From left to right: Director of the National Security Agency (NSA), Gen. Keith B. Alexander, Rand Beers, Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, Patrick Gallagher, director of the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Richard McFeely, Executive Assistant Director of Criminal, Cyber, Response and Services Branch, Federal Bureau of Investigation, arrive to testify about NSA surveillance before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, June 12, 2013. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

Have you noticed anything missing in the political discourse about the National Security Administration’s unprecedented mass surveillance? There’s certainly been a robust – and welcome – discussion about the balance between security and liberty, and there’s at least been some conversation about the intelligence community’s potential criminality and constitutional violations.

Thanks to what I’ve previously called the No Money Rule, however, there has only been indirect references to how cash undoubtedly tilts the debate against those who challenge the national security state.

Those indirect references have come in the form of stories about the business model of Booz Allen Hamilton, the security contractor which employed Edward Snowden.

CNN/Money notes that 99 percent of the firm’s multi-billion-dollar annual revenues now come from the federal government. Those revenues are part of a larger and growing economic sector within the Military-Industrial Complex – a sector that, according to author Tim Shorrock, is ”a $56 billion-a-year industry.”

For the most part, this is where the political discourse about money stops. We are told that there are high-minded debates about security and liberty, with politicians of differing parties contributing to those debates from positions of principle and ideology. We are also told in passing that there’s this massively profitable private industry that makes billions a year from the policy decisions that ultimately emerge from such a debate.

Thanks to the No Money Rule among the Washington press corps, though, there is mostly silence about the connection between the private industry and the public policy. Indeed, few in D.C. are willing to say that the policy debate may be, in part, driven by the private industry and almost nobody dares mention that politicians’ attacks on surveillance critics may actually have nothing to do with principle, and everything to do with going to bat for their campaign donors.

This is just an example from two companies among scores, but it exemplifies a larger dynamic. Simply put, there are huge corporate forces with a vested financial interest in making sure the debate over security is tilted toward the surveillance state and against critics of that surveillance state. In practice, that means when those corporations spend big money on campaign contributions, they aren’t just buying votes for specific private contracts. They are also implicitly pressuring politicians’ to rhetorically push the discourse in a pro-surveillance, anti-civil liberties direction – that is, in a direction that preserves the larger political assumptions on which the profits of the entire surveillance-industrial complex are based.

The success of that pressure is exemplified by the title of yesterday’s congressional hearing with the head of the NSA, Gen. Keith Alexander. The hearing doesn’t ask why Alexander lied to Congress or whether the NSA has engaged in illegal acts. No, a Congress bankrolled by firms like Booz Allen predictably calls the hearing “How Disclosed NSA Programs Protect Americans & Why Disclosure Aids Our Adversaries” – the two preconceived assumption being that 1) the NSA’s surveillance programs, which generate huge profits for companies like Booz, are beneficial to Americans’ security and 2) critics of those programs hurt the country.

None of this, by the way, is exclusive to debates over domestic national security policy. As Booz Allen’s business model suggests, there are also foreign policy implications to the pay-to-play culture.

As The New York Times notes, the firm is expanding its profit potential by “marketing” its surveillance and security services to Middle East dictatorships that want to strengthen their grip on power. According to the Washington Business Journal, that includes Kuwait, Qatar, Omar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and “other countries” working to crush democratic dissent “associated with the Arab Spring.” That means American politicians who are financed by Booz and other firms with a similar multinational business model not only have a vested campaign-contribution interest in shilling for the domestic surveillance state that their donors profit from. They also have a similar interest in denigrating the democratic protest movements that challenge Mideast surveillance states that make those donors big money, too.

Obviously, this kind of moneyed influence should be a critical focus of the political reporting on politicians’ declarations about Snowden, the NSA, foreign policy and surveillance in general. When, for instance, a journalist reports on a politician slamming critics of the surveillance state, the public should be told whether that politician has taken money from firms that make their money off the continued expansion of that surveillance state. But that isn’t happening thanks to the aforementioned No Money Rule in the Washington press – and that rule isn’t just about etiquette. On national security issues, it is often about the elite agenda-setting Washington media outlets which also financially rely on an ever-expanding national security state.

For a microcosmic (but not the only) example of that little-mentioned reliance – and how it may skew the way the elite media frame the national security debate – look at these side-by-side pages from the ultimate agenda-setting D.C. newspaper, Politico:

Credit: Politico

As you can see, the ad on the left side is for a defense contractor. Like surveillance/security firms, it is part of a larger industry that relies on the ever-expanding national security state for its profits – and that therefore is hostile to national security state critics like Snowden. That industry invests heavily not only in politicians, but in advertising in Washington publications like Politico. Is it any coincidence that (as you can see on the right page) such publications loyally frame the debate over Snowden not as a question that ponders possible positive qualities (heroism, courage, etc.) but as a question exclusively of negatives: specifically, did he commit treason or is he a traitor?

Noting all of this isn’t to allege conspiratorial micromanagement of politicians and media by the military-intelligence community. It isn’t, for instance, to claim that everything that comes out of surveillance defenders’ mouths comes from talking points provided by Booz Allen’s lobbyists, nor is it to claim that Politico writers are directly ordered by their advertisers to depict national security critics on exclusively negative terms. It is actually to suggest something much more pernicious and ubiquitous than that.

As anyone who has worked in Washington politics and media well knows, the Capital is not a place of competing high-minded ideologies — in terms of the mechanics of legislation and policy, it is a place where monied interests duke it, where those with the most money typically win, and where a power-worshiping media is usually biased toward the winners. In the context of money and national security, there is a clear imbalance — there are far fewer moneyed interests whose business is transparency and protecting civil liberties than there are moneyed interests whose business is secrecy and curtailing civil liberties. That imbalance has consequently resulted in a larger environment in Washington that is so dominated by national-security-state money that the capital’s assumptions reflexively, unconsciously and automatically skew toward the national security state without overt corporate orders ever having to be given to politicians or media outlets.

If the simplest most straightforward explanation is often the most accurate, then this skewing is almost certainly part of why the pro-surveillance terms of the political debate in Washington is so at odds with public opinion polling on the matter. Big Money has helped create that disconnect – even though Big Money is somehow written out of the story.

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David Sirota is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, magazine journalist and the best-selling author of the books Hostile Takeover, The Uprising and Back to Our Future. Email him at ds [at] davidsirota [dot] com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at davidsirota.com

]]> http://billmoyers.com/2013/06/19/how-cash-secretly-rules-surveillance-policy/feed/ 0 http://billmoyers.com/content/who-likes-obamacare/ http://billmoyers.com/content/who-likes-obamacare/#comments Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:14:39 +0000 John Light http://billmoyers.com/?post_type=mm_content&p=33563 Continue reading]]>

Linda Door of Laguna Beach, Ca., protests outside the United States Supreme Court in Washington in 2012, as the court begins hearing arguments on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, derisively labeled "Obamacare" by its opponents. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

The White House hopes to get 7 million people to sign up for Obamacare when it becomes available in October and is launching a huge publicity campaign in all 50 states this summer. Three years after it became law, the majority of Americans are still opposed to the president’s health care law.

The Kaiser Family Foundation has been collecting data on how Americans feel about the Affordable Care Act since 2010, and, unsurprisingly, have found that the biggest determining factor is party affiliation. Democrats are on board, Republicans loathe it and these opinions are reinforced by ongoing partisan rhetoric.

You can explore how different groups of Americans’ opinions about the law have changed over time in this interactive. Note that if someone does not support the law, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he or she is opposed to Obamacare; in a separate poll, CNN found that nearly a quarter of those who say they oppose the law think that it doesn’t go far enough. Also worth noting: The number of Americans who don’t know what to think about the law has been on the rise since the election, and recently reached an all-time high.

]]> http://billmoyers.com/content/who-likes-obamacare/feed/ 0 http://billmoyers.com/2013/06/18/what-congress-and-the-media-are-missing-in-the-food-stamp-debate/ http://billmoyers.com/2013/06/18/what-congress-and-the-media-are-missing-in-the-food-stamp-debate/#comments Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:37:57 +0000 Guest Contributor http://billmoyers.com/?p=33610 Continue reading]]> We’re proud to collaborate with The Nation in sharing insightful journalism related to income inequality in America. The following is an excerpt from Nation contributor Greg Kaufmann’s “This Week in Poverty” column.

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Stacks of paperwork await members of the House Agriculture Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington, as it considered proposals to the 2013 Farm Bill. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

To follow the Congressional debate about food stamp (SNAP) funding in the Farm Bill — and media coverage of that debate — you would think that the relevant issues are the deficit, rapists on food stamps, waste and abuse and defining our biblical obligation to the poor.

The only thing missing from that conversation is the state of hunger in America today and how we should respond to it.

“A good part of the food stamp debate in Congress and the media is not an evidence-based conversation, it’s fantasy-based,” says Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), a nonprofit organization working to improve public policies to eradicate hunger in the U.S.

Weill insists that there is plenty that we know about food stamps that Congress and the media are busy ignoring, including from the government’s own data: A January 2013 Institute of Medicine (IOM)/National Research Council (NRC) report clearly described the inadequacy of SNAP benefits for most people struggling with hunger.

“The whole thrust of the report is that this is not a benefit allotment that’s adequate for people in most real world circumstances,” says Weill.

Since the average daily benefit for a SNAP recipient is just $4.50 per day, this conclusion shouldn’t come as much of a shock. But the authors — who comprised a blue ribbon panel charged with conducting a scientific analysis of benefit levels — did a good job breaking down exactly why the benefit allotment might come up so short.

For starters, there is the “Thrifty Food Plan” (TFP) itself — a theoretical “market basket of food” that is supposed to represent “a nutritious diet at minimal cost.” The plan assumes that a consumer is able to mostly “purchase less expensive, unprocessed ingredients — such as vegetables and meat to make a stew.” It points out, however, that these ingredients require “substantial investment of the participants’ time to produce nutritious meals… inconsistent with the time available for most households at all income levels.”

But even if one did have time to shop and then slow-cook that family recipe for Granny’s Goodness Stew handed down through the generations — and not many low-wage workers or workers period do — the Thrifty Food Plan also assumes the availability of an assortment of “supermarkets and other food stores that offer a variety of healthy foods at a lower cost.”  The authors note that “low-income and minority populations are more likely than other groups to experience limited access to supermarkets and other large retail outlets… that offer a broad range of healthy foods at reasonable cost… In addition, a lack of transportation infrastructure commonly leads to limited food access in small towns and rural areas.”

There is also a bizarre assumption in the SNAP program that food prices are consistent across the nation — from Snohomish County, Washington, to Neodesha, Kansas, to New York City. Benefits are adjusted only for Hawaii and Alaska.

“SNAP participants who live in locales with higher food prices find it difficult to meet their needs with the current benefit,” reads the report. (I would argue that SNAP participants who live anywhere in America find it difficult to meet their needs with a benefit of $4.50 a day.)

This problem of an unrealistic measure of food prices is compounded by the fact that the inflation cost adjustment for food stamps has a lag time of 16 months. As the report notes, “Because of the impact of inflation and other factors on food prices, this lag in the benefit adjustment can significantly reduce the purchasing power of SNAP allotments.”

Any one of these factors would be sufficient reason to revise upward the amount of assistance offered to hungry families, but there is more.

Even the way a family’s monthly net income is calculated is flawed. For families with earnings, Social Security, or other income, there is a shelter deduction capped at $469 (unless there is an elderly or disabled member of the household). The report notes “considerable evidence that [SNAP] households face housing costs in excess of the current cap on the shelter deduction, which results in overestimation of the net income participants have available to purchase food.”  Translated, SNAP families are paying more for housing — and have less income available for food — than the government is assuming; the SNAP benefit is lower for many families than it should be due to flawed assumptions about their net income.

In calculating net income there are also no deductions permitted for out-of-pocket medical costs for nonelderly, nondisabled SNAP participants.

“The fact that these out-of-pocket health care costs are not considered particularly concerns me as a pediatrician,” says Dr. Deborah Frank, founder and principal investigator of Children’s HealthWatch, a research organization analyzing the effects of economic conditions and public policy on young children seeking care in emergency rooms and clinics around the country. “Parents with children with special health care needs are less able to work many hours and have higher out-of-pocket health care related expenses. That means they are at particularly high risk of food, energy and housing insecurity so that there is a reciprocal relationship between children’s poor health and poor nutrition.”

Weill sees a willful ignorance at play “in some corners of Congress” when it comes to examining current benefit levels.

“It’s possible that the inadequacy of SNAP benefits might have better come to Congress’ attention if the House of Representatives — among its numerous hearings on the Farm Bill — had held a single hearing on the food stamp program, which it didn’t,” he says.

Also, for all of the GOP’s talk about designing welfare programs that move people towards self-sufficiency, it is completely ignoring (as are too many Democrats) new research showing that SNAP does exactly that.

University of California at Davis economist Hilary Hoynes and her colleagues looked at adults born between 1956 and 1981 “who grew up in disadvantaged families (their parent had less than a high school education),” and the impact of access to food stamps early in life. The authors find that “access to food stamps in utero and in early childhood leads to significant reductions in metabolic syndrome conditions (obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes) in adulthood and, for women, increases in economic self-sufficiency (increases in educational attainment, earnings and income, and decreases in welfare participation).”

“The power of this study is that it goes all the way back to when the program was first being rolled out, county by county, and it looks all the way forward, to see how children’s decades-long trajectories changed as a result,” says Arloc Sherman, senior researcher, at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “A baby girl fortunate enough to be born after food stamps had arrived in her particular county was doing significantly better, years later, in terms of health, education and all around self-sufficiency. Some in Congress may not realize it but this program hasn’t been stifling long-term self-sufficiency, it’s been building it.”

And yet here we are, teetering on the edge of cutting $21 billion from a SNAP program that is assisting one in seven Americans; it’s a cut that would remove 2 million people from the program and cause more than 200,000 low-income children to lose access to school meals. Even the Democratic-led Senate is proposing a $4 billion cut which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will result in 500,000 households losing $90 per month in SNAP benefits.

“More than two-thirds of SNAP benefits go to families with children,” says Frank. “This is trying to balance the budget with the bodies and brains of babies.”

“This farm bill is going to hurt poor people as one of the last sacrifices to the short-term deficit hysteria gods,” says Weill. “It reminds me of the famous line from John Kerry, ‘How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?’ Well, not atypically, members of Congress are offering up poor people.”

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Greg Kaufmann is a freelance writer and Nation contributor covering poverty in America, primarily through his blog, This Week in Poverty. His work has also been featured on MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry show, CBSNews.com, NPR.org, WashingtonPost.com, Common Dreams and Alternet. He serves as an adviser for the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

]]> http://billmoyers.com/2013/06/18/what-congress-and-the-media-are-missing-in-the-food-stamp-debate/feed/ 11 http://billmoyers.com/2013/06/17/where-immigration-policy-intersects-with-government-surveillance/ http://billmoyers.com/2013/06/17/where-immigration-policy-intersects-with-government-surveillance/#comments Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:30:22 +0000 John Light http://billmoyers.com/?p=33156 Continue reading]]>

In this April 19, 2011, file photo, a member of the National Guard checks on his colleague inside a Border Patrol Skybox near the Hidalgo International Bridge in Hidalgo, Texas. National Guard members along the Texas-Mexico border assist Border Patrol by surveying the terrain from the tower. (AP Photo/Delcia Lopez, File)

During a week notable for dramatic disclosures about the breadth of government surveillance, the Senate started debating the immigration reform bill. The two issues are more related than you’d think. The ACLU writes that the bill “creates the kind of militarized environment along our southern border that is extremely costly, harmful to border communities’ quality of life and enormously inefficient.” The bill calls for an increase of $4.5 billion over 5 years on border security, including surveillance drones — and that’s in addition to the $18 billion we already spend annually, more than on any other type of law enforcement.

Earlier this month, I visited some of these border communities in the high desert of southwest Texas. Border Patrol officers are present in large numbers in every town and crossroads, even some a two-hour drive from the actual border. Department of Homeland Security SUVs and hatchback pickup trucks trundle regularly over mountains and through the rocky desert. It’s nearly impossible in this area to go a day without seeing an officer.

Also present: drones. The bill calls for U.S. Customs and Border Protection to “operate unarmed unmanned aerial vehicles along the Southern border for 24 hours per day and for 7 days per week” — in other words, continual surveillance of the border by drones.

The drones are already there, though they aren’t continuously in the air; some are Predator B and Guardian drones — unarmed versions of the fighter jet-shaped aircraft commonly used in the Middle East. Also in the sky are large blimps loaded with high-tech cameras, on loan from the Justice Department — like the one I saw resting here outside of Valentine, Texas, roughly 20 miles from the border.

"The floating eye." (Photo: John Light)

Called “the floating eye,” these building-sized balloons were formerly used to spot insurgents in Afghanistan. Now, they have become so common in the area that one was included in an artist’s rendering of a soon-to-be-built drive-in movie theater in Marfa, Texas, a half-hour drive southeast through the desert from Valentine.

Artists' rendering of the Marfa Ballroom drive in move theater. (Image: MOS Architects)

In 2012, these drones reportedly helped the Border Patrol to apprehend 143 individuals “involved in illicit activities,” out of 365,000 total apprehensions, and to seize 66,000 pounds of narcotics. But the program is controversial. The Center for International Policy, a think tank, released a report arguing that these small victories weren’t worth the high price tag — the drones cost about $20 million each. In May 2012, the Department of Homeland Security’s own inspector general faulted Customs and Border Protection for purchasing drones without adequately planning how it would use them.

The Center for International Policy has also joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in calling these domestic drones a threat to civil liberties. In light of recent disclosures about the extent of the government’s coordinated data collection, the EFF is curious about what happens to data collected by domestic drones. The immigration bill “offers little protections or guidance on [domestic drones'] use and on the grave privacy implications they create,” EFF policy analyst Mark Jaycox told Mother Jones’ Gavin Aronson.

Still, some senators feel the $4.5 billion in the bill doesn’t go far enough — John Cornyn (R-Texas), the minority whip, is pushing an amendment that would deny a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants until 100 percent of the border is under surveillance and 90 percent of those entering the country without papers are apprehended. His amendment also requires nationwide implementation of E-Verify, a government system for employers to determine if potential hires are eligible to work in the U.S. E-Verify logs information about private citizens regardless of immigration status, and, like drones, causes privacy concerns.

But as senators attempt to hack the legislation into a passable form over the next few weeks, the presence of drones seems to be a foregone conclusion. Some senators have shown some concern over the issue — Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) tried and failed to attach an amendment to the bill restricting drones to stay within 25 miles of the border. (She did, however, succeed in restrictingdrones to stay within three miles of the border in her home state.) But in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, Customs and Border Protection will be allowed to use drones within 100 miles of the border — the current limitation. And Customs and Border Protection is seeking to award a $443.1 million contract to defense contractor General Atomics, an estimated $237 million of which would go toward 14 new drones. So whether or not an immigration bill gets passed with new funding to increase security efforts, those living on the border can expect more floating eyes in the sky.

Snoop Scoops, by Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker

In the closing years of the last century, newspapers and broadcasters reported extensively on a program known as Echelon, under which the N.S.A. and allied intelligence agencies used satellite receivers, underseas-cable taps, and powerful computers to download and search a hefty proportion of the world’s electronic traffic. (“If you made a phone call today or sent an e-mail to a friend,” Steve Kroft began a “60 Minutes” report, in February of 2000, “there’s a good chance what you said or wrote was captured and screened by the country’s largest intelligence agency.”) After 9/11, when such activities expanded exponentially, the press did its best to keep up….This month’s leaks to the Post and the Guardian add rich texture to the picture, but what is genuinely new is that, confronted with unmistakably authentic N.S.A. documents, the government, up to and including the President, has begun to feel compelled to come clean—or, at least, less dirty.

The Making of a Global Security State, by Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

Much attention has, understandably enough, been lavished on the phone and other metadata about American citizens that the NSA is now sweeping up and about the ways in which such activities may be abrogating the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. Far less attention has been paid to the ways in which the NSA (and other U.S. intelligence outfits) are sweeping up global data in part via the just-revealed Prism and other surveillance programs.

Sometimes, naming practices are revealing in themselves, and the National Security Agency’s key data mining tool, capable in March 2013 of gathering “97 billion pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide,” has been named “boundless informant.” If you want a sense of where the U.S. Intelligence Community imagines itself going, you couldn’t ask for a better hint than that word “boundless.” It seems that for our spooks, there are, conceptually speaking, no limits left on this planet.

How the NSA is Just Like Wall Street, by Robert Reich, robertreich.org

It is rare in these harshly partisan times for the political left and right to agree on much of anything. But the reason, I think, both are worried about the encroachments of the NSA on the privacy and civil liberties of Americans, as well as the depredations of “too big to fail or jail” Wall Street banks on our economy, is fundamentally the same: It is this toxic combination of inordinate power and lack of accountability that renders both of them dangerous, threatening our basic values and institutions.

Why ‘I Have Nothing to Hide’ Is the Wrong Way to Think About Surveillance, by Moxie Marlinspike, WIRED

Imagine if there were an alternate dystopian reality where law enforcement was 100% effective, such that any potential law offenders knew they would be immediately identified, apprehended, and jailed. If perfect law enforcement had been a reality in Minnesota, Colorado, and Washington since their founding in the 1850s, it seems quite unlikely that these recent changes would have ever come to pass. How could people have decided that marijuana should be legal, if nobody had ever used it? How could states decide that same sex marriage should be permitted, if nobody had ever seen or participated in a same sex relationship?

Is Edward Snowden a Hero? A Debate with Journalist Chris Hedges and Law Scholar Geoffrey Stone, Democracy Now.

What we’re really having a debate about is whether or not we’re going to have a free press left or not. If there are no Snowdens, if there are no Mannings, if there are no Assanges, there will be no free press.

How Spy Agency Contractors Have Already Abused Their Power, by Lee Fang, The Nation

Could the sprawling surveillance state enable government or its legion of private contractors to abuse their technology and spy upon domestic political targets or judges?

This is not a far off possibility. Two years ago, a batch of stolen e-mails revealed a plot by a set of three defense contractors (Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and HBGary Federal) to target activists, reporters, labor unions and political organizations. The plans— one concocted in concert with lawyers for the US Chamber of Commerce to sabotage left-leaning critics, like the Center for American Progress and the SEIU, and a separate proposal to “combat” WikiLeaks and its supporters, including Glenn Greenwald, on behalf of Bank of America— fell apart after reports of their existence were published online. But the episode serves as a reminder that the expanding spy industry could use its government-backed cybertools to harm ordinary Americans and political dissident groups.

How the Spy Story of the Age Leaked Out, by Ewen MacAskill, The Guardian

On Sunday night, Snowden gave the last of what had been almost a week’s worth of interviews. It was his final night in that hotel room: the final night before his old life gave way to a new and uncertain one. He sat on his bed, arms folded, television news on without the sound, and spoke about the debate he had started, homing in on a comment Obama had made on Friday, in response to the leaks.

You can’t have 100% security and then also have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience,” the president said. Society had to make choices, he added.

Snowden challenged this, saying the problem was that the Obama administration had denied society the chance to have that discussion. He disputed that there had to be a trade-off between security and privacy, describing the very idea of a trade-off as a fundamental assault on the US constitution.

In what were to be the last words of the interview, he quoted Benjamin Franklin: “Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.

There’s been a lot of discussion about how Edward Snowden should be prosecuted. But there’s another question: What should happen to journalists who published the information Snowden leaked, among them Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras?

Last month, The Washington Post reported that the government had searched Fox News reporter James Rosen’s personal emails and obtained his phone records, as well as the records of other Fox employees, while investigating a leak. In a 2010 affidavit requesting permission to do so, the FBI claimed Rosen was “at the very least” an “aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator” with a government advisor, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim. Later that year, Kim was indicted under the Espionage Act for telling Rosen that the intelligence community thought North Korea would respond to U.N. sanctions with more nuclear tests — information Rosen used in an article.

In the wake of Snowden’s disclosures — which Director of National Intelligence James Clapper claims have caused “huge, grave damage” — will the government take the next step and press charges against the journalists as well as the leaker?

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington. King has called for Greenwald to be prosecuted. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

Timm noted that, earlier this month, Attorney General Eric Holder said, “The department has not prosecuted, and as long as I’m attorney general, will not prosecute any reporter for doing his or her job.” But that did not stop Representative Peter King of New York, the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, from calling for Greenwald to face charges. “Greenwald, not only did he disclose this information, he has said he has names of CIA agents and assets around the world and threatening to disclose that,” King said. Greenwald quickly responded on Twitter that he had never said any such thing.

Just watched the King video; everything he said is based on the blatant *lie that I threatened to disclose names of CIA covert agents

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 12, 2013

“It’s really disturbing King would make that claim and literally make up facts to justify it,” said Timm. “He’s a congressman who sits on the chair of a powerful committee. He has a responsibility to not make those comments. He’s flagrantly misinterpreting the First Amendment.” In a response to King’s claim yesterday that Greenwald’s reporting threatened American’s security, Timm cited Justice Hugo Black’s concurring opinion in New York Times Co. v. United States, which allowed the Times and The Washington Post to publish the Pentagon Papers.

“The word ‘security’ is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment,” Black wrote. “The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic.”

Greenwald told The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent that, though he’s spoken to lawyers in case he does end up facing prosecution, he’s not too worried. “We know that as journalists we have the right to report on what the government is doing,” he said. “I can’t imagine that anyone other than Peter King” thinks otherwise.

In an interview with Salon, Poitras also said she’s ready to weather a possible government investigation. “If there’s fallout, if there’s blowback, I would absolutely do it again, because I think this information should be public,” she said. “Whatever part I had in helping to do that I think is a service.”

“People take risks,” she added. “And I’m not the one who’s taking the most in this case.”

Timm said he didn’t think that reports about intelligence officials worrying that Snowden may defect to China will change the journalists’ situation. “Government officials may just be trying to spin the story to the media to make Snowden look like a person he’s not,” he said. Even if Snowden did defect, Timm said, he wouldn’t have any secrets to reveal that the Chinese government didn’t already know from hacking American servers.

“The only people who don’t know about what Edward Snowden is revealing is the American public,” Timm said.

Electrical conduits in a server room in New York City. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

In Big Data, A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, And Think, published earlier this year, authors Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier try to explain just how much data there is in big data. They write that “in 2013 the amount of stored information in the world is estimated to be around 1,200 exabytes, of which less than 2 percent is non-digital.”

What exactly is an exabyte, you might ask? They continue:

There is no good way to think about what this size of data means. If it were all printed in books, they would cover the entire surface of the United States some 52 layers thick. If it were placed on CD-ROMs and stacked up, they would stretch to the moon in five separate piles. In the third century B.C., as Ptolemy II of Egypt strove to store a copy of every written work, the great Library of Alexandria represented the sum of all knowledge in the world. The digital deluge now sweeping the globe is the equivalent of giving every person living on Earth today 320 times as much information as is estimated to have been stored in the Library of Alexandria.

Hundreds — probably thousands — of projects utilizing that data to improve the way the world works are already underway. A recent New York Times article profiled Mayor Bloomberg’s geek squad and the ways they are using data to solve problems around New York City.

An article in The New Yorker by Gary Marcus entitled “Steamrolled by Big Data,” notes that enthusiasm surounding big data in tech circles is “kind of a new religion.”

In your life, you’re probably most familiar with the benefits of big data by way of recommendation engines on shopping or movie sites that tell you what you might like based on what others like you, like. As Lawrence Lessig told Bill this week, he doesn’t mind seeing ads that are curated for him, “The purpose of that profiling is to narrow the information … pushed into my sphere to that information which I want.”

The New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier agrees with Lessig, with one, kind of big, caveat. He writes, “[T]he study of the consumer is one of capitalism’s oldest techniques. But it is not fine that the consumer is mistaken for the entirety of the person.”

The biggest complaint about big data is that while it’s great for correlation, it’s not so great at causality. That concerns many experts who worry about how the government is vetting the data they’ve collected, and whether they are using it to predict future criminal behavior, in a sort of Minority Report nightmare scenario.

Regardless of how the government is making use of big data, this week’s revelations have already begun a debate about personal digital data, privacy and policy that should have happened years ago, which is some good news. As Chris Hughes writes in the New Republic:

Technology may continue to grow and become more complex, but that need not preclude debate — and potentially legislation — about how it can and should be used.

The security and privacy crises that have unfolded over the past week are the perfect moment for us to ask ourselves what public policy we should adopt not only to limit the government’s ability to mine data, but the ability of technological systems to store and process this data in the first place.

“Snowden describes agents having the authority to pick and choose who they’re going to be following on the basis of their hunch about what makes sense and what doesn’t make sense. This is the worst of both worlds. We have a technology now that gives them access to everything, but a culture if again it’s true that encourages them to be as wide ranging as they can,” Lessig tells Bill. “The question is — are there protections or controls or counter technologies to make sure that when the government gets access to this information they can’t misuse it in all the ways that, you know, anybody who remembers Nixon believes and fears governments might use?”

Few are as knowledgeable about the impact of the Internet on our public and private lives as Lessig, who argues that government needs to protect American rights with the same determination and technological sophistication it uses to invade our privacy and root out terrorists.

“If we don’t have technical measures in place to protect against misuse, this is just a trove of potential misuse…We’ve got to think about the technology as a protector of liberty too. And the government should be implementing technologies to protect our liberties,” Lessig says. “Because if they don’t, we don’t figure out how to build that protection into the technology, it won’t be there.”

“We should recognize in a world of terrorism the government’s going to be out there trying to protect us. But let’s make sure that they’re using tools or technology that also protects the privacy side of what they should be protecting.”

A former conservative who’s now a liberal, Lessig also knows that the caustic impact of money is another weapon capable of mortally wounding democracy. His recent book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress — and a Plan to Stop It, decries a pervasive “dependence corruption” in our government and politics that should sound a desperate alarm for both the Left and the Right. Here, Lessig outlines a radical approach to the problem that uses big money itself to reform big money-powered corruption.

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Photographer: Alton Christensen.

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In 2011, Lessig founded Rootstrikers, a grassroots project of Fund for the Republic, which fights the corrupting influence of money on government.

Lessig has focused much of his academic career on law and technology, especially as it affects copyright. He is the author of five books on the subject: Remix (2008), Codev2 (2007), Free Culture (2004), The Future of Ideas (2001), and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999). He has served as lead counsel in important cases marking the boundaries of copyright law in a digital age, including Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, and Golan v. Holder. More recently, Lessig has covered the effects of money in politics and potential remedies in his books Lesterland (2013), One Way Forward (2012), and Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress — and a Plan to Stop It (2011).

Lessig has won numerous awards, including the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Award, and was named one of Scientific American’s Top 50 Visionaries. Lessig serves on the boards of Creative Commons, Brave New Films Foundation, and iCommons.org. He is also on the advisory board of the Sunlight Foundation and AXA Scientific Research Fund. He has previously served on the boards of Change Congress, Free Software Foundation, the Software Freedom Law Center, Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Public Library of Science, Free Press, The American Academy in Berlin, Freedom House, and Public Knowledge.

Lessig earned a BA in economics and a BS in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in philosophy from the University of Cambridge, and a JD from Yale University.

Lawrence Lessig giving a TED talk called 'We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim'

America’s political system has been bought and paid for, making it nearly impossible to get anything done that goes against the interest of deep-pocketed funders. Activists often say that fixing this legalized corruption may not be America’s biggest problem, but it is the most urgent. Author and activist Lawrence Lessig quotes Henry David Thoreau to put it another way: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” The many challenges facing American democracy today are the branches, Lessig says, but money and politics is at the root of it all.

To combat its influence, Lessig founded the Rootstrikers Campaign. Here are some ways you can get involved:

Get politicians on the record about corruption: In his farewell speech from the Senate, John Kerry said, “the unending chase for money I believe threatens to steal our democracy itself.” Call your representatives and ask them how they feel about the sway money holds over the political system. Then add their thoughts to a crowdsourced database put together by Rootstrikers and The Huffington Post.

Join the Campus Remix Challenge: Are you a student? Rootstrikers is having a competition to find the best, most inventive way of describing how this problem affects your generation. The campaign organizers ask for students to submit any kind of creative presentation about the corrupting influence of money in politics before July 22. The creators of their three favorite submission will receive a bit of tuition assistance.

Learn about fair elections legislation in New York State: Do you live in New York? The state is considering an election reform act that is similar to laws already in place in Maine, Arizona and Connecticut, and could be a model for other states. The “fair elections” legislation has passed the State Assembly, and is being considered in the Senate. Supporters of the bill are encouraging citizens who want campaign finance reform to tell their legislators that they support fair election legislation.

Make corruption your issue: Lawrence Lessig’s TED talk spread far and wide, and although he’s stopped doing it before audiences, it will live on online. The Rootstrikers campaign encourages you to pick up the torch by making the message your own and sharing it with your friends, family and social networks.

Petition the FEC to investigate corruption: Call on the Federal Elections Commission, which oversees political fundraising, to investigate the various abuses that lead to government corruption, including single-candidate super PACs.

Also worth noting: Lessig has a plan for a super PAC to end all super PACs, an organization he calls the “money bomb.” Lessig is looking for about 50 billionaires who, in the name of American democracy, will be willing to give between$20 million and $40 million dollars each, which will then be spent raising awareness about ways to get money out of politics, like grassroots public funding of campaigns. His super PAC idea will be something to keep an eye on.

Last week, The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) filed suit against Wisconsin State Senator Leah Vukmir for failing to release documents as required under the state’s public records law. CMD alleges that Sen. Vukmir possesses materials pertaining to her involvement with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the controversial organization of which she is a member. Sen. Vukmir has handed over ALEC-related documents in the past, but recently, reports CMD, the senator’s responses to records requests have “dried-up.”

ALEC may have something to do with that.

A little background for the uninitiated: ALEC calls itself a “nonpartisan” public-private partnership of state legislators and corporations, who gather regularly to produce what they term “model legislation” behind closed doors. The goal is for ALEC member legislators to get versions of those model bills passed in their statehouses.

Wisconsin’s state government has thick-roped ties to ALEC. Nearly one-third of its legislators are ALEC members, and versions of ALEC model bills have wended their way through many a legislative session. (Last week, I wrote about Wisconsin’s curiously high ranking in an ALEC “economic outlook” report.) But the state also has a comprehensive open records law, declaring that “all persons are entitled to the greatest possible information regarding the affairs of government and the official acts of those officers and employees who represent them.”

Leah Vukmir (Wikimedia Commons)

When I called Vukmir’s office, they refused to comment about the lawsuit.

Vukmir’s assertion that she has no pertinent ALEC documents comes at an interesting moment. Lately, the organization has undertaken an effort to stop its documents from falling into outside hands, most notably with an imprint that has begun to grace the bottom of ALEC materials. “Because this is an internal ALEC document,” the disclaimer reads, “ALEC believes it is not subject to disclosure under any state Freedom of Information or Public Records Act.”

The highlighted text is the disclaimer that now appears at the bottom of ALEC documents.

What’s more interesting, the new imprint emerges in the midst of an ALEC image revamp. “We really believe in transparency,” ALEC spokesman Bill Meierling told The Huffington Post back in March. “We believe that more eyes on our model policies will create better policies. We are hoping to engage with the public.” Though ALEC now posts all of its model legislation online (“If it is not on our website,” said Mieirling, “it is not our policy”) its full corporate and legislative membership lists still remain hidden from public view.

The suit against Sen. Vukmir isn’t the first time an ALEC legislator has come up against CMD. In October, the center (in conjunction with Common Cause) reached a settlement with five Wisconsin lawmakers who then released their ALEC-related emails. But the recent drama over email correspondence seems to have made ALEC all the more tech- savvy. In what CMD construes as an effort to skirt state open records laws, ALEC has begun to distribute materials using the internet drop box website Box.com, which allows ALEC members to share materials via hyperlink to ALEC-related content, rather than directly sharing the content itself. Anyone who is sent a link to a Box.com folder must have a password-protected account to access those files – and even then, a file’s “owner” retains the option of removing, altering or setting expiration dates for all files in question.

According to the Wisconsin State Journal, Michael Bowman – ALEC’s senior director of policy and strategic initiatives – said the drop box system was implemented when an attorney advised that those files wouldn’t be subject to public records laws. Bowman also claimed to be under the impression that the organization’s new non-disclosure imprint was legally valid in all 50 states.

But Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council president Bill Leuders told the Journal he finds such claims absurd. “The logic of our open records law is that if the government has documents in its possession as it goes about doing the government’s business, the public is entitled to obtain those documents,” he said.

