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 Friday 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.
]]> http://billmoyers.com/content/the-personal-is-political/feed/ 6 http://billmoyers.com/2013/05/09/a-new-spin-on-the-%e2%80%9creverse%e2%80%9d-revolving-door/ http://billmoyers.com/2013/05/09/a-new-spin-on-the-%e2%80%9creverse%e2%80%9d-revolving-door/#comments Thu, 09 May 2013 19:49:02 +0000 John Light http://billmoyers.com/?p=30852 Continue reading]]>

If you’re a regular visitor to BillMoyers.com, you’re already familiar with Washington’s revolving door – legislators and their staff members becoming lobbyists, and vice versa: lobbyists landing jobs on Capitol Hill. But you may not be aware of one of the newer and more questionable perks – those lobbyists receiving six-figure bonuses from their corporate bosses when they fly the coop for lower paying government jobs. To learn more, investigative reporter Lee Fang of The Nation spent days combing through congressional staff disclosure forms in the basement of the Cannon House Office Building and lived to tell the tale. We spoke with him about what he found.

“The real power is often derived at the staff level because they are the ones writing the laws and doing the work,” Fang said. “I think these bonuses provide an incentive for them to be more likely to be friendly, or to at least pick up the phone, when they’re contacted by their former associates.”

“A lot of people study conflicts of interest in Congress — why Congress constantly passes bills that are laden with giveaways and bailouts and special favors for big industry,” he said. “I think there’s a little bit too much of a focus on campaign contributions. There are many ways to curry favor in Congress.”

He reports:

Congressional staffers can earn as much as $170,000 as a federal employee, but such pay pales in comparison to what many have come to expect on K Street, where top lobbyists earn several million a year. The bonuses, which cut across industries, from defense contracting to broadcasting, and which can amount to several hundred thousand, help staffers to maintain the fixed costs associated with a lobbyist lifestyle.

This is emblematic of the cash culture of K Street, where salaries continue to climb as special interests seek power in Washington, says Jeff Connaughton, a former lobbyist and senior congressional staffer. To Connaughton, who chronicles the influence of big money in Congress in his 2012 book, The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins, bonuses paid to reverse revolving-door lobbyists must be judged on a case-by-case basis. Some, he said, are simply a share of profits earned during the previous year. But in some cases, bonuses are part of an effort by special interests to maintain influence on Capitol Hill.

“It strains common sense that when employers are giving employees who are about to enter government work these huge bonuses, that there isn’t a hope that there will be influence and access,” say Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, who compared the bonuses to how special interests seek access to politicians using campaign donations. “I think the main gist of the payment is the same,” notes Levinson. “It’s: ‘I hope when I’m pushing a piece of legislation, you’ll remember me with fondness.’” Read more »

Fang also told us his reporting would have been a lot easier if Congress hadn’t repealed part of the 2012 STOCK Act earlier this year. The provision required congressional staff financial disclosure forms to be made available for free online. After voting twice to delay implementation, the House and Senate voted quietly through unanimous consent to repeal the requirement in April. Fang says that’s problematic because it prevents the public from having easy access to records that show the money trail between the public and private sector.

Click the chart to zoom, or view the full report.

Workers making $12-or-less an hour say that they are scraping by. Often on public assistance, they find it difficult to afford basic necessities like rent, food, health care and utilities. Because of sequestration, pressure on government agencies to spend less money may add even more to their ranks.

The increasing number of low-wage jobs exacerbates the growing inequality gap between the richest and the poorest. As Jim Tankersley and Marjorie Censer report in The Washington Post, the disparity between CEO and government-contract worker pay is pronounced, particularly inside the Beltway.

The findings highlight inequality within the government contracting industry; as chief executives of major contractors rake in millions, many contract employees are struggling to get by, the report contends.

President Barack Obama fist-bumps AbilityOne custodian, Lawrence Lipscomb, in a federal office building. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza. (PRNewsFoto/AbilityOne, Pete Souza)

The area is home to many of the highest-paid contracting chief executives — the new Lockheed Martin CEO’s base salary alone is $1.38 million — and about 15 percent of low-wage contract workers, Demos estimates.

Stephen S. Fuller, director of George Mason University’s Center for Regional Analysis, said he has seen lower-wage jobs move over time from the federal workforce to contracted positions, particularly in the Washington area.

“Those were contracted out because they were cheaper,” he said, pointing to security and transportation jobs, among others. “The contract workers get fewer paid vacation days, fewer sick-leave [days]. They often work hourly, so you get what you pay for.”

Amy Traub, a senior policy analyst at Demos told the Post that “growing inequality and these larger, dead-end jobs are a national problem.” The report was announced Wednesday at an event at Washington, D.C.’s Union Station launching Good Jobs Nation, a new initiative started by a coalition of low-wage workers, labor, faith and community organizations calling on the Obama administration to help government-contracted workers enter the middle class by requiring better salaries and benefits .

Watch members of Good Jobs Nation at Wednesday’s D.C. event.

Though the U.S. Senate just supported a filibuster against a bipartisan amendment to expand background checks for gun purchasers, polls continue to show that 90 percent of Americans support this kind of expansion. That’s more Americans then the percentage who say they like apple pie (81 percent) or even baseball (67 percent). The rhetoric between the gun control groups and the NRA continues to be pretty predictable, but there are some voices in the middle that are reaching out to responsible gun owners — who they know support background checks and other policies — and they are finding a middle ground.

