Tea Party - Represent Consumers

Can left & right unite – against cat food diet?

If our dysfunctional politicians can collaborate to do the bidding of the 1 percent, why can’t members of the 99 percent find ways to work with those we disagree with to protect all of our interests?

Specifically, can progressive Democrats who oppose President Obama’s proposed cuts to Social Security work with members of the Tea Party who also oppose the cuts – along with everything else the president does?

The gulf between these two groups is obviously deep and wide.

Rank and file Democrats tend to want to put government to work in their interests, and believe that it can. Meanwhile, the Tea Party sees the government as the perpetual problem, and the only good thing it could do is ... disappear altogether.

But on the single issue of Social Security, the two groups appear to enjoy a rare agreement – along with most of the rest of the country.

According to this 2011 Marist poll, voters identified with the Tea Party oppose cuts to Social Security nearly as strongly as voters from across the political spectrum: nearly 8 in 10 Tea Partiers are against the cuts. Of all voters, slightly more than 8 in 10 dislike such cuts.

As for the president, he would rather not be seen as cutting Social Security benefits at all. What he’s suggesting is a change to the way cost of living adjustments are calculated, called chained CPI, in exchange for more tax hikes. Supporters say chained CPI is more accurate because it reflects how people actually react to price increases.

According to this theory, if the price of hamburger goes up, people will switch to beans. So why should the government give you more money to buy hamburger, if you’re just going to go out and eat beans? Under chained CPI, Social Security benefits would be limited to increases in the cost of beans. As economist Michael Hudson says of chained CPI, “It’s not really a cost of living index. It’s a cost of lower living standards index.”

Naked Capitalism’s Yves Smith has labeled it, “the cat food index.”

For many rank and file Democrats, it’s a bitter betrayal of President Obama’s 2012 campaign pledge to strengthen the middle class. It’s also a reversal of one of Obama’s unequivocal campaign promises as a candidate back in 2008. Drawing a contrast to his opponent, John McCain, Obama said McCain favored raising the retirement age and reducing Social Security cost of living adjustments. “Let me be clear,” candidate Obama said. “I will not do either.”

Stopping the president’s scheme will take more than just the efforts of his disgruntled base. President Obama seems to welcome their opposition, wearing it as a badge of honor. He would like people to think he’s making a principled, political sacrifice for the greater good of the country against the wishes of his own base.

Getting the 99 percenters in the Democratic base to work with their opposite numbers in the Tea Party might not be as outlandish as it first appears.

One of the founders of the Tea Party has already been reaching out to Democratic Party activists to discuss specific issues. Earlier this year, Mark Meckler met with MoveOn.org’s Joan Blades.about crony capitalism and with activist Jose Antonio Vargas about immigration. These talks haven’t yielded action – yet. Here’s Meckler talking about it.

The Tea Party has its own links to the 1 percent that undermine its credibility as a grassroots activist movement – and its ability to fight for the interests of ordinary Americans.

The Tea Party has been closely linked to the Club for Growth and Freedomworks, big-money conservative Republican operations that in the past have pushed for privatization of Social Security, most recently pushed by President George W. Bush. Privatization would be a financial bonanza for Wall Street… and would have been a catastrophe for the rest of us if George Bush’s 2005 plan had gone into effect. Most Americans would have lost all their benefits in the great crash of 2008.

Earlier this month, when one conservative Oregon Republican member of Congress criticized the president’s Social Security scheme as “a shocking attack on seniors,” the Club for Growth threatened to find an even more conservative Republican to run against him. The Club for Growth apparently thinks chained CPI is a good downpayment on further, deeper Social Security cuts down the road.

Members of the Tea Party will have to decide whether they want to work for the interests of the elites in Club for Growth and Freedomworks or join with other ordinary citizens to fight for their own interests. (Meckler quit his leadership role with the Tea Party, saying it was becoming too top down)

The Democratic base will face its own challenges. Is it prepared to fight the president and Democratic leadership that,not so long ago it worked so hard to elect, and has defended so vociferously, despite growing income inequality and continuing high unemployment?