The situation is not without irony. CMD’s Brendan Fischer notes that in a statement put forth by a 2002 “ALEC Issue Analysis,” the group states that “Transparency is a bulwark of constitutional republicanism: citizens cannot inform themselves on the issues of government if they cannot see what the government is doing. Thus, transparency serves as an important feedback mechanism by allowing the citizens to monitor and more accurately select their representatives.”

It seems ALEC’s new cellophane image does not come without wrinkles. But if suits like the one Sen. Vukmir is now facing continue to occur, the group may need to reconsider its definition of transparency.

Laura Macomber is an associate producer at Okapi Productions. She is a former employee of Newsweek & The Daily Beast, where she produced news stories for the company’s live journalism events, Women in the World and The Hero Summit.

Bill Moyers reading his iPad on set (Credit: Dale Robbins)

You can expect daily tweets about upcoming Moyers & Company guests, articles and videos related to money & politics, economic inequality, justice, poverty and other issues we explore, retweets of great content around the Web, and more to help you make sense of our tumultuous times. Look for “/BM” to know when tweets are coming directly from Bill.

Watch Snuggly make his fuzzy case.

“We’ve got to think about the technology as a protector of liberty too. So code is a kind of law…There’s a way to build the technology to give us this liberty back, this privacy back. But it’s not a priority to think about using code to protect,” Lessig tells Bill.

“We have two kinds of specialized knowledge here, lawyers and coders — those people have to be in the same room as they listen to the government and the government says, ‘This is what we need to do to keep America safe.’ Let’s force the government to prove that to both of these lawmakers, the lawyers and the coders.”

Lessig will be Bill’s guest on this weekend’s Moyers & Company.

SEK-CAP offers a range of services to twelve counties, responding to the housing, utilities, transportation, employment, medical care, child care, education and nutrition needs of low-income people in southeast Kansas. The counties have a combined population of approximately 192,000 people and the child poverty rate is nearly 26 percent — an increase of 13 percent in the past year. The past three years have also seen a rise in unemployment, food and housing insecurity, as well as agricultural and natural disasters.

Due to sequester cuts, SEK-CAP decided in May that it could no longer afford to operate the Head Start Center in Neodesha, which served 17 children and their families, and employed five staff members. The rental and maintenance costs of the building made this closure the obvious choice for the agency to find the savings forced upon it by Congress.

Gray said the affect of the cuts is far more significant than “it might appear on paper.”

“When you’re talking about people’s lives, and their ability to maintain gainful employment, or ensure that their children are receiving age-appropriate care and intellectual stimulation, then the cuts become incredibly deep and incredibly apparent,” said Gray.

In addition to instruction at the Center, teachers made monthly home visits to work on family and education goals. Every child had an individualized education plan based on an assessment of his or her needs.

“My oldest son struggled with gross-motor skills for a while, so we focused on that and got him where he needs to be,” said Amanda Tompkins, chair of the SEK-CAP Policy Council and a Head Start parent who sent three children through the program. “My daughter was advanced in her speaking ability, so the teacher gave me tools so that I could [help] her grow that skill. The program has taught me how to be a mom and a teacher for my children.”

Linda Broyles, director of early childhood services for SEK-CAP, said that Tompkins’ experience is typical for a Head Start family.

“It’s more than just a preparation for the educational system, [it’s] comprehensive family services,” said Broyles. “That means working with the whole family to set and attain goals, increase positive behaviors, establish preventative health care and create a lifelong love of learning and education.”

“There are no other means of comprehensive family-centered services in the town,” said Kristie Groff, a teacher at the center for twelve years.

The sequestration cuts in southeastern Kansas have had somewhat of a domino effect. SEK-CAP also offered home-based services to 10 children and their families in the town of Parsons (pop. 10,454) in neighboring Labette County, where the child poverty rate for children under age 5 is over 31 percent. These home-based slots are now going to be moved to Neodesha — to partly compensate for the loss of the Head Start Center — because there are other early childhood education alternatives in Parsons.

“Some of those alternatives might be cost prohibitive for some families, but the fact is Neodesha needs the [home-based program] more now. It was just our best possible fix,” said Gray.

A teacher visited the 10 families in Parsons once a week, for an hour and a half, to provide age-appropriate activities and referral services to address other family needs such as transportation difficulties or a desire to pursue continuing education. The program also offered “socialization opportunities” twice per month. These events usually included nutrition education and preparation of a healthy snack or meal; age-appropriate games; and time for the adults to break off and hold a meeting.

“It’s an opportunity to train parents about the program, and they can share their questions or concerns, so it’s fantastic for communication and a sense of community,” said Tompkins. “And if you’re a stay-at-home mom and don’t have an outlet, these daytime play dates are pretty important so you don’t tear your hair out.”

Gray said the home-based services are especially important for parents struggling with transportation and employment, and sometimes education.

“The focus on health and nutrition leads to budgeting food dollars, which leads to budgeting your household resources,” she said. “These are the kinds of supports that help families move out of poverty.”

As early childhood education services are lost for low-income people with limited options in towns like Parsons and Neodesha, the concern is that too many parents are turning to “the house down the street” to watch their kids, said Gray.

“Often times that is more child care than early childhood development,” said Gray. It’s also more often than not an unlicensed facility, which is why it’s affordable. “In a licensed facility we know there is appropriate safety and hygiene, and there are age-appropriate, developmentally appropriate activities. We don’t necessarily know that those things are in place in an unlicensed facility.”

Gray said that the sequester cuts in some cases are more significant in rural areas — where families might have to travel “forty miles one way” — than in “a larger metropolitan city, where two or three blocks away there might be another option.”

“Rural America often gets overlooked. We know Kansas is referred to as a ‘Flyover State’,” said Gray. “But there are a lot of people here, and a lot of people in poverty.  Sequestration is just one cut. It’s the impact of that steady erosion of financial resources that is much greater in rural communities — because there are far fewer resources.”

Tompkins believes the long-term costs of these cuts are being overlooked by policymakers.

“I see all of the benefits of Head Start services — early education, early intervention, early detection for children ages 0 to 5,” she said. “The people who are making these decisions — they just see the numbers that cross their desk.”

On the next Moyers & Company, Lawrence Lessig, professor of law and director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and founder of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, joins Bill to discuss the implications of our government’s actions and Edward Snowden’s role in leaking the information.

Watch a preview above and check local listings for the full program.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper listens as he testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, March 12, 2013, before the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on worldwide threats. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

When introducing James Clapper as his director of national intelligence in 2010, President Obama specifically justified the appointment by saying Clapper is someone who “understands the importance of working with our partners in Congress (and) not merely to appear when summoned, but to keep Congress informed.” At the time, it seemed like a wholly uncontroversial statement – it was simply a president making a sacrosanct promise to keep the legislative branch informed, with the insinuation that previous administrations hadn’t.

Three years later, of course, James Clapper is now the embodiment of perjury before Congress. Indeed, when you couple Edward Snowden’s disclosures with this video of Clapper’s Senate testimony denying that the National Security Administration collects “any type of data on millions (of Americans),” Clapper has become American history’s most explicit and verifiable example of an executive branch deliberately lying to the legislative branch that is supposed to be overseeing it.

Incredibly (or, alas, maybe not so incredibly anymore) despite the president’s original explicit promises about Clapper, transparency and Congress, the White House is nonetheless responding to this humiliating situation by proudly expressing its full support for Clapper. Meanwhile, as of today’s announcement by Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI), the demands for Clapper’s resignation are finally being aired on Capitol Hill.

Those demands are obviously warranted not just because Clapper so clearly lied, but also because his was no ordinary spontaneous fib. On the contrary, according to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Clapper was given a full day’s advance notice that the question was coming, and yet he nonetheless still opted to lie. That’s not a spur-of-the-moment fib – that’s a calculated, willful attempt to mislead those who have a constitutional responsibility to perform oversight.

Now that a United States congressman is starting the drumbeat for Clapper’s resignation, the rejoinder will almost certainly be a version of what Clapper told National Journal and NBC News.

In the former interview, Clapper said he “stand(s) by” his statement to the Senate and insisted “What I said was, the NSA does not voyeuristically pore through U.S. citizens’ e-mails.” Of course, as New York magazine points out, that’s not what he said – not even close.

In the latter interview, Clapper again stood by his statement, and claimed “I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner.”

These talking points will no doubt metastasize into the idea that because he was asked about a classified program, Clapper had no choice but to lie, and that therefore outright lying is somehow the “least untruthful” – and therefore acceptable – thing to do in his situation. That’s right, apparently as if living in 1984, we are all supposed to believe that war is peace, freedom is slavery and, now, yes, lying is not untruthful.

Beyond its Orwellian absurdity, the problem with that line of reasoning is that it is fundamentally false. We know Clapper didn’t have to lie because other people in a similar position managed to not commit perjury. As one example, at a Senate hearing in 2006, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was asked a similar question about mass surveillance, and answered by saying simply: “The programs and activities you ask about, to the extent that they exist, would be highly classified.”

Clapper didn’t do this – instead, with a day’s notice of the question, he decided to lie to Congress. And, as The New York Times Andrew Rosenthal says, that’s a big deal.

“Government officials employ various tactics to avoid actually saying anything at intelligence hearings, mostly by fogging up the room with references to national security and with vague generalities,” he writes. “Outright lying is another matter…You have to wonder about giving a position of vast responsibility to someone who can beat Mr. Gonzales in dishonesty.”

You have to also wonder how a person like that can be allowed to stay in his job and avoid prosecution.

David Sirota is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, magazine journalist and the best-selling author of the books Hostile Takeover, The Uprising and Back to Our Future. Email him at ds [at] davidsirota [dot] com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at davidsirota.com

Sarita Gupta (Photo: Dale Robbins)

Throughout the Great Recession, only one type of household debt grew: student debt. As student debt and student loan defaults escalate at an unsustainable pace, private lenders continue to increase their profit margins. Sallie Mae is the largest private student loan lender and one of the chief profiteers off of student debt, yet it faces minimal public scrutiny and accountability. There’s an incredible amount of work to be done to try to ease the burden of student debt in this country, but we can start by regulating lenders like Sallie Mae whose profits are soaring at the expense of our nation’s students.

The reality is that students won’t have access to an education without the accompanying burden of a lifetime of debt until we take the undue influence of big banks out of our democracy. Today, lenders like Sallie Mae spend millions of dollars peddling influence with legislators. Sallie Mae’s lobbying efforts were recently described by The New York Times as “aggressive” — the company spent nearly $37.5 million on lobbying from 1998 to 2012. This year, Sallie Mae has already spent over $1.2 million on federal lobbying trying to squash several consumer protection bills, including the Private Student Loan Bankruptcy Fairness Act of 2013 and the Fairness for Struggling Students Act of 2013. Both pieces of legislation call for increased regulation of private banks with a history of bad lending practices. To combat this, hundreds of students and activists traveled to Newark, Del., late last month to introduce a resolution demanding increased transparency and disclosure at Sallie Mae’s annual shareholder meeting. The resolution received support from an unprecedented 35.5 percent of shareholders who voted, a huge victory in the long-term campaign to hold Sallie Mae accountable to its customers.

Last month also marked another major victory in the battle to rein in Sallie Mae: after months of requests, CEO Jack Remondi agreed to meet with students. Now, those directly affected by the bank’s sky-high interest rates will have an opportunity to explain why those business practices are actively standing in the way of recent graduates’ ability to contribute to an economy that desperately needs them. We’re always fighting for the 99 percent to have a seat at the table, because when enough of those voices are heard – the voices of workers, students, community members and consumers – changes finally get made.

On July 1, student loan interest rates will double from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent unless Congress acts to provide relief for approximately seven million students. The increase will cost borrowers receiving the federal subsidized Stafford loans an additional $1,000 per year. A variety of bills have been introduced to address the looming July 1 deadline. Students can’t afford the same lobbyists that wealthy banks and corporations can, but they’ve still managed to get their voices heard on Capitol Hill and are committed to taking an active role in finding a legislative solution.

The final piece of this puzzle is regulation. On May 8, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued a report (“Student Loan Affordability”) that encouraged private lenders to modify existing private student debt through a series of options, including refinancing interest rates, term extensions, principal forbearance and principal reduction. Other experts have suggested a shared loss on defaults and increased transparency on fees associated with student loans. We used our incredible online activist community to mobilize borrowers to submit comments to the CFPB and offer real-life testimony on how these regulations could provide immediate and real relief for those struggling to pay off their student loans – allowing recent graduates to participate fully in our economic recovery.

At the end of the day, the story of our country’s student debt crisis is just the latest chapter of a troubling narrative where the economy only works for the wealthiest one percent of Americans. Corporations are bringing in record profits despite record-high unemployment, and now students are taking out mortgage-sized loans just to get an education. Students and graduates are fighting back to put education into the hands of consumers, not wealthy corporate lenders. The only way that higher education can return to an affordable and accessible right for all families is if we remove the corporate bottom line from the classroom and make loan forgiveness, bank regulation and education investment a national priority.

Sarita Gupta is the executive director of Jobs With Justice, a Washington, D.C.-based organization. With offices located nationwide in 25 states and 45 communities, Jobs With Justice collaborates with community, student and faith organizations to build a vital labor movement for economic and social justice.

Gupta appeared on Moyers & Company last year to speak with Bill about restoring workers rights and her involvement in the 99% Spring.

These students and their families have worked hard, saved what they could and borrowed what they need to pay for higher education. Rather than reward their efforts, the government plans to add to their burden. Students are already drowning in debt. With $1 trillion in outstanding student loans and many borrowers struggling to stay afloat, we cannot afford to let this happen.

When our students go on to higher education, it helps us all. No state knows that better than Massachusetts. We have the nation’s highest percentage of adults with postsecondary degrees, and our highly skilled workforce attracts businesses from out of state and provides the raw material to launch new businesses in state.  Our highly skilled workforce is helping our economy grow and recover faster than other states, which is why it is so important to help our students get a good education.

Some people say that we can’t afford low interest rates for students. But the federal government offers far lower rates on loans every single day — they just don’t do it for everyone. Right now, a bank can get a loan through the Federal Reserve discount window at a rate of less than one percent. The same big banks that destroyed millions of jobs and broke our economy can borrow at about 0.75 percent, while our students will be paying nine times as much as of July 1.

This is not fair. And it’s not necessary, either. The federal government makes 36 cents on every dollar it lends to students. Just last week, the Congressional Budget Office announced that the government will make $51 billion on the student loans it issued this year — more than the annual profit of any Fortune 500 company, and about five times Google’s yearly earnings. We should not be profiting from students who are drowning in debt while we are giving great deals to big banks.

That’s why we introduced the Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act. The bill gives students the same deal that we give to the big banks by allowing those who are eligible for federally subsidized Stafford loans to borrow at the same rate offered to banks through the Federal Reserve discount window. For one year, the Federal Reserve would make funds available to the Department of Education to make these loans to our students. This would give students relief from high interest rates while giving Congress time to find a long-term solution.

Fixing the interest rate on new subsidized loans is only a first step in helping students who are drowning in debt. We must ensure that the interest rates on all student loans are as low as possible, and that struggling borrowers have options to help them avoid default. Congress will have the opportunity to address these issues next year when it reauthorizes the Higher Education Act. We will work with our colleagues to make student loans a fair deal for students rather than a profit center for the federal government.

Economists explain that banks need low rates because their stability is essential to our shaky economic recovery. But students are just as important as banks to a strong recovery. High levels of student debt pose a risk to our economy if students cannot pay it back. If the Federal Reserve can lend trillions to financial institutions at low rates to grow the economy, surely it can float the money that will keep student loan payments low, keep us competitive and grow our middle class.

Unlike big banks, students do not have armies of lobbyists and lawyers. They’re banking on us to do what’s right. Let’s bank on students by investing in their futures and giving them a break on student loan interest.

Senator Elizabeth Warren and Congressman John Tierney are co-sponsors of the Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act. This piece was first published in The Boston Globe. 

If that sounds utopian, ask a baby boomer who went to an in-state public college or university how much debt they went into to finance their education.

Today, after decades of cuts in state funding, debt-financed higher education is exacerbating the U.S.’s already extreme level of economic inequality. As it stands, students from low-income homes are regularly charged more than a third of their family’s annual earnings for a year of tuition at a public college. Extracting excessive interest to capitalize on the mortgaged futures of the 99 percent is repugnant, but Democrats’ efforts to lower rates will — at best — bring defaults under control, offering life support to a broken system in which all but the privileged few must incur crushing, life-altering debts to receive an education while loan servicers, speculators and administrators profit from their misery.

We can resuscitate our public university system and restore opportunity to millions, it’s simply a matter of priorities. For the money spent so far on the ten years of war in Iraq, we could provide completely free public higher education at every single two and four year school in the country — for the next 58 years. For those already suffering under the burden of student debt, we call for a one-time jubilee — a mass cancellation of debts. Wiping the slate clean. Each generation that graduates into a lifetime of debt is a lost generation. Student debtors are less likely to start families, choose public service careers or be able to build their lives in ways that include more than just following a plan to repay loans. With a trillion dollars of student debt dragging down the economy as a whole, a jubilee is the only realistic solution for an economic turnaround. Jubilees work. Just ask Iceland, which offered a qualified jubilee on mortgages and rebounded from the mortgage crisis faster than any other country.

Until the conventional debate is opened up to include alternatives that genuinely reflect the needs of the 99 percent, we see collective resistance and refusal as the tactics most likely to succeed. Forty-three percent of Americans under 25 already have student debt, and debt burdens for those 60 and older are skyrocketing. Though what’s left of the white middle class has surely not been spared, the rate of Black and Latino students graduating with unmanageable debt burdens is around 20 percent higher than that of their white counterparts. Indebted women, LGBTQ and disabled folks who enter the workforce will also have a hard time keeping up with payments given the significant gap in wages they’ll encounter. Student debt is a tie that binds people from all corners of the 99 percent. It’s only a matter of time until we shake off the shackles of shame and isolation and realize our collective power.

Strike Debt is building a movement of debt resistance and liberation based on principles of anti-oppression, autonomy, democratic decision making and direct action. Debt resistance can take many forms and Strike Debt is developing tactics, resources and frameworks for expanding the fight against the debt system while developing alternative systems of mutual aid for the common good. This post was written by members of the the collective for BillMoyers.com.

Amy Lin

Student debt is a serious problem we need to tackle long term. But the pressing issue that we have to address immediately is the doubling of interest rates on subsidized Stafford loans scheduled to go into effect on July 1. These loans are critical to low- and middle-income college students. But without Congressional action soon, the interest rate will go from 3.4 to 6.8 percent in just a few short weeks. With student debt at a record high and recent graduates struggling to repay their loans, this rate hike would strike another blow to our generation.

Students have gotten loud on this issue. And with pressure from student groups and other advocates, members of Congress have introduced a number of different proposals.

In May, the House of Representatives passed The Smarter Solutions for Students Act, which ties the student loan interest rate for all Stafford loans (subsidized and unsubsidized) to the 10-year Treasury note rate with a cap of 8.5 percent. However, interest rates are predicted to rise in the next few years — which means high interest rates for future students — and the CBO estimates that students will actually pay more in the long run under this proposal.

Last week, the Senate failed to approve two proposals of its own. The Student Loan Affordability Act was a short-term bill from Senate Democrats that extended the 3.4 percent interest rate by two years. The Comprehensive Student Loan Protection Act came from Senate Republicans, and like the Smarter Solutions for Students Act, tied the interest rate to the 10-year Treasury note rate. The latter bill had no cap and used the revenue generated for deficit reduction.

With just a few weeks to go before the deadline, short-term solutions may be our best bet for now, but longer-term solutions must ultimately be a part of the conversation. Solutions to student debt must include all stakeholders: schools, students, states, the federal government, Congress and lenders. Congress will have another chance to address college affordability challenges during the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, set to happen soon (although who knows with Congress). Students need solutions to the recurring Pell grant shortfall, accountability and transparency from higher education institutions about how they are doing when it comes to graduating their students and how their graduates are doing in the labor force, and a loan repayment system that is clear, straightforward and based on income earned.

Students have to take responsibility here as well. Young adults entering college must have full understanding of the costs and a plan to repay their loans.

They must also work to keep their colleges accountable and advocate for states to invest in higher education and schools to rein in tuition.

With just days left before July 1, we’ll be watching Congress and lawmakers closely to see what happens with student loan interest rates. The fight extends well beyond July 1, however. It is critical that students and advocates continue to push for solutions with the same energy to ensure economic opportunity for our generation.

Amy Lin is the Deputy Policy and Organizing Director at Young Invincibles, where she leads the Organizing Team on health care, education and jobs campaigns across the country. She began her tenure at Young Invincibles leading the National Youth Bus Tour, a 3 month-long national listening tour that included 100 events in 20 states.

Lin was previously Staff and Legislative Assistant for Senator Edward M. Kennedy in his Labor Policy Office on the Senate HELP Committee. For Senator Kennedy, Amy worked on labor issues including: unemployment insurance, economy and jobs, the right to form a union, paid sick days and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Amy has also served as the Staff Assistant for the Chief Economist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, then Development Coordinator at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a non-profit think tank focused on policy issues that affect women.

Amy has a B.A. in Economics from Tulane University and a Master in Public Affairs (M.P.A.) from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

In 2011, he and political consultant Joe Trippi founded Rootstrikers, a nonpartisan group dedicated to reforming our campaign finance system. The group’s name draws on a quote by Henry David Thoreau: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” The “branches of evil,” in this metaphor, are the many issues taken up by activists, from climate change to media reform, civil liberties to education. The corrupting influence of money in politics, Lessig argues, is the “root.”

“We will never get your issue solved until we fix this issue first,” Lessig said in a TED talk earlier this year. “So it’s not that mine is the most important issue. It’s not. Yours is the most important issue, but mine is the first issue, the issue we have to solve before we get to fix the issues you care about.”

Watch the entire TED talk.

Lessig illustrates his point with the story of Lesterland, a fictional country where a general election happens after everyone named Lester has had his say over who the candidates will be. Presumably, the Lesters of Lesterland would be of all stripes: young, old, poor, rich, liberal, conservative, black, white, Latino and Asian, hailing from all states in the country. In America, it works much the same way it does in Lesterland, but with one big difference: we cast our ballots only after a relatively homogeneous group, the richest of the rich, have announced their favorite candidates. Citizen United amplified their voices; in the 2012 election, 132 Americans — 0.000042 percent of the country — gave 60 percent of the money super PACs received.

Lessig goes on to say this is not an insurmountable problem. “If you think about the issues our parents tried to solve in the 20th century, issues like racism, or sexism, or the issue that we’ve been fighting in this century, homophobia, those are hard issues. You don’t wake up one day no longer a racist. It takes generations to tear that intuition, that DNA, out of the soul of a people. But this is a problem of just incentives, just incentives. Change the incentives, and the behavior changes, and the states that have adopted small dollar funded systems have seen overnight a change in the practice.”

Got a question for Lessig? Share your thoughts below and be sure to tune in to Moyers & Company for Lawrence Lessig’s interview later this week.

Day in and day out, the residents of the Standard Heights neighborhood in Baton Rouge watch as a century-old oil refinery, operated by Exxon Mobil, belches forth plumes of smoke in various shades of gray. The Louisiana State Department of Environmental Quality allows the facility to pump millions of pounds of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) into the atmosphere each year; but the company recently announced that between 2008 and 2011, the refinery accidentally leaked 4 million pounds more than they were supposed to release.

And that’s just the amount Exxon admits to. NPR and the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) reported in their 2011 “Poisoned Places” series that companies who have exposed their neighbors to risky concentrations of hazardous chemicals often underreport the chemicals released in such accidents. Regulatory loopholes and confusion between state and local environmental agencies allow them to get away with it. The VOCs leaked in Baton Rouge can cause smog and respiratory problems, like asthma — and after a major benzene spill at the facility last year, initially played down by Exxon, the refinery’s residential neighbors worry that the plant is having an adverse effect on their health.

This interactive map, compiled by NPR and CPI, shows serious polluters across America that release hazardous chemicals — including lead, mercury and arsenic — into the air or water.

Enter your zip code or click on the map at NPR.com and get information about polluters in your state.

Pregame festivities are shown at AT&T Park before the final game of the World Baseball Classic between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic in San Francisco, Tuesday, March 19, 2013. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

The melancholy account of the vainglorious power hitter Casey stepping to the plate, his Mudville team down 4-2 at the bottom of the ninth with two men on base and two outs, epitomizes baseball as the game that will break your heart, especially in its immortal final lines:

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout,
But there is no joy in Mudville — mighty Casey has struck out.

The poem was written by Ernest Thayer, a college friend of media magnate William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of his day who owned the Examiner and the man on whom Orson Welles based Citizen Kane. Thayer used the pen name “Phin,” and was paid five dollars for his masterpiece, or around $125 at today’s prices.

I know of some baseball employees who can relate to that kind of bargain basement salary, and they’re in San Francisco, too. They’re not the A-Rods, Riveras and Pujols who pull down ten million and more. The people I mean are the 800 concession workers who sell hot dogs and beer, serve and clean the restaurants, and cater to the luxury skyboxes at AT&T Park, home of the 2012 World Series champion San Francisco Giants. Employed by a South Carolina-based company called Centerplate, their jobs only last the six months of the season and they make but $11,000 a year, right at the poverty line for a single individual in the United States. Their situation is yet another flagrant example of the vast and widening gap created by income inequality in America.

As Dave Zirin at The Nation magazine recently wrote:

“Concession workers at the park earn their $11,000 in a city where a one-bedroom apartment runs $3,000 a month and people are spending near that much to live in laundry rooms and unventilated basements. These same workers, who commute as much as two hours each way to get to the park, have now gone three years without a pay increase. This despite the fact that the value of the team, according to Forbes, has increased 40 percent, ticket prices have spiked and the cost of a cup of beer has climbed to $10.25. This also despite the fact that, as packed sellouts become the norm, the stress and toil of the job has never been greater.”

Job security, health care and pensions are issues as well. ThinkProgress reports:

“Under the current plan, a worker who staffs 10 events in a month receives health care for the next month, but Centerplate wants to increase that to 12 events per month under a new contract, workers said (A Centerplate spokesperson would not confirm that detail). That would make it impossible to obtain health coverage in months like June, when the Giants have just nine home games, and making health care harder to obtain is a major sticking point for the workers.”

Workers hold signs during a one-day strike at AT&T Park in San Francisco on May 25, 2013 against Centerplate, the San Francisco Giants’ food and beverage subcontractor. (Photo courtesy of UNITEDHERE Local 2)

There were long lines at the concession stands. Centerplate bussed in replacement workers for the day, including, In These Times reported, volunteers from non-profit organizations who worked for free in exchange for donations. This is common practice at sports venues to raise money for churches and other charities, but in San Francisco, it undermines the workers’ dispute. The president of Local 2 — who just happens to be named Casey — said, “It’s a real scam. They [Centerplate] make huge savings… They don’t have to do any of the contractual requirements that they have to do for a worker.”

The Giants management is quick to claim that they have no skin in the game — that the workers are paid not by them but by Centerplate. But as Dave Zirin and others point out, 55 cents of every dollar spent by fans at the concessions in the stadium goes into the Giants’ pockets. “Centerplate says talk to the Giants,” one of the workers told Zirin. “The Giants say talk to Centerplate. If we stepped back for five minutes, they’d figure it out after they started to lose all that money. All we’re saying is we want a fair share.”

The team could easily step up to the plate if it wanted to. The Giants’ principal owner is Charles B. Johnson, 80, the multibillionaire chair of the Franklin Resources mutual fund, founded by his father in 1947. He and his wife, Ann, live in the Carolands Chateau, a 65,000 square foot mansion built by the daughter of railway industrialist George Pullman, who notoriously used Federal troops to suppress workers during the Pullman strike of 1894. The Johnsons bought the 98-room property for several million and reportedly spent more than $20 million in its restoration.

The architecture was inspired by a 17th century French design, which in turn was a prototype for Versailles. Republican fundraisers have been held at Carolands, including one for Mitt Romney in May 2012, and Charles Johnson has been a generous contributor to the party and its candidates, including — according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics — a $200,000 donation last year to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads super PAC, as well as $50,000 to the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future.

For that same $200,000, you can rent Johnson’s AT&T Park stadium for a day. Recently, millionaire hedge fund manager Mike Wilkins did just that, inviting 100 of his nearest and dearest hedge fund pals to come to the empty ballpark (the Giants were on the road), have a drink at a bar moved out to the playing field, run the bases, and take batting practice with a bullpen pitcher (which costs an additional $5,000 per person and includes “a paramedic standing by”).

They were living the dream, “grown up boys fantasy time,” a source told BuzzFeed. Meanwhile, the men and women who barely scrape by are feeding the fantasy, making and selling hamburgers and fries, peanuts and Cracker Jack, and cleaning up the mess after. If they don’t win, it’s a shame.

Diedre Melson, John Cox and Pamela Thatcher. (Credit: Don Mathis.)

On Thursday, Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) got off to an auspicious start as chair of the Banking Subcommittee on Economic Policy by doing something that is all too novel — inviting people with the most at stake in economic policy decisions to testify in Congress.

Three Oregonians featured in the HBO documentary American Winter joined four public policy experts at the subcommittee’s first hearing, entitled “The State of the American Dream — Economic Policy and the Future of the Middle Class.”

Senator Merkley set the context with some powerful and totally depressing statistics, including that between 1989-2010, hourly productivity grew more than three times as fast as wages did during that time; the bottom 20 percent of wage earners saw their average hourly wages decline by 30 cents; the next lowest 20 percent saw their earnings decline by 4.3 percent. In contrast, over that same period, the top 20 percent of workers enjoyed a nearly 30 percent increase in earnings.

And while middle class earnings have declined, Senator Merkley noted that “the costs of basic features of the middle class such as public college, rent and utilities, and health expenditures have increased between 41 and 80 percent between 1970 and 2009.”

“The data seems to suggest that ordinary families have been slowly hurting for awhile, the financial crisis and recession nearly crushed them and our budget austerity policies are making it even worse,” said the senator.

Certainly the witnesses from American Winter agreed with his analysis.

Diedre Melson started working at age thirteen and, after graduating high school, enrolled in college. But after two and a half years she could no longer afford it, and so she transferred to “a career school” where she was certified as a medical assistant, cardiac technician and phlebotomist.

She obtained a good job at the Alpha Plasma Clinic but was laid off along with 1,500 other workers when it was shut down during the recession. She was unemployed for two years before finding minimum wage work, and she received SNAP (food stamps) and housing assistance. But even with this assistance, she needed to sell scrap metal — as well as her plasma once or twice a week — to support her four children, two of whom are in college. She now works full-time for the 211info social services hotline and earns $13.50 an hour, but she still must turn to SNAP assistance to feed her family.

Melson said she is frustrated with a media that “exploits” instances of abuse of the safety net rather than showing the vast majority of people who turn to it in the midst of a financial crisis.

“[We] are not the people we see in the media — people taking advantage of the system — we’re the working poor,” she said. “We’re people who get up every day, and try to pay our fair share, and try to pay our dues. But despite our efforts, we’re sinking.”

John Cox is also no stranger to hard work. He was raised on a cattle ranch and said, “From the time I could walk it seemed like I was having to get up at 4 a.m. to feed the cattle in the winter — and that wasn’t going out in the barn, that was in open pastures.” He was taught by his “parents, grandparents and church” to believe in the American Dream, and his father constantly told him, “You take care of your job and your job will take care of you.”

Cox paid his way through college — which he noted was much cheaper then — working various jobs, including commercial fishing in Alaska, and sweeping volcanic ash from parking lots after the eruption of Mount St. Helens.

“I hadn’t been without a job since I was about 12 years old — until October 2008,” he said.

That’s when he was laid off from his position as an accountant. He was confident he would be rehired quickly, but ended up exhausting $35,000 in savings and $35,000 in his 401(k) to support himself and his 12-year-old son, who has Downs Syndrome.

“After the dreaded six months of unemployment, employers won’t look at you. They’re not anxious to hire a person of my age anyway,” said Cox, who is in his 50s.

After a year and a half, Cox applied for unemployment benefits that he “had always thought of as for other people.”

“I still am putting out job applications left and right. I’ve even looked at minimum wage jobs — if it was just me, I would have no problem,” said Cox. “But when you work for minimum wage and you have to pay for day care or a baby sitter, it’s just a wash. You can’t afford to work and pay a baby sitter.”

Wells Fargo is now trying to foreclose on his home — he owes far more on his mortgage than his home is worth (as did nearly one in four homeowners in the first quarter of 2013, according to Senator Merkley). Cox had purchased the house so that his son would have a “nest egg in the future when [I’m] not around.”

Pam Thatcher and her husband saved up before having their first child so that she could stop teaching preschool and work as a stay-at-home mother. But after they had their second child, her husband was laid off.

“We cut back on every possible extra expense and carefully used our savings to pay for the basics like rent, food and diapers,” said Thatcher. “It wasn’t long before cutting corners was no longer enough and we were faced with the grim prospect of going without, or turning to social services and government assistance for help. Thank goodness there was help when we needed it.”

Thatcher said that prior to her own need for assistance, she thought “it was easy for people who depended on government programs” and that “the system bred abuse.” Now she sees that safety net programs “help keep families like [mine] just barely above water.”

“Something has gone wrong when instead of investing in programs that will help families get back on their feet, our elected officials are making cuts,” she said. “When you cut funding for SNAP, TANF or WIC you are making the decision to take away what little support people have to keep the lights on, or food on the table.”

Her husband has found a new job, but like so many other workers, he is earning a much lower salary than he was before the recession.

“Now, even with full-time work, we still struggle to make ends meet,” said Thatcher.

The panel’s public policy experts — Princeton economics professor, Dr. Atif Mian, Demos senior policy analyst Amy Traub and venture capitalist Nick Hanauer — suggested many reforms to help rebuild the middle class, including raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour; investing in public education and reducing student loan rates to make college affordable; rebuilding the right to organize and collectively bargain; and insisting that the wealthy and corporations pay a fair share of taxes as they did in the past.

Senator Merkley wondered if — absent such policy initiatives — “[we] are in danger of a national cycle of depressed aspirations replacing the motivating vision of the American Dream?”

Mian, Traub and Hanauer did an excellent job laying out the economic trends that are diminishing the middle class, and proposing ways to reverse these trends. But it was the voice of the people — represented by three Oregonians — that made this hearing so meaningful. Kudos to Senator Merkley for making that happen. I candidly think it will take 1,000 Diedres, Pams and Johns doing sit-ins in Congressional offices — along with other advocates for the poor and the middle class — to create the kind of change that is needed.

But in the meantime, Senator Merkley opened the door to authentic experience in his subcommittee, and I hope he will keep it open.

Greg Kaufmann is a freelance writer and Nation contributor covering poverty in America, primarily through his blog, This Week in Poverty. His work has also been featured on MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry show, CBSNews.com, NPR.org, WashingtonPost.com, Common Dreams and Alternet. He serves as an adviser for the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

In an encore broadcast, Economist Richard Wolff joins Bill to shine light on the disaster left behind in capitalism’s wake, and to discuss the fight for economic justice, including a fair minimum wage. A Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, and currently Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School, Wolff has written many books on the effects of rampant capitalism, including Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It.

“We have this disparity getting wider and wider between those for whom capitalism continues to deliver the goods by all means, [and] a growing majority in this society facing harder and harder times,” Wolff tells Bill. “And that’s what provokes some of us to say it’s a systemic problem.”

Also on the broadcast, activist and author Saru Jayaraman marches on Washington with restaurant workers struggling to make ends meet, and talks about how we can best support their right to a fair wage. Jayaraman is the co-founder and co-director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, which works to improve pay and working conditions for America’s 10 million-plus restaurant workers. She is also the author of Behind the Kitchen Door, an exposé of the restaurant industry.

Learn more about the production team behind Moyers & Company.

Michelle Rhee, right, talks to third grader Kmone Feeling during a visit at J.O. Wilson Elementary School on Aug. 23, 2010 in Washington. D.C. Rhee was D.C.'s public schools chancellor at the time. Mayor Adrian Fenty, back second left, and school principal Sheryl Warley, left, stand at the back. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

In the great American debate over education, the education and technology corporations, bankrolled politicians and activist-profiteers who collectively comprise the so-called “reform” movement base their arguments on one central premise: that America should expect public schools to produce world-class academic achievement regardless of the negative forces bearing down on a school’s particular students. In recent days, though, the faults in that premise are being exposed by unavoidable reality.

Before getting to the big news, let’s review the dominant fairy tale: As embodied by New York City’s major education announcement this weekend, the “reform” fantasy pretends that a lack of teacher “accountability” is the major education problem and somehow wholly writes family economics out of the story (amazingly, this fantasy persists even in a place like the Big Apple where economic inequality is particularly crushing). That key — and deliberate — omission serves myriad political interests.