Sandy Hook Promise is one of those organizations. The powerful, emotional voices of families who have lost children to gun violence cannot be ignored, but their sensible, constructive approach to this is turning heads and moving the issue. Finding a way to speak to the middle doesn’t have to mean giving up your moral high ground. It just means realizing that what unites us is sometimes more important than what divides us. And that if we take a look at ourselves as parents, siblings, grandchildren and grandparents we can all agree that the majority of deaths by gun violence in this country are not the price we must pay for our freedoms, and there has to be a better way.

Tim Makris is a co-founder of Sandy Hook Promise, a non-profit organization formed in response to the Dec. 14 shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., which killed 20 children and six educators. The group was organized by friends and neighbors and has two main goals: to support members of the Newtown community and to “work to identify and implement holistic, common sense solutions” that will make us safer from similar acts of violence.

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.

Watch a preview of the show above, and also see a special extended clip in which Marshall Ganz challenges the notion of the ‘free market’ as an effective way to address our economic, political, and moral issues.

Adam Eidinger

Parents want to know if the food that they’re feeding their children has been genetically modified. They do not want to bring their children into harm’s way, so they will avoid protests where they have reason to believe that the police will be heavy-handed. Anyone can occupy a public street corner and hold up a sign, but they must first feel empowered and unafraid to stand in the limelight.

Protesters at the Stone Soup FDA protest in Washington, D.C. Photo Credit: MA Right to Know

Is a potluck protest with parents and children the new face of the protest movement? Well, yes and no. There are many ways to fight for justice — with kindness as well as traditional forms of resistance. It’s like a to0l kit, and sometimes a gentle touch can go a lot further than a big push.

Saru Jayaraman

Historically, the workers who organized were mostly working class, white and in big factory-floor-type industries. Of course, to a working class white guy — not just Alinsky but most of the political figures who have shaped the institutional left — organizing other working class white guys is the easiest default. There’s nothing wrong with organizing working class white people. There is, however, something quite wrong if those are the only communities we’re organizing. A broad-based and far-reaching progressive movement must have broad strategies and reach into every community in America.

Ironically, while low-wage workers, people of color and immigrant workers are often considered “unorganizable,” it was these workers clamoring to be organized that sparked the creation of Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United. Over the last twelve years we at ROC have built a national restaurant workers’ organization with more than 10,000 members in 26 cities, 100 employer partners and several thousand consumer members. While we’ve won back millions of dollars in stolen tips and wages for workers, opened several worker-owned restaurants, trained thousands of low-wage workers in livable-wage job skills, published two dozen reports on the industry and won some policy changes, our biggest accomplishment has been to develop the leadership of women and men from all backgrounds – white, black, Latino, Asian, Arab, immigrant and non-immigrant – to lead this movement themselves.

The communities most often neglected as “unorganizable” are the critical canaries in the coal mine of American society. When women, people of color and immigrant workers aren’t paid a living wage, it drives down incomes and the economy for everyone. When low-wage restaurant workers don’t have access to paid sick days, they come to work and spread germs and everyone who eats out pays the price. If we are not only including but focusing our organizing efforts on poor people, communities of color, immigrants and women, then not only are we failing to build a broad and powerful left but we are also failing to include the perspectives of those most affected by the injustices we seek to fix.

Saru Jayaraman is co-founder and director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC-United) and author of Behind the Kitchen Door. She was featured on Moyers & Company in February 2013.

Marshall Ganz (Photo by Dale Robbins)

The core of a story is a plot, a moment of choice in which a protagonist is confronted by a challenge for which he or she is not prepared, but which he or she must nevertheless face, the outcome of which we take away as the “moral.” Why do we pay attention? Because it is in plot moments that we most fully experience the gift of agency as human beings – moments of real anxiety, to be sure, but also of exhilaration — when our choices matter most, but we are least prepared to make them. And because we identify empathetically with the protagonist, we not only “understand” the dilemma with our heads, but we experience the dilemma in our hearts. This is why our families, faith traditions, cultural traditions, organizations, movements and communities all teach through story.

Narrative is how we learn to make choices, how we learn to access the moral resources (hope, empathy, self worth) to respond mindfully and courageously to urgent challenges. As St. Augustine observed, it is one thing to “know” the good, but another to “love” it – and loving it calls forth action. Because values are emotional in content, they are sources not only of information about what we “ought” to do, but also of the motivation to do it. I say values, not interests, because while self-interest is sufficient to sustain the status quo, our values are sources of the courage to take the risks, make the commitments, and reach out to others that challenging the status quo requires.

By learning to tell a story of my calling — not my “career,” but my “calling” — I can communicate my values to others. By attending to the stories of others, and those we share with them, I can communicate values we share — a story of us. And by telling stories of the challenge to those values, the hope we can respond, and a path to action, we can inspire others to join us in action. Hope, however, is not the same as optimism. As Maimonides said, hope is belief in the plausibility of the possible, as opposed to the necessity of the probable. A realist recognizes that early in 2007 it was highly improbable a black man could be elected president, but it happened.