If the two groups found a way to move beyond their disagreements, that would really be something fresh in American politics, showing leadership to replace stale rhetoric with robust action in support of the majority of Americans. Not only could that coalition mobilize a successful campaign against Social Security cuts, it could throw a genuine scare into a complacent political class and the 1 percent it serves.

How Ryan's real math adds up

OK, so Paul Ryan’s budget numbers don’t add up.

But there’s another critical bit of arithmetic that has been working just fine for him, though you won’t read anything about it in the lengthy New York Times magazine profile now available on the newspaper’s web site.

Ryan is portrayed as the Miller Lite-sipping, regular guy NFL-watching, ribs-chomping, charmingly wonky, politically courageous future of the Republican Party.

Give me a break.

What the New York Times did not find newsworthy or illuminating is Ryan’s own money trail.

When you pull back the curtain on the slickly constructed down-home image, a starkly different picture emerges. Ryan, it turns out, is a magnet for Wall Street and hedge fund campaign cash.

As Politico and the Wall Street Journal have reported, members of the financial and insurance industries have been Ryan’s key backers since he first?? ran for reelection?? in 2000. The country’s commercial banks’ PACs and employees spent nearly $60,000 on his campaign. His top contributor that year was Bank One, which was later gobbled up by JP Morgan Chase.
In 2002, the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors contributed $10,000 to Ryan – the maximum allowed by law. He also formed his own PAC that year, with the help of supporters from Goldman-Sachs and the Securities Investment Association.

The bankers’ and hedge funds’ generosity has continued – among his top recent contributors is billionaire Chicago-based hedge fund operator Ken Griffin, of Citadel Investment Group, who gave Ryan $5,000. Griffin has also contributed $150,000 to Restore Our Future, a super PAC that supports Mitt Romney, and another $800,000 to the Karl Rove super PAC, American Crossroads.

Over the years, as Ryan rose to head the House Budget Committee, Politico reports that he became one of the top fundraisers in the House, and he has shared his largesse with other Republican candidates.

Another of Ryan’s top financial boosters is Paul Singer, who runs Eliot Financial hedge fund. Ryan paid Singer back when he was one of only 32 Republicans to vote for the auto bailout, a vote that angered Ryan’s fans in the Tea Party. But the bailout boosted Ally Financial; the financial arm of General Motors – in which Singer’s hedge fund had a major stake, the Nation reports.

Hedge funds, banks and insurance companies groups stand to profit handsomely from Ryan’s scheme to privatize Social Security as well as Ryan’s continuing austerity blitzkrieg and plan to strip government of its regulatory power.

Seen from the perspective of his successful fundraising, Ryan isn’t a politician courageously pursuing unpopular policies to dismantle the New Deal and subsequent social programs (like turning Medicare into a voucher program); Ryan is actually acting as a faithful servant of the Wall Street bankers and hedge-fund money men who insist that the federal government’s budget be balanced – as long as it doesn’t cost them anything.

Ryan is also serving his corporate masters when he spreads collective amnesia about the causes of the 2008 financial crisis, preaching the same gospel of deregulation that got the country into the mess we’re in. But Ryan wants you to believe he’s one of us because he digs ribs and roots for the Packers.

The man who would be vice president embodies a pretty twisted definition of political courage – protecting Wall Street while crushing the economic security of the little people.

Martin Column / Paul Ryan / Social Security / Tea Party - 10/18/2012

Break of Day

Last August, right-wing television host Glenn Beck made a bizarre attempt to hijack the spirit of Martin Luther King’s 1963 Freedom March with his own manipulative March on Washington.

Millions of Americans wrung their hands in despair as Beck and his colleagues from Fox News and the Tea Party stood on what was deemed sacred ground and dominated the political discourse, while our own leaders failed to respond to the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression or to hold Wall Street accountable for causing it.

Then last fall, the Occupy Wall Street movement arrived.