For education, technology and charter school companies and the Wall Streeters who back them, it lets them cite troubled public schools to argue that the current public education system is flawed, and to then argue that education can be improved if taxpayer money is funneled away from the public school system’s priorities (hiring teachers, training teachers, reducing class size, etc.) and into the private sector (replacing teachers with computers, replacing public schools with privately run charter schools, etc.). Likewise, for conservative politicians and activist-profiteers disproportionately bankrolled by these and other monied interests, the “reform” argument gives them a way to both talk about fixing education and to bash organized labor, all without having to mention an economic status quo that monied interests benefit from and thus do not want changed.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel listens during a forum on education at American University in Washington, Friday, March 2, 2012. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

In other words, elite media organizations (which, in many cases, have their own vested financial interest in education “reform”) go out of their way to portray the anti-public-education movement as heroic rather than what it really is: just another get-rich-quick scheme shrouded in the veneer of altruism.

That gets to the news that exposes “reformers’” schemes — and all the illusions that surround them. According to a new U.S. Department of Education study, “about one in five public schools was considered high poverty in 2011… up from about one in eight in 2000.” This followed an earlier study from the department finding that “many high-poverty schools receive less than their fair share of state and local funding… leav(ing) students in high-poverty schools with fewer resources than schools attended by their wealthier peers.”

Those data sets powerfully raise the question that “reformers” are so desperate to avoid: Are we really expected to believe that it’s just a coincidence that the public education and poverty crises are happening at the same time? Put another way: Are we really expected to believe that everything other than poverty is what’s causing problems in failing public schools?

Because of who comprises it and how it is financed, the education “reform” movement has a clear self-interest in continuing to say yes, we should believe such fact-free pabulum. And you can bet that movement will keep saying “yes” — and that the corporate media will continue to cheer them as heroes for saying “yes” — as long as public education money keeps being diverted into corporate coffers.

But we’ve now reached the point where the economics-omitting “reform” propaganda has jumped the shark, going from deceptively alluring to embarrassingly transparent. That’s because the latest Department of Education study isn’t being released in a vacuum; it caps off an overwhelming wave of evidence showing that our education crisis has far less to do with public schools or bad teachers than it does with the taboo subject of crushing poverty.

In 2011, for instance, Stanford University’s Sean Reardon released a comprehensive study documenting the new “income achievement gap.” The report proved that family income is now, by far, the biggest determining and predictive factor in a student’s educational achievement.

A few months later, Joanne Barkan published a groundbreaking magazine report surveying decades worth of social science research. Her conclusions, again, came back to non-school factors like family economics and poverty:

Out-of-school factors — family characteristics such as income and parents’ education, neighborhood environment, health care, housing stability, and so on — count for twice as much as all in-school factors. In 1966, a groundbreaking government study — the “Coleman Report” — first identified a “one-third in-school factors, two-thirds family characteristics” ratio to explain variations in student achievement. Since then researchers have endlessly tried to refine or refute the findings. Education scholar Richard Rothstein described their results: “No analyst has been able to attribute less than two-thirds of the variation in achievement among schools to the family characteristics of their students.”

Then, just a few months ago, Reardon chimed in again to contextualize all of this. In a follow-up New York Times article, he noted that it is no coincidence that these out-of-school factors — and in particular economic conditions — have created the “income achievement gap” at the very moment economic inequality and poverty have exploded in America.

New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, right, listens as Washington public schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington in 2008, before the House Education and Labor Committee hearing on mayor and superintendent partnerships in education. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

One way to appreciate this reality in stark relief is to just remember that, as Barkan shows, for all the claims that the traditional public school system is flawed, America’s wealthiest traditional public schools happen to be among the world’s highest-achieving schools. Most of those high-performing wealthy public schools also happen to be unionized. If, as “reformers” suggest, the public school system or the presence of organized labor was really the key factor in harming American education, then those wealthy schools would be in serious crisis — and wouldn’t be at the top of the international charts. Instead, the fact that they aren’t in crisis and are so high-achieving suggests neither the system itself nor unions are the big factor causing high-poverty schools to lag behind. It suggests that the “high poverty” part is the problem.

That, of course, shouldn’t be a controversial notion; it is so painfully obvious it’s amazing anyone would even try to deny it. But that gets back to motive: The “reform” movement (and its loyal media outlets) cast a discussion of poverty as taboo because poverty and inequality are byproducts of the same economic policies that serve that movement’s funders.

To understand this pernicious bait and switch that writes economics out of the education story, simply think through the motives.

Think first about how the dominant policy paradigms in America — tax cuts for the rich, deregulation and budget cuts to social services — exacerbate inequality and poverty, but also benefit the major corporations that fund the “reform” movement. Then think about how it isn’t a coincidence that the “reform” movement’s goal is to divert the education policy conversation away from anything having to do with poverty and economic inequality.

You can tell that’s not a coincidence because unlike other issues, the topics of poverty and economic inequality will inevitably prompt a conversation about changing the underlying economic policies (regressive taxes, deregulation, etc.) that create crushing poverty and inequality. For corporations served by the existing economic paradigm and for the politicians and activists those corporations underwrite, such a conversation is simply unacceptable because changing the policies that create poverty and inequality potentially threatens their existing financial power and privilege. Thus, those corporations, politicians and activists in the “reform” movement do whatever they can — bash teachers, scream strong-but-meaningless words like “accountability,” criticize public school structures, etc. — to shift the education conversation away from poverty and inequality.

Reality, though, is finally catching up with the “reform” movement’s propaganda. With poverty and inequality intensifying, a conversation about the real problem is finally starting to happen. And the more education “reformers” try to distract from it, the more they will expose the fact that they aren’t driven by concern for kids but by the ugliest kind of greed — the kind that feigns concerns for kids in order to pad the corporate bottom line.

David Sirota is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, magazine journalist and the best-selling author of the books Hostile Takeover, The Uprising and Back to Our Future. Email him at ds [at] davidsirota [dot] com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at davidsirota.com

A critique of ALEC's 'Rich States, Poor States' calls the report's premise -- the idea that there’s even such a thing as a state business climate to report on -- "nonsensical."

Many local news outlets are touting the report as a concrete source for assessing their state’s economic performance. But it appears that ideology is what gets a state to the top — or the bottom — of the rankings.

ALEC's annual report

For example, it’s no surprise, given the nature of its model bills, that ALEC’s report favors states offering low taxes and minimal government regulation. Whether or not those things create a strong economic climate, they are certainly favored by corporations. And red states — surprise, surprise — greatly outrank their blue brethren: of the ten states on which ALEC bestowed the honor of greatest economic outlook, all but Virginia have a Republican governor and a Republican-controlled legislature. (The Virginia Senate is split equally among Democrats and Republicans.) Eight of the report’s lowest-ranking states are governed by Democrats.

Some in the press are eating all this up. A recent Louisiana headline reads: “State-By-State Economic Report Shows a Lackluster Louisiana,” followed by an article that treats the state’s economic ranking as emanating from a disinterested authority. (Louisiana came in at #28 on ALEC’s list — the first time it hasn’t placed in the top 25.) North Dakota’s Jamestown Sun, claiming that “the assessment of North Dakota’s business friendly economy is being made again and again by independent out-of-state analysts,” cites ALEC as offering the latest of these “independent” analyses. Maryland’s WUSA9 essentially endorses “Rich States, Poor States” in a short “Your Money” report, pointing to ALEC’s recent “bad report card for Maryland – especially for your tax credit.” And then there’s Utah’s Deseret News, which exclusively interviews supporters of “Rich States, Poor States” – without once mentioning any of the report’s very vocal critics. (Utah, remember, is number one.)

Dr. Arthur Laffer, Economist and professor at University of Southern California, with "Laffer Curve" on blackboard, Feb. 23, 1981. (AP Photo)

“Grading Places” goes on to disparage using population growth, tax cuts, and anti-union “right to work” laws as measures for a state’s economic outlook. Despite the ALEC-Laffer report’s “aggressive claims,” Fisher and LeRoy say that the document still “fails to predict job creation, GDP growth, state and local revenue growth or rising personal incomes. Empirical evidence does not support its claims that estate taxes or graduated personal income taxes cause rich people to move and thereby retard economic development.” Their report goes on to illustrate that small negative correlations sometimes exist between ALEC-endorsed economic policies and a state’s positive economic outcome.

Protestors to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to eliminate collective bargaining rights for many state workers listen in the rotunda at the State Capitol in Madison, Wis., in 2011, to testimony. (AP Photo/Andy Manis)

In the coming year, it wouldn’t be surprising if certain legislators attempted to pass off the “Rich States, Poor States” document as sound evidence in favor of changing their state’s economic policies. But citizens might do well to beware: as Greg LeRoy recently pointed out: “The real agenda is a policy or political agenda. It’s about trying to get states to lower taxes.”

Laura Macomber is an associate producer at Okapi Productions. She is a former employee of Newsweek & The Daily Beast, where she produced news stories for the company’s live journalism events, Women in the World and The Hero Summit.

In an encore Moyers & Company broadcast, Economist Richard Wolff joins Bill to shine light on the disaster left behind in capitalism’s wake, and to discuss the fight for economic justice, including a fair minimum wage. A Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, and currently Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School, Wolff has written many books on the effects of rampant capitalism, including Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It.

“We have this disparity getting wider and wider between those for whom capitalism continues to deliver the goods by all means, [and] a growing majority in this society facing harder and harder times,” Wolff tells Bill. “And that’s what provokes some of us to say it’s a systemic problem.”

A student in Washington State's Head Start program practices her writing. Courtesy of Washington Head Start.

“The results speak for themselves,” said Joel Ryan, executive director of the Washington State Association of Head Start & ECEAP (WSA). “The research shows that kids who go through Head Start are more likely to be ready for kindergarten, less likely to need special education services and more likely to graduate from high school.”

All of that adds up to saving money over the long haul. But even before the sequester Head Start was reaching less than half of eligible children in the United States — and only 38 percent in Washington. Now, even fewer children will benefit from the program.

Figures are for Head Start and do not include Early Head Start enrollment. Source: U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Congressional Justifications, Fiscal Years 2002-2014

 
Estimates put the number of slots lost this year alone at 70,000. According to a recent survey by WSA, 68 percent of Washington State’s Head Start providers will be forced to drop children from their classrooms over the next few months as a direct result of sequestration.

“These cuts are happening now,” said Ryan. “A lot of directors have issued lay-off notices to teaching staff and kids are already getting dropped from programs. That’s going to get worse come September. Most of the impact right now is that they are closing programs earlier in the day, or closing earlier in the school year altogether, so families are needing to scramble to find some other place for child care.”

One place that has sliced a half-hour from its four-hour Head Start program is Snohomish County, where Robert Wheeler’s four-year-old daughter started attending class last October.

“When she started she could only identify the letters ‘i’ and ‘s’ but she couldn’t spell the word ‘is,’” said Wheeler. “Just over seven months later she’s reading at the kindergarten-first grade cusp — reading books and sight words to me. Her whole vocabulary has changed.”

Wheeler emphasized that it’s not just about the classroom and “learning your ABCs.”

“It’s about understanding the whole emotional, mental and cognitive support needed — and helping families understand it too — because the parents are with the kids more than the teachers are,” he said.

Wheeler said that while he has family members he can lean on to provide child care, he’s seeing how the shortened Head Start day is affecting the wellbeing of other parents and children.

“There are parents that work part-time who have had to cut their hours back,” he said. “And some full-time workers who were eligible for child care programs before and after school, and they’ve had to cut back to part-time. Some have even lost jobs and it’s just a downward spiral.”

Ryan also noted that you can’t isolate Head Start cuts from cuts in other programs — it all adds up to making life far more difficult for low-income families.

“It’s WIC programs, or fuel programs, or they are trying to go to school and their work-study is cut — the families we serve are being affected in a host of ways,” said Ryan.

But the biggest hit for Wheeler and his daughter might come in September when their Head Start program is closed for good. He said it’s a real loss for the entire community — the facility was built exclusively for Head Start in the 1970s.

“What lawmakers don’t understand is that it’s the way families and communities are working together as partners in Head Start that creates an even greater potential for children to succeed,” said Wheeler.

The closure of the center will directly affect 38 children, two teachers, three or four paid employees, and three salaried positions. Wheeler said he hopes three state-run early childhood education programs — called ECEAPs — will be able to absorb some of the children currently participating in Head Start.

“But there’s no guarantee,” said Wheeler. “ECEAP won’t take a Head Start kid if another kid has greater need.”

Ryan said that next school year not only will there be fewer Head Start classrooms and fewer students served, but most of the programs that survive the cuts will be opening later in the year, as late as October.

“That’s really putting these kids at a further disadvantage — they are already starting behind, Head Start’s job is to get those kids ready for kindergarten. They are going to be doing it in fewer hours, and with less staff to help them get ready,” said Ryan.

He adds that this is all happening as more kids are living in poverty, more are homeless and there is increased “adverse trauma and toxic stress” in struggling families.

“We see it in the rising number of child protective services cases,” said Ryan. “And as there is increased need for assistance, the federal government is cutting back and pulling services. It’s really a double hit to the gut of these kids and families.”

But Wheeler remains hopeful that media attention can make a difference in mobilizing citizens to demand a more sensible approach to the budget.

“If we reach out more to the public, I think we can make greater waves in the political realm,” he said.

Greg Kaufmann is a freelance writer and Nation contributor covering poverty in America, primarily through his blog, This Week in Poverty. His work has also been featured on MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry show, CBSNews.com, NPR.org, WashingtonPost.com, Common Dreams and Alternet. He serves as an adviser for the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Click on the map to expand. Download the report to find out more details about your state's grade.

We called Shawn McMahon, the report’s author and acting director and CEO of WOW, to talk about how policy trends, the economic recovery and the sequester are affecting the economic security of Americans.

Theresa Riley: What are some of the policy areas that you looked at in your scorecard? How do you define economic security?

Shawn McMahon

We first started to measure economic security — we originally called it self-sufficiency — in the 1990s during the welfare reform movement. At that time, the only measure of wellbeing available was the official federal poverty level. That measure, created in the 1960s, is very antiquated and it doesn’t tell us anything about people living $1 or $1,000 or $10,000 above the poverty line. It’s also not aspirational. It doesn’t tell us about the targets or the goals that we as a society (or the federal government) should have for people living under the federal poverty level.

Marjorie Hill, second left, CEO of the Gay Men's Health Crisis, address the Women for Paid Sick Days rally on the steps of New York's City Hall last summer. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Riley: Some have predicted that the growing number of female breadwinners will result in an increase in family friendly work policies, such as paid family leave and child care support for single mothers. Have you seen any evidence of this at the local level already? Do you agree that that’s likely?

McMahon: I do agree that it’s likely. Unfortunately, a lot of people consider these policies, or lack of policies, to be market phenomena. Although there are certainly groups here in D.C. and on the state level working hard to secure sick and safe days for workers, millions of whom lack them, I don’t think the average worker realizes that there is an option to press for this sort of benefit. Traditionally, a lot of these benefits would have been addressed by unions, and these days, with the lack of unions, a lot of workers simply consider themselves to be dependent upon their employer’s good will or at the mercy of the market.

Source: Living Below the Line: Economic Insecurity and America's Families, Wider Opportunities for Women

Riley: Can you talk about some states that are doing well in that area and what types of policies they’re implementing?

McMahon: There’s a wide range of policies that are affected at both the federal and the state level, and they play off of each other, such as the Family Medical Leave Act. It was created in 1993 to allow women leave in the event of a birth or to care for sick family members, but there were a lot of holes in the law. It only applied to establishments with 50 or more employees. It didn’t allow people to take leave to care for sick parents or elders. It also didn’t cover all employees. There’s a very long list of employee categories that are not covered by the law, so some states have taken the initiative in trying to expand the legislation, which makes up for some of these weaknesses.

To a large degree, that’s the nature of the relationship. For example, the state earned income tax credit or the caregiving credits are often expressed as percentages of the federal credit, or they’re intended to supplement that federal credit. Same thing for state minimum wage laws and many leave laws. A lot of public support programs at the state level are in some way either co-administered or based on what’s available at the federal level. So it’s rare that a state acts entirely independently of the federal laws, it tends to be responsive.

Riley: One thing I noticed in the report was the way that you highlighted state pre-K programs and enrollment not only as something beneficial for students in terms of education and job prospects, but in terms of the parents’ jobs, it also has to do with child care, right?

McMahon: Absolutely, and that’s a good example of something that’s determined at the state level, sometimes even the local level and less so at the federal level. The availability of preschool programs has been a major issue, and is becoming even more of an issue because research suggests that the earlier a student is enrolled in a school setting, the better their long-term outcomes; and secondly, with so many working parents, they want to have pre-school available to them, not only as a way of defraying costs, but also to make sure that their children are in a proper setting.

For a lot of low or moderate income families getting quality, licensed child care is a stretch. For some, it’s only a dream. The availability of a quality program for their kids is very important. States need to think about these [programs] not just as an expense, but as an investment, in that these several investments are interlocking and interdependent.

Surprisingly, some of the states that are not highly ranked did better in the education category than we might otherwise expect. States like Alabama and Arkansas seem to be investing more heavily than some other states in the aforementioned preschool opportunities, and we may see those types of investments paying off down the road in a way that we don’t see it at the moment.

Riley: What were some other findings that surprised you?

McMahon: We didn’t find there was much of a relationship between the state’s fiscal health, in recent years, and whether or not they received higher overall grades on their economic security related policies. Every year each state spends billions of dollars, perhaps a bit less in smaller states. The solution to improving economic security is not necessarily for states create a large number of new laws or a large number of very expensive programs. Instead, they need to take this comprehensive view of economic security and use it as something of a checklist or a blueprint, and determine where the money is best spent, and then create policies to plug very definitive holes in the overall scheme.

Riley: What about federal budgets? Does sequestration have any effect on these policies or programs?

McMahon: For better or worse, the sequester rarely eliminates or nullifies a policy or a program. Rather, it tends to trim or substantially cut the budgets of a lot of these programs, so that wouldn’t necessarily affect a lot of the scores in a lot of the categories that we looked at, but it would certainly affect variables such as spending per capita, in certain areas. We know that states are, for example, cutting a lot of family friendly policies, such as the number of preschool slots available, the number of child care subsidies available and the amounts of subsidies, the investment in their workforce system, thereby decreasing the number of people that could be trained or retrained by the state workforce development system. And as everybody knows intuitively, this will have a cumulative impact in the long run, when these lack of investments don’t pay off or come back to our detriment.

Millions of American families say they have trouble putting food on the table and the economic recovery has done little to provide them with relief. Despite our relative prosperity as a nation, the percentage of Americans who, at some point in a given year, cannot afford to eat sets us apart from other wealthy countries.

Last month, the Pew Research Center used International Monetary Fund data to analyze the “levels of deprivation” across various countries, including our own. When the data is compiled in a chart (as it is below), it’s clear that the U.S. is an outlier: We are by far the richest country included in Pew’s study, but nearly a quarter of our population – over 78 million people — live in what’s called a “food insecure” household. In Canada, the second richest country Pew looked at, only nine percent of people had difficulty; in China, it was eight percent.

(Roll over the countries to see the percentages.)

Sherman Alexie (Credit: Alton Christensen)

1. Barking Water, written and directed by Sterlin Harjo, 2009

Frankie, a Native American man living in Oklahoma, has been diagnosed with cancer. Before he dies, he wants to make amends with his daughter and granddaughter who live on the other side of the state. Too weak to travel alone, Frankie convinces his ex-wife to accompany him on the journey that takes them through Oklahoma’s Native American communities. The trip reminds them why they fell for one another, and why they ultimately split. Barking Water premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

2. Frozen River, written and directed by Courtney Hunt, 2008

This film takes place near a little-known border crossing on the Mohawk reservation between New York State and Quebec. On the banks of the St. Lawrence River, the lure of fast money from smuggling presents a challenge to those who would otherwise be earning minimum wage. The film follows two single mothers — one white, one Mohawk — who give in to that temptation.

3. Clearcut, written by M.T. Kelly and Richard Forstyth, directed Ryszard Bugajski, 1991

In this surrealistic thriller, a lawyer representing a Canadian Native American tribe fails to block a logging company from clear cutting tribal land and a militant member of the tribe, named Arthur, kidnaps him, along with the manager of the logging mill. Once in the forest, Arthur begins to torture the logging manager, drawing parallels to how his clear cutters torture the environment, as the lawyer watches.

4. Little Big Man, written by Calder Willingham, directed by Arthur Penn, 1970

Starring Dustin Hoffman and Faye Dunaway, this film follows the fictional life of Jack Crabb, a white man raised by a Cheyenne chief during the 19th century. After adventuring around the American West and observing the atrocities committed by George Custer’s armies, Crabb ends up tricking the general into charging to his defeat at Little Bighorn.

5. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, directed by Zacharias Kunuk, 2001

Based on Inuit legend, The Fast Runner tells the story of an evil spirit menacing a Native American community in the eastern Arctic, and a warrior’s battle to defeat it. The film is the first Inuktitut-language feature ever produced. It won the Caméra d’Or at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival and was named the Best Canadian Feature Film at the 2001 Toronto International Film Festival.

6. Miss Navajo, directed by Billy Luther, 2007

This documentary follows 21-year-old Crystal Frazier, an introverted contestant in the Miss Navajo competition. The title has been awarded every year for over five decades to a woman who can best showcase skills that are crucial to Navajo daily life including sheep butchering, fry-bread making and rug weaving, and who has substantial knowledge of Navajo history and the tribe’s disappearing traditions.

7. Indian Country: Native Americans in the 20th Century, directed by Chris Eyre, in production

Native American director Chris Eyre is working on a yet-to-be-released follow-up to the 1995 TV miniseries 500 Nations, which chronicled the history of America’s indigenous people up to the end of the 19th century. Eyre’s new four-part documentary, titled Indian Country: Native Americans in the 20th Century, will pick up where 500 Nations left off. The Katahdin Foundation, which is producing the documentary, writes, “The series will show how Native American populations have grown eight-fold since Wounded Knee, how they are in the process of reviving their cultural traditions, preserving their languages, prospering in new enterprises and even occasionally forcing the U.S. government to uphold its treaties.”

If you’re interested in learning more about the student debt crisis, be sure to watch Bill’s interview with Heather McGhee, director of Demos’s Washington office of the research, an advocacy group that is fighting for financial reforms and consumer protection for students and graduates.

Sallie Mae protest over student loan debt; Photo via Greg Kaufmann

An update appears below.

Nearly 200 students, parents, community members and union leaders rallied at Sallie Mae’s annual shareholder meeting in Newark, Delaware, last Thursday. On the agenda: first, demand that the nation’s largest private student loan lender meet directly with students to discuss their crushing debt burden; and second, introduce a shareholder resolution calling for disclosure of the corporation’s lobbying practices and membership in groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Outside of Sallie Mae’s corporate headquarters, the activists were met by “dozens of police, blockades and K-9 units,” according to participants. Sarita Gupta, executive director of Jobs with Justice – American Rights at Work, urged the crowd to confront Sallie Mae executives and board members “about their role in America’s student debt crisis.”

More than 38 million people now owe over $1.1 trillion in student debt; Sallie Mae owns approximately 15 percent of that debt, or $162.5 billion. Students owe an average of $27,000 when they graduate from college and many have a debt load several times greater than that amount. Nearly one in ten will default on their loans within two years.

Gupta noted that Sallie Mae “spent $16 million on federal lobbying from 2008 to 2012 and has more than sixty state lobbyists.” The corporation has lobbied at the federal level “to block student loan reform,” and at the state level “for reduced public investment in higher education, forcing more students to rely on private student loans.”

“They’re in the business of condemning students to a lifetime of debt, not making education a reality,” said Sara Fitouri, a law student at the University of Denver, who owes $145,000 in student debt.

“They show that when we privatize something that used to be in the public realm it can lead to horrible results,” said Sam Nelson, a junior at George Washington University who expects to graduate with approximately $50,000 in student loan debt.

Sallie Mae was indeed created as a government-sponsored enterprise in 1972, and transitioned to a fully privatized bank lender between 1997 and 2004. Organizers say that as the largest lender it now sets the trends and standards for the industry.

Gupta spoke out against profit margins that continue to increase for Sallie Mae as “student debt and student loan defaults escalate at an unsustainable pace.” She noted that the senior management team of five executives made more than $20 million combined in 2011; the former CEO — who just announced his retirement — was paid $35 million from 2007 to 2011.

Twenty of the activists entered Sallie Mae headquarters as legal proxies for shareholders with a right to vote. The groups they represented included: the United States Student Association, the Student Labor Action Project, Common Cause, the Responsible Endowment Coalition, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and Jobs with Justice–American Rights at Work. Sallie Mae personnel attempted to restrict these individuals to a holding area but the activists successfully negotiated their way into the meeting.

Prior to introducing the shareholders resolution, Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT, whose members’ pension plans have more than $1 trillion in assets and are long-term shareholders of Sallie Mae, said, “As Sallie Mae profits from billions of dollars of student loans, it has an obligation to students, educators and shareholders to be transparent about its lobbying efforts, including on student loan reform.”

The resolution asked that the board disclose in an annual report the corporation’s policies, procedures and payments for direct and indirect lobbying; as well as its membership and payments to any tax-exempt organization “that writes and endorses model legislation.” (See: ALEC.) Although there has yet to be a tally of the vote, organizers hope that they received the support of approximately 30 percent of the shareholders.

Following the vote, the students won a long-fought-for victory: newly named Sallie Mae CEO Jack Remondi agreed to their demand to meet next month. His predecessor had been steadfast in his refusal to allow the students a seat at the table.

“We are going to work hard and be ready to give him a run for his money,” said Nelson. “We’ll get a lot of no’s, but if we organize enough we might get a few yes’s. Ultimately though, what’s going to bring the pressure to [get] the change we need is what’s worked in the past for other issues — organizing, direct action and taking the fight to them in their own backyard.”

The promise of privatization of the student loan industry was that there would be greater efficiency and therefore more opportunities for students to pay for college and thrive. That is clearly not what Sallie Mae and the big banks have delivered to students like Sam, Sara and their families — not to mention the millions of young people who are priced out of college.

“After we win this campaign against Sallie Mae, we are not going to stop until student debt is a thing of the past,” said Nelson. “We fundamentally believe that education is a right and it should be free and accessible to all people who wish to pursue it. We know that free education has worked in the past, and that the government and companies are choosing not to do it — and to fight against it — for their own political or profit-motivated reasons.”

UPDATE: The resolution has received over 35 percent of shareholder votes. (Importantly, this figure understates support for the resolution, as there were a large number of abstentions counted as no votes.) Student organizers say that they are very pleased with this result.

Greg Kaufmann is a freelance writer and Nation contributor covering poverty in America, primarily through his blog, This Week in Poverty. His work has also been featured on MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry show, CBSNews.com, NPR.org, WashingtonPost.com, Common Dreams and Alternet. He serves as an adviser for the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Later, writer Sherman Alexie, who was born on a Native American reservation, shares his irreverent perspective on contemporary American life, and discusses the challenges of living in two different cultures at the same time — especially when one dominates the other. Alexie has been navigating the cultural boundaries of American culture in poetry, novels, short stories, screenplays, even stand-up comedy for over two decades.

“I know a lot more about being white than you know about being Indian,” Alexie tells Bill.

Learn more about the production team behind Moyers & Company.

But you wouldn’t know it from Congress’ lack of urgency to confront and end $85 billion in across-the-board sequester cuts this year, despite the fact that these cuts are already reducing employment and shrinking gross domestic product, and straining state budgets as a loss of federal grants makes it more difficult to fund vital services.

Even the very programs designed to prepare the American workforce for high demand jobs — another Congressional favorite, at least rhetorically — are being squeezed.

Focus: HOPE's "Earn & Learn" graduates pose for graduation photos in March 2013. The E&L program is expected to be discontinued later this year because of funding cuts.

But according to Steve Ragan, chief development and external relations officer at Focus: HOPE, just as employers are ready to hire again in the Detroit metropolitan area, sequestration is limiting the organization’s ability to help those looking for work.

“We’re often contracting with regional or local Michigan workforce agencies, and they are very conscious of the impact of sequestration on their budgets, so it’s really slowed down funding at a time that is critical,” Ragan told me. “We’ve been waiting to see people hiring for a long time — now we have employers interested in hiring our students, a waiting list of people who want job training, but we can’t fund the programs as we have in the past.”

Ragan said that the information technology programs are being hit particularly hard, and the “Earn and Learn” program — focusing on jobs for at-risk minority youth and adults who have been incarcerated or are chronically unemployed — is expected to be discontinued. To date, Focus: HOPE is 35 percent behind budgeted revenue for workforce development, or approximately $800,000. The average job training cost per student is $5,000 — though it varies greatly from program to program— which means that the organization is down 160 funded spots through two-thirds of its fiscal year. Ragan said at the current pace 250 to 350 students will miss out on job training and “the impact on personal lives and families is devastating.”

“Our capacity used to be limited not by money but by getting the students who could commit to the academic rigor of our programs,” said Ragan. “Now we are capped by money and it’s often a month-to-month challenge.”

Most Focus: HOPE students come from the Detroit public school system and many have what Ragan described as “very serious foundational education problems.”

“In recent months, we had a student with a high school diploma who was reading at a 1st grade level,” said Ragan. “We see lots of students with 3rd, 5th, or 6th grade reading and math levels—so our first task is usually bringing them up to a 7th or 8th grade level so they are prepared to study in our career training programs.”

Ragan said Focus: HOPE takes great pride in “maintaining a job placement rate in at least the high 70s for our graduates — and committing to lifetime assistance with job placement.” The organization also provides scholarships for graduates who want to pursue a bachelor’s or associate’s degree.

“We have partnerships with most of the universities in the area that have engineering and technology programs,” said Ragan.

Ragan emphasized that sequestration is the latest chapter in a “persistent reduction” of public investment in skilled job training that is “especially difficult in a struggling community like Detroit.”

“It’s been a huge mistake,” he said. “This is an investment in our economic recovery, but we are spreading reduced money among more people in need. We’ve become a victim of hyperbole and the political battle.”

Greg Kaufmann is a freelance writer and Nation contributor covering poverty in America, primarily through his blog, This Week in Poverty. His work has also been featured on MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry show, CBSNews.com, NPR.org, WashingtonPost.com, Common Dreams and Alternet. He serves as an adviser for the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

U.S. poverty (less than $17,916 for a family of three): 46.2 million people, 15.1 percent

Click pie chart to enlarge. Read the full report at the National Center for Children in Poverty website.

Children in poverty: 16.1 million, 22 percent of all children, including 39 percent of African-American children and 34 percent of Latino children. Poorest age group in country.

Deep poverty (less than $11,510 for a family of four): 20.4 million people, 1 in 15 Americans, including more than 15 million women and children

People who would have been in poverty if not for Social Security, 2011: 67.6 million
(program kept 21.4 million people out of poverty)

People in the U.S. experiencing poverty by age 65: Roughly half

Gender gap, 2011: Women 34 percent more likely to be poor than men

Gender gap, 2010: Women 29 percent more likely to be poor than men

Twice the poverty level (less than $46,042 for a family of four): 106 million people, more than 1 in 3 Americans

Jobs in the U.S. paying less than $34,000 a year: 50 percent

Jobs in the U.S. paying below the poverty line for a family of four, less than $23,000 annually: 25 percent

Poverty-level wages, 2011: 28 percent of workers

Percentage of individuals and family members in poverty who either worked or lived with a working family member, 2011: 57 percent

Families receiving cash assistance, 1996: 68 for every 100 families living in poverty

Families receiving cash assistance, 2010: 27 for every 100 families living in poverty

Impact of public policy, 2010: Without government assistance, poverty would have been twice as high — nearly 30 percent of population

Percentage of entitlement benefits going to elderly, disabled or working households: Over 90 percent.

Number of homeless children in U.S. public schools: 1,065,794

Annual cost of child poverty nationwide: $550 billion

Federal expenditures on home ownership mortgage deductions, 2012: $131 billion

Federal funding for low-income housing assistance programs, 2012: Less than $50 billion

Greg Kaufmann is a Nation contributor covering poverty in America. His work has also appeared on Common Dreams, Alternet, Tikkun.org, NPR.org, CBSNews.com and MichaelMoore.com. He serves as an adviser for the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Longtime fans of Moyers & Company will recognize two economists who appear in the film. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson are the authors of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class and appeared on the first episode of the show to talk about how income inequality was politically engineered.

The first caller was indignant. “This bill is anti-consumer!” he bellowed because, he insisted, it would raise prices. I thought, no, this bill is pro-citizen, helping out people, many of them in extremis — and just when did we stop being citizens and become merely consumers? When did access to material goods and low prices become a right more important than public health and welfare? When did our celebration of profit take precedence over fundamental fairness and justice?

I thought of this again the other night while attending the ceremony for the Hillman Prizes in Journalism, named after the late union leader Sidney Hillman, once the influential president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. One of the awards went to ABC News for its coverage of a deadly fire at a garment factory in Bangladesh where Tommy Hilfiger clothing was being manufactured. Deliberately locked in and unable to escape, 29 died.

Workers stand outside an 11-story building that houses the Tung Hai Sweater Ltd. factory and apartments after a fire in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Thursday, May 9, 2013. (AP Photo/Ismail Ferdous)

The Hillman Prize came just weeks after the April 24 collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh that killed 1,127 workers, and indeed another award was given by the Hillman Foundation in the name of the workers and in honor of labor activists fighting for safer factories in that country, many of whom have been intimidated, beaten and even murdered.

And yet, unlike nearly three dozen European companies, almost all American businesses refuse to sign onto a formal plan for Western retailers to fund safety upgrades at these Bangladesh factories where their clothes are manufactured. The American firms cite fears of legal liability. But as Paul Lister, director of legal services at Associated British Foods, one of whose subsidiaries has signed the agreement, told The New York Times, “It’s not a perfect document. We’ll deal with the imperfections in the document, and we have to deal urgently with the underlying issue — the moral and ethical issues of fire safety and building integrity in Bangladesh.”

Nonetheless, Matthew Shay, president of America’s National Retail Federation, claims the plan “seeks to advance a narrow agenda driven by special interests.” He means, of course, labor. Where profit is concerned, any excuse to foot drag will do and as Michigan Congressman Sander Levin pointed out to the Times, “It’s been left up to the retailers, suppliers and government all these years, and that hasn’t worked.”

Witness the JPMorgan Chase shareholders meeting in Tampa, Florida, last week. Its chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon has unparalleled authority – rivals call him “the sun god” — and yet Bloomberg Businessweek reports, “The litigation section of the bank’s quarterly filings now runs to almost 9,000 words, or 18 single-spaced pages.” The magazine listed the institution’s “year of federal investigations into whether it manipulated energy markets, inadequately guarded against money laundering, abused homeowners in foreclosure, facilitated Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, and misled the public about the ‘London Whale’ fiasco, the worst trading loss in JPMorgan’s history.” What’s more, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and California’s attorney general are each looking into how JPMorgan Chase has gone after credit card debt.

Despite this impressive litany of potential transgression, Dimon handily beat back an attempt by some stockholders to split his job in two, which theoretically would have added some much-needed adult supervision, regulation and corporate oversight. He did so with a concerted campaign of pressure and public relations; support from such pals as Mike Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch and former White House chief of staff Bill Daley; threats to resign; and with this one simple statistic: record earnings of $21.3 billion last year.

Dimon delivers value and that’s all that counts — over the last year, shares have risen more than 50 percent. As New York magazine columnist Kevin Roose wrote, “No matter what happens, it seems that as long as Jamie Dimon is making money for JPMorgan, he can get away with basically anything.”

Profit will out, whether in Wall Street boardrooms or in the ashes of a south Asian sweatshop. All of which makes for ever wealthier plutocrats, consumers kept content with cheap goods, and if we do nothing about it, lousy citizens.

Senate Agriculture Committee Chair Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich. speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, May 14, 2013, during the committee's hearing on the Farm Bill, officially known as the Agriculture Reform, Food and Jobs Act of 2013. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

I was actually more disturbed that the Democratic Senate Agriculture Committee would vote for a $4.1 billion cut in food stamps — even though the average benefit is about $1.46 per person, per meal, and a recent Institute of Medicine report demonstrates that benefit levels are already too low to stave off hunger. The cut “would mean $90 less a month for 500,000 families already struggling to make ends meet,” according to Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. Berg noted that an amendment by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand would have prevented the SNAP cuts “by instead cutting subsidies for crop insurance companies, many of which are foreign owned.”

Unfortunately, the committee failed to pass Sen. Gillibrand’s amendment, and Senate Democrats proved yet again that the party’s commitment to those who are the most economically vulnerable is about as thin as Republican cut proposals are deep.