Marshall Ganz is a senior lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. As an organizer and strategist, he worked with the United Farm Workers for sixteen years, and played a pivotal role organizing students and volunteers for Barack Obama’s historic 2008 presidential campaign.

Bill McKibben (Photo credit: Toby Talbot, AP)

So, for instance, young people have been crucial leaders of this battle from the beginning, which makes a lot of sense. I’ll be dead before global warming gets to its absolute worst (though it’s already pretty bad — my home state of Vermont nearly washed away in Hurricane Irene). But if you’re 20 right now, with 60 or 70 years left on this earth, those chart lines of rising temperatures and rising sea levels will run over your life. It’s no wonder, then, that we’ve managed in a matter of weeks to get the fossil fuel divestment campaign up and running on more than 300 college campuses: there’s the same kind of deep moral and practical understanding that we last saw when young people faced the Vietnam-era draft — the stakes are that high.

But there are things that can be hard for young people — if you’re 22 right now, in our economy, an arrest record may not be the best thing for your resume. Past a certain age, however, what the hell are they going to do to you? So when we announced plans for mass civil disobedience to protest the Keystone pipeline in 2011, we asked older people in particular to step up. We didn’t ask the 1,253 arrestees (the most in any protest for 30 years) how old they were — that would be rude. But we did ask ‘who was president when you were born?’ And we were delighted when it turned out the biggest cohorts came from the Truman and FDR administrations. Elders were beginning to act like elders, and taking real pride in it.

The most profound leadership in the climate fight, of course, has come from the people most affected, here and around the world. “Frontline communities” feeling the brunt of climate change are doing the brunt of the work. And as global warming pushes those frontlines into ever more places, the fight will grow ever larger.

Bill McKibben is the author of a dozen books about the environment, beginning with The End of Nature in 1989, regarded as the first book for a general audience on climate change. He is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org.

“We need a new story, a new way of describing our economic challenges and our political challenges that emphasizes not this idea of what each individual competes with, but the ways in which we cooperate and collaborate with one another,” Ganz tells Bill.

Watch the full conversation between Marshall Ganz and Bill on this weekend’s Moyers & Company.

(AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

At the top of their list? JC Penney’s recently departed CEO Ron Johnson raked in an estimated 1,795 times what the average retail worker made in 2012. Also rans include Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who made 1,135 times the average worker and David Novak, CEO of Yum! Brands — the company that manages Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut — who made 819 times as much.

Click to view Bloomberg's chart of CEO vs. worker compensation for Standard & Poor’s 500 Index top 250 companies.

All three CEOs — and many others — received paychecks and benefits in the millions, while the median worker at their company likely earned less than $30,000 annually. In fact, the average multiple of CEO-to-typical-worker compensation among the companies Bloomberg looked at increased 20 percent since 2009, even as the country has struggled to recover from the recession.

A homeless individual sits on the sidewalk in downtown Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Nick Ut)

Last week the California Assembly’s Judiciary Committee passed AB 5, the Homeless Bill of Rights, by a vote of 7 to 2. At a time when homelessness is increasingly criminalized, this is an important step towards helping people instead of punishing them for not having a home. Advocates overcame strong opposition to the bill, in part through a grassroots movement of homeless and poor people that mobilized hundreds of people to rally and lobby the Democratic members of the committee.

There are now approximately 160,000 men, women and children who experience homelessness in California on a daily basis, about 20 percent of the nation’s total homeless population. The state ranks second worst in the number of homeless children, and third worst in the percentage of children who are homeless, according to the National Center on Family Homelessness. A 2011 U.S. Conference of Mayors report attributed the rise in homelessness across the nation — despite the recovering economy — primarily to unemployment and a lack of affordable housing, in that order.

Yet the response by political leaders in California and other states hasn’t been a sympathetic one — it’s largely been to prosecute those who are struggling.

A report by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty notes that criminalization of homelessness has taken many forms, including: enactment of laws that make it illegal to sleep, sit or store personal belongings in public spaces of cities without sufficient shelter or affordable housing; selective enforcement against homeless people for violating seemingly neutral laws like loitering, jaywalking or open container ordinances; sweeps to drive homeless people out of areas — which often results in the destruction of their personal property, including medications and personal documents; punishing people for begging or panhandling; and restricting groups from sharing food with homeless people in public areas.

“What cities and counties are doing right now to respond to homelessness isn’t helping, it’s making the problem worse,” said Jessica Bartholow, legislative advocate for the Western Center on Law and Poverty, another cosponsor of the legislation.

In contrast, some of the measures proposed in the Homeless Bill of Rights include the creation of hygiene centers with bathrooms and showers; allowing people to rest, sit or sleep in public spaces; access to counsel during civil prosecutions; and protecting people who offer food in public places. It would also instruct local governments to track laws and arrests that target homeless people and report them to the district attorney.

In this Sept. 18, 2012 picture, Homeless veteran George Krider poses for a portrait at a homeless shelter in San Diego. Krider has lived on and off the streets since leaving the navy with the rank of Petty Officer Second Class. Despite budget increases and an aggressive strategy, the Obama administration struggles to make good on its audacious promise: End homelessness among veterans by 2015. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

Bartholow was particularly moved by testimony from homeless people from Los Angeles who were woken up and arrested at 6:02 am due to a law against sleeping in public past 6. Another disabled woman in a wheelchair had lived on the same street corner for many years and been arrested more than a hundred times.