Although the media tried to ignore them and then proceeded to belittle them, Occupiers tapped into a deep-seated longing, capturing the public imagination with their 21^st century take on King’s message: overcome despair, shame and division; organize and dare to imagine; and fight nonviolently for a better society for everyone.

We don’t need a séance to know that for Martin Luther King, the notion that our government would dare to characterize the economy as “in recovery” while black unemployment remains nearly twice the national average would be an outrage, not a footnote.

Unlike the Tea Party, Occupy has avoided electoral politics, preferring to focus, as King did, on empowering the powerless through direct action on the streets. And while some have criticized Occupy for not delivering a more focused message, the Occupiers have clearly picked up the spiritual aspect of King’s call to action, posing profound questions about the kind of society we have become and what kind of society we want to be.

Occupy’s debt to King's non-violence is direct: In Los Angeles, activists are integrating techniques developed in the antinuclear and anti-globalization movements with the techniques taught at free monthly classes with the Reverend James Lawson, one of the men who guided King and taught him about Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolence strategy.

During the last year of King’s life, he expanded the focus of his actions and goals beyond African-American civil rights to building an all-encompassing movement to challenge U.S. militarism and poverty. His last appearance in Memphis was in support of a strike by sanitation workers, opening his arms wide to embrace the cause of what Occupy has forever branded “the 99 percent.”

Beck’s travesty in Washington hit rock bottom for those of us who have been observing and decrying a system that seems designed to benefit those whose values preclude equality and fairness. The assault on the middle class in our country has been brutal. There was—during those dark August days—no loud voice, outside the rarified world of blogs and op-ed pages, crying out in moral outrage.

In September, a small band set up camp in Zuccotti Square. Since that time, the Occupy Wall Street movement has ignited those cries, on the streets and from a growing number of pulpits nationwide.

These are the spirits that endure and the ties that bind.

For me and for many others, embracing the Occupy movement posed a challenge. As a long-time journalist, I’ve had to find a new kind of voice. Like so many friends and colleagues who had lost faith that we would ever be heard, I’ve had to overcome fear and cynicism, learn to act more boldly, engage more creatively.

The memory of the Reverend Martin Luther King reminds us that whatever our obstacles, we need to link arms and learn to put one foot in front of the other, keeping our eyes on the prize, a prize that belongs to all of us.

Martin Column / Occupy / Outrage / Tea Party - 01/17/2012

We the Fee

I couldn’t find any comment from the Republican presidential candidates on one of the most compelling financial events of the last week: Verizon’s virtually instant reversal of its $2 fee on people who pay their wireless bills over the phone or online.

Nor apparently did the White House have anything to say, even though the Federal Communication Commission’s announcement that it was “concerned” about the fee no doubt factored into Verizon’s decision. The FCC, once the cell phone industry’s best friend in Washington, D.C., has morphed into something actually looking like a consumer protection agency under Obama. It also killed the AT&T – T-Mobil merger that would have destroyed competition in the wireless marketplace and led to vastly higher prices and much worse service. The President certainly deserves a victory lap – and could use one – but remained incommunicado during his vacation in Hawaii.

Nothing from the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street either.

Fees have become the bane of the American consumer. Airlines make more money from fees than from air fares. Banks replaced tellers with machines and now force their customers to pay $3-$5 for the privilege of accessing their own money. Hotels apply “resort fees” for using the typically impoverished gym. And then there is the coup de grace: the fee you have to pay for getting a bill in the mail – a favorite of the cell phone and health insurance companies.

Undisclosed, or at best hidden in the fine print, these fees cripple consumers’ ability to compare prices. Which becomes a nightmare if you realize you are paying too much and decide to take your business elsewhere: many of these companies require you to stay with them for two years or pay an early termination fee in the hundreds of dollars.

Verizon’s retreat from the fee was a major victory for consumers, who organized a massive internet/Twitter/Facebook protest worthy of Zuccotti Park or Tahrir Square. In November, Bank of America tried to institute a $5 fee for using a debit card – it too was forced to back down in the face of national outrage.