But the party outdid itself on Wednesday when the Farm Bill was debated on the Senate floor. As Center on Budget and Policy Priorities president Robert Greenstein describes:

Senator David Vitter offered — and Senate Democrats accepted — an amendment that would increase hardship and will likely have strongly racially discriminatory effects. [It] would bar from SNAP, for life, anyone who was ever convicted of one of a specified list of violent crimes at any time — even if they committed the crime decades ago in their youth and have served their sentence, paid their debt to society, and been a good citizen ever since…. The amendment would [also] mean lower SNAP benefits for their children and other family members. So, a young man who was convicted of a single crime at age 19 who then reforms and is now elderly, poor and raising grandchildren would be thrown off SNAP, and his grandchildren’s benefits would be cut…. Senator Vitter hawked his amendment as one to prevent murderers and rapists from getting food stamps. Democrats accepted it without trying to modify it to address its most ill-considered aspects.

Antipoverty advocates suggest contacting your senators — particularly Harry Reid, Debbie Stabenow and Richard Durbin — to tell them that you oppose this provision. They suggest doing it as soon as possible since it’s unclear how quickly the Farm Bill will move.

You might also suggest to them that the party check Lost and Found for its spine, too.

But at Least We Have Congresswoman Barbara Lee

Congresswoman Barbara Lee and Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer introduced the Half-in-Ten Act of 2013, which would establish the Federal Interagency Working Group on Reducing Poverty. The working group would develop and implement a national strategy to reduce poverty by half in ten years, integrating federal policies on poverty reduction, and also provide regular progress reports to Congress.

“Our policies and programs addressing poverty have not kept pace with the growing needs of millions of Americans,” said Congresswoman Lee, who chairs the new Democratic Whip Task Force on Poverty and Opportunity and consistently represents the interests of low-income Americans. “It is time we make the commitment to confront poverty head-on, create pathways out of poverty and provide opportunities for all.”

I would imagine this bill has about as much a shot at passing the House as this blog has at becoming Speaker Boehner’s favorite bedtime reading. Nevertheless, I’m always thankful for Representative Lee — I’m glad the Democratic whip is supporting her efforts — and it’s always worthwhile to keep up with her work and listen to what she has to say.

And That Goes for Senator Bernie Sanders, Too

Senator Bernie Sanders, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging, introduced legislation last week to reauthorize and strengthen the Older Americans Act, which supports Meals on Wheels and other critical programs for seniors such as in-home care, transportation, benefits access, caregiver support, chronic disease self-management, job training and placement, and elder abuse prevention.

“With 10,000 Americans turning 65 every day, our country’s growing population of seniors includes many who rely on these critical programs to help them stay in their own homes and communities,” said Sanders, speaking at an Older Americans Summit.

Funding has not kept pace with the growth in need or numbers, and recent cuts before the sequester hit have further eroded investments in key services.

In a letter endorsing Senator Sanders’s bill, National Council on Aging president and CEO James Firman writes that the legislation “can empower seniors and improve their health and economic security, bend downward the long-term entitlements cost curve, and promote greater program efficiency and coordination.”

The bill would also require the Bureau of Labor Statistics to create a consumer price index for the elderly that would account for spending on high-inflation goods and services like healthcare, prescription drugs and heating homes.

Greg Kaufmann is a Nation contributor covering poverty in America. His work has also appeared on Common Dreams, Alternet, Tikkun.org, NPR.org, CBSNews.com and MichaelMoore.com. He serves as an adviser for the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians topple a statue of Saddam Hussein in this April 9, 2003, file photo. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)

It did at the outset.  After 9/11, George W. Bush’s administration wasted no time in announcing that the U.S. was engaged in a Global War on Terrorism, or GWOT. With few dissenters, the media quickly embraced the term. The GWOT promised to be a gargantuan, transformative enterprise. The conflict begun on 9/11 would define the age. In neoconservative circles, it was known as World War IV.

Upon succeeding to the presidency in 2009, however, Barack Obama without fanfare junked Bush’s formulation (as he did again in a speech at the National Defense University last week). Yet if the appellation went away, the conflict itself, shorn of identifying marks, continued.

Does it matter that ours has become and remains a nameless war? Very much so.

Names bestow meaning. When it comes to war, a name attached to a date can shape our understanding of what the conflict was all about. To specify when a war began and when it ended is to privilege certain explanations of its significance while discrediting others. Let me provide a few illustrations.

With rare exceptions, Americans today characterize the horrendous fraternal bloodletting of 1861-1865 as the Civil War.  Yet not many decades ago, diehard supporters of the Lost Cause insisted on referring to that conflict as the War Between the States or the War for Southern Independence (or even the War of Northern Aggression). The South may have gone down in defeat, but the purposes for which Southerners had fought — preserving a distinctive way of life and the principle of states’ rights — had been worthy, even noble. So at least they professed to believe, with their preferred names for the war reflecting that belief.

Schoolbooks tell us that the Spanish-American War began in April 1898 and ended in August of that same year. The name and dates fit nicely with a widespread inclination from President William McKinley’s day to our own to frame U.S. intervention in Cuba as an altruistic effort to liberate that island from Spanish oppression.

Yet the Cubans were not exactly bystanders in that drama. By 1898, they had been fighting for years to oust their colonial overlords. And although hostilities in Cuba itself ended on August 12th, they dragged on in the Philippines, another Spanish colony that the United States had seized for reasons only remotely related to liberating Cubans. Notably, U.S. troops occupying the Philippines waged a brutal war not against Spaniards but against Filipino nationalists no more inclined to accept colonial rule by Washington than by Madrid. So widen the aperture to include this Cuban prelude and the Filipino postlude and you end up with something like this: The Spanish-American-Cuban-Philippines War of 1895-1902. Too clunky? How about the War for the American Empire? This much is for sure: rather than illuminating, the commonplace textbook descriptor serves chiefly to conceal.

Strange as it may seem, Europeans once referred to the calamitous events of 1914-1918 as the Great War. When Woodrow Wilson decided in 1917 to send an army of doughboys to fight alongside the Allies, he went beyond Great. According to the president, the Great War was going to be the War To End All Wars. Alas, things did not pan out as he expected. Perhaps anticipating the demise of his vision of permanent peace, War Department General Order 115, issued on October 7, 1919, formally declared that, at least as far as the United States was concerned, the recently concluded hostilities would be known simply as the World War.

In September 1939 – presto chango! — the World War suddenly became the First World War, the Nazi invasion of Poland having inaugurated a Second World War, also known as World War II or more cryptically WWII. To be sure, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin preferred the Great Patriotic War. Although this found instant — almost unanimous — favor among Soviet citizens, it did not catch on elsewhere.

Does World War II accurately capture the events it purports to encompass? With the crusade against the Axis now ranking alongside the crusade against slavery as a myth-enshrouded chapter in U.S. history to which all must pay homage, Americans are no more inclined to consider that question than to consider why a playoff to determine the professional baseball championship of North America constitutes a “World Series.”

In fact, however convenient and familiar, World War II is misleading and not especially useful. The period in question saw at least two wars, each only tenuously connected to the other, each having distinctive origins, each yielding a different outcome. To separate them is to transform the historical landscape.

On the one hand, there was the Pacific War, pitting the United States against Japan. Formally initiated by the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, it had in fact begun a decade earlier when Japan embarked upon a policy of armed conquest in Manchuria. At stake was the question of who would dominate East Asia. Japan’s crushing defeat at the hands of the United States, sealed by two atomic bombs in 1945, answered that question (at least for a time).

Then there was the European War, pitting Nazi Germany first against Great Britain and France, but ultimately against a grand alliance led by the United States, the Soviet Union and a fast fading British Empire. At stake was the question of who would dominate Europe. Germany’s defeat resolved that issue (at least for a time): no one would. To prevent any single power from controlling Europe, two outside powers divided it.

This division served as the basis for the ensuing Cold War, which wasn’t actually cold, but also (thankfully) wasn’t World War III, the retrospective insistence of bellicose neoconservatives notwithstanding. But when did the Cold War begin? Was it in early 1947, when President Harry Truman decided that Stalin’s Russia posed a looming threat and committed the United States to a strategy of containment? Or was it in 1919, when Vladimir Lenin decided that Winston Churchill’s vow to “strangle Bolshevism in its cradle” posed a looming threat to the Russian Revolution, with an ongoing Anglo-American military intervention evincing a determination to make good on that vow?

Separating the war against Nazi Germany from the war against Imperial Japan opens up another interpretive possibility. If you incorporate the European conflict of 1914-1918 and the European conflict of 1939-1945 into a single narrative, you get a Second Thirty Years War (the first having occurred from 1618-1648) — not so much a contest of good against evil, as a mindless exercise in self-destruction that represented the ultimate expression of European folly.

So, yes, it matters what we choose to call the military enterprise we’ve been waging not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in any number of other countries scattered hither and yon across the Islamic world. Although the Obama administration appears no more interested than the Bush administration in saying when that enterprise will actually end, the date we choose as its starting point also matters.

Although Washington seems in no hurry to name its nameless war — and will no doubt settle on something self-serving or anodyne if it ever finally addresses the issue — perhaps we should jump-start the process. Let’s consider some possible options, names that might actually explain what’s going on.

The Long War: Coined not long after 9/11 by senior officers in the Pentagon, this formulation never gained traction with either civilian officials or the general public. Yet the Long War deserves consideration, even though — or perhaps because — it has lost its luster with the passage of time.

At the outset, it connoted grand ambitions buoyed by extreme confidence in the efficacy of American military might. This was going to be one for the ages, a multi-generational conflict yielding sweeping results.

The Long War did begin on a hopeful note. The initial entry into Afghanistan and then into Iraq seemed to herald “home by Christmas” triumphal parades. Yet this soon proved an illusion as victory slipped from Washington’s grasp. By 2005 at the latest, events in the field had dashed the neo-Wilsonian expectations nurtured back home.

With the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan dragging on, “long” lost its original connotation. Instead of “really important,” it became a synonym for “interminable.” Today, the Long War does succinctly capture the experience of American soldiers who have endured multiple combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

For Long War combatants, the object of the exercise has become to persist. As for winning, it’s not in the cards. The Long War just might conclude by the end of 2014 if President Obama keeps his pledge to end the U.S. combat role in Afghanistan and if he avoids getting sucked into Syria’s civil war. So the troops may hope.

The War Against al-Qaeda: It began in August 1996 when Osama bin Laden issued a “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places,” i.e., Saudi Arabia. In February 1998, a second bin Laden manifesto announced that killing Americans, military and civilian alike, had become “an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”

Although President Bill Clinton took notice, the U.S. response to bin Laden’s provocations was limited and ineffectual. Only after 9/11 did Washington take this threat seriously. Since then, apart from a pointless excursion into Iraq (where, in Saddam Hussein’s day, al-Qaeda did not exist), U.S. attention has been focused on Afghanistan, where U.S. troops have waged the longest war in American history, and on Pakistan’s tribal borderlands, where a CIA drone campaign is ongoing. By the end of President Obama’s first term, U.S. intelligence agencies were reporting that a combined CIA/military campaign had largely destroyed bin Laden’s organization. Bin Laden himself, of course, was dead.

Could the United States have declared victory in its unnamed war at this point? Perhaps, but it gave little thought to doing so. Instead, the national security apparatus had already trained its sights on various al-Qaeda “franchises” and wannabes, militant groups claiming the bin Laden brand and waging their own version of jihad. These offshoots emerged in the Maghreb, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, and — wouldn’t you know it — post-Saddam Iraq, among other places. The question as to whether they actually posed a danger to the United States got, at best, passing attention — the label “al-Qaeda” eliciting the same sort of Pavlovian response that the word “communist” once did.

Americans should not expect this war to end anytime soon. Indeed, the Pentagon’s impresario of special operations recently speculated — by no means unhappily — that it would continue globally for “at least 10 to 20 years.” Freely translated, his statement undoubtedly means: “No one really knows, but we’re planning to keep at it for one helluva long time.”

The War For/Against/About Israel: It began in 1948. For many Jews, the founding of the state of Israel signified an ancient hope fulfilled. For many Christians, conscious of the sin of anti-Semitism that had culminated in the Holocaust, it offered a way to ease guilty consciences, albeit mostly at others’ expense. For many Muslims, especially Arabs, and most acutely Arabs who had been living in Palestine, the founding of the Jewish state represented a grave injustice. It was yet another unwelcome intrusion engineered by the West — colonialism by another name.

Recounting the ensuing struggle without appearing to take sides is almost impossible. Yet one thing seems clear: in terms of military involvement, the United States attempted in the late 1940s and 1950s to keep its distance. Over the course of the 1960s, this changed. The U.S. became Israel’s principal patron, committed to maintaining (and indeed increasing) its military superiority over its neighbors.

In the decades that followed, the two countries forged a multifaceted “strategic relationship.” A compliant Congress provided Israel with weapons and other assistance worth many billions of dollars, testifying to what has become an unambiguous and irrevocable U.S. commitment to the safety and well-being of the Jewish state. The two countries share technology and intelligence. Meanwhile, just as Israel had disregarded U.S. concerns when it came to developing nuclear weapons, it ignored persistent U.S. requests that it refrain from colonizing territory that it has conquered.

When it comes to identifying the minimal essential requirements of Israeli security and the terms that will define any Palestinian-Israeli peace deal, the United States defers to Israel. That may qualify as an overstatement, but only slightly. Given the Israeli perspective on those requirements and those terms — permanent military supremacy and a permanently demilitarized Palestine allowed limited sovereignty — the War For/Against/About Israel is unlikely to end anytime soon either. Whether the United States benefits from the perpetuation of this war is difficult to say, but we are in it for the long haul.

The War for the Greater Middle East: I confess that this is the name I would choose for Washington’s unnamed war and is, in fact, the title of a course I teach. (A tempting alternative is the Second Hundred Years War, the “first” having begun in 1337 and ended in 1453.)

This war is about to hit the century mark, its opening chapter coinciding with the onset of World War I. Not long after the fighting on the Western Front in Europe had settled into a stalemate, the British government, looking for ways to gain the upper hand, set out to dismantle the Ottoman Empire whose rulers had foolishly thrown in their lot with the German Reich against the Allies.

By the time the war ended with Germany and the Turks on the losing side, Great Britain had already begun to draw up new boundaries, invent states, and install rulers to suit its predilections, while also issuing mutually contradictory promises to groups inhabiting these new precincts of its empire. Toward what end? Simply put, the British were intent on calling the shots from Egypt to India, whether by governing through intermediaries or ruling directly. The result was a new Middle East and a total mess.

London presided over this mess, albeit with considerable difficulty, until the end of World War II. At this point, by abandoning efforts to keep Arabs and Zionists from one another’s throats in Palestine and by accepting the partition of India, they signaled their intention to throw in the towel. Alas, Washington proved more than willing to assume Britain’s role. The lure of oil was strong. So too were the fears, however overwrought, of the Soviets extending their influence into the region.

Unfortunately, the Americans enjoyed no more success in promoting long-term, pro-Western stability than had the British. In some respects, they only made things worse, with the joint CIA-MI6 overthrow of a democratically elected government in Iran in 1953 offering a prime example of a “success” that, to this day, has never stopped breeding disaster.

Only after 1980 did things get really interesting, however. The Carter Doctrine promulgated that year designated the Persian Gulf a vital national security interest and opened the door to greatly increased U.S. military activity not just in the Gulf, but also throughout the Greater Middle East (GME). Between 1945 and 1980, considerable numbers of American soldiers lost their lives fighting in Asia and elsewhere. During that period, virtually none were killed fighting in the GME. Since 1990, in contrast, virtually none have been killed fighting anywhere except in the GME.

What does the United States hope to achieve in its inherited and unending War for the Greater Middle East? To pacify the region? To remake it in our image? To drain its stocks of petroleum? Or just keeping the lid on? However you define the war’s aims, things have not gone well, which once again suggests that, in some form, it will continue for some time to come. If there’s any good news here, it’s the prospect of having ever more material for my seminar, which may soon expand into a two-semester course.

The War Against Islam: This war began nearly 1,000 years ago and continued for centuries, a storied collision between Christendom and the Muslim ummah. For a couple of hundred years, periodic eruptions of large-scale violence occurred until the conflict finally petered out with the last crusade sometime in the fourteenth century.

In those days, many people had deemed religion something worth fighting for, a proposition to which the more sophisticated present-day inhabitants of Christendom no longer subscribe. Yet could that religious war have resumed in our own day? Professor Samuel Huntington thought so, although he styled the conflict a “clash of civilizations.” Some militant radical Islamists agree with Professor Huntington, citing as evidence the unwelcome meddling of “infidels,” mostly wearing American uniforms, in various parts of the Muslim world. Some militant evangelical Christians endorse this proposition, even if they take a more favorable view of U.S. troops occupying and drones targeting Muslim countries.

In explaining the position of the United States government, religious scholars like George W. Bush and Barack (Hussein!) Obama have consistently expressed a contrary view. Islam is a religion of peace, they declare, part of the great Abrahamic triad. That the other elements of that triad are likewise committed to peace is a proposition that Bush, Obama, and most Americans take for granted, evidence not required. There should be no reason why Christians, Jews and Muslims can’t live together in harmony.

Still, remember back in 2001 when, in an unscripted moment, President Bush described the war barely begun as a “crusade?” That was just a slip of the tongue, right? If not, we just might end up calling this one the Eternal War.

Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University and a TomDispatch regular. His next book, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country, will appear in September.

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Protesters mobilize at Freedom Plaza. Credit: Greg Kaufmann

Gisele Mata of Whittier, California, never considered herself a political activist. Other than making some calls on behalf of President Obama during the 2012 campaign, her focus was on her work, family, church and volunteering as a Girl Scout troop leader.

But on Monday, May 20, 2013, at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., she was ready to march to the Department of Justice, where she would risk arrest in order to save her family’s home and stand up for other people facing foreclosure.

“Banks are doing extreme things to get people out of their homes, so it requires extreme action,” Mata told me. “I wouldn’t be here except the banks are not being monitored so we have to stand up as citizens. They are getting away with acts of inhuman behavior and the Justice Department is not reacting.”

Mata was among 500 activists from across the country who came to the nation’s capital to “Bring Justice to Justice” — participating in three days of action organized by Home Defenders League and Occupy Our Homes. They were calling for the criminal prosecution of banks for ongoing illegal activity, including illegal foreclosures; and for resetting mortgages to a property’s fair market value for the more than 13 million homeowners still at risk of foreclosure.

Mata and her family have been in their home for more than ten years. Their struggle began in 2009 when she and her husband were laid off from their jobs in retail and engineering, respectively. They survived by cashing out on their 401(k)s and working in low-wage jobs.

“We didn’t have any problems until last year,” she said, when they no longer could afford both their home and food for their family of five. So Mata and her husband requested a mortgage modification from Bank of America.

“We asked them to tack on what we owed to the principal, and to give us the going interest rate because we still have a high rate,” she said. “We aren’t even asking for a principal reduction. Plus we’re both working, we have equity in our home—but they still refuse.”

Her eldest daughter is now working as a massage therapist. Her husband is again employed as an aircraft parts quality inspector — for $13 an hour, compared to the $19 hourly wage he previously earned — and Mata earns commissions as a sales representative for an energy company. But the high interest payments they are paying force them to choose between a roof over their head or food for the family.

“Right now we’re choosing the roof and getting food from our church in order to make payments on the mortgage,” she said. “And we go to the 99 cent store and buy Top Ramen [noodles] and tuna fish. That’s pretty much how we make it.”

But even as the Matas continue to make their payments, Bank of America continues to push for foreclosure. Her dealings with the bank in an effort to get a modification tell a story that is now all too familiar in this country.

“Negotiating means paperwork multiple times over and over again,” she said. “As soon as you get it in they switch your point-of-contact and then you have to start over again. And as many times as they ask is how many times you do it, or else they won’t consider you for the modification. No one is holding them accountable.”

Ann Haines of St. Paul, Minnesota, was also ready to get arrested after experiencing an even more extreme nightmare in dealing with U.S. Bank. She had lived in her home with her three sons for thirteen years, and was struggling to meet a monthly mortgage payment that had risen from $800 to $1,300.

“I work in intake at a methadone program,” she said. “I see people at their lowest and my nature is to help. So I was foolishly thinking that by asking the bank for help I would get it.”

Instead, what she got was U.S. Bank telling her to stop making payments for three months so she would be eligible for a modification, followed by the bank sending her the wrong modification application. She then arrived home one day to find her locks changed and a realtor going out her back door. The bank proceeded with a sheriff’s sale.

“It was terrifying and you don’t know what to do,” said Haines.

Legal Aid was able to stop the sale of her home, since the bank admitted it had sent her the wrong modification application and foreclosed while she was still in underwriting — a process known as “dual tracking.” (This is now barred under the California Homeowners’ Bill of Rights and the just-passed Minnesota Homeowners’ Bill of Rights.)

“But what really inspired me to fight was the attorney for U.S. Bank sitting across from me in court and saying, ‘The only negotiation U.S. Bank is willing to do right now is to get her out,’ ” said Haines. “He didn’t have enough courage to look at me, but he said it.”

Haines hooked up with Occupy Homes MN and traveled last month to the U.S. Bank shareholders meeting in Boise, Idaho, to confront CEO Richard Davis.

“Two days later the eviction case was magically closed,” said Haines.

She described herself as “elated” that she no longer fears losing her home at any moment. But she still felt the need to be in Washington, D.C., to support other struggling homeowners.

“I don’t want to be arrested, jail is scary for me,” she said. “But I’m willing to do it to show that this is serious. There are too many people going through this, and the banks have to be held accountable. If I did something wrong they would hold me accountable.”

Cammy Dupuy of Gonzales, Louisiana, isn’t affiliated with any particular group — she had learned about the action in recent weeks on the Internet. She was also prepared for arrest, though not particularly looking forward to it.

“I’m really nervous and scared to go to jail,” said Dupuy. “But if that’s what it takes to let people know they’re not alone — the shame shouldn’t be put on people.”

Since 2006, Dupuy’s mortgage has had so many different banks and loan servicers attached to it that the trail is dizzying. As a result, she has had her paperwork lost as servicers change, not been provided new mailing addresses for payments, fought off two sheriff’s sales and even received modification “offers” that would have had her paying double-digit interest rates and waiving her right to sue for the mishandling of her note.

Throughout her struggle, Dupuy has found herself alone.

“The thing about Louisiana, nobody talks about foreclosures, and they don’t put signs out in people’s yards like in other states, so they really keep it from the public,” she said. “But I’ve been pulling up the sales on my local sheriff’s website and every month there are quite a bit just in my parish alone.”

Dupuy said a lot of people are “just walking away because they don’t know what to do.”

“I’m tired of feeling alone. I want people in Louisiana to start talking about it, start standing up, start doing something,” said Dupuy. “The people in Louisiana fear the law. But if all of us come together and take a stand then fear shouldn’t be a problem.”

By the end of the day on Monday, Mata was arrested on the steps of the Department of Justice along with sixteen other nonviolent activists. (The nonviolence by activists didn’t translate to nonviolent arrests by Homeland Security officers, who used tasers.) The demonstrators had set up an encampment and also blocked traffic along a very busy Constitution Avenue. Mata and others didn’t give their names when booked — they didn’t want this to be just another routine booking and quick release — so she was held until Tuesday evening.

“I told them I was [Bank of America CEO] Brian Moynihan,” said Mata, and many of the other demonstrators who were arrested used the names of bank CEOs as well.

Dupuy was arrested along with six other homeowners Wednesday morning while blocking the lobby entrance to Covington & Burling — a prominent international law firm that has represented JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS and other major banks. Haines was one of the demonstrators blocking the entrance too, but because she was on the outside of the building, police just removed her from the space.

In addition to representing the large banks, organizers said the law firm epitomizes the “revolving door” between serving government and serving Wall Street’s interests, noting that Attorney General Eric Holder was a partner at Covington & Burling before coming to the DOJ, and former Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer left his post in March to become vice chair of the firm.

For three straight days, these homeowners and their supporters — mostly low-income people of color — demonstrated what it means to personally sacrifice for the good of others, to move beyond hopeful words to deeds and actions.

I hope that those of us who seek change feel their urgency, and will follow their lead to take more and greater action — together.

Victories in Minnesota: Progressive Budget and Homeowners Bill of Rights

According to Carol Nieters, executive director of SEIU Local 284, in 1971, Minnesota Governor Wendell Anderson called education equity — poor school districts that were struggling — and high property taxes “the issue of our time.”

The state legislature responded by creating a “general education levy” that equalized and created dedicated funding for schools, and also lowered property taxes.

“It went forward like that for like the next four decades,” said Nieters. “It put Minnesota in a place to be a premier state in education.”

But then along came Governor Jesse “The Body” Ventura who body-slammed the levy, and Governor Tim Pawlenty who presided over nearly a decade of disinvestment from schools and taking from school appropriations to plug other holes in the budget.

“As a result, we’ve now got ten or eleven four-day school districts, and other than core curriculum, everything else is cut out — arts, music, in some cases languages,” said Nieters.

But this week the state reaffirmed its commitment to education. At a time when so many states are opting to close schools that primarily serve low-income students, Minnesota passed a budget that closes corporate tax loopholes and increases education funding and equity.

The 2013 budget erases the state’s $627 million budget deficit, raises the income tax by 2 percent on the wealthiest 2 percent of Minnesotans, raises $424 million by closing corporate tax loopholes and reduces property taxes by $400 million.

The budget uses new revenues to make key investments in education, including: fully funding optional, all-day kindergarten; increasing special education funding by $236 million; and importantly, passing two levies that will make funding for all school districts more reliable, while also providing additional resources to local districts with the greatest need.

“This budget gets to equity in education and reduces property taxes,” said Nieters. “Over four decades later we are doing the same thing we did right in 1971.”

She said the budget was achieved by the union and its progressive allies reaching out to groups all across the state that were pursuing a “common interest of stronger communities [through] an educated society and workforce.” They began organizing prior to the 2012 election with a message that wealthy individuals and corporations must pay their fair share in order to strengthen education. Many Democrats ran on that platform, and the party picked up enough seats to win majorities in both the House and Senate.

After the election, the grassroots coalition kept the pressure on the newly elected legislators to follow through on their commitments. In the last few months alone, there were thousands of calls, visits, letters and e-mails to representatives, and a “Students’ Day” for parents and children at the Capitol, with students from kindergarten through high school attending.

The budget was passed last Monday night by the legislature, and Democratic Governor Mark Dayton signed it into law on Thursday.

“We engaged organizations all over the state — and we can make a difference if we do that,” said Nieters. “The voice of the people can be heard over the folks with the money. But you gotta get out there.”

* * *

On May 12, 2013, the Minnesota House of Representatives passed the Homeowners’ Bill of Rights by a bipartisan 123-0 vote. The Senate passed a companion bill two weeks ago, so now it just awaits Governor Dayton’s signature.

The bill protects homeowners through a number of provisions, including: requiring loan servicers to offer modifications to all eligible homeowners; banning “dual tracking,” which occurs when a bank forecloses on a homeowner before communicating a decision on a loan modification application; and allowing homeowners to take the servicer to court to stop foreclosure if the servicer fails to comply with any aspect of the Homeowners’ Bill of Rights. (Also important, lawyer’s fees and court costs would be covered if the homeowner proves his or her case.)

Ann Haines, the homeowner from St. Paul interviewed in the DOJ story above, testified along with other homeowners at a House hearing on the bill in January.

Greg Kaufmann is a Nation contributor covering poverty in America. His work has also appeared on Common Dreams, Alternet, Tikkun.org, NPR.org, CBSNews.com and MichaelMoore.com. He serves as an adviser for the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

In the years since his arrest, Peaceful Uprising has become an important part of the fight for environmental justice, using DeChristopher’s model of civil disobedience as its centerpiece for organizing efforts in Utah and around the country. Members of the group have staged sit-ins at the Department of Interior, protested the Keystone XL pipeline, and marched against the Tar Sands in Utah, reigniting what some say is a spirit of empowerment in the environmental movement.

In 2011, he was named as a person of the year by TreeHugger.com and that same year was a finalist for the Salt Lake Tribune’s “Utahan of the Year” award.

DeChristopher received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Utah in 2009 and will attend Harvard divinity school in the fall of 2013.

DeChristopher — who was released less than a month ago — joins Bill to talk about the necessity of civil disobedience in the fight for justice, how his jury was ordered to place the strict letter of the law over moral conscience, and the future of the environmental movement. Bidder 70, a new documentary chronicling DeChristopher’s legal battle and activism, opened May 17. DeChristopher is co-founder of the grassroots environmental group Peaceful Uprising.

“When I went into this, I was pretty focused on the direct impacts of my actions, keeping that oil under those parcels and stopping this particular auction,” DeChristopher tells Bill. “I think those impacts turned out to be much more important than just keeping that oil in the ground.”

Producer: Jessica Wang. Editor: Sikay Tang. Associate Producer: Reniqua Allen.
Photographer: Dale Robbins.

“These banks are not getting smaller; they’re getting larger. There are now more too-big-to-fail institutions than there were prior to the 2008 crisis,” Morgenson tells Bill.

And while the Dodd-Frank Act was supposed to prevent that from happening, Morgenson says the law itself is less powerful than those it hopes to regulate.

“Dodd-Frank set up a system to unwind troubled institutions when they become troubled. But it requires regulators taking a really firm stand against large, politically-interconnected, and powerful companies… I just think it’s too easy to put the taxpayer on the hook and bail these people out. So of course the response from these people is going to be, I’ll just do it bigger next time, the taxpayer will be there to bail me out, and we’ll go on our merry way.”

Producer: Gail Ablow. Editor: Rob Kuhns.
Intro Producer: Robert Booth. Intro Editor: Paul Desjarlais.

DeChristopher — who was released less than a month ago — joins Bill to talk about the necessity of civil disobedience in the fight for justice, how his jury was ordered to place the strict letter of the law over moral conscience, and the future of the environmental movement. Bidder 70, a new documentary chronicling DeChristopher’s legal battle and activism, opened May 17. DeChristopher is co-founder of the grassroots environmental group Peaceful Uprising.

Also on the show, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Gretchen Morgenson tells Bill that, five years after the country’s economic near-collapse, banks are still too big to fail, too big to manage, and too big to trust. Stockholders’ reaffirmation of Jamie Dimon as JP Morgan Chase’s chairman and CEO this week — despite a year of accusations and investigations at the bank — is further evidence, she says, of an unchecked system that continues to covet profits and eschew accountability, putting our economy and democracy at risk. Morgenson also discusses how behemoth companies like Apple manipulate the system and avail themselves of the biggest tax loopholes money and influence can buy.

Learn more about the production team behind Moyers & Company.

Here’s a list, topped by Apple, of 10 companies that increased their offshore holdings in the past year.

Read more about this chart on the Citizens for Tax Justice site.

 
The U.S. corporate tax rate is 35 percent — one of the highest in the world — but as The New York Times reported yesterday, the effective corporate tax rate (what companies actually pay) “fell to 17.8 percent in 2012 from 42.5 percent in 1960,” according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Another chart from the Citizens for Tax Justice shows 10 companies that managed to do much better than average, paying little or no taxes for the past five years. Dollar amounts are numbers in millions and “rate” is the effective tax rate that the companies paid.

Read more about this chart on the Citizens for Tax Justice site.

Bill’s guest this week, Tim DeChristopher, went to an auction where the Bureau of Land Management was leasing the mineral rights for federally-controlled Utah wilderness to oil and gas companies, and won the rights to the parcels worth nearly two million dollars. He went to jail for his act of protest.

BornFree glass baby bottles are seen on display in the foreground as a mother shops at Babies'R'Us in Peabody, Mass. (AP Photo/Lisa Poole)

As public health historians David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz explained on last week’s Moyers & Company, existing legislation allowed the EPA to test chemicals only after there was cause to believe they were dangerous. Of the 84,000 registered chemicals in the United States, only about 200 have been tested. Each year, another 700 chemicals are introduced into the environment. They argued that the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act was in great need of a major overhaul, but that they didn’t expect new legislation to pass anytime soon.

In the compromise bill, lauded by industry and activists, it looks like they might get some of what they were hoping for. While the new version doesn’t go as far as the Safe Chemicals Act Lautenberg introduced last month, it covers some of the same territory, namely:

Require Safety Evaluations for All Chemicals: All active chemicals in commerce must be evaluated for safety and labeled as either “high” or “low” priority chemical based on potential risk to human health and the environment. For high priority chemicals, EPA must conduct further safety evaluations.

Protect Public Health from Unsafe Chemicals: If a chemical is found to be unsafe, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has the necessary authority to take action. This can range from labeling requirements to the full phase-out or ban of a chemical.

Prioritize Chemicals for Review: The Environmental Protection Agency will have to transparently assess risk, determine safety, and apply any needed measures to manage risks.

Screen New Chemicals for Safety: New chemicals entering the market must be screened for safety and the EPA is given the authority to prohibit unsafe chemicals from entering the market.

Secure Necessary Health and Safety Information: The legislation allows EPA to secure necessary health and safety information from chemical manufacturers, while directing EPA to rely first on existing information to avoid duplicative testing.

Promote Innovation and Safer Chemistry: This legislation provides clear paths to getting new chemistry on the market and protects trade secrets and intellectual property from disclosure.

Protect Children and Pregnant Women: The legislation requires EPA to evaluate the risks posed to particularly vulnerable populations, such as children and pregnant women, when evaluating the safety of a chemical—a provision not included in existing law.

Give States and Municipalities a Say: States and local governments will have the opportunity to provide input on prioritization, safety assessment and the safety determination processes, requiring timely response from EPA, and the bill establishes a waiver process to allow state regulations or laws to remain in effect when circumstances warrant it.

The new bill was a surprise to many because the two senators had reportedly been working on competing bills for months. Lautenberg was updating a 2011 bill that had made it through committee that year, but never came to a vote. Vitter was said to be working on a bill with help from the American Chemistry Council. In an interesting report, E&E‘s Jason Plautz writes that Vitter’s staff reached out to Lautenberg’s, they discovered that their bills had a lot more common ground than previously thought and they worked out a compromise.

Although some activists consider the new bill a step back from Lautenberg’s original, most agreed that the bipartisan bill had more of a chance of passage and were generally positive about the direction it takes. Andy Igregas, executive director of Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, told Politico: “On the one hand, the bill gives EPA new tools to protect the public from toxic chemicals. It also gives state governments, who have made important gains in public health protections, a continued role in chemical regulation. On the other hand, the bill omits many of the deadlines in the Lautenberg/Gillibrand legislation, its special focus on heavily impacted communities and other important provisions.”

Richard Denison, a senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, called the bill a “policy and political breakthrough.” He told Politico that “while this bill represents a hard-fought compromise, it opens, at last, a bipartisan path forward to fix our badly outmoded system to ensure the safety of chemicals in everyday use.”

Penny Pritzker — Secretary of Commerce

Penny Pritzker listens in the Rose Garden of the White House on Thursday, May 2, 2013, where President Obama announced he would nominate her for Commerce Secretary. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Status: Awaiting Senate confirmation vote. Hyatt hotel scion and billionaire investor Penny Pritzker is a major Obama fundraiser and bundler who co-chaired his 2012 campaign, bundling over $500,000 and personally contributing $250,000 to this year’s inauguration. Profiles of Pritzker note her toughness: She earned a law degree and MBA in the same year and, famously, managed to finish her first Ironman triathalon after spraining her ankle in the first mile of the marathon. Her family is known, The New York Times writes, “as innovators in the use of offshore trusts and foreign bank secrecy laws to shelter their wealth from income, capital gains and inheritance taxes.” “This is the second nominee in a row, Jack Lew being the first, who’s associated with the kind of tax avoidance activity that the president dismisses as fat cat shenanigans for others,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said after her nomination. “It’s hypocritical to overlook tax avoidance when it’s convenient.” Pritzker told The New York Times in 2008 that the offshore investments were established when she was a child and that she does not control how they are administered. Republican senators aren’t the only ones speaking out against Pritzker. Unite Here, the labor union that represents employees of Hyatt hotels, announced its opposition to her appointment on Monday. The union is in a battle with management over wages and has alleged worker safety violations at the chain for years. A recent 18-month investigation by federal authorities found no major violations. But Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), ranking member on the Senate Commerce Committee, said Pritzker is likely to be confirmed quickly. “She’s got a great background that’s very much needed in the current administration,” he said. “We’ll wind this thing up probably in the next work period.”

On this week’s show, DeChristopher — who was released less than a month ago — joins Bill to talk about the necessity of civil disobedience in the fight for justice, how his jury was ordered to place the strict letter of the law over moral conscience, and the future of the environmental movement.