“Not for committing a crime, not for blocking a street or sidewalk — just for sitting there in her wheelchair,” said Bartholow.

Bartholow said that too many homeless people also end up in jail because they can’t pay the citations they receive for sitting in a public space. “So they have to spend time behind bars, because they sat peaceably in a public space, because they have no private space to sit in,” she said.

The bill now goes to the Appropriations Committee, where costs will be considered for measures such as the hygiene centers, legal representation and reporting requirements of local jurisdictions. Bartholow said that advocates will look for ways to “ameliorate costs,” but that this bill is a critical step in changing how we address homelessness and poverty as a society.

“The greatest misconception about this bill is that it somehow makes things more dangerous by allowing people to rest in public places,” she said. “But the bill in no way protects malicious or antagonistic behavior, or blocking doorways or pathways. It protects people’s right to rest — which is a human need. People who don’t have a private space to do that need to be able to do that somewhere. And sometimes the only place available is a public space.”

You can follow the campaign to pass this bill here.

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.

Alivia Terry looks nervously at the adults waiting for she and her classmates from the Anderson Grove Head Start program in Caledonia, Miss., to ring their hand bells to accompany several patriotic songs at the conclusion of a rally by early childhood education supporters, childcare providers and supporters. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)

In a recent article in The New Republic, “The Hell of American Day Care,” reporter Jonathan Cohn investigates what he describes as the “barely regulated, unsafe business of looking after our children.” Lax regulation leading to unsafe child care is indeed a critical issue that needs to be addressed; and so is the huge unmet need for affordable child care options for low-wage working parents.

Cohn acknowledges that the tragic example used as the frame for his article — a child care fatality — is relatively rare. But what is not at all rare — and what really gets to the root of the problem — is the heartbreaking, no-win choice the mother was faced with in trying to find child care that she could afford on her low wage.

Mothers across the country face this dilemma constantly. They too often work in jobs that don’t pay enough to meet a family’s basic needs. Or they want to work, or go to college for a shot at a better career, but can’t afford child care. Or the welfare work requirement forces them into low-wage jobs where they can’t afford child care.

Mothers with young children make up our nation’s poorest families. If they earn the minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, that’s roughly $15,080 per year (though minimum wage jobs rarely provide full-time work because employers restrict hours to avoid paying benefits).

Wider Opportunities for Women developed the Self-Sufficiency Standard to calculate the wage a worker would need to earn in order to afford a family’s basic needs, based on the family’s size and geographic location. The tool shows that parents need to earn far more than a minimum wage, and if the family includes a young child or infant, the wage required is significantly higher due to the high cost of child care.

Our nation does have a child care assistance program that is supposed to help low-income working parents afford child care — the federal Child Care Development Fund (CCDF) block grant to states. This program is hugely helpful for the families it serves. Unfortunately, it only serves about 18 percent of eligible children, which means that 82 percent of eligible children do not receive the subsidy. Eligibility requires a parent to be both working and low-income. Waiting lists are swelling in every stat­­­­­­e — millions of parents wait for the child care they need in order to continue working.

What makes our lack of commitment to providing affordable quality child care for all families even more frustrating is that we know what children need for successful outcomes later in life. In fact, we know more than ever before about the kind of environment, interactions and experiences children need to support their cognitive, physical, social and emotional development.

We also know what working parents need. Other countries such as France provide examples of systems that provide quality care for children so their parents can work. And we have an example in our own country: the Military Child Care Act that transformed an abysmal child care system into a system that is the best in the nation.

If the need is so great, we know what to do, and the consequences of failing are so dire as illustrated by The New Republic article, then why haven’t we created a national system of quality child care for all working parents?

Polls show that Americans believe that child care is a parent’s personal responsibility and that there is no social obligation to help parents pay for it. The result of this prevailing opinion is that mothers buy the child care that they can afford: wealthier mothers are able to buy high quality care; poor mothers — mostly single mothers and women of color — usually cannot. Thus, a vicious cycle of inequity and inequitable outcomes continues.

In this country where all child care is financed with parent fees, child care providers struggle to cobble together resources to pay for their services. Where the ability of parents to pay is limited, providers barter with them, or serve families for free, or reduce rates. For the few families lucky enough to receive subsidies, the reimbursement rate to providers is low — four-fifths of states reimburse below the 75th percentile of the current market rate. Reimbursement is also unreliable — parents have to apply and re-apply frequently through an often cumbersome process. Even worse, states are whittling away at this already inadequate assistance. Erosions in payment are occurring at the same time that quality requirements are being ramped up, which might lead to even fewer affordable options for low-income families.

The child care subsidy program that is so critical to affordable services for working parents is bemoaned as lacking quality standards. But a system starved for revenue cannot enact quality improvements without more resources: increasing staff education levels requires increasing child care wages; enhancing the learning environment means buying more books and learning materials. Some states have initiated quality-rating systems, but in doing so they are often reducing the supply of direct child care services for low-income working parents in order to fund these efforts.

