional district seat, she has indeed bucked the party establishment--in order to advance a hard-line social conservative agenda. In the nonsensical Palin universe, that's what "rogue" means: walking in lockstep with the Christian right.

The Republican Party's candidate in the race, Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava, is pro-choice, pro-gay marriage and has pledged to support the pro-union Employee Free Choice Act. While Scozzafava has been depicted as a radical leftist in the right-wing blogosphere, in fact she is a centrist with conservative leanings. The net effect of Palin's "rogue" intervention may be to split the conservative vote and help elect the Democrat in the race, Bill Owens, who maintains an edge over the other two candidates in the polls. Still, Hoffman has been gaining momentum, and--in a testament to Palin's enduring appeal to her devoted base--he's been raking in the campaign cash in the wake of her endorsement.

In her Facebook posting announcing her support for Hoffman this past Thursday evening, Palin wrote, "Our nation is at a crossroads, and this is once again a ‘time for choosing.'"

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October 24, 2009

The Paranoid Style at Pacifica

By Eyal Press

In his Wall Street Journal column yesterday, Tom Frank paid homage to Richard Hofstadter's famous essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." As Frank noted, Birthers convinced that Barack Obama's birth certificate was forged in a plot to turn the United States into a fascist state are heirs to a long tradition of conspiracy thinking that has periodically flourished on the fringes of the American right.

But the paranoid style has seeped into some institutions on the left as well. For proof, look no further than a recent meeting of the Pacifica radio network's National Board, where a resolution was introduced that requires all programmers to disclose funding sources above $5,000. "The reason I created this motion," Chris Condon, a member of Pacifica's National Governance Committee, explained, "is because there has been a lot of debate about whether or not Amy Goodman has received CIA conduit foundation funding from the Ford Foundation and other places."

Amy Goodman is, of course, the co-host of Democracy Now!, an unabashedly progressive news program that airs on over 800 stations across the country. As anyone who has listened to even five minutes of the program knows, Goodman is about as likely to be on the payroll of the CIA as Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky. She has probably devoted more airtime to dissecting the CIA's transgressions in the past decade than any other member of her profession.

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October 22, 2009

Hoaxville USA

By Leslie Savan

Ah, the dog days of autumn, when the media are full of hoaxes because nothing much else is going on.

Last Thursday, the Heene family of Colorado gave us a homemade version of the movie Up!, sending their six-year-old into the wild blue yonder of the garage attic while their UFO-shaped balloon led authorities on a wild goose chase across our TV screens.

A day earlier, four House Republicans called a press conference to demand an investigation into the Council for American-Islamic Relations, a civil liberties lobby, for supposedly trying to "infiltrate" the Capitol with Muslim intern spies. This dastardly threat was uncovered by a stalwart young American who had grown a beard, read up on Islam, and passed himself off to CAIR as a Muslim convert committed to their goals. Once inside, he (the son of a co-author of the book Muslim Mafia, with a foreword written by Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC), the leader of the intern-busters) discovered that CAIR was actively involved in...lobbying.

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October 21, 2009

Memo to Hillary: Friends Don't Let Friends ♥ Fascists

By D.D. Guttenplan

How much should it matter to Americans that David Cameron, who will probably become the Prime Minister of Britain in May, recently took his party out of the main center-right group in the European Parliament to join the European Conservative and Reformists (ECR)--a group whose chairman, Polish MEP Michal Kaminski, began his career in the neo-Fascist National Revival Party, and where the Tories' new bedfellows also include Roberts Zile, the Latvian MEP whose party annually marches alongside veterans of the Latvian SS?

A week ago, when I blogged on this issue in the Guardian, it seemed purely a British affair. But two things have led me to change my mind. First, London's chattering classes have spent the past week tying themselves up in knots over an invitation to Nick Griffin, leader of the racist British National Party, to appear on a BBC discussion program this Thursday evening. The BBC claim that by winning two seats in the European parliamentary elections last June the BNP demonstrated a level of national support which needed to be reflected in coverage. To those of us used to First Amendment protections even for arguments we abhor the debate may seem odd, but in a country where, until recently, duly elected Sinn Fein members of Parliament were banned from the airwaves, the decision to grant Griffin a platform has been extremely controversial.

At the same time, and perhaps not entirely coincidentally, Cameron's failure to revisit his alliance with the ECR has put a spotlight on this afternoon's meeting between Hillary Clinton and William Hague, the Tory MP who would become Foreign Secretary in a Cameron government. The British press, from Rupert Murdoch's anti-European Times across to the pro-European Guardian, worry that the Conservative's far-right BF's will make Britain a less useful--and therefore less influential--ally for Washington.

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October 21, 2009