Also on the show, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Gretchen Morgenson tells Bill that, five years after the country’s economic near-collapse, banks are still too big to fail, too big to manage, and too big to trust. Stockholders’ reaffirmation of Jamie Dimon as JP Morgan Chase’s chairman and CEO this week — despite a year of accusations and investigations at the bank — is further evidence, she says, of an unchecked system that continues to covet profits and eschew accountability, putting our economy and democracy at risk.

IRS Headquarters in Washington, DC

Consider this our Top 6 list of need-to-know facts on social welfare nonprofits, also known as dark money groups because they don’t have to disclose their donors. The groups poured more than $256 million into the 2012 federal elections.

1. Social welfare nonprofits are supposed to have social welfare, and not politics, as their “primary” purpose.

A century ago, Congress created a tax exemption for social welfare nonprofits. The statute defining the groups says they are supposed to be “operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare.” But in 1959, the regulators interpreted the “exclusively” part of the statute to mean groups had to be “primarily” engaged in enhancing social welfare. This later opened the door to political spending.

So what does “primarily” mean?  It’s not clear. The IRS has said it uses a “facts and circumstances” test to say whether a group mostly works to benefit the community or not. In short: If a group walks and talks like a social welfare nonprofit, then it’s a social welfare nonprofit.

This deliberate vagueness has led some groups to say that “primarily” simply means they must spend 51 percent of their money on a social welfare idea — say, on something as vague as “education,” which could also include issue ads criticizing certain politicians. And then, the reasoning goes, a group can spend as much as 49 percent of its expenditures on ads directly advocating the election or defeat of a candidate for office.

Nowhere in tax regulations or rulings does it mention 49 percent, though. Some nonprofit lawyers have argued that the IRS should set hard limits for social welfare nonprofits — setting out, for instance, that they cannot spend more than 20 percent of their money on election ads or even limiting spending to a fixed amount, like no more than $250,000.

So far, the IRS has avoided clarifying any limits.

2. Donors to social welfare nonprofits are anonymous for a reason.

Unlike donors who give directly to politicians or even to super PACs, donors who give to social welfare nonprofits can stay secret. In large part, this is because of an attempt by Alabama to force the NAACP, then a social welfare nonprofit, to disclose its donors in the 1950s. In 1958, the Supreme Court sided with the NAACP, saying that public identification of its members made them at risk of reprisal and threats.

The ACLU, which is itself a social welfare nonprofit, has long made similar arguments. So has Karl Rove, the GOP strategist and brains behind Crossroads GPS, which has spent more money on elections than any other social welfare nonprofit. In early April 2012, Rove invoked the NAACP in defending his organization against attempts to reveal donors.

The Federal Election Commission could in theory push for some disclosure from social welfare nonprofits — for their election ads, at least. But the FEC has been paralyzed by a 3-3 partisan split, and its interpretations of older court decisions have given nonprofits wiggle room to avoid saying who donated money, as long as a donation wasn’t specifically made for a political ad.

New rulings indicate that higher courts, including the Supreme Court, favor disclosure for political ads, and states are also stepping into the fray. During the 2012 elections, courts in two states – Montana and Idaho – ruled that two nonprofits engaged in state campaigns needed to disclose donors.  

But sometimes, when nonprofits funnel donations, the answers raise more questions. It’s the Russian nesting doll phenomenon. Last election, for instance, California’s election agency pushed for an Arizona social welfare nonprofit to disclose donors for $11 million spent on two California ballot initiatives. The answer? Another social welfare nonprofit, which in turn got the money from a trade association, which also doesn’t have to reveal its donors.

3. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision meant that corporations could pay for political ads, anonymously, using social welfare nonprofits.

In January 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations and unions could spend money directly on election ads. A later court decision made possible super PACs, the political committees that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money from donors, as long as they don’t coordinate with candidates and as long as they report their donors and spending.

Initially, campaign finance watchdogs believed corporations would give directly to super PACs. And in some cases, that happened. But not as much as anyone thought, and maybe for a reason: Disclosure isn’t necessarily good for business. Target famously faced a consumer and shareholder backlash after it gave money in 2010 to a group backing a Minnesota candidate who opposed gay rights.

Many watchdogs now believe that large public corporations are giving money to support candidates through social welfare nonprofits and trade associations, partly to avoid disclosure. Although the tax-exempt groups were allowed to spend money on election ads before Citizens United, their spending skyrocketed in 2010 and again in 2012.

A New York Times article based on rare cases in which donors have been disclosed, sometimes accidentally, explored the issue of corporations giving to these groups last year. Insurance giant Aetna, for example, accidentally revealed it gave $3 million in 2011 to the American Action Network, a social welfare group founded by former Sen. Norm Coleman, a Republican, that runs election ads.

Groups that favor more disclosure have so far failed to force action by the FEC, the IRS, or Congress, although some corporations have voluntarily reported their political spending. Advocates have now turned to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is studying a proposal to require public companies to disclose political contributions.

The idea is already facing strong opposition from House Republicans.

4. Social welfare nonprofits do not actually have to apply to the IRS for recognition as tax-exempt organizations.

With all the furor over applications being flagged from conservative groups — particularly groups with “Tea Party,” “Patriot” or “9/12″ in their names — it’s worth remembering that a social welfare nonprofit doesn’t even have to apply to the IRS in the first place.

Unlike charities, which are supposed to apply for recognition, social welfare nonprofits can simply incorporate and start raising and spending money, without ever applying to the IRS.

The agency’s nonprofit wing is mainly concerned about ferreting out bad charities, which are the biggest chunk of nonprofits and the biggest source of potential revenue. After all, the IRS’s main job is to collect revenue. Charities allow donors to deduct donations, while social welfare nonprofits don’t.

Most major social welfare nonprofits do apply, because being recognized is seen as insurance against later determination by the IRS that the group should have registered as a political committee and may face back taxes and disclosure of donors. A recognition letter is also essential to raise money from certain donors — like, say, corporations.

But some of the new groups haven’t applied.

The first time the IRS hears about these social welfare nonprofits is often when they file their first annual tax return, not due until sometimes more than a year after they’ve formed.

In many cases, the first time the IRS hears about these groups is a full year after an election.   

5. Most of the money spent on elections by social welfare nonprofits supports Republicans.

Of the more than $256 million spent by social welfare nonprofits on ads in the 2012 elections, at least 80 percent came from conservative groups, according to FEC figures tallied by the Center for Responsive Politics.

None came from the Tea Party groups with applications flagged by the IRS. Instead, a few big conservative groups were largely responsible.

Crossroads GPS, which this week said it believes it is among the conservative groups “targeted” by the IRS, spent more than $70 million in federal races in 2012. Americans for Prosperity, the social welfare nonprofit launched by the conservative billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, spent more than $36 million. American Future Fund spent more than $25 million. Americans for Tax Reform spent almost $16 million. American Action Network spent almost $12 million.

Besides Crossroads GPS, each of those groups has applied to the IRS and been recognized as tax-exempt. (You can look at their applications here.)

All of those groups spent more than the largest liberal social welfare nonprofit, the League of Conservation Voters, which spent about $11 million on 2012 federal races. The next biggest group, Patriot Majority USA, spent more than $7 million. Planned Parenthood spent $6.5 million. VoteVets.org spent more than $3 million.

None of those figures include the tens of millions of dollars spent by groups on certain ads that run months before an election that are not reported to the FEC.

6. Some social welfare groups promised in their applications, under penalty of perjury, that they wouldn’t get involved in elections. Then they did just that.

Much of the attention when it comes to Tea Party nonprofits has focused on their applications and how the IRS determines whether a group qualifies for social welfare status.

As part of our reporting on dark money in 2012, ProPublica looked at more than 100 applications for IRS recognition. One thing we noted again and again: Groups sometimes tell the IRS that they are not going to spend money on elections, receive IRS recognition, and then turn around and spend money on elections

The application to be recognized as a social welfare nonprofit, known as a 1024 Form, explicitly asks a group whether it has spent or plans to spend “any money attempting to influence the selection, nomination, election, or appointment of any person to any Federal, state, or local public office or to an office in a political organization.”

The American Future Fund, a conservative nonprofit that would go on to spend millions of dollars on campaign ads, checked “No”in answer to that question in 2008. The very same day the group submitted its application, it uploaded this ad to its YouTube account:

Even before mailing its application to the IRS saying it would not spend money on elections in 2010, the Alliance for America’s Future was running TV ads supporting Republican candidates for governor in Nevada and Florida. It also had given $133,000 to two political committees directed by Mary Cheney, the daughter of the former vice president. 

Another example of this is the Government Integrity Fund, a conservative nonprofit that ran ads in last year’s U.S. Senate race in Ohio. Its application was approved after it told the IRS that it would not spend money on politics. The group went on to do just that.

President Bush touts his tax cut plan to a crowd at Lafayette Regional Airport March 9, 2001, in Lafayette, La. (AP Photo/Kenneth Lambert)

Ten years ago this month, Congress enacted the third major tax cut of the George W. Bush administration. Its centerpiece was a huge cut in the tax rate on dividends. Historically, they had been taxed as ordinary income, but the Bush plan, enacted by a Republican Congress, cut that rate to 15 percent. The tax rate on ordinary income went as high as 35 percent.

This initiative originated with the economist R. Glenn Hubbard, who had been chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers when the proposal was sent to Congress. Mr. Hubbard was a strong believer that the double taxation of corporate profits – first at the corporate level and again when paid out as dividends – was a major economic problem.

During the George H. W. Bush administration, Mr. Hubbard had been deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for tax policy and wrote a Treasury report advocating full integration of the corporate and individual income taxes.

Mr. Hubbard had also spearheaded enactment of big tax cuts in 2001 and 2002 that he said would jump-start the American economy. In an op-ed article in The Washington Post on Nov. 16, 2001, he predicted that the soon-to-be-enacted 2002 tax cut, which President Bush signed on March 9, 2002, would “quickly deliver a boost to move the economy back toward its long-run growth path.”

Mr. Hubbard predicted that it would create 300,000 additional jobs in 2002 and add half a percentage point to the real gross domestic product growth rate.

There is no evidence that the tax cut had any such effect. The unemployment rate remained above 5.7 percent all year, rising to 5.9 percent in November and 6 percent in December. The real GDP growth rate fell each quarter of 2002, and by the fourth quarter growth was at a standstill. Hence the need for yet another big tax cut.

The idea of the 2003 legislation was to raise dividend payouts, thereby bolstering personal income, and raise the prices of common stock, which would improve household balance sheets. As President Bush explained in his signing statement, “This will encourage more companies to pay dividends, which in itself will not only be good for investors but will be a corporate reform measure.” He also said the dividend tax cut would “increase the wealth effect around America and help our markets.”

The Treasury Department issued a fact sheet on July 30 asserting that the decline in dividends had been a cause of the weak stock market and noting that dividend payouts had risen since enactment of the tax cut on May 28.

Subsequent research, however, found that the increase in dividends was a short-term phenomenon and mainly at companies where stock options were a major form of executive compensation. A 2005 Federal Reserve Board study found that the United States stock market did not outperform European stock markets after the dividend cut. Nor did stocks qualifying for lower dividend taxes outperform those, such as real estate investment trusts, that did not qualify for lower dividend taxes. Non-dividend paying stocks slightly outperformed dividend-paying stocks, and many corporations that did pay higher dividends scaled back stock repurchases by a similar amount.

Share repurchases were a common way that corporations returned profits to shareholders. They raised stock prices, which were untaxed as long as shareholders held the stock and were taxed at low capital gains tax rates when sold.

A 2006 Federal Reserve study found that a third of corporations cut share repurchases by the same amount they increased dividend payouts. Hence only the form of shareholder compensation changed, not the amount. A 2010 Federal Reserve study found little change in total dividend payouts after the 2003 rate cut as a percentage of corporate earnings. It concluded that the tax cut had little, if any, effect.

A 2008 study published in the National Tax Journal surveyed investment professionals to see their reaction to the dividend tax cut. It found that the tax cut was less significant than other factors, such as corporate cash flow and cash holdings that were unaffected by the tax change.

A 2011 study by the Treasury Department examined household portfolios. It found no evidence that households shifted their investments from those whose return was taxed as ordinary income into dividend-paying stocks whose income was taxed less.

Finally, a January 2013 study by Danny Yagan of the University of California, Berkeley, examined the impact of the 2003 tax cut on corporate investment. He found zero change.

It is hard to find even a reputable conservative economist willing to say anything good these days about President Bush’s tax and economic policies. In 2009, the Harvard economist Dale Jorgenson said he saw no redeeming features in them.

In 2011, the economist Alan Viard of the conservative American Enterprise Institute told Bloomberg News, “The effects of the Bush tax cuts on growth were ambiguous at best.” He added, “They were not much of a poster child for pro-growth tax policy.”

Even Mr. Hubbard now seems unwilling to defend the tax cuts he shepherded into law. Earlier this year, he was asked by The New York Times what he thought about the repeal of many of the Bush-era tax cuts on Jan. 1. He said many of those tax cuts were no longer relevant to our tax and economic problems.

Mr. Hubbard even suggested that higher revenues, long a Republican no-no, were not a bad thing. “We need a tax system that can promote economic growth and raise the revenue the American people want to devote to government,” he said.

Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. He is the author of The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform – Why We Need It and What It Will Take. He’s been a guest of Bill’s twice on Moyers & Company.

Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., left, and the subcommittee's ranking Republican Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., arrive on Capitol Hill this morning. McCain quipped that Apple's tax strategy has given "new meaning" to its old slogan, "Think Different." (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

A government report (PDF) released yesterday says that Apple kept billions of dollars in profits in an offshore tax haven that made it possible for them to avoid paying taxes in any country. Reuters reports:

The main subsidiary, a holding company that includes Apple’s retail stores throughout Europe, has not paid any corporate income tax in the last five years.

The subsidiary, which has a Cork, Ireland, mailing address, received $29.9 billion in dividends from lower-tiered offshore Apple affiliates from 2009 to 2012, comprising 30 percent of Apple’s total worldwide net profits, the report said.

“Apple has exploited a difference between Irish and U.S. tax residency rules,” the report said.

Apple CEO Tim Cook arrives on Capitol Hill this morning to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Permanent subcommittee on Investigations hearing. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Interesting comments from a CEO whose company spent a total of nearly $3 million on lobbying in 2012, including more than $300,000 on five revolving door lobbyists from Capitol Tax Partners, which according to its website is “Washington’s largest independent consulting firm specializing in tax legislative and regulatory matters… offering intimate knowledge of the tax-writing and rulemaking process.”

The Sunlight Foundation blog notes that of all the issues Apple lobbies Congress about, taxes tops the list. One of the pieces of legislation that Apple lobbied on last year was the Freedom to Invest Act, a bill sponsored by Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) that would “allow U.S. companies to bring home some of the cash they hold overseas without facing tax on it.” Despite Apple and other companies employing an “army of over 160 lobbyists” to persuade Congress to pass the Freedom to Invest Act, the bill never made it out of committee.

Cook insisted in his prepared remarks that Apple is a powerful jobs creation engine that has “created or supported approximately 600,000 jobs in the U.S.” including 50,000 at Apple and about 550,000 in related areas, such as engineering, manufacturing and software development. Over 300,000 of the jobs grew out of the so-called “App Economy.” He says that Apple carefully manages overseas accounts in the best interests of Apple shareholders.

You can watch Cook deliver his prepared remarks and hear senators’ questions at C-Span and The Guardian live blog.

But, as Matt Iglesias notes this morning in Slate, the “showdown” between Senator Carl Levin, the chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and Cook is unlikely to amount to much beyond good theater. He writes:

The unfortunate thing here is that Carl Levin, the Senator with the interest in this matter, chairs this investigations committee rather than, say, the Finance Committee. There really isn’t a great deal to “investigate” here. It’s not like it turns out that Apple minimized its tax bill by blackmailing IRS agents by secretly reading their iPhone emails. The issue here is with the tax code not with Apple. Portraying it as a showdown between the Senate and a CEO makes for better television, but the actual issue here is one of legislators versus legislators. Apple has its favorite tax strategies and General Motors has its favorite tax strategies. It’s a question of public policy how much revenue we want to raise via corporate income tax and what sectors do we want to coddle with loopholes.

The streets are so much darker now, since money for streetlights is rarely available to municipal governments. The national parks began closing down years ago. Some are already being subdivided and sold to the highest bidder. Reports on bridges crumbling or even collapsing are commonplace. The air in city after city hangs brown and heavy (and rates of childhood asthma and other lung diseases have shot up), because funding that would allow the enforcement of clean air standards by the Environmental Protection Agency is a distant memory. Public education has been cut to the bone, making good schools a luxury and, according to the Department of Education, two of every five students won’t graduate from high school.

It’s 2023 — and this is America 10 years after the first across-the-board federal budget cuts known as sequestration went into effect.  They went on for a decade, making no exception for effective programs vital to America’s economic health that were already underfunded, like job training and infrastructure repairs. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

A plane prepares to land at Newark Liberty International Airport in Newark, NJ. Commercial flights moved smoothly throughout most of the country on Sunday, April 21, 2013, the first day air traffic controllers were subject to furloughs resulting from government spending cuts, though some delays occurred around New York. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

Robust public investment had been a key to U.S. prosperity in the previous century. It was then considered a basic part of the social contract as well as of Economics 101. As just about everyone knew in those days, citizens paid taxes to fund worthy initiatives that the private sector wouldn’t adequately or efficiently supply. Roadways and scientific research were examples. In the post-World War II years, the country invested great sums of money in its interstate highways and what were widely considered the best education systems in the world, while research in well-funded government labs led to inventions like the Internet. The resulting world-class infrastructure, educated workforce and technological revolution fed a robust private sector.

Austerity Fever

In the early years of the twenty-first century, however, a set of manufactured arguments for “austerity,” which had been gaining traction for decades, captured the national imagination. In 2011-2012, a Congress that seemed capable of doing little else passed trillions of dollars of what was then called “deficit reduction.” Sequestration was a strange and special case of this particular disease. These across-the-board cuts, instituted in August 2011 and set to kick in on January 2, 2013, were meant to be a storm cloud hanging over Congress. Sequestration was never intended to take effect, but only to force lawmakers to listen to reason — to craft a less terrible plan to reduce deficits by a wholly arbitrary $1.2 trillion over 10 years. As is now common knowledge, they didn’t come to their senses and sequestration did go into effect. Then, although Congress could have cancelled the cuts at any moment, the country never turned back.

It wasn’t that cutting federal spending at those levels would necessarily have been devastating in 2013, though in an already weakened economy any cutbacks would have hurt. Rather, sequestration proved particularly corrosive from the start because all types of public spending — from grants for renewable energy research and disadvantaged public schools to HIV testing — were to be gutted equally, as if all of it were just fat to be trimmed. Even monitoring systems for possible natural disasters like river flooding or an imminent volcanic eruption began to be shut down. Over time the cuts would be vast: $85 billion in the first year and $110 billion in each year after that, for more than $1 trillion in cuts over a decade on top of other reductions already in place.

Once lawmakers wrote sequestration into law they had more than a year to wise up. Yet they did nothing to draft an alternate plan and didn’t even start pointing out the havoc to come until just weeks before the deadline. Then they gave themselves a couple more months — until March 1, 2013 — to work out a deal, which they didn’t. All this is, of course, ancient history, but even a decade later, the record of folly is worth reviewing.

If you remember, they tweeted while Rome burned. Speaker of the House John Boehner, for instance, sent out dozens of tweets to say Democrats were responsible: “The president proposed sequester, had 18 mo. to prioritize cuts, and did nothing,” he typically wrote, while he no less typically did nothing. For his part, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tweeted back: “It’s not too late to avert the damaging #sequester cuts, for which an overwhelming majority of Republicans voted.” And that became the pattern for a decade of American political gridlock, still not broken today.

Destruction Begins

March 1st came and went, so the budgetary axe began to fall.

At first, it didn’t seem so bad. Yes, the cuts weren’t quite as across the board as expected. The meat industry, for example, protested because health inspector furloughs would slow its production lines, so Congress patched the problem and spared those inspectors. But meat production aside, there was a sense that the cuts might not be so bad after all.

They were to be doled out based on a formula for meeting the arbitrary target of $85 billion in reductions in 2013, and no one knew precisely what would happen to any given program. In April, more than a month after the cuts had begun, the White House issued the president’s budget proposal for the following year, an annual milestone that typically included detailed information about federal spending in the current year. But across thousands of pages of documents and tables, the new budget ignored sequestration, and so reported meaningless 2013 numbers, because even the White House couldn’t say exactly what impact these cuts would have on programs and public investment across the country.

As it happened, they didn’t have to wait long to find out. The first ripples of impact began to spread quickly indeed. Losing some government funding, cancer clinics in New Mexico and Connecticut turned away patients. In Kentucky, Oregon and Montana, shelters for victims of domestic violence cut services. In New York, Maryland and Alabama, public defenders were furloughed, limiting access to justice for low-income people. In Illinois and Minnesota, public school teachers were laid off. In Florida, Michigan and Mississippi, Head Start shortened the school year, while in Kansas and Indiana, some low-income children simply lost access to the program entirely. In Alaska, a substance abuse clinic shut down. Across the country, Meals on Wheels cut four million meals for seniors in need.

Only when the FAA imposed furloughs on its air traffic controllers did public irritation threaten to boil over. Long lines and airport delays ensued, and people were angry. And not just any people — people who had access to members of Congress.  In a Washington that has gridlocked the most routine business, lawmakers moved at a breakneck pace, taking just five days to pass special legislation to solve the problem. To avoid furloughs and shorten waits for airline passengers, they allowed the FAA to spend funds that had been intended for long-term airport repairs and improvements.

Flights would leave on time — at least until runways cracked and crumbled. (You undoubtedly remember the scandal of 2019 at Cincinnati International Airport, when a bright young candidate for Senate met her demise in a tragic landing mishap.)

And then, of course, the Pentagon asked for an exemption, too. We’re talking about the military behemoth of planet Earth, which in 2013 accounted for 40 percent of military spending globally, its outlays exceeding the next 10 largest militaries combined. It, too wanted a special exemption for some of its share of the cutbacks.

Meat inspectors, the FAA and the Department of Defense enjoyed special treatment, but the rest of the nation was, as the history books recount, not so lucky. Children from middle-class and low-income families saw ever fewer resources at school, closing doors of opportunity. The young, old and infirm found themselves with dwindling access to basic resources such as health care or even a hot dinner. Federal grants to the states dried up, and there was less money in state budgets for local priorities, from police officers to lowly streetlights.

And remember that, just as the sequestration cuts began, carbon concentration in the atmosphere breached 400 parts per million.  (Climate scientists had long been warning that the level should be kept below 350 for human security.) Unfortunately, as with the groundbreaking research that led to the Internet, it takes money to do big things, and the long-term effects of cutting environmental protection, general research and basic infrastructure meant that the U.S. government would do little to stem the extreme weather that has, in 2023, become such a part of our world and our lives.

Looking back from a country now eternally in crisis, it’s clear that a Rubicon was crossed back in 2013. There was then still a chance to reject across-the-board budget cuts that would undermine a nation built on sound public investment and shared prosperity. At that crossroads, some fought against austerity. Losing that battle, others argued for a smarter approach: close tax loopholes to raise new revenue, or reduce waste in health care, or place a tax on carbon, or cut excessive spending at the Pentagon. But too few Americans — with too little influence — spoke up, and Washington didn’t listen.  The rest of the story, as you well know, is history.

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargeant reports that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is threatening to make filibuster reform a reality if Republicans block three key Obama cabinet nominees in coming weeks.

President Obama’s picks to head the Department of Labor, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Consumer Financial Protections Bureau are in danger of — or already are — being filibustered. Apparently, Harry Reid has had enough.

According to an aide, Reid has talked to the president and other senior officials about his plan — dubbed the “nuclear option” — which would change the rules regarding judicial and executive branch nominations. Some Democrats have been urging Reid to revisit the filibuster issue for months — and he has threatened to, at times — but it seems he now has a timeline set. Sargeant writes:

If Republicans block those three nominees, the aide tells me, “then our position will be very easy.”

Second, immigration reform is looming as a wild card in Reid’s internal thinking about whether to revisit the filibuster. The aide says senior Democratic senators have privately expressed worry to the majority leader that revisiting the rules could imperil the immigration push, and have asked him to delay it until after immigration reform is done (or is killed).

This is why July has emerged as the rough target date, the aide says. “The fear is that if he does this before immigration reform is done, then all of the Republicans are going to walk,” the aide tells me.

Congressional expert Sarah Binder writes in The Monkey Cage that it may be an empty threat: Reid may not have the 51 Democratic votes needed to go nuclear. In the past, the majority party has been reluctant to enact filibuster reform knowing that someday in the future, they will be the minority.

Washington Post opinion blogger Jonathan Bernstein thinks Reid is choosing “exactly the right path” to push Republicans to back down, regardless of whether or not he really intends to go nuclear.

For Reid, the trick is to find a way to ratchet up the threat of reform in order to push Republicans as far away from that line as possible. That’s a very difficult job; after all, he can hardly announce that he’s okay with Republicans filibustering Smith as long as they don’t filibuster Jones (thus inviting them to filibuster Smith, something he doesn’t want but which might not trigger reform).

As far as I can see, Reid is doing an excellent job at this complex game; leaking this threat now and generally upping the ante on nominations in general seems to be exactly the way to go. Sargent’s report has Reid ready to pull the trigger if Republicans defeat cloture on three specific upcoming executive branch nominees. That seems about the right way to play it; it’s a tough, specific threat (ratcheting up!) while still leaving plenty of ambiguity about whether a slightly different configuration of obstruction would also trigger reform.

A mountaintop removal mining site at Kayford Mountain, W.Va. (AP Photo/Jeff Gentner, File)

Joe Sacco and I spent two years reporting from the poorest pockets of the United States for our book “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.” We went into our nation’s impoverished “sacrifice zones” — the first areas forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace — to show what happens when unfettered corporate capitalism and ceaseless economic expansion no longer have external impediments. We wanted to illustrate what unrestrained corporate exploitation does to families, communities and the natural world. We wanted to challenge the reigning ideology of globalization and laissez-faire capitalism to illustrate what life becomes when human beings and the ecosystem are ruthlessly turned into commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse. And we wanted to expose as impotent the formal liberal and governmental institutions that once made reform possible, institutions no longer equipped with enough authority to check the assault of corporate power.

Chris Hedges (Credit: Dale Robbins)

Corporations write our legislation. They control our systems of information. They manage the political theater of electoral politics and impose our educational curriculum. They have turned the judiciary into one of their wholly owned subsidiaries. They have decimated labor unions and other independent mass organizations, as well as having bought off the Democratic Party, which once defended the rights of workers. With the evisceration of piecemeal and incremental reform — the primary role of liberal, democratic institutions — we are left defenseless against corporate power.

The Department of Justice seizure of two months of records of phone calls to and from editors and reporters at The Associated Press is the latest in a series of dramatic assaults against our civil liberties. The DOJ move is part of an effort to hunt down the government official or officials who leaked information to the AP about the foiling of a plot to blow up a passenger jet. Information concerning phones of Associated Press bureaus in New York, Washington, D.C., and Hartford, Conn., as well as the home and mobile phones of editors and reporters, was secretly confiscated. This, along with measures such as the use of the Espionage Act against whistle-blowers, will put a deep freeze on all independent investigations into abuses of government and corporate power.

Seizing the AP phone logs is part of the corporate state’s broader efforts to silence all voices that defy the official narrative, the state’s Newspeak, and hide from public view the inner workings, lies and crimes of empire. The person or persons who provided the classified information to the AP will, if arrested, mostly likely be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. That law was never intended when it was instituted in 1917 to silence whistle-blowers. And from 1917 until Barack Obama took office in 2009 it was employed against whistle-blowers only three times, the first time against Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971. The Espionage Act has been used six times by the Obama administration against government whistle-blowers, including Thomas Drake.

The government’s fierce persecution of the press — an attack pressed by many of the governmental agencies that are arrayed against WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and activists such as Jeremy Hammond — dovetails with the government’s use of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force to carry out the assassination of U.S. citizens; of the FISA Amendments Act, which retroactively makes legal what under our Constitution was once illegal — the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of tens of millions of U.S. citizens; and of Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which permits the government to have the military seize U.S. citizens, strip them of due process and hold them in indefinite detention. These measures, taken together, mean there are almost no civil liberties left.

A handful of corporate oligarchs around the globe have everything — wealth, power and privilege — and the rest of us struggle as part of a vast underclass, increasingly impoverished and ruthlessly repressed. There is one set of laws and regulations for us; there is another set of laws and regulations for a power elite that functions as a global mafia.

We stand helpless before the corporate onslaught. There is no way to vote against corporate power. Citizens have no way to bring about the prosecution of Wall Street bankers and financiers for fraud, military and intelligence officials for torture and war crimes, or security and surveillance officers for human rights abuses. The Federal Reserve is reduced to printing money for banks and financiers and lending it to them at almost zero percent interest; corporate officers then lend it to us at usurious rates as high as 30 percent. I do not know what to call this system. It is certainly not capitalism. Extortion might be a better word. The fossil fuel industry, meanwhile, relentlessly trashes the ecosystem for profit. The melting of 40 percent of the summer Arctic sea ice is, to corporations, a business opportunity. Companies rush to the Arctic and extract the last vestiges of oil, natural gas, minerals and fish stocks, indifferent to the death pangs of the planet. The same corporate forces that give us endless soap operas that pass for news, from the latest court proceedings surrounding O.J. Simpson to the tawdry details of the Jodi Arias murder trial, also give us atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide that surpass 400 parts per million. They entrance us with their electronic hallucinations as we waiver, as paralyzed with fear as Odysseus’ sailors, between Scylla and Charybdis.

There is nothing in 5,000 years of economic history to justify the belief that human societies should structure their behavior around the demands of the marketplace. This is an absurd, utopian ideology. The airy promises of the market economy have, by now, all been exposed as lies. The ability of corporations to migrate overseas has decimated our manufacturing base. It has driven down wages, impoverishing our working class and ravaging our middle class. It has forced huge segments of the population — including those burdened by student loans — into decades of debt peonage. It has also opened the way to massive tax shelters that allow companies such as General Electric to pay no income tax. Corporations employ virtual slave labor in Bangladesh and China, making obscene profits. As corporations suck the last resources from communities and the natural world, they leave behind, as Joe Sacco and I saw in the sacrifice zones we wrote about, horrific human suffering and dead landscapes. The greater the destruction, the greater the apparatus crushes dissent.

More than 100 million Americans — one-third of the population — live in poverty or a category called “near poverty.” Yet the stories of the poor and the near poor, the hardships they endure, are rarely told by a media that is owned by a handful of corporations — Viacom, General Electric, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., Clear Channel and Disney. The suffering of the underclass, like the crimes of the power elite, has been rendered invisible.

In the Lakota Indian reservation at Pine Ridge, S.D., in the United States’ second poorest county, the average life expectancy for a male is 48. This is the lowest in the Western Hemisphere outside of Haiti. About 60 percent of the Pine Ridge dwellings, many of which are sod huts, lack electricity, running water, adequate insulation or sewage systems. In the old coal camps of southern West Virginia, amid poisoned air, soil and water, cancer is an epidemic. There are few jobs. And the Appalachian Mountains, which provide the headwaters for much of the Eastern Seaboard, are dotted with enormous impoundment ponds filled with heavy metals and toxic sludge. In order to breathe, children go to school in southern West Virginia clutching inhalers. Residents trapped in the internal colonies of our blighted cities endure levels of poverty and violence, as well as mass incarceration, that leave them psychologically and emotionally shattered. And the nation’s agricultural workers, denied legal protection, are often forced to labor in conditions of unpaid bondage. This is the terrible algebra of corporate domination. This is where we are all headed. And in this accelerated race to the bottom we will end up as serfs or slaves.

Rebel. Even if you fail, even if we all fail, we will have asserted against the corporate forces of exploitation and death our ultimate dignity as human beings. We will have defended what is sacred. Rebellion means steadfast defiance. It means resisting just as have Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, just as has Mumia Abu-Jamal, the radical journalist whom Cornel West, James Cone and I visited in prison last week in Frackville, Pa. It means refusing to succumb to fear. It means refusing to surrender, even if you find yourself, like Manning and Abu-Jamal, caged like an animal. It means saying no. To remain safe, to remain “innocent” in the eyes of the law in this moment in history is to be complicit in a monstrous evil. In his poem of resistance, “If We Must Die,” Claude McKay knew that the odds were stacked against African-Americans who resisted white supremacy. But he also knew that resistance to tyranny saves our souls. McKay wrote:

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back! 

It is time to build radical mass movements that defy all formal centers of power and make concessions to none. It is time to employ the harsh language of open rebellion and class warfare. It is time to march to the beat of our own drum. The law historically has been a very imperfect tool for justice, as African-Americans know, but now it is exclusively the handmaiden of our corporate oppressors; now it is a mechanism of injustice. It was our corporate overlords who launched this war. Not us. Revolt will see us branded as criminals. Revolt will push us into the shadows. And yet, if we do not revolt we can no longer use the word “hope.”

Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” grasps the dark soul of global capitalism. We are all aboard the doomed ship Pequod, a name connected to an Indian tribe eradicated by genocide, and Ahab is in charge. “All my means are sane,” Ahab says, “my motive and my object mad.” We are sailing on a maniacal voyage of self-destruction, and no one in a position of authority, even if he or she sees what lies ahead, is willing or able to stop it. Those on the Pequod who had a conscience, including Starbuck, did not have the courage to defy Ahab. The ship and its crew were doomed by habit, cowardice and hubris. Melville’s warning must become ours. Rise up or die.

Watch Bill Moyers’s 2012 interview with Chris Hedges about his book, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt a collaboration with comics artist and journalist Joe Sacco.

All too often, instead of acting as a brake on runaway corporate power and greed, government becomes their enabler, undermining the very rules and regulations intended to keep us safe.

Think of inadequate inspections of food and the food-related infections which kill 3,000 Americans each year and make 48 million sick. A new study from Johns Hopkins shows elevated levels of arsenic — known to increase a person’s risk of cancer — in chicken meat. According to the university’s Center for a Livable Future, “Arsenic-based drugs have been used for decades to make poultry grow faster and improve the pigmentation of the meat. The drugs are also approved to treat and prevent parasites in poultry… Currently in the U.S., there is no federal law prohibiting the sale or use of arsenic-based drugs in poultry feed.”

And here’s a story in The Washington Post about toxic, bacteria-killing chemicals used in poultry plants to clean more chickens more quickly to meet increased demand and make more money. According to Amanda Hitt, director of the Government Accountability Project’s Food Integrity Campaign, “They are mixing chemicals together in these plants, and it’s making people sick. Does it work better at killing off pathogens? Yes, but it also can send someone into respiratory arrest.”

Think of that and think of the 85,000 industrial chemicals available today – only a handful have been tested for safety. Ian Urbina writes in The New York Times, “Hazardous chemicals have become so ubiquitous that scientists now talk about babies being born pre-polluted, sometimes with hundred s of synthetic chemicals showing up in their blood.”

Think, too, of that horrific explosion of ammonium nitrate in the Texas fertilizer plant. Fifteen people were killed and their little town devastated. The magazine Mother Jones noted, “Inspections are virtually non-existent; regulatory agencies don’t talk to each other; and there’s no such thing as a buffer zone when it comes to constructing plants and storage facilities in populated areas.” For years, the Fertilizer Institute, described as “the nation’s leading lobbying organization of the chemical and agricultural industries,” resisted regulation and legislators went along. People can lose their lives when federal or state government winks at bad corporate practices — 4,500 workplace deaths annually at a cost to America of nearly half a trillion dollars.

An investigator looks over a destroyed fertilizer plant in West, Texas, Thursday, May 2, 2013. (AP Photo/Pool/ LM Otero, Pool)

Finally, consider this story from ProPublica’s investigative reporter Abrahm Lustgarten about a uranium company that wanted a mining project in Texas that threatened to pollute drinking water. The EPA resisted — until the company hired as its lobbyist the Democratic fundraiser and fixer Heather Podesta, a favorite of the White House. Her firm was paid $400,000, she pulled the strings, and presto, the EPA changed its mind and said yes, go ahead and do your dirty work. In fact, ProPublica found that “the agency has used a little-known provision in the federal Safe Drinking Water Act to issue more than 1,500 exemptions allowing energy and mining companies to pollute aquifers, including many in the driest parts of the country.”

Of course, in a free society we’ll always be debating the role of government and its agencies. What are the limits, when is government oversight necessary and when is it best deterred? But it’s not only government that can go too far. As long as there are insufficient checks and balances on big business and its powerful lobbies, we are at their mercy. Their ability to buy off public officials is an assault on democracy and a threat to our lives and health. When an entire political system persists in producing such gross injustice, it is making inevitable wholesale defiance.