President Obama is proposing significant additional investments in our nation’s early childhood system: pre-k, Early Head Start, Head Start, the federal child care block grant to states, home visiting, 21st Century Learning Centers, etc. But these pieces of our system are like pieces of a puzzle: some parents qualify for some of these services, and some of these services are only available to serve some children some of the time. Parents and providers have to navigate all these fragments and try to piece them together into a seamless system of service.

While all of these investments are sorely needed — and President Obama should be commended for his proposal — if we truly want to solve the problems faced by low-income working parents, then we need a seamless system: one that provides the secure, quality care children need for good outcomes, at an affordable cost that allows parents to remain employed.

Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, has said, “No parent should have to choose between the child they love and the job they need.”

I couldn’t agree more. Until we build a system of affordable, quality child care for all families, we will continue to force parents into making no-win decisions.

Carol Burnett is the executive director of the Mississippi Low Income Child Care Initiative, a statewide organization of parents, providers and community leaders working together to improve the quality of child care for all of Mississippi’s low-income children.

In this excerpt from a 1991 interview with Bill Moyers, Reagon explains how music was used throughout black history to empower and show solidarity, and how one particular song — “This Little Light of Mine” — helped do that during the civil rights movement.

One of their allies is folk singer Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary fame, who joined with the Wheelers and others in a February concert of harmony, resilience and solidarity.

Francine Wheeler and Peter Yarrow discuss with Bill the power of music to create change, and their mission to protect children and adults from gun violence in communities across America. We also see excerpts from the concert, soon to appear on many public television stations. Later, the conversation continues as David Wheeler joins his wife to talk about what can be done and if the gun issue can be addressed in a way that includes diverse viewpoints and bypasses partisan brinkmanship.

Learn more about the production team behind Moyers & Company.

The Victims

Number of people killed by guns in the first 98 days post-Newtown: 2,244

Click on map to see full interactive version from The Huffington Post

Number of people killed since Newton to date, according to a crowdsourced project on Slate: 3,819

Total gun homicides in 2011 (the latest year for which there are FBI records): 8,583

Total gun deaths, including homicide, suicide and accidental death in 2010 (the latest year for which there are CDC records): 31,300

Number of school shootings since Newtown: 9*

The Guns

Number of guns in the U.S.: 270,000,000

Number of guns per person: About 9 guns for every 10 Americans

Countries with more guns per person: None

Runner up: Yemen, with about 5.5 guns for every 10 Yemenis

Percentage of Americans with a gun in their home: 42

State with the highest rate of gun ownership: Wyoming, 61 percent

State with the lowest rate of gun ownership: New Jersey, 10 percent

Number of licensed firearms dealers in the U.S.: 134,997

Number of grocery stores in the U.S.: 36,569

The Money

Total spent by the NRA (2010): $276,903,028

Total spent by the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, the largest gun control organization (2010): $3,083,886

The Polls

Percentage of Americans that support an assault weapons ban: 57

Percentage of Americans that support background checks for all gun purchases: 91

Percentage of Americans that purport to like apple pie: 81

The Vote

On April 17th, 2013, the Senate defeated several gun control measures, including the overwhelmingly popular proposal to expand background checks for firearms purchases. Here’s how each senator voted on the bipartisan proposal by Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) that would have expanded background checks to online sales and sales at gun shows. The measure needed 60 votes to pass.

Yes Votes (54)

No Votes (46)

 
* Our recent broadcast referred to eight school shootings since Newtown. The tally here includes the death of MIT police officer Sean Collier, 27, who was allegedly killed by Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Collier’s murder was not included in the segment count.
**Reid voted no for procedural reasons.

Along with his friend Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger is credited for sparking the folk music revival that swept America in the 1960s and played a role in the social movements that gained traction during that decade. In this clip, Seeger tells Bill how music has a power that, even after decades of playing it, he still doesn’t fully understand.

Bernice Johnson Reagon — singer, civil rights activist and scholar — was an integral part of the African-American struggle for civil rights. Along with Cordell Reagon, Rutha Harris and Charles Neblett, Bernice founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Freedom Singers, the first group of freedom singers to travel nationally. In this excerpt from a 1991 interview, Reagon explains to Bill how music was used throughout black history to empower and show solidarity.

One of the many things Johnny Cash is remembered for are his prison performances, during which he showed a heartfelt empathy for inmates. At Huntsville State Prison in 1957, Cash’s performance of “Amazing Grace” held special potency for crowds of convicted felons. In this 1990 clip featuring both conversation and performances, Cash and Huntsville prisoners explain the common message that “Amazing Grace” holds for them.

Like Woody Guthrie (whose guitar was famously inscribed with the slogan “This Machine Kills Fascists”), former Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello uses his instrument to “steel the backbone of people on the frontlines of social justice struggles.” In this clip from his May 2012 conversation with Bill on Moyers & Company, Morello explains the role of music in uniting a movement.

They also work closely with Sandy Hook Promise, a nationwide group founded by Newtown friends and neighbors to heal the hurt, and open new avenues of communication and action against the scourge of gun violence in the United States. The Wheelers were among the Newtown parents who flew with President Obama on Air Force One to speak with members of Congress about gun control legislation, specifically to enforce mandatory background checks on purchases of firearms at gun shows and online.