How then to explain the silence of political candidates and public officials? The simple answer harkens back to the Occupy metaphor. The political class doesn’t sweat the small stuff like a $2 fee – they can afford not to. But most Americans can’t afford to throw away two bucks.

Harvey Column / Occupy / Outrage / President Barack Obama / Tea Party - 01/03/2012

Of, By and For

I wrote this about the Tea Party a year ago:

I’m not one of those people who is offended by the eruption of angry Tea Party organizations around the country. To the contrary, the TPʼrs are raising questions, pointing out problems and demanding answers from elected officials – just what an active citizenry is supposed to do.
But I disagree with their premise, which is that government is responsible for all that is wrong with our country, and that the solution therefore is a castrated federal government or no federal government at all.

A recent post by a Tea Party supporter framed the split this way:

The key difference between the left and right is that the left sees government as the answer to its dreams while the right sees government as the problem, not the solution.

Take away the hyperbole and that’s pretty much the debate that’s underway today in our country.

I believe that government of, by and for the People is one of the great inventions of humankind in history– along with the rule of law: We need police. We need the military. We also need a cop on the corporate beat in the executive suites of Wall Street. And we need rules and regulations to prevent health insurance companies from ripping us off or condemning us to death.

But a series of catastrophic failures by the U.S. government – the failure to detect and prevent 9/11, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to award the 2000 election to George Bush, and especially the financial debacle that Washington suborned (PDF) – has deeply shaken public confidence in the basic institutions of our democracy.

During the Summer of Our Discontent two years ago, I traced the Town Hall confrontations over health care to displaced rage over the bailout. But let’s consider what happened to health reform, probably the single most urgently needed big government fix since Social Security nearly eighty years ago. President Obama did what Presidents Truman, Nixon and Clinton were unable to do: create a national health program under which all Americans will receive care, and several of the most unfair practices in the private marketplace will end. All Americans will be required to buy coverage. But in a compromise to win the support of the insurance industry – and its beholden members of Congress – Obama failed to include any controls on the price Americans will have to pay the private insurance companies.

What happened in California when lawmakers in 1984 required people to buy auto insurance, but failed to regulate industry prices or practices? A way of protecting innocent people against bad drivers became a license to steal for the insurance industry, and led to a revolt that I took part in.

A viral New York Times oped on President Obama put a fine point on the administration’s failures:

To the average American, who was still staring into the abyss, the half-stimulus did nothing but prove that Ronald Reagan was right, that government is the problem. In fact, the average American had no idea what Democrats were trying to accomplish by deficit spending because no one bothered to explain it to them with the repetition and evocative imagery that our brains require to make an idea, particularly a paradoxical one, “stick.” Nor did anyone explain what health care reform was supposed to accomplish (other than the unbelievable and even more uninspiring claim that it would “bend the cost curve”), or why “credit card reform” had led to an increase in the interest rates they were already struggling to pay. Nor did anyone explain why saving the banks was such a priority, when saving the homes the banks were foreclosing didn’t seem to be. All Americans knew, and all they know today, is that they’re still unemployed, they’re still worried about how they’re going to pay their bills at the end of the month and their kids still can’t get a job.

This is not merely a “messaging” problem, however. If government can’t protect average people’s wallets from thievery; if instead, all government can do is protect the interests of the wealthy and big corporations at the expense of vast numbers of the rest of us who sink into economic oblivion; if the United States Supreme Court is right that corporate power, won through campaign contributions and lobbying, is protected by the First Amendment… then those who say government is too big and costs too much are going to find an increasingly receptive audience.

Not in my lifetime has the ideological divide been so stark as it is today. But the debate was just as intense when our Founders, constructing a new nation based on a constitution backed by a Bill of Rights, contended with competing visions of the role that the federal government would play in the new nation.

In the midst of economic and political chaos, I am reassured by that.

Harvey Column / Tea Party - 08/20/2011