This year, I’ve been focused on how anti-poverty activists can move from a defensive battle defined by trying to save what needs to be saved during these budget debates, to an offensive one, laying out a vision that inspires ongoing, unified action and builds a vibrant movement that connects with people in their communities.

I offered one modest proposal for an “anti-poverty contract” — five issues that impact both low-income and middle class people — around which activists and groups could organize. The Western Center on Law & Poverty and a handful of other national and local groups are trying to build an effort around that idea.

However, when you consider the scale of the problems we face — and what inspires people to take action — clearly much, much more is needed. As I wrote previously, to build a new anti-poverty movement will require the kind of organizing and actions that are as creative, visible and gripping as the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Enter Stephen Lerner.

Lerner is a labor and community organizer who has spent more than three decades organizing hundreds of thousands of janitors, farm workers, garment workers and other low-wage workers into unions. These efforts resulted in increased wages, first-time health benefits, paid sick days and other improvements on the job. The architect of the historic Justice for Janitors campaign, he is currently working with unions and community groups across the country to break Wall Street’s anti-democratic grip on our politics and our economy.

Lerner lays out a powerful case about the intersection between poverty and Wall Street accountability — and how a Wall Street accountability movement can transform an economy that offers so few pathways out of poverty, and so many ways to keep people impoverished.

Here is our conversation:

Greg Kaufmann: Why is the Wall Street accountability movement now the focus of your work, and what is the potential you see there?

Credit: Dale Robbins

So the focus on Wall Street is: how do you connect all of these different battles? And, in fact, are there core things in common that drive them together?

If you look at some of the biggest issues of the day — whether it’s the loss of wealth in communities of color, the housing crisis, the student debt crisis, local and state governments cutting jobs and services because of debt — you can connect all of these issues to the original economic crisis of 2008, and the growing and continued dominance of the Wall Street big banks.

The majority of people in this country are either impacted by student debt, the ongoing housing crisis or the crisis of the public sector. And you can trace so much of it to Wall Street. This means instead of having 20 separate campaigns, you can have one campaign, that says how do we rebalance and reorganize the economy so that it benefits everybody — not just a teeny elite at the top.

Kaufmann: How does the effort to address these three issues intersect with the fight against poverty in particular?

Lerner: Let’s start with housing. In this country, for many workers and people of color, wealth isn’t in the stock market, or the Cayman Islands — it’s in a home. And the banks first preyed on folks through subprime loans pre-crisis, making enormous profits while putting people in danger. Then when the bubble burst, millions of people lost their homes, and those who didn’t have had outrageous payments because the subprime loans exploded. Now you still have 13 million families that are underwater — owing more on their loans than their homes are worth.

In Latino communities, 66 percent of their wealth was lost, half as a result of housing. In the African-American community, it was 53 percent. Fifty years of the gains of the civil rights movement and the expansion of the economy were wiped out overnight, pushing millions into poverty. If you add to that the people who are unemployed as a result of the crashed economy — we just have this strange thing that happened: the banks created a disaster, and economists and politicians said, “That’s terrible for the economy, let’s give them trillions.” And then the folks who were actually hit the hardest were forced into poverty.

On student debt: funding to public education was dramatically cut, which obviously hurts poor people and workers the most. As it was cut, people had to take out loans. So 37 million people have now run up a trillion dollars in student debt. It’s a burden no matter what, but if you come from a family that doesn’t have means, you now graduate from school with a crushing debt burden, and then there aren’t jobs available. And there’s a vicious cycle: you cut the budget of public universities, to give tax breaks to banks and big companies, who respond by creating toxic loan packages for students that they make a profit on. And because public funding of universities has been cut — the schools need to borrow more money in order to operate and build, so the banks get a piece of that action, too. And now university endowments are investing in Sallie Mae — the largest private student loan lender — so students have to take out loans to go to school, and the university endowment profits off those loans.

There are much better ways to fund education — like by [publicly] funding education so people can actually afford it, instead of creating these twenty layers that let Wall Street suck money out at every step.

Kaufmann: So individuals and families are getting crushed by housing and education debt, and then you say public debt completes a sort of perfect storm?

Lerner: That’s right, what we call predatory public loans. So three things have happened: Wall Street has taken advantage of the desperation of cities and municipalities since the crisis; the deals are so complex that public entities don’t know what they are getting into; and third is that Wall Street gets its money at a subsidized, Too Big to Fail rate, and in the case of the discount window, almost for free. Banks get money at .075 percent interest from the Federal Reserve, and they then create all sorts of ways to make more and more money off the spread, from the public sector.

Take interest rate swaps, for example. On the surface it sounds like not a bad idea — a bank says they will protect a city from a fluctuating interest rate by locking it in at, say, 4 percent. If it goes higher, they eat it. And if it goes lower, they make money. But they then add so many different formulas and traps, that all of a sudden when the whole thing blew up during the crisis and a city is hemorrhaging money, and they want to get out of it, it turns out that they have an exit fee that’s extraordinary and they can’t afford it. In Detroit, the city had to pay around $470 million on a series of bond and interrelated swap deals gone bad at the same time they were laying off police and firemen. So then you end up in fights like, ‘Do we help the poor, or do we take workers that are middle class and cut their wages so they’ll be poor?’

Kaufmann: Describe what this movement looks like — what are some of the asks and how do you see it potentially playing out?

Lerner: There are multiple levels of how Wall Street is impoverishing the country, and so different people can engage in different ways.

On housing, in Atlanta, Minneapolis, all over California — one piece is the Home Defenders League and Occupy Our Homes. This involves physical encampments, blockading the police and saying you’re not going to take my home, or my neighbor’s home. It’s incredibly vibrant, street-level resistance — and it’s often successful. And as folks are successful, it grows. This is all non-violent, and involves people who are willing to go to jail.

If you take it up a level, there is a simple policy demand, which is that banks should reduce principal on homes to current market value. That means if you’re paying a $300,000 mortgage on a home that’s worth $200,000, the bank should rewrite it to that value. If we did that, it would save $700 billion to $1 trillion — that’s how much people are underwater — and generate $101 billion in economic activity, create 1.5 million jobs, and the average underwater homeowner would save $7,700 a year.

There are cities all over the country that are now exploring using eminent domain to seize these underwater mortgages and rewrite them with principal reductions. For years eminent domain was the tool to take advantage of poor people — tear up a neighborhood, build a highway, build a stadium and tell people they will be paid what their homes are worth on the open market. They said it was for the public good even as it devastated once stable neighborhoods. We’re saying let’s flip that on it’s head — for the public good, let’s seize these mortgages and rewrite them at current market value so people can stay in their homes.

On student debt, there is a gamut of activity ranging from student activism on campuses, to state and local legislation, to sit-ins at the Sallie Mae shareholders meeting, to challenging the Education Department on why they have as contractors like Sallie Mae that are profiting off this disaster. The movement includes Senator Elizabeth Warren’s brilliant bill to give students loans at the same rate we give to banks. Why should banks get money cheap and student loans be more expensive? And it includes people on their college campuses — a movement around Big Banks Off Campus — because the banks shouldn’t be allowed to come on campus and sell their credit cards and figure out new ways to indebt students.

Finally, on public debt, people are fighting back. In the case of Oregon, SEIU Local 503 calculated that the state lost $110 million because of the LIBOR manipulations. So here’s what happens: the SEIU public sector union goes in to negotiate with the state representing public employees, and the state says we want to cut all of these services for poor people. And the workers themselves are often poor — homecare workers who haven’t had a raise in six years. The state says there is no money. And how do you argue if there’s no money? Except that the money was stolen! And so the movement is changing the debate. This is not about: Are public employees overpaid? Are their too many benefits for poor people? Should we have pre-K or not? There are incredible sums of money out there but we’ve devised a system that drains it from the bottom to the top. Why don’t we cut out the middleman? Like let’s have an infrastructure bank and loan the money at cost. Let’s figure out a way so banks can’t make more than a certain amount of money on the spread. And I know that gives the free-market people heart attacks, because this is intervening in the market, but there is no market. Because five banks control it, and where they get their money is from taxpayers. It’s our money.

Kaufmann: To what extent are these three threads — on student debt, housing debt and public debt — coalescing into a movement so they aren’t the kind of independent, divided struggles that you suggest hold us back from big victories?

Lerner: As the campaigns develop, the overlap happens more and more. For example, people are seeing the relationship between housing debt and student debt — needing to take out student loans because your family’s house isn’t worth anything anymore so you can’t help finance an education through a second mortgage like you might have in the past. At the Wells Fargo meeting at Salt Lake City, folks campaigning about student debt showed up, and so did people campaigning on housing, and so did people about the environment. So, on an organic level on the street, people are seeing it more and more.

Kaufmann: After I covered the actions at the Wells Fargo shareholders meeting, a progressive friend and writer told me, “The activists seem to think banks can’t ignore their message, that being heard is equivalent to making change.” How do you think a movement like this actually could make principal reduction, for example, a reality? 

Lerner: First, the enemy of change is the notion that if you are not winning at that moment then you are losing. These things never have an even flow. It’s not like you start one day, you have steady escalation — they go up and down. In Taylor Branch’s book, At Canaan’s Edge, you read these transcripts of FBI wiretaps on civil rights leaders and it’s them saying, “We’re losing”…or “so and so was killed”…or “we have in-fighting, how will we win?” But when we look back at that period now, we see that the Civil Rights bill was going to pass, it was all going to happen. I think when you are in the middle of the battle, under siege, you can’t see the forest for the trees.

But your friend’s critique is fair in that we’ve been screaming about the banks for years, and they are more powerful than ever — the top six banks now control 73 percent of the total assets in the U.S. banking sector. However, we’ve started to identify some levers that we think begin to level the playing field. Eminent domain is one example — if you’re not willing to reduce principal, then we’ll use the power of the city to force you to do it. On LIBOR, city after city is investigating whether they can sue to get their money back. Many are exploring, and some have passed, bills that say if banks don’t meet certain standards the cities won’t deal with them anymore. Los Angeles, Oakland, New York, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh have all passed responsible banking ordinances recently.

Also, the banks’ greed and hubris is so great that [there are] new avenues to go after them. So if you look at the litigation that California Attorney General Kamala Harris filed: this is where the banks essentially did the same thing with credit card loans that they did with mortgages — they moved to litigation without accurate documentation to even show that people owed them money. We are seeing more opportunities for growing protest, more litigation and more public policy changes. You even now have Ohio Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown and Louisiana Republican Senator David Vitter working together on a bill to break up the big banks.

Kaufmann: Is there a role in this movement for people and organizations that are focused on the Hill?

Lerner: Petitions can raise important issues and get people involved. Lobbying can be important — but I think what we need to do is connect all of this to an analysis of who the villains are and why the economy is unbalanced. This is not a problem of lack of policy — we have unlimited great policy ideas. This is not a problem of lack of money to fund anti-poverty programs. This is a problem of power. I think people need to accept that there is no real significant economic and political change as long as the finance sector is so dominant. The D.C.-centric stuff will be far more effective if there is something out there in the rest of the country brewing. If this is just an intellectual policy debate about who has the best idea and who has the best statistics, we’re doomed.

Kaufmann: To win — to really make the kinds of structural changes you are talking about — does the public protest need to be as constant and visible, engaging and creative, as Occupy Wall Street?

Lerner: Yes, we need to get to that. And there is an interesting myth about Occupy that somehow it just emerged out of nowhere. But many of the people who were engaged in it were part of other battles before Occupy Wall Street. The month before Occupy, community groups were doing rallies and sit-ins at banks all over the country. So you never know when things are going to take off. Why did the Vietnam protests take off when they did? Or the civil rights protests? You never know what triggers something to go from dedicated souls to a mass movement.

But your key point is right — the system is currently working for the banks and super-rich. And as long as they feel it’s working we won’t really achieve change. And so some combination of mass disruptive protest — non-violent — of all sorts of local legislative activity; of a growing change in the narrative. Some mix and match of that has to put the kind of heat on them that makes them feel they have to negotiate over these issues — that they need, for example, to fix mortgages because the alternative is worse. We need to have a better system on student loans, because the alternative is worse. I think that’s really our challenge.

Kaufmann: In a recent piece, you suggest that anger is insufficient to sustain a movement — that what keeps people going is love. Can you describe what you mean by that?

Lerner: There are four things currently that are self-defeating for progressives and labor folks: one, the mantra of progressives is built on “we’re losing, there’s no hope, we’re getting clobbered.” That leads to the slogan of much of the progressive movement which is “Let’s fight for small, incremental, not particularly important change now.” So what we largely talk about isn’t very inspiring. We talk about stopping cuts — stopping bad — not how we win good things.

The great movements — take the story of Exodus — they didn’t say, “Can the Egyptians whip us less often?” They said, “We’re leaving. We’re outta here. We’re gonna form a new country, a place where we can be free.” Ghandi, South Africa, the civil rights movement — all of these movements were based on this idea that there is something profoundly better that we can fight for. And I think for many of us in America we’ve lost that ability to say we’re engaged in this — not just because we care about principal reduction — but because we believe in the richest country on earth we can transform society and redistribute wealth and power. So, we need to have a vision that’s inspiring and not be afraid to be called a little utopian.

Second, we need an analysis, a narrative, of who the bad guys are that are concentrating wealth and power. All of the organizing I was involved with — with the garment workers, the farmworkers and the janitors — they all had an analysis of who really had the power and could fix things, and I think we’ve forgotten how to do that.

Third, we need to think about the strategy and tactics that give us leverage, so this is not simply yelling and screaming.  And fourth is about love — which is that people are involved both out of self-interest because they want to make their lives better; but also because they realize their life is better if they help make other lives better.

If you look at the great movements that’s what happens — some combination of vision, analysis, strategy and this deep, deep feeling that by supporting and sacrificing for others — in the labor movement we call it solidarity — you not only transform your own life, but you transform the lives of people around you and in doing that transform how society operates. That’s the roots of how we build what we have to build.

End “Too Big to Jail”: May 18-23, Washington, D.C.

If you think what Lerner has to say makes sense, here’s an immediate opportunity to get involved. Next week, families on the front lines of the foreclosure crisis are traveling from across the country to the nation’s capital to make their voices heard.

Their message is simple: five years into the financial crisis, Wall Street has still not been held accountable, and communities are still suffering. In fact, a new report from Alliance for a Just Society, the New Bottom Line and Home Defenders League shows that $192.6 billion in wealth was lost due to the foreclosure crisis in 2012, and this year another 13 million homes are at risk of foreclosure with $221 billion in wealth on the line. (See “Studies/Briefs” below for more information on this report.)

It’s long past time for the administration to prosecute those who violated the law and for the banks to repay individuals, families and communities that continue to suffer losses — beginning with reducing their mortgages to fair market value.

“We can’t have two systems of justice in this country: one for the rich and powerful, where Wall Street criminals are actually rewarded with bailouts and huge bonuses, and another for the rest of us,” said Vivian Richardson, who will be in D.C. next week after successfully defending her home from foreclosure with the help of members of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment. “These Wall Street banksters stole many homes, and are still committing crimes. It is time for them to be held accountable.”

There will be home-defense and non-violent, civil disobedience trainings on May 18-19 and a rally and march to the Department of Justice on Monday, May 20. The activists will attempt to meet with Attorney General Eric Holder and are prepared to take direct action if that doesn’t happen — blocking entrances, setting up an Occupy-style encampment, getting arrested and staying in jail.

To participate in the Week of Action, you can RSVP here. To take part in the direct action on May 20, fill out this form.

Greg Kaufmann is a Nation contributor covering poverty in America. His work has also appeared on Common Dreams, Alternet, Tikkun.org, NPR.org, CBSNews.com and MichaelMoore.com. He serves as an adviser for the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

The deadly explosion at a West, Texas, fertilizer plant was absolutely preventable. The plant was had not been inspected since 1985, and heavily violated safety standards. Why did this happen? The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is the government agency set to ensure workplace safety, but it’s been steadily hollowed out by Republicans, it’s been denied funds, and its enforcement has been severely shaved down.

This problem isn’t just for OSHA though — it’s all kinds of government agencies, including the IRS. Reducing IRS enforcement is extremely counterproductive to our budget, but is that what Republicans are truly looking out for?

What about taxes on corporations? Big banks? Must essential programs be hollowed out and dismantled in favor of greed?

Robert Reich (professor of public policy at UC-Berkeley, and former labor secretary) explains why reducing, de-funding, and disabling government agencies and programs hurts the American people in the long run (and why Republicans won’t stop doing it).

A new project of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), the Center for Science and Democracy, is encouraging scientists to do just the opposite. The center encourages scientists to speak out and help others to better understand scientific information and to distinguish evidence from political positioning. We spoke with the Center’s director Dr. Andrew Rosenberg by phone this week. This is an edited version of our conversation.

Theresa Riley: In Bill’s conversation with public health historians David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, they talk about a “war on science” that is being waged by industries to prevent and weaken regulations. In Heads They Win, Tails We Lose, a report released last year, UCS investigators showed how widespread the practice is. What tactics do they use?

Dr. Andrew Rosenberg

A second way is creating a false and parallel science. Of course, that’s quite dramatic on climate change, where there’s been very extensive funding, particularly from the energy industry, of so-called climate change skeptics. I think it’s less well known that that occurs in many other fields, particularly the testing of chemicals, such as toxic contaminants, formaldehyde and silica, where the industry is creating a body of science, ostensibly of science that says, “Well, really this isn’t such a problem.”

One of their tactics is to create groups that are labeled things like Safer Chemicals for a Healthy World — I’m making that one up, but there are actual groups like this. You find out they’re funded by The American Chemistry Council (and they’re funded by the chemical industry). They cast doubt and continually challenge scientific results. Formaldehyde is a good example. The formaldehyde industry is continually challenging evidence that shows that formaldehyde is a carcinogen in the crafting of EPA regulations and product safety regulations.

Riley: In some cases, they go as far as suing scientists. For instance, Markowitz and Rosner tell Bill that in the 1970s and ’80s, the lead industry went after researchers like Herbert Needleman who had uncovered the fact that even low levels of lead were damaging children. They accused him of scientific misconduct and filed charges against him. It took several years for him to prevail.

Rosenberg: Attacking scientists unfortunately, directly and personally, has become part of the toolbox for industry and for political groups. We have instances of attacking scientists in court (as in the lead example), but in the digital age it’s become “let’s subpoena all the private emails of scientists and we’ll find something in there that will cast doubt on the results.”

For example in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, BP asked for help from some scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to try to estimate how much oil was leaking into the Gulf, because the government estimates seemed to be low. So these scientists came up with methods to figure out a better way to calculate how much was spilling before they capped the well and showed that the amount of oil was very much larger than had been initially estimated.

BP subsequently went to court to subpoena their private emails to cast doubt on their results. They needed to know the actual amount of oil to figure out how to cap it, but then after the fact it pertained directly to [their] liability. So they really went after these guys to cast doubt on their results by saying, “Well, gee, in the email traffic, one of the scientists said to the other, ‘I’m not sure I think that’s quite right. Maybe we ought to try it a different way,’ and ‘I’m not sure we can rely on this result’” — the usual process of science that goes on in any analysis now becomes a weapon in court, and, in addition, is not only demoralizing, but potentially expensive. It certainly dampens the enthusiasm for scientists to get involved in issues. We’ve seen that with climate change, too. It’s not a new phenomenon; it’s still going on.

Riley: What role does the media have in this, particularly in terms of facilitating the production of uncertainty and, ultimately, the undermining of the truth.

Rosenberg: We live in a very noisy media environment and there are huge changes in news and media, as you know better than I. If somebody wants to know something about fracking and they type it into Google or Bing they get a whole bunch of information and it’s really hard for someone who’s not working in the field to sort through that information and know what its provenance is. I think that’s true for many people in the media who are writing about this as well. All of this effort to undermine or misrepresent science affects the media too, because certain media outlets are spinning their own opinion pages and then cherry picking the science. We’ve done a report on News Corp reporting on climate science, for the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal and for Fox News. It becomes easier for people to hammer away at their position because they’re able to go to think tanks that are funded with a particular bent, Heartland being the classic case.

I also think the media still has a tendency to say, “We’ve got to have a balanced view, so let’s get one person who thinks climate change is occurring or thinks that there’s a problem with formaldehyde and we’ll find somebody who doesn’t, and disagrees,” as if it’s an adversarial system in court and these are expert witnesses. But that’s not what happens in the science community. Yes, people challenge each other, but then you ask, “what’s the weight of the evidence.” It’s not a courtroom where you present alternatives in that way. That’s problematic and it gets disseminated very broadly on digital media.

Riley: In 2009 when President Obama took office, he called for comprehensive scientific integrity reform in federal departments and agencies. How is he doing?

Rosenberg: There is good policy in many agencies. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — and this isn’t because I used to work at NOAA — did an outstanding job, as I think is noted in the report you mentioned earlier, in creating a scientific integrity policy. They enabled scientists to speak out.

The Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House has said they stand behind scientific integrity policies. But the real challenge now is making sure that the implementation follows those policies. And there it’s a little harder to be quite so laudatory. I think they did a great job of putting the policies in place. We worked very intensively with many of the agencies to help provide guidance, since it was critically important in our scientific integrity program. But the implementation of those policies in some places, like USDA, FDA and others, has lagged. There are still concerns in Department of Interior and its many various departments. I think there’s an opportunity for improvement.

Riley: Last month, in a speech at an event marking the 150th anniversary of the National Academy of Sciences, President Obama told scientists, engineers and doctors that his goal is to reach for a level of private and public research and development investment that we haven’t seen since the height of the space race. At the same time, the sequester is expected to take a significant toll on scientific research with numerous federal agencies and organizations now facing the possibility of huge cuts to their budgets. Some examples of that are the National Institutes of Health (NIH) expecting $1.6 billion in cuts, the National Science Foundation (NSF) possibly shrinking by $283 million, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science estimating a $9.3 billion cut across the board in R&D this year. How concerned should we be about these cuts?

Rosenberg: We should be very concerned. I’m not sure that outside the science community it’s well known that the competition for NIH and NSF grants is really intense, meaning that there’s intense scrutiny of every grant proposal. If you add to that now a reduced pool of money, then those success rates become really shockingly low, like less than 10 percent, I believe. That means that many scientists will have difficulty continuing their programs. Some people would say, “Oh well, maybe they should just be funded by private industry or private funding.” That’s all well and good but it’s totally different from a basic research enterprise of an NSF or an NIH, where people are doing the basic, fundamental, underlying research, not to immediately produce a product, but because it helps our understanding of the world. So that’s one area that is frightening.

But we also need to remember the applied science agencies like NOAA, NASA and USGS and others that are doing the basic daily scientific work for the country, everything from weather forecasts, climate forecasts, monitoring of water tables and the research that goes along with those things, understanding weather systems and understanding hydrologic systems, understanding fisheries — the area that I worked in for many years. You start to cut that research, which is also taking a very large hit, and that means our understanding gets weaker as the challenges are only increasing. It’s not as if the issues of trying to maintain the health of the oceans is diminishing, we need that applied scientific research for climate impacts and a whole range of other things.

One of the great things about the U.S. science enterprise and why it was so powerful is because it was valued not just with dollars but in the way that scientists were allowed to operate with much less hierarchy and with much greater freedom than many other places. We’re going to lose that if we continue not only with the sequester but also with this scrutiny of grants, restrictions on travel and attacks on scientists.

A documentary film chronicling his lengthy legal battle, imprisonment and his personal development as an activist, called Bidder 70, opened May 17 in New York. The film, The New York Times says, “nails the way that a spontaneous act of courage can focus the mind and clarify an ideology.” Reviewer Jeannette Catsoulis writes “Observing [DeChristopher] as he ponders nonviolent protest, quotes Edward Abby and visits mountaintop-removal coal mines in West Virginia, where he was born, we hear not the legal machinery humming inexorably in the background but the mental gears of an activist clicking into place.”

Watch the trailer.

In this clip from his interview with Bill, Tim DeChristopher explains why Americans concerned about the environment need to think beyond their role as consumers and consider themselves players in a democratic society.

The research was “conducted in the best interest of all of the children enrolled,” Dr. Gary W. Goldstein, president and chief executive of the Kennedy Krieger Institute, said in response to a class-action lawsuit filed by the families in 2011. “Over all, the blood lead levels of most children residing in the study homes stayed constant or went down.”

But in some cases, children placed in homes that received the two cheaper forms of abatement were exposed to levels of lead known to cause permanent neurological problems.

Here, public health historians Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner tell the story. You can read about it in more detail in this chapter of their book, Lead Wars.

Watch Bill’s entire interview with Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner.

In this 2001 Moyers Moment from Trade Secrets, Bill speaks with David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, two public health historians, and Richard Lemen, the director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, about the U.S. vinyl chloride industry’s attempts to cover up scientific research with their own skewed science.

Vinyl chloride is a toxic chemical compound that is used to manufacture PVC plastic. The companies who produce it knew for decades that being exposed even to small amounts of vinyl chloride could be extremely damaging to a person’s health, but documents show they conspired to keep that fact from their workers, who were exposed daily. In many cases, employees died of rare forms of cancer after years of working in factories that manufactured the compound.

Watch Bill’s 2013 conversation with David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz on Moyers & Company.

Over the years, Professor Markowitz’ books and testimony have been used by law firms, cities, and states seeking damages from companies that perpetuate harmful occupational environments or manufacture hazardous consumer products without adequate disclosure. In his earlier books, Deadly Dust: Silicosis and the On-Going Struggle to Protect Workers’ Health, and Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution, Markowitz and co-author, David Rosner, sifted through enormous volumes of primary source material to uncover industrial misuse of vinyl chloride, lead, and silica. In 2001, Professor Markowitz was featured in Bill Moyers’ investigative report, Trade Secrets.

Professor Markowitz has received numerous honors, including the Viseltear Prize from the American Public Health Association’s Medical Care Section in 2000; the “Outstanding Health, Safety, and Environmental Investigative Journalism” award from the American Industrial Hygiene Association, Social Concerns Committee in 2005; and the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health Award in 2006.

Gerald Markowitz holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin and a BA from Earlham College in Indiana.

Professor Rosner’s extensive research and writing on the politics of industrial pollution and occupational disease has supported litigation at the city, state, and community level nationwide. He has been an expert witness in cases focusing on the occupational disease silicosis, and against former lead paint manufacturers for their role in creating the hazardous environment that has plagued generations of American homes. In 2001, Professor Rosner was featured in Bill Moyers’ investigative report, Trade Secrets.

Before joining the faculty at Columbia University, Professor Rosner was a Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York. He is the recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Investigator Award and the Viseltear Prize from the American Public Health Association’s Medical Care Section for “Outstanding Health, Safety, and Environmental Investigative Journalism”. Professor Rosner has also been a Guggenheim Fellow; a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow; a Josiah Macy Fellow; and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine in 2010.

Professor Rosner received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, his Masters in Public Health from the University of Massachusetts and his BA from the City College of New York. He is the father of two, and currently lives in New York City with his wife, an author and psychotherapist.

Bill talks with David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, public health historians who’ve been taking on the chemical industry for years — writing about the hazards of industrial pollution and the neglect of worker safety — despite industry efforts to undermine them. Their latest book, Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children, is the culmination of 20 years of research. Markowitz and Rosner warn that, for young children, there’s no safe level of exposure to this dangerous toxin still lurking in millions of homes.

The authors discuss thwarted efforts to hold the lead industry accountable, failed attempts to find cheap solutions, and the cost to the future of our children. As long as the chemical industry and its powerful lobbies prevail in blocking efforts to reform outdated laws, Markowitz and Rosner say, we will continue to float in a soup of toxins — inhaling, drinking, and absorbing chemicals that we may learn, years later, have put us all in harm’s way.

Producer: Gail Ablow. Editor: Rob Kuhns.
Intro Producer: Robert Booth.

Photographer: Dale Robbins.

Producer: Gina Kim. Editor: Sikay Tang.
Associate Producer: Lena Shemel.

Photographer: Dale Robbins.

Krumholz began her career at the Center for Responsive Politics as an assistant editor of the first edition of the Open Secrets publication in 1989, and became the organization’s executive director in 2006. Under her leadership, the Center brought the 200 million records collected over the years online and open to the public, creating one of the country’s premiere watchdog web outlets. In 2010, Fast Company magazine named Krumholz to its “Most Influential Women in Technology” list for her contribution to government transparency through technology. Krumholz has a degree in International Relations and Political Science from the University of Minnesota.

Under Brian’s leadership, POGO has launched numerous investigations that were successful in creating meaningful public policy reform. Some of her successes include the exposure of wasteful spending that led to the cancellation of some of the government’s largest contracts, uncovering oil and gas industry fraud on public lands, and increased security at U.S. nuclear weapons sites. Brian’s dedication to ethical governance earned her an induction into the Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame in 2006. She serves on the board of Taxpayers for Common Sense, and is the chair of the Steering Committee for Openthegovernment.org. She obtained her Master’s degree in International Relations at Johns Hopkins University, and her Bachelor’s degree in Government from Smith College.

Lead

(AP Photo/Stew Milne)

1) Find out if there’s lead in your water. A good place to start is with your local government. website. At NYC.gov, for example, you can order a free testing kit. You can also try contacting your local water company, your landlord or a private lab. You may also want to install an NSF-certified water filter on your water tap. Though the EPA has mandated that water systems be tested for lead since 1991, your home’s own internal plumbing could still contain lead, particularly if you live in an older building.

2) Replace old windows. Though lead paint has been illegal since 1978 and has largely been removed from old buildings, in some cases, it was seen as too costly to replace the windows. To have your windows replaced (or to do any sort of renovation on a building that may still contain lead paint), contact an EPA-certified renovator who has been trained to follow lead safety practices. In some cases, your local government may cover the costs.

3) Throw out colorfully-painted toys that were made outside the U.S. or Europe. They may look innocent, but toys, crayons, ceramic and jewelry, particularly those manufactured in China or Mexico, may contain lead, and as any parent knows, children are likely to put these things in their mouths.

4) Dust or vacuum regularly. Even without any obvious source of lead in your home, there may still be lead in the air, particularly if you live in an industrial area or if a neighbor has been renovating an old home. Dust particles containing lead are especially dangerous to babies who crawl around on the floor. It’s also important to keep toys and hands clean.

5) Test the soil. Urban and suburban yards can still contain contaminants from the days when lead paint and gasoline were widespread. Before planting a garden or even letting your kids run around in the yard, make sure the soil is lead-free. Your local public health department may offer free testing; you can also contact a private or university-run lab.

Flame Retardants

The hazards of flame retardants have been known for some time — brominated tris was banned from children’s pajamas back in 1977. And yet, similar chemicals can still be found in everything from couch cushions to television sets. Studies have linked one group of flame retardants, polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, to lower IQs, behavioral problems, early puberty and fertility issues. And the fire-safety benefits of these chemicals are debatable. Here’s what you can to keep toxic flame retardants out of your home:

1) Check the labels on your furniture. The California Furniture Flammability Standard essentially requires that cushioned furniture, children’s car seats, diaper-changing tables and other products containing polyurethane foam are dipped in toxic chemicals. (Don’t breathe a sigh of relief just because you live in one of the other 49 states — because of California’s size, most mass-produced furniture is designed to meet California’s standard). Check the tags for the familiar notice: This article meets the flammability requirements of California Bureau of Home Furnishings Technical Bulletin 117. (The tag is not required though, so just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s safe.) Fortunately, California has proposed changing the rule; until that happens, you can look for products made with wool, cotton or polyester filling instead of polyurethane foam. And if you can’t afford all new eco-friendly furniture, be sure to dust, vacuum and wash your hands regularly — most of the toxins enter the body by swallowing contaminated dust.

2) Check the labels on electronics, too. Flame retardants have long been used in electronic equipment like computers and television sets. Thankfully, that’s slowly changing. As of 2008, the following companies had committed to phasing out all brominated flame retardants: Acer, Apple, Eizo Nanao, LG Electronics, Lenovo, Matsushita, Microsoft, Nokia, Phillips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony-Ericsson, and Toshiba. To find flame retardant-free versions of everything from refrigerators to nose-hair clippers, check this list created by ChemSec, an environmental non-profit based in Sweden.

3) Beware of fleece pajamas. Though one flame retardant, brominated tris, was banned from children’s pajamas, some sleepwear is still treated with another flame retardant called PROBAN which has been linked to genetic abnormalities and cancer. Check the label — children’s pajamas that DO NOT contain flame retardants must have a tag that reads: “For child’s safety, garment should fit snugly” (the snug fit limits the flow of oxygen in order to prevent fire from spreading, an approved alternative to chemical flame retardants). Cotton and polyester products rarely contain flame retardants, but look out for those cozy fleece footed pajamas — they usually do.

BPA

Bisphenol A, or BPA, has been linked to cancer, asthma, obesity and reproductive issues. And yet, until recently, the chemical was found in, among other things, baby bottles. The FDA finally banned the use of BPA in baby bottles and children’s sippy cups in 2012 — three years after major manufacturers had voluntarily stopped using it. But BPA is still found in other hard plastic containers, the lining of metal cans and the paper that receipts are printed on. It’s difficult to completely avoid BPA — 90 percent of Americans have traces of the chemical in their urine. But here are some things you can do to limit your exposure:

1) When purchasing plastic products — particularly those that come into contact with your food, such as food storage containers, plastic plates and cups, look for those that are clearly marked BPA free. Thanks to vocal consumers, many companies are now manufacturing BPA-free products and marketing them as such.

2) Avoid food containers marked with recycling codes 3 or 7, which may be made with BPA. If your food does come in a container marked 3 or 7, don’t microwave it in that container – chemicals are more likely to leak into your food at high temperatures.

3) Limit your consumption of canned foods, or look for cans marked BPA free — they are rare, but do exist. Eden Organic cans have been BPA free since 1999.

4) BPA is often used in the thermal paper that receipts are printed on. Since it’s impossible to know whether or the receipt you’re being handed has contains BPA, don’t take receipts that you don’t need. If you operate a business that uses receipts, switch to a BPA-free paper manufacturer, such as Appleton Paper, which went BPA-free in 2006.

Moyers & Company’s Gina Kim sat down with Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, to discuss the Justice Department’s decision to seize phone records for 20 Associated Press reporters and editors. The move marks the latest chapter in the recent crackdown on leakers and whistleblowers, and an unprecedented challenge to the freedom of the press protected by the First Amendment. Brian and Kim discuss the many reasons why Brian’s watchdog organization finds this latest example of government overreach problematic. “It’s as though there is no sense of discretion on when to prosecute what matters and when to make sure that we’re protecting our free speech,” Brian told Kim.

On this week’s episode of Moyers & Company, Brian and Sheila Krumholz, the executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics and OpenSecrets.org, talk with Bill about the importance of transparency to our democracy, and their efforts to document who’s giving money, who’s receiving it and what’s expected in return.

highlights

On why this subpoena matters

“So the first part of this that’s so disturbing is that they were only notified after the fact. So they just went in and took the information. And what they took was over 20 phone lines of the AP journalist’s records, not just in the office, but also at home. So the breadth of the subpoena is extraordinary. And that was one of the other elements that has historically been very important: to make sure that the subpoenas are very limited in scope. So this particular act is unique in how it’s such an invasion of the journalist’s capacity to do their work. But it’s part of a pattern that we’ve been seeing in this Justice Department — the Obama administration’s Justice Department — in being so aggressive in prosecuting people who have leaked classified information.”

On Eric Holder’s role and responsibility

“I understand that he may need to recuse himself from the particulars of this investigation. But the purpose of his position is to exhibit leadership. And if he isn’t willing to say, ‘This is a line we must not cross’ by taking himself out of the picture, I think he really abdicated his responsibility. They trampled the line between government and the free press in a way that I think is extremely damaging. And we need to see some recourse on President Obama’s behalf to do something about this.”

On the chilling effect of the government crackdown

“We’ve already seen a chilling effect on the part of people inside these agencies, who when they want to make disclosures are afraid to because of the prosecutions. You now have them realizing that even if there is a trusted journalist, that it isn’t even a case of whether they can trust the journalist, because they now know that the government might just take their information without even the journalist having the capacity to fight back. So we are having a tremendous chilling effect on both sides of our journalistic table, where you have both the journalists and the people who are their sources being essentially powerless to the power of the national security establishment and the justice department. [...]There is no question, especially in the national security arena that there has been a diminishing number of people who feel comfortable coming forward, even though there’s a vast increase in the number of people who are being given security clearances and access to this information.”