In addition to their fight in Washington, the Wheelers spread their message through music. In February, they performed in a free concert with folksinger Peter Yarrow, which was attended by families who lost loved ones at Sandy Hook and other members of the Newtown community.

A former actor and comedian who now works as a graphic designer, Wheeler performs with his wife in a variety show called the Flagpole Radio Café in Newtown.

.

On April 13, Francine was invited to give the President’s Weekly Address in lieu of President Obama. In the address, she spoke about her son and urged Americans to talk to their Senators about passing gun control reform. The Wheelers were among Newtown parents who flew with President Obama on Air Force One to speak with members of Congress about gun control legislation, specifically to enforce mandatory background checks on purchases of firearms at gun shows and online.

They also work closely with Sandy Hook Promise, a nationwide group founded by Newtown friends and neighbors to heal the hurt, and open new avenues of communication and action against the scourge of gun violence in the United States.

A music teacher, singer and a founder of the children’s music group the Dream Jam Band, Wheeler performed in a free concert with folksinger Peter Yarrow, which was attended by families who lost loved ones at Sandy Hook and other members of the Newtown community.

Watch the full conversation between Bill Moyers and Tom Morello.

Yarrow said the concert was about “restoring the heart and soul of a caring community.” Watch two of the songs they performed:

Francine Wheeler and Dar Williams sing “Family”

The Wheelers, Peter Yarrow and others sing “Blowing in the Wind”

In this clip from a 1994 interview, Seeger tells Bill that music has a power that, even after decades of playing it, he still doesn’t fully understand. “All I know,” he says, “is that throughout history, the leaders of countries have been very particular about what songs they want sung, so some people, beside me, must think songs do something.”

Yarrow’s gift for singing and songwriting is driven by a passionate belief that music holds a unique power to build community and inspire change. He has devoted himself to causes including equal rights, peace, protection of the environment, gender equality, education, hospice care, and child welfare. Yarrow is the founder of Operation Respect, a non-profit organization helping children to enjoy lives free of bullying, ridicule and violence.

Yarrow is currently working to help the grief-stricken community of Newtown, Connecticut, where 20 children and 6 adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December, 2012. Working with the Newtown community, Yarrow organized and participated in a concert to honor lives lost and give those still grieving a sense of comfort and solidarity through music. That concert will be broadcast on public television stations across the country to galvanize support for meaningful solutions to gun violence.

~ Find out how your representatives voted on gun control measures and call them to either thank them for their support or to let them know that you disagree with the way they voted.

~ Promise to honor the 26 lives lost at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

~ Promote the mission of Sandy Hook Promise by holding a meeting or hosting a conversation in your town on making communities safer from similar acts of violence.

A Message From Executive Director Tim Makris

There are some issues in our body politic where digging in your heals, demonizing the other side and screaming bloody epithets over the high fence won’t get you any closer to victory. Plenty of people have worked to find common ground, but the partisan bickering reinforces each position to the detriment of those in the middle who represent powerful majoritiy.

Despite the fact that the U.S. Senate just supported a filibuster against a bipartisan amendment to expand background checks for gun purchasers, polls continue to show that 90 percent of Americans support this kind of expansion. That’s more Americans then the percentage who say they like apple pie (81 percent) or even baseball (67 percent). The rhetoric between the gun control groups and the NRA continues to be pretty predictable, but there are some voices in the middle that are reaching out to responsible gun owners — who they know support background checks and other policies — and they are finding a middle ground.

Sandy Hook Promise is one of those organizations. The powerful, emotional voices of families who have lost children to gun violence cannot be ignored, but their sensible, constructive approach to this is turning heads and moving the issue. Finding a way to speak to the middle doesn’t have to mean giving up your moral high ground. It just means realizing that what unites us is sometimes more important than what divides us. And that if we take a look at ourselves as parents, siblings, grandchildren and grandparents we can all agree that the majority of deaths by gun violence in this country are not the price we must pay for our freedoms, and there has to be a better way.

Join us and take the pledge at sandyhookpromise.org.

Francine and David Wheeler and their sons, Nate and Ben, in 2012; Courtesy of the Wheeler Family

The Wheelers’ courage and commitment deeply touched us. Since their son’s death, they have managed to cope with memory and hold together their lives — and the life of their surviving son, Nate — with uncommon grace. Along with other Newtown families, they lobbied the Connecticut state legislature — which now has the toughest gun law in America — and in Washington, they walked the halls of Capitol Hill, urging senators to vote yes for the amendment that would expand the use of background checks for people buying guns.

Although a majority favored the legislation, they fell six votes short of the 60 votes necessary for passage, but the Newtown families, friends and neighbors do not intend to quit. They are part of a growing nationwide movement committed to changing our gun culture. They call it Sandy Hook Promise. “America is in desperate need of a new path forward to address our epidemic of gun violence,” they write. And then comes the promise: “THIS TIME THERE WILL BE CHANGE.”

You want to believe with all your heart that this is one promise that will be kept. But arrayed against them are mighty forces, mountains of money, a corrupted political system, and habits deeply ingrained in the human psyche.

That Minnesota radio host who told the Newtown families “to go to hell” is hardly alone in placing his freedom to own weapons over a child’s right to live. The gun industry’s most conspicuous pitchman, Wayne LaPierre, is the walking embodiment of the sociopathic mentality, one radically devoid of empathy. His National Rifle Association spent $18.6 million on the 2012 elections and then at least $800,000 lobbying the Federal government in just the first three months of this year — pushing back against those like Sandy Hook Promise who have been calling for change after the Newtown massacre.

But Gregg Lee Carter, the editor of the encyclopedia Guns in American Society, told the Center for Public Integrity:

“The issue is not so much how much the NRA gives any senator or member of the House, it’s how they can make their lives miserable. And how they make their lives miserable is they e-mail ’em, they call ’em, they fax ’em, they show up at meetings… They’re much more activist than the other side and that’s what really produces their gains.”

As the NRA holds its annual meeting in Houston this weekend (expected attendance: more than 70,000), you see their tracks everywhere. A kindred, pistol-packing spirit, the Arizona Citizens Defense League has been raffling off an AR-15 semi-automatic at their website’s online store, similar to the weapon Adam Lanza used at Sandy Hook Elementary School. They’ve taken it down from their site now — when we first saw the offer, there were only five tickets left, so maybe it’s sold out, but here’s what the offer looked like (including the Statue of Liberty brandishing a rifle, Rambo-style).

A page, since removed, from the Arizona Citizens Defense League website, raffling off an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. Click to enlarge.

That same group cheered on Arizona Governor Jan Brewer this week as she signed two pro-gun bills — one that prohibits local governments from keeping lists of people who have firearms – not them any of them were – and another that requires police to take guns that are voluntarily surrendered in buyback programs and instead of destroying them, sell them back to the public. That’s right: get them off the street and then get them back on the street as fast as you can. Perhaps they should install a drive-through window at the precinct houses.

Granted, this is in Arizona, where the OK Corral is hallowed ground (reenactment daily at 2 pm) and there’s even a TV station in Tucson with the call letters K-GUN, but the mindset pervades across the country, even as there have been eight school shootings since Newtown and more than 3,800 gun deaths. The killing field that is America never calls a truce. In Kentucky this week, a two-year-old girl was accidentally shot and killed by her 5-year-old brother who was playing with a rifle he had received as a gift. In Alabama, a stray bullet fired nearby killed a 24-year-old mother holding her 10-day-old baby in her arms. She fell onto a couch by the door still clutching her child.

Hold that image in your head and in your heart, so emblematic of a country that has taken leave of its senses. Remember all the dead from all the solitary shootings and all the massacres. Some senators suggest there may be another vote on background checks before the end of the year. If, as David Wheeler suggested to us, this is a tipping point for the movement against gun violence, the moment has come to push harder than ever.

Make the promise: THIS TIME THERE WILL BE CHANGE.

A carniolan honey bee works the hyacinth in Washington Park in Albany, N.Y. (AP Photo/Mike Groll)

The report comes on the heels of an announcement Monday by the European Union that they are banning the use of pesticides that may be harmful to bees for two years. The measure is being closely watched here because the insecticides, known as neonicotinoids, have been in wide use for the past decade. Many studies, including the study released today by the USDA, have made a link between the insecticides — which are used to ward off pests such as aphids and beetles — and honeybee deaths. European researchers will conduct further experiments over the two-year period to assess whether the chemicals are a contributing factor in “colony collapse disorder.”

U.S. beekeepers have been reporting annual hive deaths of about 30 percent or higher for much of the past 10 years, but this past winter marked the worst loss ever — nearly 40 to 50 percent or more. The loss was so bad that California’s almond growers had to scramble to find enough bees to pollinate the state’s 800,000 acres of almond trees this spring. Tim Tucker, vice-president of the American Beekeeping Federation and owner of Tuckerbees Honey, which lost half of its hives this past winter, told The Guardian: “Other crops don’t need as many bees as the California almond orchards do, so shortages are not yet apparent, but if trends continue, there will be. Current [bee] losses are not sustainable. The trend is down, as is the quality of bees. In the long run, if we don’t find some answers, and the vigor continues to decline, we could lose a lot of bees.”

In a “show of concern,” the Environmental Protection Agency sent three representatives to the San Joaquin Valley in California for discussions. A coalition of beekeepers, environmental and consumer groups sued the EPA last week for its failure to protect bees from harmful pesticides.

In Europe, the decision to institute the moratorium was not without controversy. BBC News reports that leading up to Monday’s decision, lobbying was “ferocious” on both sides. Nearly three million signatures were collected in support of a ban. Chemical and pesticide manufacturers argued that the science is inconclusive and that a ban could inhibit food production.

Experts at the USDA, EPA and others involved in the federal bee study concluded that there was not enough evidence to support a ban in the United States, and that the cost of imposing one could outweigh the benefits. They recommended further research be done.

Jay Feldman, the executive director of Beyond Pesticides, said in a statement, “we’re happy to see the EU take a leadership role to remove from the market these chemicals associated with colony collapse disorder and hazards to bee health. We’ll continue to push EPA through legal and advocacy means to follow-up with urgent actions needed to protect bees.” Find out more about the BEE Protective campaign and how you can protect wild bees in our Take Action section.