Billionaires with an axe to grind, now is your time. Not since the days before a bumbling crew of would-be break-in artists set into motion the fabled Watergate scandal, leading to the first far-reaching restrictions on money in American politics, have you been so free to meddle. There is no limit to the amount of money you can give to elect your friends and allies to political office, to defeat those with whom you disagree, to shape or stunt or kill policy, and above all to influence the tone and content of political discussion in this country.

Today, politics is a rich man’s game. Look no further than the 2012 elections and that season’s biggest donor, 79-year-old casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. He and his wife, Miriam, shocked the political class by first giving $16.5 million in an effort to make Newt Gingrich the Republican presidential nominee. Once Gingrich exited the race, the Adelsons invested more than $30 million in electing Mitt Romney. They donated millions more to support GOP candidates running for the House and Senate, to block a pro-union measure in Michigan, and to bankroll the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other conservative stalwarts (which waged their own campaigns mostly to help Republican candidates for Congress). All told, the Adelsons donated $94 million during the 2012 cycle — nearly four times the previous record set by liberal financier George Soros. And that’s only the money we know about. When you add in so-called dark money, one estimate puts their total giving at closer to $150 million.  

It was not one of Adelson’s better bets. Romney went down in flames; the Republicans failed to retake the Senate and conceded seats in the House; and the majority of candidates backed by Adelson-funded groups lost, too. But Adelson, who oozes chutzpah as only a gambling tycoon worth $26.5 billion could, is undeterred. Politics, he told the Wall Street Journal in his first post-election interview, is like poker: “I don’t cry when I lose. There’s always a new hand coming up.” He said he could double his 2012 giving in future elections. “I’ll spend that much and more,” he said. “Let’s cut any ambiguity.”

Comedian Stephen Colbert, left, confers with his attorney Trevor Potter, as he testified before the Federal Election Commission in Washington, Thursday, June 30, 2011. Colbert, who plays a conservative TV pundit on "The Colbert Report," launched Colbert Super PAC, a type of political action committee that allowed him to raise unlimited amounts of money from corporations, unions and individuals to support or oppose candidates in the 2012 elections through independent expenditures such as TV ads. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)

But simply tallying Adelson’s wins and losses — or the Koch brothers’, or George Soros’s, or any other mega-donors’ — misses the bigger point. What matters is that these wealthy funders were able to give so much money in the first place.

With the advent of super PACs and a growing reliance on secretly funded nonprofits, the very wealthy can pour their money into the political system with an ease that didn’t exist as recently as this moment in Barack Obama’s first term in office. For now at least, Sheldon Adelson is an extreme example, but he portends a future in which 1-percenters can flood the system with money in ways beyond the dreams of ordinary Americans. In the meantime, the traditional political parties, barred from taking all that limitless cash, seem to be sliding toward irrelevance. They are losing their grip on the political process, political observers say, leaving motivated millionaires and billionaires to handpick the candidates and the issues.“It’ll be wealthy people getting together and picking horses and riding those horses through a primary process and maybe upending the consensus of the party,” a Democratic strategist recently told me. “We’re in a whole new world.”

The Rise of the Super PAC

She needed something sexy, memorable. In all fairness, anything was an improvement on “independent expenditure-only political action committee.” Eliza Newlin Carney, one of D.C.’s trustiest scribes on the campaign money beat, didn’t want to type out that clunker day after day. She knew this was big news — the name mattered. Then it came to her:

Super PAC.

The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision is often blamed — or hailed – for creating super PACs. In fact, it was a lesser-known case, SpeechNow.org vs. Federal Election Commission, decided by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals two months later, that did the trick. At the heart of SpeechNow was the central tension in all campaign money fights: the balance between stopping corruption or the appearance of corruption, and protecting the right to free speech. In this instance, the D.C. appeals court, influenced by the Citizens United decision, landed on the side of free speech, ruling that limits to giving and spending when it came to any group — and here’s the kicker – acting independently of candidates and campaigns violated the First Amendment.

Wonky as that may sound, SpeechNow reconfigured the political landscape and unchained big donors after decades of restrictions. The lawyers who argued the case, the academics and legal eagles whose expertise is campaign finance, and the beat reporters like Carney Newlin soon grasped what SpeechNow had wrought: a new, turbocharged political outfit that had no precedent in American politics.

Super PACs can raise unlimited amounts of money from pretty much anyone — individuals, corporations, labor unions — and there is no limit on how much they can spend. Every so often, they must reveal their donors and show how they spent their money. And they can’t directly coordinate with candidates or their campaigns. For instance, Restore Our Future, the super PAC that spent $142 million to elect Mitt Romney, couldn’t tell his campaign when or where it was running TV ads, couldn’t share scripts, couldn’t trade messaging ideas. Nor could Restore Our Future — yes, even its founders wince at the name — sit down with Romney and tape an interview for a TV ad.

It’s far easier, in other words, for a super PAC to attack the other guy, which helps explain all the hostility on the airwaves in 2012. Sixty-four percent of all ads aired during the presidential race were negative, up from 51 percent in 2008, 44 percent in 2004, and 29 percent in 2000. Much of that negativity can be blamed on super PACs and their arsenal of attack ads, according to a recent analysis by Wesleyan University’s Erika Franklin Fowler and Washington State University’s Travis Ridout. They found that a staggering 85 percent of all ads aired by “outside groups” were negative, while only 5 percent were positive.

And it will only get worse. “It’s going to be the case that the more super PACs invest in elections, the more negative those elections will be,” Michael Franz, a co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, told me. “They’re the ones doing the dirty work.” Think of them as the attack dogs of a candidate’s campaign — and the growling packs of super PACs are growing fast.

The savviest political operatives quickly realized how potentially powerful such outfits could be when it came to setting agendas and influencing the political system. In March 2010, Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s erstwhile political guru, launched American Crossroads, a super PAC aimed at influencing the 2010 midterms. As consultants like Rove and the wealthy donors they courted saw the advantages of having their own super PACs — no legal headaches, no giving or spending limits — the groups grew in popularity.

By November 2010, 83 of them had spent $63 million on the midterm elections. Nearly $6 of every $10 they put out supported conservative candidates, and it showed: buoyed by the Tea Party, Republicans ran roughshod over the Democrats, retaking control of the House and winnowing their majority in the Senate. It was a “shellacking,” as President Obama put it, powered by rich donors and the new organizations that went with them.

In 2012, no one, it seemed, could afford to sit on the sidelines. Having decried super PACs as “a threat to democracy,” Obama and his advisers flip-flopped and blessed the creation of one devoted specifically to reelecting the president. Soon, they were everywhere, at the local, state and federal levels. A mom started one to back her daughter’s congressional campaign in Washington State. Aunts and uncles bankrolled their nephew’s super PAC in North Carolina. Super PACs spent big on abortion, same-sex marriage and other major issues.

In all, the number of super PACs shot up to 1,310 during the 2012 campaign, a 15-fold increase from two years earlier. Fundraising and spending similarly exploded: these outfits raised $828 million and spent $609 million.

But what’s most striking about these groups is who funds them. An analysis by the liberal think tank Demos found that out of every $10 raised by super PACs in 2012, $9 came from just 3,318 people giving $10,000 or more. That small club of donors is equivalent to 0.0011 percent of the U.S. population.

Into the Shadows

In late April, roughly 100 donors gathered at a resort in Laguna Beach, California. They were all members of the Democracy Alliance, a private group of wealthy liberals that includes George Soros and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. Over five days, they swapped ideas on how best to promote a progressive agenda and took in pitches from leaders of the most powerful liberal and left-leaning groups in America, including Organizing for Action, the rebooted version of Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign. Since the Democracy Alliance’s founding in 2005, its members have given $500 million to various causes and organizations. At the Laguna Beach event alone, its members pledged a reported $50 million.

At the same time, about 100 miles to the east, a similar scene was playing out. A few hundred conservative and libertarian donors descended on the Renaissance Esmeralda Resort and Spa in Palm Springs for the latest donor conference convened by billionaire Charles Koch, one-half of the mighty “Koch brothers.” Over two days, donors mingled with politicians, heard presentations by leading activists, and pledged serious money to bankroll groups promoting the free-market agenda in Washington and around the country.

The philosophies of these two groups couldn’t be more different. But they have this in common: the money raised by the Democracy Alliance and the Kochs’ political network is secret. The public will never know its true source. Call it “dark money.”

So what is dark money? How does it wind up in our elections? Say you’re a billionaire and you want to give $1 million to anonymously influence an election. You’re in luck: you can give that money, as many donors have, to a nonprofit organized under the 501(c)(4) section of the tax code. That nonprofit, in turn, can spend your money on election-related TV ads or mailers or online videos. But there’s a catch: unlike super PACs, the majority of a 501(c)(4) nonprofit’s work can’t be political. Note, though, that where the IRS draws the line on how much politicking is too much, and even what the taxman defines as political, is very murky. And until Congress and the IRS straighten all of that out, donors wanting to influence elections have a mostly scrutiny-free way to unload their money.

This type of nonprofit has a long history in U.S. politics. The Sierra Club, for instance, has a 501(c)(4) affiliate, as does the National Rifle Association. But in recent years, political operatives and wealthy donors have seized on this breed of nonprofit as a new way to shovel secret money into campaigns. Between 2010 and 2012, the number of applications for 501(c)(4) status spiked from 1,500 to 3,400, according to IRS official Lois Lerner.

During the 2010 campaign, politically active nonprofits — “super secret spooky PACs,” as Stephen Colbert calls them — outspent super PACs by a three to two margin, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis. Take the American Action Network (AAN), run by former Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota. The group purports to be an “issue-based” nonprofit that only dabbles in politics, but its tax records suggest otherwise. From July 2009 through June 2011, as Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington noted, 60 percent of AAN’s money went toward politics. (An AAN spokesman called the complaint “baseless.”)

Because they’re so lacking in transparency, some nonprofits have been emboldened to bend — if not break — the tax law. One of the more egregious examples was benignly named the Commission on Hope, Growth and Opportunity (CHGO). Created in the summer of 2010, it informed the IRS that it wouldn’t spend a penny on politics. During the 2010 elections, however, it put $2.3 million into ads attacking 11 Democratic congressional candidates. Then, sometime in 2011, CHGO simply closed up shop and disappeared — a classic case of political hit-and-run. And it wouldn’t have happened without a secretive wealthy bankroller: of the $4.8 million raised by CHGO, tax records show that $4 million came from a single donor (though we don’t know his or her name).

Transparency advocates and reformers supporting more limits on spending have pushed back against the new wave of dark money. They have filed numerous complaints with the IRS and the Federal Election Commission alleging that politically active nonprofits are flouting the law and demanding a crackdown. Marcus Owens, the former head of the IRS’s exempt organizations division, which oversees politically active nonprofits, agrees that the agency needs to take action. “The government’s going to have to investigate them and prosecute them,” Owens, who is now in private practice, told me in January. “In order to maintain the integrity of the process, they’re going to be forced to take action.”

Don’t hold your breath for that. This week, a report by a Treasury Department inspector general revealed that IRS staffers singled out tea partiers and other conservative groups which had applied for tax-exempt status for special scrutiny. Now, Republicans and Democrats are howling with outrage and demanding that heads roll. One result of this debacle, ex-IRS director Marcus Owens told me, is that the IRS will certainly shy away from cracking down on those nonprofits that do abuse the tax code.

At least one politician is upset enough by the steady flow of dark money into our politics to do something about it. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, who is retiring in 2014, has made the issue of dark money one of the priorities of his time left in office. He plans to “look into the failure of the IRS to enforce our tax laws and stem the flood of hundreds of millions of secret dollars flowing into our elections, eroding public confidence in our democracy.”

Do millionaires and billionaires dominate the donor rolls of nonprofits, too? Without disclosure, it’s near impossible to know who funds what. But not surprisingly, the limited data we have suggest that, as with super PACs, rich people keep politically active nonprofits flush with cash. The American Action Network, for instance, raised $27.5 million from July 2010 to June 2011; of that haul, 90 percent of the money came from eight donors, with one giving $7 million. The story is the same with Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS. It raised $77 million from June 2010 to December 2011, and nearly 90 percent of that came from donors giving at least $1 million. And while Priorities USA, the pro-Obama nonprofit, raised a comparatively tiny $2.3 million in 2011, 80 percent of it came from a single, anonymous donor.

Big Money Civil War

A few days after the 2012 elections, a handful of Republican politicians including Governor John Kasich of Ohio and Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana met privately with Sheldon Adelson. They were officially in Las Vegas for a gathering of the Republican Governors Association, but it was never too early to court the man who, with a stroke of his pen, could underwrite a presidential hopeful’s bid for his or her party’s nomination.

Democratic candidates are no different. House and Senate hopefuls are flocking to Hollywood studio boss Jeffrey Katzenberg, one of their party’s biggest donors and fundraisers. And why wouldn’t they? Barack Obama might not be where he is today without Katzenberg. Days after Obama launched his presidential campaign in 2007, the DreamWorks Animation mogul gave the junior senator his imprimatur and prodded Hollywood into raising $1.3 million for him. Years later, Katzenberg provided $2 million in seed money for the pro-Obama super PAC that played a pivotal role in his reelection.

As 2016 nears, don’t be surprised to see the next set of Democrats clambering over each other to win Katzenberg’s endorsement and money. Paul Begala, the Democratic consultant and TV pundit, is already predicting what he calls the “Katzenberg primary.”

More than ever, a serious Senate or White House bid is dependent not on climbing the party ranks, but on winning the support of a few wealthy bankrollers. In fact, it’s no longer an exaggeration to say that while the political parties still officially pick the candidates for office, the power increasingly lies with the elites of the political donor class.

Super PACs, just three years old, are now a fixture, not a novelty. They’ve become de rigueur for candidates running at the federal, state and even local level. Want to scare off potential primary challengers? A super PAC with millions in the bank will help. Need to blast away at your opponent with negative ads without tarnishing your own reputation? Let a super PAC do the dirty work. Any candidate running for office begins with a to-do list, and with each month, getting a super PAC and making friends in the dark money universe rises higher on those lists.

Super PACs and their wealthy donors are also stoking civil wars within the parties. At the moment, they have been springing up to offer cover to politicians who vote a certain way, or stake out traditionally unpopular positions. For instance, Republicans for Immigration Reform, a relatively new super PAC, says it will spend millions to defend GOP politicos who take a moderate stance on immigration reform. And another super PAC, bankrolled by hedge fund investor Paul Singer, intends to spend big money to push more Republicans toward the middle on same-sex marriage. But there are also vigorous tea-party-style super PACs pushing their politicians toward the fringes. Each faction of the GOP is getting its own set of super PACs, and that means an already contentious fight for the future of the party could get far bloodier.

Democrats could find themselves in a money-fueled internal struggle, too. Tom Steyer, a former hedge fund investor worth $1.3 billion, says he’s sick of seeing climate change neglected in campaigns. He now plans to use his vast wealth to elevate it into a banner issue. In a recent primary in Massachusetts, he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars attacking Democratic Congressman Stephen Lynch for supporting the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. Lynch’s opponent, Congressman Ed Markey, a leading House environmentalist, went on to win the primary, but Steyer’s intervention raised plenty of eyebrows about possible Democrat-on-Democrat combat in 2014.

Meanwhile, as the recent Democracy Alliance and Koch retreats show, millionaires and billionaires are revving up to take ever-greater control of the political process via secretive nonprofits. In April, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg unveiled FWD.us, a quasi-dark-money outfit created to give Silicon Valley a greater political presence in Washington. It has already raised $25 million.

Right now, the best avenues for fired-up billionaires exist outside the traditional political parties. The Supreme Court could change that. In a case called McCutcheon vs. Federal Election Commission, the court is considering whether to demolish the overall aggregate limit on how much a donor can give to candidates and parties. If the court rules in favor of Republican donor Shaun McCutcheon, and perhaps goes on to eliminate contribution limits to candidates and parties altogether, super PACs could go out of style faster than Crocs. Donors won’t need them. They’ll give their millions straight to the Democrats or the Republicans and that will be that.

There is an important backdrop to all of these changes, and that’s the increase in income inequality in this country. Just as the incredibly wealthy are given the freedom to flood the political system with money, they’ve got more and more money to spend. Our lopsided economic recovery affords a glimpse of that growing inequality gap: from 2009 to 2011, the average wealth of the richest 7 percent of American households climbed by almost 30 percent, while the wealth of the remaining 93 percent of households actually declined by 4 percent. (So much for that “recovery.”)

Can there be any question that this democracy of ours is nearing dangerous territory, if we’re not already there? Picture the 2016 or 2020 election campaigns and, barring a new wave of campaign reforms, it’s not hard to see a tiny minority of people exerting a massive influence on our politics simply by virtue of bank accounts. There is nothing small-d democratic about that. It flies in the face of one of the central premises of this country of ours, equality, including political equality — the concept that all citizens stand on an equal footing with one another when it comes to having their say on who represents them and how government should work.

Increasingly, it looks like before the rest of us even have our say, before you enter the voting booth, issues, politics and the politicians will have been winnowed, vetted and predetermined by the wealthiest Americans. Think of it as a new definition of politics: the democracy of the wealthy, who can fight it out with each other inside and outside the political parties with little reference to you.

In the meantime, the more those of modest means feel drowned out by the money of a tiny minority, the less connected they will feel to the work of government, and the less they will trust elected officials and government as an institution. It’s a formula for tuning out, staying home and starving whatever’s left of our democracy.

I caught a glimpse of this last November, when I spoke to a class of students at Radford University in Virginia, a state blanketed with super PAC attack ads and dark money in 2012. Over and over, students told me how disgusted they were by all the vitriol they heard when they turned on the TV or the radio. Most said that they ended up ignoring the campaigns; a few were so put off they didn’t bother to vote. “They’re all bought and sold anyway,” one student told me in front of the entire class. “Why would my vote make any difference?”

Andy Kroll covers money in politics for Mother Jones magazine, and is an associate editor at TomDispatch, which he writes for regularly. He lives in Washington, D.C., the only place in America where people freely discuss campaign financing at happy hour.

Earlier this month, the Census Bureau reported that more black Americans voted in the 2012 election than any other group, including white Americans. The Associated Press called it a “tipping point” of historic proportions. A new study out this week contends that black male turnout was even higher than the Census reported.

Nearly all U.S. states have laws barring those convicted of a felony from voting while serving time in prison. In 11 states, some felons lose their voting rights for life; the ACLU puts the number of felons currently unable to vote at 5.3 million.

The Census measures voter turnout by counting all individuals of voting age — but nearly one in 10 black men are ineligible to vote because of state felony laws. Harvard political scientist Bernard Fraga found that by excluding black men who are not currently in prison but still cannot vote from the overall count of eligible voters, turnout figures for the group increased from 61.4 to 68 percent. Fraga also saw changes in the figures for black women, and white men and women, but none as substantial as the 6.6 point shift he saw with black men.

via The New York Times

Across the U.S., minorities are particularly affected both by mass incarceration and felony disenfranchisement laws. In some Southern states, the laws date to the post-Civil War reconstruction period, when states crafted legislation aimed at suppressing the black vote.

In an interview with Bill earlier this year, Bryan Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, explained how many of those charged with small crimes, such as position of marijuana, plead guilty without realizing the rights they are giving away by doing so. “You’ll be told that if you plead guilty, you can go home. You’re not told that there will be these collateral consequences,” Stevenson said. “You might lose your right to vote, you’ll be barred from public housing, you won’t ever be eligible for food stamps.”

Click below to use an interactive map from the ACLU to see how felony disenfranchisement laws differ from state to state.

ACLU map of felony disenfranchisement laws

"The Destruction of Tea at Boston Harbor" by Nathaniel Currier, a lithograph depicting the 1773 Boston Tea Party shows how some colonists disguised themselves as Native Americans. This time, the IRS was trying to unmask political operatives disguised as tea partiers. (Wikicommons)

The president and members of Congress on both sides of the aisle are falling over themselves to express their shock and indignation over the scandal. President Obama said it was “outrageous.” Rep. Darrell Issa of California told just about anyone who would listen how upset he was, saying in a statement that “the fact that Americans were targeted by the IRS because of their political beliefs is unconscionable.” And House Speaker John Boehner was blunt: “My question is who’s going to jail over this scandal?”

There’s no doubt that what the IRS did was wrong. Officials claim that the targeting wasn’t politically motivated, but a misguided attempt to more efficiently weed out political groups posing as social welfare nonprofits. In 2010, the year some IRS functionaries started searching for key words like “patriot” and “tea party” in tax forms, the number of groups registered as 501(c)4s and campaigning on behalf of candidates started trending, mostly on the Republican side, and were outspending super PACs by a margin of 3-2.

There are distinct advantages to having 501(c)4 status. As Jeffrey Toobin points out at NewYorker.com, thanks to Citizens United, there are no limits on the amount of money you can accept from corporations and private donors, and no limits on what you can spend. You don’t have to pay taxes or disclose donors. The catch is that electioneering cannot be your primary activity. But as Toobin observes, “leading up to the 2012 elections, many conservative organizations, nominally 501(c)(4)s, were all but explicitly political in their work.”

Campaign reformer Fred Wertheimer of Democracy 21 tells The Washington Post‘s Dylan Matthews that the IRS made two mistakes.

“They got it wrong in targeting conservative groups for review based on their names and their identified interests, and they got it wrong in not investigating and acting against groups that in our view were blatantly abusing the tax laws by improperly claiming to be 501(c)(4) groups so they could keep the donors paying for their campaign activities secret from the American people.”

Over the past two years, Wertheimer and others filed more than a dozen complaints with the IRS seeking an investigation of larger social welfare groups founded by political operatives like Karl Rove and former Obama administration aides. They received no response. Instead, the IRS focused on small somewhat insignificant groups in what their inspector general’s report called a confused and mismanaged approach to the problem.

Although many are worried that the backlash will discourage the IRS from pursuing political groups posing as social welfare groups in the future, Sheila Krumholz, the director of Center for Responsive Politics and this week’s guest on Moyers & Company, told The Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein that she thinks the affair is “crystallizing the problem.”

“On the one hand we want the IRS to fulfill its oversight duties. On the other hand there’s so much uncertainty about what the rules are and what they should be. What are those duties? What should they have been doing? They’re saying they made mistakes. They’ll be held to account for those. But the larger problem still is present.”

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) proposed a bill yesterday that would prevent the IRS from targeting tax-exempt organizations based on their names or ideologies. Last year’s DISCLOSE Act is being updated for reintroduction and a new bipartisan bill, The Follow the Money Act, proposed by Senators Wyden (D-Ore.) and Murkowski (R-Alaska) was introduced last month. But ultimately the IRS (or Congress) needs to decide whether these organizations should be allowed to continue engaging in political activities, and if so, produce clear guidelines on the percentage of money that can be used for that purpose. Until that happens, dark money will continue to pollute our political process.

Rosner and Markowitz discuss thwarted efforts to hold the lead industry accountable, failed attempts to find cheap solutions, and the cost to the future of our children. As long as the chemical industry and its powerful lobbies prevail in blocking efforts to reform outdated laws, the authors say, we will continue to float in a soup of toxins — inhaling, drinking, and absorbing chemicals that we may learn, years later, have put us all in harm’s way.

Also on the show, Bill is joined by the heads of two independent watchdog groups keeping an eye on government as well as on powerful interests — like chemical companies — seeking to influence it. Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics and OpenSecrets.org, and Danielle Brian, who runs the Project on Government Oversight, talk to Bill about the importance of transparency to our democracy, and their efforts to scrutinize who’s giving money, who’s receiving it, and most importantly, what’s expected in return.

It’s a distressing milestone that you likely read about: On Friday, the average daily level of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere passed 400 parts per million — about 50 ppm over what scientists said was the “safe upper limit.” The gas, of course, is a byproduct of our fossil fuel economy, and is the key driver of climate change.

The amount of CO² in the atmosphere has increased dramatically since 1958, when the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii — the gold standard for measuring the gas — first began tracking levels. That year, the daily average was 316 ppm — since then, the level has increased by 26.5 percent.

And yet, Washington is doing very little to rein in CO² emissions and slow the climate change that’s already underway.

The Sunlight Foundation provides a glimpse into one possible reason for D.C.’s inaction. In a new chart, Sunlight graphed CO² levels alongside campaign donations from the oil and gas industry, and the mining industry, both of which make money on fossil fuels. As the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere has increased, so too has the flow of cash from these industries to politicians.

via Sunlight Foundation.

The donations reached an all-time high in 2010, the same year that senators came close but ultimately failed to pass a bipartisan climate bill that would have cut emissions. Their successors in the 112th Congress were much less ambitious. For the first time since 2003, when Senators McCain and Lieberman proposed the greenhouse gas cap-and-trade bill, not a single piece of cap-and-trade legislation was introduced. In fact, there were nearly as many bills seeking to bar legislators from regulating carbon dioxide as there were seeking to regulate it.

Author Francis Scott Fitzgerald in an undated photo. (AP Photo, File)

A good time, too, to be reminded of how the book’s depiction of conspicuous consumption during the Jazz Age of the 1920s — and the stark contrast between rich and poor — so parallel life in New York today, where, as The New York Times reported last year, “The poverty rate reached its highest point in more than a decade, and the income gap in Manhattan, already wider than almost anywhere else in the country, rivaled disparities in sub-Saharan Africa.”

Daisy Buchanan, the object of Gatsby’s desire, and her husband Tom would feel at home in the 1% world of overindulgence and profligacy. As Fitzgerald famously described them:

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

The hype around the new movie also reminded me of an unusual invitation that led to my own brush with the legend of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. It was in the fall of 1975, an odd, homely and poignant coda to their years of celebrity and luminescence, years that slipped too quickly into the wreckage of alcoholism and mental illness.

My friend Emily worked at and later owned the Francis Scott Key Book Shop in Washington, D.C., now gone but once a literary haven for bibliophiles and Georgetown society, who relied on the store for reading recommendations and gift suggestions. Adlai Stevenson had once lived in an apartment upstairs and it was a stop for many in government and politics, including secretaries of state, embassy diplomats and CIA operatives.

Christmas wtih F Scott, Zelda and Scottie Fitzgerald in an undated photo

Among the regulars was Scottie Lanahan Smith, F. Scott and Zelda’s daughter (and like her father, a distant cousin of the shop’s namesake, Francis Scott Key of “Star Spangled Banner” fame). A writer and journalist, Scottie had been married to a prominent Washington lawyer and was very much part of the social scene. At a book party one night, she told Emily and me that after long negotiations, the Catholic Church had finally agreed that F. Scott and Zelda could be laid to rest at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in nearby Rockville, Maryland, where his parents were buried.

This was big news. F. Scott Fitzgerald had died from a heart attack in 1940, only 44 years old, his career in decline, at the apartment of his lover, Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. Only 25 people, including Scottie, attended the funeral on a cold, wet winter’s day and his editor had to pay for six pallbearers to carry the body.

For various reasons — among them, Fitzgerald’s adulterous relationship with Graham and his notorious lifestyle during the Roaring ’20s – he was denied burial on St. Mary’s consecrated ground and placed instead in a Protestant cemetery a mile and a half away.

A St. Mary’s parishioner wrote more luridly, “By all accounts Fitzgerald was a fallen-away Catholic, married to a Protestant, a college drop-out, a drunk, an irresponsible child all his life, an exhibitionist, who with his wife became the poster couple for a lawless, bawdy, free living, sexually prolific, selfish, gluttonous, crime-driven and immoral time period…” Many of those adjectives could be applied to Gatsby and his friends; you have to wonder if the parishioner partly confused Fitzgerald with his fictional creations.

Less than eight years after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s death, Zelda Fitzgerald and eight other patients died horribly in a fire at a North Carolina sanitarium where she was under treatment. Zelda was 47, and despite their estrangement her casket was placed in Maryland with her husband’s.

Now, 35 years after Scott’s demise, the Catholic Church had relented and would allow their bodies to be moved to the grounds of St. Mary’s. “The church believed it important,” a monsignor told The Washington Post, “to consider his God-given talents and literary genius.”

Scottie promised Emily and me that we would be invited to the reinterment. She was as good as her word. I took a train down from New York City and on a crisp Friday morning in autumn we made the short drive from D.C. to Rockville.

The reburial was short and simple with at most a hundred or so onlookers in attendance. Priests officiated. I don’t recall if Scottie spoke at the ceremony, but I remember some words from Matthew Bruccoli, the great Fitzgerald scholar from the University of South Carolina. (As part of its comprehensive Fitzgerald collection, the school just made available online F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ledger, donated by Scottie, in which he kept a combination record of earnings and diary. It notes that in 1925, the year of publication, he received less than $2,000 for The Great Gatsby.)

That same St. Mary’s parishioner who so vividly described Scott’s alleged debauchery called the event “The Longest Irish Wake,” a reference, I assume, to the decades between death and the transfer of cemeteries. It certainly didn’t apply to the proceedings we witnessed or the reception afterward, which were briefer and more abstemious than any Irish wake I’ve ever attended, and seemed even further removed from the halcyon days when Scott and Zelda drank magnums of champagne among café society.

Cold cuts and soft drinks (and maybe some wine) were served in the church basement. There, a woman told Emily and me how she and her high school boyfriend would go to the grave at the Protestant cemetery and read to one another from Gatsby. And one of the gravediggers described to us how, when they exhumed the coffins, some wood had rotted on Scott’s and he could see through a hole the green plaid wool of his funeral suit.

Zelda and Fitzgerald's grave in Rockville, Maryland, inscribed with the final sentence of The Great Gatsby (Wikimedia Commons)

The premiere of the new movie has now tripled the number of visitors to the grave. “Some visitors leave mementos, most commonly flowers, spare change and liquor,” The Washington Post reports. “Aspiring authors leave pens, and admirers occasionally write handwritten notes. A top hat, adorned with a martini glass ribbon, is the most recent addition.”

Most important, engraved on Scott and Zelda’s tombstone, inevitably and as it should be, that perfect closing sentence from The Great Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Bill talks with David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, public health historians who’ve been taking on the chemical industry for years — writing about the hazards of industrial pollution and the neglect of worker safety — despite industry efforts to undermine them. Their latest book, Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children, is the culmination of 20 years of research. Markowitz and Rosner warn that, for young children, there’s no safe level of exposure to this dangerous toxin still lurking in millions of homes.

The authors discuss thwarted efforts to hold the lead industry accountable, failed attempts to find cheap solutions, and the cost to the future of our children. As long as the chemical industry and its powerful lobbies prevail in blocking efforts to reform outdated laws, Markowitz and Rosner say, we will continue to float in a soup of toxins — inhaling, drinking, and absorbing chemicals that we may learn, years later, have put us all in harm’s way.

Also on the show, Bill is joined by the heads of two independent watchdog groups keeping an eye on government as well as on powerful interests seeking to influence it. Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics and OpenSecrets.org, and Danielle Brian, who runs the Project on Government Oversight, talk to Bill about the importance of transparency to our democracy, and their efforts to scrutinize who’s giving money, who’s receiving it, and most importantly, what’s expected in return.

Learn more about the production team behind Moyers & Company.

In this March 29, 2013 photo, women walk past blighted row houses in Baltimore. The U.S. Census Bureau puts the number of Americans in poverty at levels not seen since the mid-1960s, while $85 billion in federal government spending cuts that began last month are expected to begin squeezing services for the poor nationwide. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

This is a tough moment in the fight against poverty.

Sequester is the latest chapter in a time-honored tradition of kicking the poor when they are down. A do-nothing Congress certainly isn’t going to do something about poverty without pressure from the grassroots. And it seems that the only way most of the mainstream media will pay attention to the more than 1 out of 3 Americans living below twice the poverty line — on less than $36,000 for a family of three — is if their lives make good fodder for tabloid television or play out in a courtroom drama.

That said, there are still plenty of people and groups fighting for real change, and plenty of ways you can get involved or stay engaged. I reached out to a handful of folks who dedicate their lives to fighting poverty in different ways. Here is what they asked people to do:

1.

From Sister Simone Campbell, Sisters of Social Service, Executive Director of NETWORK: “Support an increase in the minimum wage to more than $11 per hour.”

What people don’t know is that a large percentage of people living in poverty are workers who support their families on very small salaries. In fact, 57 percent of individuals and family members below the official poverty line either worked or lived with a working family member in 2011.

Pope Francis said on May 1, 2013, that all workers should make wages that allow them to live with their families in dignity. Contact your senators and representative and urge them to vote for a minimum wage (that is more than $11 an hour) and tipped minimum wage that reflect the dignity of ALL people.

2.

From the Coalition of Immokalee Workers: “Tell Publix: Help end sexual harassment, wage theft and forced labor in the fields — join the Fair Food Program today.” 

Until very recently, Florida’s fields were as famous for producing human rights violations — with countless workers suffering daily humiliation and abuse ranging from wage theft to sexual harassment and even forced labor — as they were for growing oranges and tomatoes.

Today, however, there is a new day dawning for farmworkers in Florida’s tomato fields. The CIW’s Fair Food Program is demanding a policy of zero tolerance for human rights abuses on tomato farms, and it’s working. The program sets the highest human rights standards in the fields today, including: worker-to-worker education on rights, a 24-hour complaint line and an effective complaint investigation and resolution process — all backed by market consequences for employers who refuse to respect their workers’ rights.

The White House recently called the exciting new program “one of the most successful and innovative programs” in the world today in the fight to uncover — and prevent — modern-day slavery; and just last week United Nations investigators called it “impressive” and praised its “independent and robust enforcement mechanism.”

As the veteran food writer Barry Estabrook put it, thanks to the Fair Food Program, the Florida tomato industry is on the path “from being one of the most repressive employers in the country… to becoming the most progressive group in the fruit and vegetable industry” today.

But we need your help to complete this transformation.

One of the country’s largest supermarket chains, Publix Super Markets, is refusing to support the Fair Food Program. Publix continues to buy tomatoes from growers in the old way, where workers have no access to the Fair Food Program’s proven protections. Rather than step up to the highest human rights standards, Publix continues to turn its back on the workers whose poverty helps fuel its record profits.

Tell Publix Super Markets CEO William Crenshaw to join the fight against human rights abuses in the U.S. tomato industry.

3.

From Ralph da Costa Nunez, President and CEO, Institute for Children, Poverty and Homelessness: “Make a Personal Commitment to Helping Homeless Families”

More than one-third of Americans who use shelters annually are parents and their children. In 2011, that added up to more than 500,000 people. Since 2007, family homelessness has increased by more than 13 percent. Indeed, there is a growing prevalence of child and family homelessness across America.

While it is important to track the federal, state and local policies that impact homelessness, we can’t forget about getting involved on a personal level with the growing numbers of families that are struggling since the Great Recession.

You can visit a local shelter, meet a homeless family and see first hand the damage poverty is doing to young mothers and children. Then, become a big brother or sister, a role model for these young families to help them dream again. You are meeting an immediate need while also helping to stem generational poverty.

You can also contact your local department of social services, United Way, or religious organization to find out where the need is in your community. Also, speak with the homeless liaison at your local school to see what needs they have identified in your neighborhood. There are many ways that you (and your children) can help families right in your community. Here are a few other ideas.

4.

From Dr. Deborah Frank, Founder and Principal Investigator, Children’s HealthWatch: “Fund the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) at the maximum authorized level”

Research by Children’s HealthWatch has shown that energy insecurity is associated with poor health, increased hospitalizations and risk of developmental delays in very young children, and that energy assistance can be effective in protecting children’s health.  The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) provides low-income households with assistance in paying their utility bills — particularly those that must spend higher proportions of their income on home energy. To be eligible for LIHEAP, families must have incomes at or below 150 percent of the federal poverty level — less than $35,000 annually for a family of four.

When Children’s HealthWatch compared children in families that do and do not receive LIHEAP assistance — after controlling for participation in SNAP and WIC — we found that children in families that received LIHEAP were less likely to be at risk of growth problems, more likely to have healthier weights for their age and less likely to be hospitalized when seeking care for acute medical problems.

As pediatricians and public health researchers, we at Children’s HealthWatch know that LIHEAP matters for the bodies and minds of young children. Even in these tough economic times, we believe it is critical that President Obama and Congress make a funding commitment that meets the heating and cooling needs of America’s youngest children.

But the president has proposed reducing funding for LIHEAP to $2.970 billion in his FY 2014 budget, down from $3.5 billion for the current fiscal year. (Even funding at the current level has left millions of households without the aid they need to cope with their home energy costs.) Please join the National Fuel Fund’s call to fund LIHEAP at $4.7 billion in FY2014. Although that level is insufficient to meet the full needs of vulnerable households, it will enable states to end a trend over the last few years of needing to reduce the number of households served, cut benefits, or both. Contact the president and your members of Congress today.

5.

Sarita Gupta, Executive Director, Jobs with Justice/American Rights at Work and Co-Director, Caring Across Generations: “Support of a living wage and basic labor protections for home care workers”

Caring Across Generations is a campaign that unites people to change the long-term care system that supports each of us, our family members and our neighbors, to live and age in our own homes and communities. One of the key ways we can strengthen this system is to protect the 2.5 million people working as care givers in the United States. With a projected future demand for an additional 1.3 million workers over the next decade, home care workers make up one of the largest occupations in the nation, yet many of them make below minimum wage.

In December 2011, at a White House ceremony surrounded by home care workers, employers and people who rely on personal care services, President Obama announced plans for new regulations that would at long last guarantee federal minimum wage and overtime protections for most home care aides. The moment capped decades of effort by advocates to revise the “companionship exemption,” which lumps professional care workers with teenage babysitters, excluding most home care aides from the basic labor protections that nearly all other American workers receive.

Following the White House announcement, the U.S. Department of Labor published draft regulations in the Federal Register. During the public comment period, the proposed rule received 26,000 comments with almost 80 percent in favor of providing home care workers with basic labor protections like minimum wage and overtime pay. But today, over a year after the public comment period closed, we are still waiting for a final rule to be announced.

Join Caring Across Generations and all of our partner organizations in the effort to push for basic minimum wage and overtime protections for care workers, and help us in our final push to ensure that the Obama Administration issues this long-awaited regulation to give 2.5 million care workers a path out of poverty. Visit www.caringacross.org to get involved with the campaign.

6.

 From Judith Lichtman, Senior Advisor, National Partnership for Women & Families: “Urge Congress to pass the Healthy Families Act (H.R. 1286/S.631) and a national paid leave program”

More than 40 million workers in this country — and more than 80 percent of the lowest-wage workers — cannot earn a single paid sick day to use when they get the flu or other common illnesses. Millions more cannot earn paid sick days to use when a child is sick.

For these workers and families, paid sick days can mean the difference between keeping a job and losing it, or keeping food on the table and going hungry. Nearly one-quarter of adults say they have lost a job or been threatened with job loss for needing a sick day. And, for the average worker without paid sick days, taking just 3.5 unpaid days off is equivalent to losing a month’s worth of groceries for their family. To make matters worse, the majority of new parents cannot take any form of paid leave of any length to care for a child, pushing many into debt and poverty. The United States is one of only a handful of countries that does not have a national paid leave standard of some kind.

In a nation that claims to value families, no worker should have to lose critical income or be pushed into poverty because illness strikes or a child or family member needs care.

Urge members of Congress to support the Healthy Families Act, legislation that would guarantee workers the right to earn paid sick days. And sign this petition calling on Congress to take up the national paid leave program workers and families urgently need.

7.

 From Tiffany Loftin, President, United States Student Association (USSA): “Increase regulation of private student loans and hold Sallie Mae accountable for its role in the student debt crisis.”

Throughout the Great Recession, only one type of household debt grew: student debt.

In April 2012, student debt surpassed the $1 trillion mark, and now students owe on average nearly $27,000 by the time they graduate. As student debt and student loan defaults escalate at an unsustainable pace, private student loan lenders continue to increase their profit margins.

Sallie Mae is the largest private student loan lender and one of the chief profiteers off of student debt, yet it faces minimal public scrutiny and accountability. With their sky-high interest rates, highly profitable government loan servicing contracts and predatory lending practices, they play a major role in keeping the American Dream out of reach for millions of borrowers.

Join USSA, the Student Labor Action Project (SLAP), Jobs with Justice/American Rights at Work, Common Cause, the American Federation of Teachers and others at the Sallie Mae shareholder meeting on May 30 in Newark, DE.

We’ll introduce a shareholder resolution asking Sallie Mae to be more transparent and accountable about its lobbying efforts, affiliations and executive bonus structure — all part of a corporate strategy to increase their bottom line at the financial expense of borrowers. Sign up to attend the join the shareholder action here.

8.

From Elizabeth Lower-Basch, Policy Coordinator, the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP): “Support Pathways Back to Work”

Even as the economy recovers, too many unemployed workers and individuals with low education and skill levels face a difficult job market. Nearly two out of five unemployed workers have been jobless for six months or more. 6.7 million youth are both out of work and out of school.

Subsidized and transitional jobs are a proven way to give unemployed workers the opportunity to earn wages, build skills and connect to the labor market, while also giving businesses an incentive to hire new employees when they might not be able to do so otherwise.

President Obama’s FY14 budget blueprint calls for the creation of a $12.5 billion Pathways Back to Work Fund that includes: investments in subsidized employment opportunities, support services for the unemployed and low-income adults, summer and year-round employment opportunities for low-income youth and other work-based employment strategies with demonstrated effectiveness.

Please share this letter with nonprofits, businesses or other organizations and ask them to sign on to  join us in thanking President Obama for his support of subsidized and transitional jobs in the FY2014 budget, and asking the President and Congress to work together to ensure that the Pathways Back to Work Fund becomes law!  (This sign on letter is only for organizations, but individuals are also encouraged to ask their Members of Congress to support the Pathways Back to Work Fund — click the “reintroduce” buttons here and here.)

9.

From Marci Phillips, Director of Public Policy and Advocacy, National Council on Aging: “Invest in the Older Americans Act”

The Older Americans Act encompasses a range of programs that enable seniors to remain healthy and independent, in their own homes and communities, and out of costly institutions.  Services include healthy meals, in-home care, transportation, benefits access, caregiver support, chronic disease self-management, job training and placement and elder abuse prevention.

Funding has not kept pace with the growth in need or numbers, and recent cuts before the sequester hit have further eroded investments in key services. About 10,000 people turn 65 each day, and those over 85 are the fastest growing segment of the aging population.

One in three seniors is economically insecure. Social Security accounts for at least 90 percent of the income of more than one-third of older adults, and there has been a 79 percent increase in the threat of hunger among seniors over the past decade. The average duration of unemployment for people 55 and older is almost 50 weeks — longer than any other age group. Over 75 percent of all older adults have at least two chronic conditions, and the average Medicare household spends $4,500 on out-of-pocket health care costs.

There is a real need to increase funding for Older Americans Act programs like Meals on Wheels and in-home care. Please share your stories of cuts affecting seniors, so we can share them with Congress and the Administration and protect investments in the Older Americans Act.

10.

From Rebecca Vallas, Staff Attorney/Policy Advocate, Community Legal Services

“Tell Congress NO CUTS to Social Security and SSI through the Chained CPI”

While the “chained CPI” is often referred to as just a technical change, in truth it’s a benefit cut for millions of seniors, people with disabilities and their families who rely on the Social Security system to meet their basic needs. Social Security retirement, disability and survivors benefits and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) serve as a vital lifeline, making up a significant percentage of total family income for many workers and families.

The average yearly benefit for the lowest quintile of earners receiving retirement benefits in 2010 was $10,206 — and that represented 94 percent of their family income. Social Security Disability and SSI benefits are incredibly modest as well. The average SSDI benefit is about $1,100 per month in 2013, and the average SSI benefit is less than $550 per month. And for most disabled workers receiving Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI), their benefits make up most or all of their income. Even the maximum SSI benefit ($710 in 2013) is just three-fourths of the federal poverty level for a single person, and a quarter of SSDI beneficiaries live in poverty.

The amount a person gets in Social Security or SSI benefits is adjusted annually based on the Social Security Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA). The chained CPI would slow the increase in the Social Security COLA, cutting benefits and eroding the purchasing power of seniors, people with disabilities and their families. Cuts under the chained CPI add up significantly over time. Since the effect of the chained CPI is cumulative, it would be especially hard on people with disabilities, since they typically begin receiving benefits at a younger age than retirees.

The chained CPI is not a more accurate measure of inflation for seniors and people with disabilities. It is based on a concept called the “substitution effect” — which assumes that when the price of one good goes up, a consumer will substitute a lower-cost alternative in its place (e.g., when the price of steak goes up, a person will buy hamburger instead). For Social Security and SSI beneficiaries who are struggling to make ends meet as it is, there’s no room for substitution — and no room for benefit cuts. Benefit cuts under the chained CPI would push beneficiaries to make impossible choices such as not paying the gas bill to afford the water bill, taking half a pill instead of a whole pill, or eating two meals per day instead of three to afford the cost of a copay on a needed medication.

Low-income seniors and people with severe disabilities are already struggling and can’t afford cuts. Send this email to Congress to tell them NO on the chained CPI, and to keep Social Security cuts out of any budget plan. For AARP’s chained CPI calculator, click here.

11.

From Jim Weill, President, Food Research and Action Center:

“Tell Congress: Increase, Don’t Cut SNAP (Food Stamp) Benefits”

SNAP is a great program — boosting food security, health and nutrition and lifting millions out of poverty and millions of others out of deep poverty. But as a National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine expert committee just found, for most families benefits simply aren’t enough to afford a healthy diet for the month. This means that the program isn’t doing as much for food security, poverty reduction, child development, disease prevention and health care cost containment, as it could. And despite a series of Pinocchio-inspired political attacks on the program in the 2012 election season and in this year’s run-up to SNAP reauthorization as part of the Farm Bill, public support for the program is high: 73 percent of voters believe the program is important to the country; 70 percent say cutting it is the wrong way to reduce government spending; and 77 percent say the government should be spending more (43 percent) or the same (34 percent) on SNAP. This support crosses parties, demographic groups and rural, urban and suburban lines.

Here’s what you can do: Tell your representative and senators that the right course for the nation is to improve food stamp benefits (and support at least the temporary benefit boost the President has proposed) and that they must oppose any SNAP cuts being considered by the Agriculture Committees in the “Farm Bill.”

12.

From Debbie Weinstein, Executive Director, Coalition on Human Needs:

“Tell Congress to stop harmful cuts to anti-poverty programs now”

Across the country, federal “sequestration” cuts (aka mindless automatic reductions) are closing Head Start programs weeks early and canceling summer programs for poor 3 to 5 year old children; some Head Start centers are closing altogether or dropping children. Seniors are losing home-delivered meals or homemaker services that allow them to remain at home instead of being pushed into nursing homes. The long-term jobless are losing 10 to 20 percent of their meager benefits; in Maine, they decided to cut all unemployed people off of assistance 9 weeks early. 140,000 fewer families will get rental housing vouchers, despite waiting for help for years, which will contribute to rising family homelessness. Education is being cut, from pre-school to the Federal Work-Study Program (formerly “College Work-Study”) that helps students finance college through part-time employment. In Michigan, they are eliminating a $137 back-to-school clothing allowance for 21,000 poor children.

These cuts are wrong and foolish any way you slice it — they keep people poor, cost jobs and stall economic growth for everyone.

Send this email to your representative and senators and join hundreds of thousands who are fed up that Congress would ignore these problems while fixing just one thing — inconvenient delays at airports. Also, for weekly summaries of the impact of these sequester cuts, click here.

Standing for Communities: ‘The Power of Collective’ (from the Marguerite Casey Foundation via Equal Voice News)

Greg Kaufmann is a Nation contributor covering poverty in America. His work has also appeared on Common Dreams, Alternet, Tikkun.org, NPR.org, CBSNews.com and MichaelMoore.com. He serves as an adviser for the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

What do words mean in a post-9/11 world? Apart from the now clichéd Orwellian twists that turn brutal torture into mere enhanced interrogation, the devil is in the details. Robert MacLean is a former air marshal fired for an act of whistleblowing. He has continued to fight over seven long years for what once would have passed as simple justice: getting his job back. His is an all-too-twenty-first-century story of the extraordinary lengths to which the U.S. government is willing to go to thwart whistleblowers.

First, the government retroactively classified a previously unclassified text message to justify firing MacLean. Then it invoked arcane civil service procedures, including an “interlocutory appeal” to thwart him and, in the process, enjoyed the approval of various courts and bureaucratic boards apparently willing to stamp as “legal” anything the government could make up in its own interest.

And yet here’s the miracle at the heart of this tale: MacLean refused to quit, when ordinary mortals would have thrown in the towel. Now, with a recent semi-victory, he may not only have given himself a shot at getting his old job back, but also create a precedent for future federal whistleblowers. In the post-9/11 world, people like Robert MacLean show us how deep the Washington rabbit hole really goes.

The Whistle Is Blown

Robert MacLean Federal Law Enforcement Training Center graduation oath on October 22, 2001. Credit: Wikicommons.

It was then that he decided to blow the whistle, hoping that public pressure might force the TSA to reinstate the marshals’ flights. So MacLean talked to a reporter, who broadcast a story criticizing the TSA’s decision and, after 11 members of Congress joined in the criticism, it reversed itself. At this point, MacLean had not been identified as the source of the leak and so carried on with his job.

A year later, he appeared on TV in disguise, criticizing the TSA dress code and its special boarding policies, which he believed allowed marshals to be easily identified by other passengers. This time, the TSA recognized his voice and began an investigation that revealed he had also released the 2003 text message. He was fired in April 2006. Although the agency had not labeled that message as “sensitive security information” (SSI) when it was sent in 2003, in August 2006, months after MacLean’s firing, it issued a retroactive order stating that the text’s content was indeed SSI.

A Whistleblower’s Catch-22

That disclosing the contents of an unclassified message could get someone fired for disclosing classified information is the sort of topsy-turvy situation which could only exist in the post-9/11 world of the American national security state.

Under the 1989 Whistleblower Protection Act (WPA), a disclosure prohibited by law negates whistleblower protections. That, of course, makes it in the government’s interest to define disclosure as broadly as possible and to classify as much of its internal communications for as long as it possibly can. No wonder that in recent years the classification of government documents has soared, reaching a record total of 92,064,862 in 2011.

Officially, the U.S. government recognizes only three basic levels of classification: confidential, secret, and top secret. Since 9/11, however, various government agencies have created multiple freestyle categories of secrecy like “SSI,” “Law Enforcement Sensitive,” “Sensitive But Unclassified,” and the more colorful “Eyes Only.” All of these are outside the normal codification system; all are hybrids that casually seek to incorporate the full weight of the formal law. There are currently 107 designations just for “sensitive” information. In addition to those labels, there exist more than 130 sets of extra “handling requirements” that only deepen the world of government secrecy.

At issue for MacLean was not only the retroactive classification of a text message already in the public domain, but what classified could possibly mean in an era when everything related to the national security state was slipping into the shadows. Such questions are hardly semantic or academic. MacLean’s case hinges on how they are answered.

The case against Army Private Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks is, for example, intimately tied up in them. The military hides behind classification to block access to Manning’s “public” trial. With WikiLeaks, despite more than 100,000 U.S. State Department diplomatic cables being available to anyone anywhere on the web, the government continues to insist that they remain “classified” and cannot even be rereleased in response to requests. Potential federal employees were warned to stay away from the cables online, and the State Department even blocked TomDispatch from its staff to shield them from alleged WikiLeaks content (some of which was linked to and discussed, but none of which was actually posted at the site).

With author Tony Shaffer, the government retroactively classified its own account of why he was given the Bronze Star and his standard deployment orders to Afghanistan after he published an uncomplimentary book about American actions there. The messy case of alleged “hacktivist” Barrett Brown includes prosecution for “disclosing” classified material simply by linking to it at places where it had already been posted online; and, while still at the State Department, I was once accused of the same thing by the government.

In MacLean’s case, over a period of seven years, the legality of the TSA firing him for using an only-later-classified text was upheld. Legal actions included hearings before administrative judges, the Merit Systems Protections Board twice, that interlocutory appeal, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The sum of these decisions amid a labyrinth of judicial bureaucracies demands the use of the term Kafkaesque. MacLean, so the general judgment went, should have known that the text message he planned to leak was a classified document, even when it wasn’t (yet). As a result, he should also have understood that his act would not be that of a whistleblower alerting the public to possible danger, but of a criminal risking public safety by exposing government secrets. If that isn’t the definition of a whistleblower’s catch-22, what is?

What such a twisted interpretation by the various courts, boards, and bodies meant was chillingly laid out in an amicus brief on behalf of MacLean filed by the United States Office of Special Counsel (a small, lonely U.S. government entity charged with protecting whistleblowers):

“Whistleblowers should not have to guess whether information that they reasonably believe evidences waste, fraud, abuse, illegalities or public dangers might be later designated as SSI [unclassified sensitive security information] and therefore should not be disclosed. Rather than making the wrong guess, a would-be whistleblower will likely choose to remain silent to avoid risking the individual’s employment.”

Seven Years Later…

In 2011, five years after he had been fired as an air marshal, MacLean’s case finally reached the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Two full years after that, in April 2013, the court handed down a decision that may yet provide justice for Robert MacLean — and for future whistleblowers. While awkwardly upholding previous decisions that the government can indeed retroactively classify information, even documents in categories like SSI that exist outside the government’s official framework for classification and secrecy, the court tackled a more basic question: Was Robert MacLean a whistleblower anyway, entitled to protection for his act of conscience?

Here lies the conflict at the heart of just about every whistleblower case — between the public’s right (and need) to know and the (at times legitimate) need for secrecy. The government typically argues that individuals should not be allowed to decide for themselves what remains secret and what doesn’t, or chaos would result. At the same time, in a post-9/11 world of increasing secrecy, the loss of the right to know, and the massive over-classification of documents, the “conflict” has become ever more one-sided. If everything can be considered a classified secret document too precious for Americans to know about, and nothing classified can be disclosed, then the summary effect is that nothing inside the government can ever be shown to the public.

The court found that while the Transportation Safety Administration could legally apply any classification it wanted to information any time it wanted, even retroactively, simply slapping on such a label did not necessarily prohibit disclosure. Absent an actual law in MacLean’s case mentioning SSI, a term created bureaucratically, not congressionally, there could be no Whistleblower Protection Act-excepting prohibition. In other words, MacLean could still be a whistleblower.

One of MacLean’s lawyers, Tom Devine, told me the decision “restored enforceability for the Whistleblower Protection Act’s public free speech rights. It ruled that only Congress has the authority to remove whistleblower rights. Agency-imposed restraints are not relevant for WPA rights.”

“With this precedential decision,” MacLean explained to me, “agencies can no longer cancel out Whistleblower Protection Act rights with their semi-secret markings like SSI, Law Enforcement Sensitive, etcetera.”

In a concurring opinion, United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit Judge Evan Wallach was even clearer: “Mr. MacLean presented substantial evidence that he was not motivated by personal gain but by the desire to protect the public… I concur to emphasize that the facts alleged, if proven, allege conduct at the core of the Whistleblower Protection Act.”

MacLean’s case now returns to the Merit Systems Protection Board. The board is a complex piece of bureaucracy inside the already complicated federal government personnel system. In simple terms, it is supposed to be a place to appeal personnel actions, such as alleged unfair hirings and firings. It thus serves as a kind of watchdog over the sprawling federal human resources empire. The Board now has the court-ordered specific charge to “determine whether Mr. MacLean’s disclosure qualifies for WPA protection.”

Note as well that this case could continue without end for years more, traveling on “appeal” back through the federal judicial bureaucracy and the courts. And remember that this, too, is an advantage to a government that wants ever less known about itself. If, as a federal employee, you are watching a case like MacLean’s (or Thomas Drake’s, or Franz Gayle’s, or Morris Davis’s, or John Kiriakou’s, or even my own small version of this), then you can’t help noticing that the act of whistleblowing could leave you: a) out on your ear; b) prosecuted for a criminal act and/or c) with your life embroiled for years in the intricacies of your own never-ending case. None of this is exactly an encouragement to federal employees to blow that whistle.

Whistleblowers and Secrecy

Threats to whistleblowers abound, so any positive step, however minimalist or reversible, is important. Entering the White House pledging to head the most transparent administration in history, Barack Obama has, in fact, gone after more national security whistleblowers, often using the draconian Espionage Act, than all previous administrations combined.

His Justice Department has repeatedly tried to prosecute whistleblowers, crudely lumping them in with actual spies and claiming they endanger Americans (and sometimes “the troops”) by their actions. In addition, through the ongoing case of Berry v. Conyers, Obama has sought to expand the definition of “national security worker” to potentially include thousands of additional federal employees. Many employees who occupy truly sensitive jobs in the intelligence community (for example, real-world spies at the CIA) are exempt from being granted whistleblower status. They also cannot appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board if fired. By seeking to expand that exemption to a significantly larger group of people who may work at some federal agency, but in non-sensitive positions, Obama is also functionally moving to shrink the pool of potential whistleblowers. In Berry v. Conyers, for example, the persons Obama seeks to exempt as occupying sensitive jobs are merely an accounting technician and a commissary worker at an Air Force base. Neither of them even hold security clearances.

What happens with MacLean’s case potentially affects every future whistleblower. If the mere presence of a pseudo-classification on an item, even applied retroactively, negates whistleblower protections, it means dark days ahead for the right of the citizenry to know what the government is doing (or how it’s misbehaving) in its name. If so, no act of whistleblowing could be considered protected, since all the government would have to do to unprotect it is classify whatever was disclosed retroactively and wash its hands of the miscreant. Federal employees, not a risk-taking bunch to begin with, will react accordingly.

This is what gives MacLean’s case special meaning. While the initial decision on his fate will occur in the bowels of the somewhat obscure Merit Systems Protections Board, it will set a precedent that will surely find its way into higher courts on more significant cases. Amid a lot of technical legal issues, it all boils down to something very simple: Should whistleblower protections favor the conscience of a concerned federal employee willing to risk his job and the freedom to inform the public, or should they dissolve in the face of an unseen bureaucrat’s (retroactive) pseudo-classification decision?

Procedurally, there are many options ahead for MacLean’s case, and the government will undoubtedly contest each tiny step. Whatever happens will happen slowly. This is exactly how the government has continually done its dirty work post-9/11, throwing monkey wrenches in the gears of the legal system, twisting words, and manipulating organizations designed to deliver justice in order to deny it.

MacLean smiles at this. “I did seven years so far. I can do seven more if they want. There’s too much at stake to just give up.”

Copyright 2013 Peter Van Buren

A gun-rights activist carries his rifle during a "National Day of Resistance" rally in Salt Lake City, Utah on Saturday, Feb. 23, 2013. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

About the same time that man’s post showed up on the web, we saw the startling survey from Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind polling organization, the one finding that nearly three in ten registered voters agree with the statement: “In the next few years, an armed revolution might be necessary in order to protect our liberties.” Three out of ten! That includes 44 percent of Republicans, 27 percent of independents and 18 percent of Democrats.

That poll also noted that a quarter of Americans think that facts about the Newtown shootings “are being hidden,” and an additional 11 percent “are unsure.” As Sahil Kapur wrote at Talking Points Memo:

“The eye-opening findings serve as a reminder that Americans’ deeply held beliefs about gun rights have a tendency to cross over into outright conspiracy theories about a nefarious government seeking to trample their constitutional rights — paranoia that pro-gun groups like the National Rifle Association have at times helped stoke.”

Paranoia and just plain meanness. On May 8, Christina Wilkie reported in The Huffington Post that Connecticut Carry, a pro-gun lobbying group, had issued a press release detailing the arrest record and financial difficulties of Neil Heslin, father of one of the children murdered at Newtown’s Sandy Hook Elementary School. Connecticut Carry accused him of “profiting off of the tragedy.” Their release read, in part, “Mr. Heslin has found the employment he has needed for so long lobbying against the rights of the citizens of Connecticut and the rest of the country,” and the group implied that Heslin had received payment from Mike Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which adamantly denies anything of the sort. Similar smears have been attempted against other Newtown parents.

This hate in our country — egged on by fervid ideologues and profiteering fearmongers — is palpable, stirred by years of irresponsible invective against public officials and agencies. Gun sales are going through the roof. In a sense, so much anger and so much disillusionment are understandable in a country where the gap between rich and poor is so vast that an environment is created in which brooding resentment is easily hatched. Sure, there is corruption in government and business — crony capitalism is the offspring of it — and when the public sees plutocrats who regard politicians as the hired help, and Washington as the feeding trough, it’s natural to fear that we are becoming vassals; subjects rather than citizens.

But a violent uprising, with all the bloodshed and chaos that would follow? Armed revolt is when people are so desperate they kill and are killed. Who would wash the blood from the streets, restore order after the chaos and bury the dead? Have we lost our minds?

There is an alternative to force, blood, and suffering. It’s called democracy. Yes, there is plenty of injustice, greed and sheer wickedness. But don’t mourn the fact — organize. Stop wringing your hands and berating real and imaginary foes. Join up with others, stand up to the exploiters, throw the rascals out. If Congress and the White House are crooked and out of touch, come Election Day, you make sure they lose. And on all the other days, when you can, you work for change and demand a say.

It’s not easy, but slow, hard and demanding – it takes long and patient activism to make democracy work. But with committed people organized and united toward common goals of social justice and accountability, victories are possible. Drop your weapons and celebrate that we live in a country where peaceful change is still possible. Make democracy work.

One of Ganz’s themes is the crucial role narrative plays in social movements. “I think it’s particularly important because doing the kind of work that movements do requires risk-taking, uncertainty, going up against the odds. And that takes a lot of hope,” Ganz tells Bill. “And so where do you go for hopefulness? Where do you go for courage? You go to those moral resources that are found within narratives and within identity work and within traditions.”

Producer: Jessica Wang. Editor: Sikay Tang. Associate Producer: Reniqua Allen.
Photographer: Dale Robbins.

In particular, LaForest and Janis talk about the strength of human stories to power a movement, as part of a multifaceted approach that includes research, communication, and political involvement.

“You have a struggling housekeeper in a hotel who cleans 25 rooms in a day and barely puts food on the table. The idea of her being able to fight for better working conditions — a union in her hotel, a living wage — that’s going to move her a lot more than just the theory of being able to have a voice in her democracy,” explains Janis. “Although, when she finds her voice, it’s just the most incredible, empowering thing. And it’s overpowering when she stands up before a city council, or she stands up before press and tells her story.”

Using stories from real people “puts a face to the organizing that happens on the ground. It makes very real the people and the material conditions that they’re going through,” says LaForest. “It introduces neighbors to each other. It establishes trust. It’s something that really starts to build the power and a collective voice of a community, in a way that facts and figures and being able to put up front statistics just doesn’t get to.”

Interview Producer: Gail Ablow. Intro Producer: Robert Booth. Editor: Rob Kuhns.
Photographer: Dale Robbins.

Marshall Ganz is a social movement legend who dropped out of Harvard to become a volunteer during Mississippi’s Freedom Summer of 1964. He then joined forces with Cesar Chavez of the United Farmworkers, protecting workers who picked crops for pennies in California’s fields and orchards. Ganz also had a pivotal role organizing students and volunteers for Barack Obama’s historic 2008 presidential campaign. Now 70, he’s still organizing across the United States and the Middle East, and back at Harvard, teaching students from around the world about what it takes to beat Goliath.

Later on the broadcast, economic equality advocates Rachel LaForest, executive director of Right to the City, and Madeline Janis, co-founder and national policy director of Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, discuss with Bill how social action can change both policy and lives. Janis led the fight for a living wage in Los Angeles; LaForest fights for fair and affordable housing across the country.

Learn more about the production team behind Moyers & Company.

As Executive Director from 1993 to 2012, Janis lead Los Angeles’ living wage campaign, transformed the city’s sanitation system, and helped pass one of the country’s most sweeping anti-pollution and anti-poverty measures at the Port of Los Angeles, instituting a “clean trucks” program that has improved air quality and raised the standard of living for nearly 16,000 truck drivers. Janis’ groundbreaking approaches to economic development and community empowerment also helped defeat Wal-Mart’s efforts to construct — exempt from all state and local regulation — a 60-acre shopping complex in Inglewood, CA.

On the national level, LAANE is proposing a new policy to the Federal Department of Transportation ensuring that all new U.S. investment in public transportation, such as trains and buses, also create U.S jobs, particularly for veterans and the disabled. Janis served as an appointed commissioner on the board of L.A.’s Community Redevelopment Agency from 2002 until 2012.

Before founding LAANE, Janis was the executive director of the Central American Refugee Center. Under her leadership, the organization fought civil rights abuses by the L.A. Police Department against Central American immigrants, and helped tens of thousands of people achieve legal immigrant status. Janis is a graduate of Amherst College in Massachusetts and UCLA Law School.

The organization’s current “Homes for All” campaign explores solutions to problems suffered by urban and suburban communities in the wake of the mortgage crisis. Prior to joining Right to the City in 2011, LaForest held leadership positions with progressive labor organizations, including Director of Organizing at the Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100, the first Public Policy Director for Actors Equity, and Lead Organizer/Co-campaign Director at Jobs with Justice.

While with the TWU, LaForest played a prominent role during the New York City transit strike in 2005. She was a leader in the New York Unemployment Project campaign at Jobs with Justice, which resulted in a $2 per hour increase in the state minimum wage. Born into a family of activists, LaForest’s mother and maternal grandparents were union organizers and tenant activists in New York City. Her father, a Haitian immigrant, fought against the Haitian dictatorship.

In college, LaForest co-founded the Student Liberation Action Movement (SLAM), a student organization working to prevent the City University of New York from raising tuition to levels that would prevent low-income students from getting a college education.

LaForest is a graduate of Hunter College of The City University of New York, and lives in New York City.

There are many ways corporations and financial interests can exercise influence in Washington. Some donate money to political campaigns while others hire lobbyists to be their megaphones to legislator ears. But information flows the other way, too. And since the financial crisis, details about the laws and regulations being hashed out behind closed doors is more valuable than ever.

A story from the Washington Post this week looks at the growing popularity of “political intelligence” firms that sell analysis of federal actions, and the likely policy ramifications of those actions, to interested parties. Oftentimes, the clients are investors in a company that will be affected by a policy decision or a proposed regulation. Some firms even coordinate meetings and conference calls with congressional staff members in which they share what they know about relevant legislation.

The Post illustrates this with an example: Capitol Street, a political intelligence firm specializing in health policy, recently set up a private conference call between a member of Sen. Orrin Hatch’s staff (R-Utah) and investors in Humana, a major healthcare company. The staffer told the investors that the odds were improving that Congress would make a decision related to Medicare that would help insurance companies. That same morning, the level of speculative trading on Humana’s stock was nearly 10 times more than it had been on any day in the previous two weeks. Lawmakers and federal regulators have noted that this sort of politically informed investing can look suspicious, and investigators recently issued subpoenas in connection with a different spike in trading after a D.C.-based investment-research firm correctly predicted a change in policy.

In a Washington Post video, reporter Jia Lynn Yang says many on the Hill don’t see what they’re doing as illegal or problematic. “In their minds, they talk to constituents all day, they talk to lobbyists, they talk to reporters — they’re just saying what they would say to these same people. And so in their mind, this information is actually public because it’s available and they’re just trying to be transparent about it. And for the investors, it’s potentially very valuable. Our story found that if people [investors in Humana] had actually traded on these options that morning, they could have made millions of dollars right off the bat from that.”

The power that political intelligence has to move markets has made it a $400 million a year industry and a hot topic in both political and financial circles. Wayne State University law professor Peter Henning wrote last month in the NYT Dealbook blog about the fine line between political intelligence and insider trading.

[T]rying to regulate firms that seek government information is difficult because of the lack of a definition of what constitutes “political intelligence” that would distinguish it from the ordinary analysis of governmental operations. A report issued by the Government Accountability Office points out just how hard it would be to try to adopt workable rules for the industry whose sole purpose is to gather such information.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has announced plans to reintroduce legislation that would require political intelligence firms to register like lobbyists and to disclose their contacts with government officials. “After digging up information in the halls of Congress and nosing around the federal bureaucracy, the political intelligence industry is profiting from non-public government information that Main Street does not have and that Wall Street is secretly buying. These nuggets can turn into a potential gold mine for those who pay for it,” Grassley wrote, referring to political intelligence as “Washington’s secret merry-go-round” of information.

Grassley had previously pushed for a registration requirement as part of the 2012 Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act that was dropped from the watered-down version that was passed last April.

Veteran organizer Marshall Ganz is is credited with devising the successful grassroots organizing model and training for Barack Obama’s winning 2008 presidential campaign. (AP Photo/Stephan Savoia)

Why tell stories?

Storytelling is one of the most powerful tools organizers can use to unite a movement. Your story is the “why” of organizing — the art of translating values into action through stories. It is an ongoing discussion process through which individuals, communities and nations construct their identity, make choices and inspire action. Each of us has a compelling story to tell that can move others.

Two ways to engage

Leaders employ both the “head” and the “heart” in order to mobilize others to act effectively on behalf of shared values. In other words, they engage people in interpreting why they should change their world — their motivation — and how they can act to change it — their strategy.

Many leaders are good at the analysis side of public speaking: They focus on presenting a good argument or strategy. Alternatively, other leaders tell their personal story, often a tale of heartbreak that educates us about the challenge but doesn’t highlight the potential for successfully realizing the end goal.

An effective story of self has to have elements of both the analytical and the emotional. It is a story that involves the head and the heart — and moves people to use their hands and feet in action.

Action is inhibited by inertia, fear, self-doubt, isolation and apathy. Action is facilitated by urgency, hope, knowing you can make a difference, solidarity and anger. Stories mobilize emotions that urge us to take action and help us overcome emotions that inhibit us from action.

The key to storytelling is understanding that values inspire action through emotion. We experience our values emotionally — they are what actually move us to act. Because stories allow us to express our values not as abstract principles, but as lived experience, they have the power to move others to action as well.

Finding your story of self’s “choice point”

A story of self tells why we have been called to serve. It expresses the values or experiences that call each person to take leadership on a given issue.

The key focus is on choice points: moments in our lives when values are formed because of a need to choose in the face of great uncertainty. When did you first care about being heard, or learn that you were concerned about the issue on which you want to take action? Why? When did you feel you had to do something about it? Why did you feel you could? What were the circumstances? What specific choice did you make?

The three key elements of storytelling structure:
Challenge — Choice — Outcome

A plot begins with an unexpected challenge that confronts a character with an urgent need to pay attention, to make a choice — a choice for which he or she is unprepared. The choice yields an outcome, and the outcome teaches a moral.

Because we can empathetically identify with the character, we can “feel” the moral. We not only hear about someone’s courage; we can also be inspired by it.

The story of the character and their effort to engage around values engages the listener in their own challenge, choice and outcome relative to the story. Each story should include all three elements. It’s not enough to say, “I was scared.” You need to say, “I was very scared, I needed to decide, and when I did, I learned it was possible.” Challenge, choice, outcome.

Incorporating challenge, choice and outcome in your own story

There are some key questions you need to answer as you consider the choices you have made and the path you have taken that brought you to this point in time as a leader. Once you identify the specific relevant choice point, dig deeper by answering the following questions.

Challenge: What was the specific challenge you faced? Why did you feel it was a challenge? What was so challenging about it? Why was it your challenge?

Choice: What was the specific choice you made? Why did you make the choice you did? Where did you get the courage (or not)? Where did you get the hope (or not)? How did it feel?

Outcome: What happened as a result of your choice? What hope can it give us? How did the outcome feel? Why did it feel that way? What did it teach you? What do you want to teach us? How do you want us to feel?

A word about challenge: Sometimes people see the word “challenge” and think that they need to describe the misfortunes of their lives. Keep in mind that a struggle might be one of your own choosing — a high mountain you decided to climb as much as a hole you managed to climb out of. Any number of things may have been a challenge to you and be the source of a good story to inspire others.

Tips

If you’re having trouble getting started, here are some factors that may have contributed to your current choice to take leadership on your issue.

Click to watch activists share their stories of self.

Life choices: Schools you went to, the career you chose, your partner and family, your hobbies, interests and talents, challenges you’ve overcome

Organizer experiences: Role models, your first experience organizing, your first awareness of the issue on which you want to take action

Focus on one key story — one event or one place or one important relationship. Take some time to think about the elements of your story in the context of the challenge, choice and outcome. In this case, the outcome might also be the thing you learned, in addition to what actually happened.

Remember, the purpose of telling your story of self is to begin to create common ground with your audience by sharing a story that reflects the values that brought you to work on your given issue, and where those values come from.

These tips for constructing your “story of self” are adapted from 350.org’s toolkit, which was compiled with help from Marshall Ganz and other organizing experts.

After working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Ganz joined Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in the fall of 1965, working on expanding the rights of underpaid farm workers. Following a 16-year career with the UFW, he began to work with other grassroots organizations, developing voter mobilization strategies for local, state and national campaigns.

In 1991, Ganz returned to Harvard, where he completed his undergraduate degree and went on to receive an MPA from the Kennedy School of Government and a Ph.D. in sociology.

Ganz is now a senior public policy lecturer at Harvard, and a founder of The Leading Change Network, a global community of organizers, educators, and researchers, working together to “build power for sustained democratic change.” His latest book, Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement, was published in 2009.

Each of us has a story that can move others. If there’s an issue you feel passionately about, the story of how you came to care about it could compel others to care as well. Consult our how-to guide for more on the art of translating values into action through stories, and share your own “story of self” below.
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