Watch Dance of the Honey Bee, a short film by Peter Nelson, narrated by Bill McKibben.

“What we’re trying to do in our small way is approach this in a way that it’s never been approached before,” David Wheeler says. “It becomes a question of how many voices can we raise and how many people can make their opinions known so that eventually our systems of government that are intentionally designed to do nothing very quickly will respond.”

Francine Wheeler tells Bill, “I don’t focus on what other people are thinking about what we’re doing. I don’t even focus really about that senator that voted no. What I focus on is saying, ‘We are here. This is what we believe This is what we hope for, and we’re going to continue to talk.’ It’s almost like standing at a doorway and saying, ‘Okay, well, you can close the door and then we’ll keep knocking and then maybe you’ll open it again.’ And they will. They will.”

Producer: Candace White. Editor: Sikay Tang. Associate Producer: Julia Conley.
Photographer: Dale Robbins.
Essay Producer: Rob Booth. Essay Editor: Paul Desjarlais.

“An act of positive movement forward is singing together. This is not a benign thing,” Yarrow tells Bill. “Woody Guthrie had his guitar and said, ‘this machine kills fascists’…This is so powerful a tool that when you galvanize people’s hearts together, and they create that movement by singing together, you’re not saying, ‘Oh, look how prettily I can sing.’”

Wheeler says they’re focusing on core values that most people have in common, not issues that drive them apart. “There are a lot of responsible gun owners out there, some of whom are NRA members. And they want safety for their children and for their grandchildren,” she tells Bill. ” So, what we’re talking about is, hey, why don’t we find a way to not debate and fight about what you believe guns are and what I believe guns are. Let’s come together and figure out a way to make them safer.”

Producer: Gina Kim. Editor: Rob Kuhns. Associate Producer: Lena Shemel.
Photographer: Dale Robbins.

In March 2013, Beyond Pesticides, the Center for Food Safety, Pesticide Action Network (PAN) filed a lawsuit with the Environmental Protection Agency asking it to suspend the uses of neonicotinoids, the pesticides banned by the European Union earlier this week.

If you want to support their on-going effort, PAN asks that you write editorials and blog posts, call your local and state representatives, and take the pledge to create a honeybee haven of your own by following the four pollinator protection principles:

1. Protect bees from pesticides. Keep your lawn and garden pesticide-free. Explore organic solutions and control pests with homemade remedies and ladybugs.

2. Provide a variety of food for bees. Clusters of plants with staggered blooming times provide pollen for bees through the year, particularly late summer and fall. Native plants are always best.

3. Provide a year-round, clean source of water for bees. This could take many forms: A rainwater collection or irrigation system or a small garden water feature. Shallow water sources can provide enough water for bees, without creating opportunities for mosquitoes to breed.

4. Provide shelter for bees. Attract wild bees to your backyard by leaving some dead trees or plants that they might nest in.

A recent study shows that the loss of wild bees may be “an even more alarming threat to crop yields than the loss of honeybees.” Visit the Honey Bee Haven website to learn more about protecting wild bees in your own backyard and post your haven on their crowd-sourced map.

The Wells Fargo logo is displayed outside a home mortgage office in Springfield, Illinois. (AP Photo/Seth Perlman)

Consider this: Latinos lost 66 percent of their household wealth after the housing bubble burst, and African-American households lost 53 percent. Nearly 12 million families—disproportionately people of color — have either lost their homes or are currently in foreclosure, and another 16 million are underwater, owing more on their mortgages than their homes are worth.

Communities are decimated by boarded up houses and vacant lots, declining property values and the consequent loss of state and local revenues, and fewer opportunities to weather and recover from financial hardship. A new study from the Urban Institute indicates that white families now average six times the wealth of African-American and Latino families.

So when US Bank executives fled Minneapolis two weeks ago to hold their annual shareholders meeting in what they believed would be friendlier confines in Boise, it was important that activists from Minnesota and Oregon traveled to join Idahoans in an effort to hold the bank accountable. Then last week, Wells Fargo bankers traveled from San Francisco to Salt Lake City for their shareholders meeting, and activists again weren’t deterred — they came from California, Colorado and New York to stand with local groups and protest the bank’s practices.

“Wells Fargo moved the shareholders meeting to Salt Lake because last year there were 3,000 people in the streets in San Francisco,” said Maurice Weeks, campaign coordinator for the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), which had fifteen members make the eleven-hour trip to Utah. “We wanted them to know that they can’t hide from us.”

ACCE members attended the shareholders meeting as legal proxies. They were joined by members of the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project (NEDAP) from New York, the Colorado Student Power Alliance and local groups from Salt Lake City that were focused on Wells Fargo’s investments in private prisons and the impact on communities of color.

Several ACCE members in attendance were facing immediate foreclosures and welcomed the opportunity to tell Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf — who was paid $22.87 million last year, more than any other banker — that they hadn’t been given a fair shake.

“We’re talking about folks who could pay their mortgages and stay in their houses with a modification, and Wells refuses,” said Weeks. “We’ve had situations where a HUD counselor tells our members that they qualify and Wells still denies a modification.”

More broadly, ACCE was there to demand that Wells commit to pursuing principal reductions — reducing the amount owed on a mortgage so that it reflects the fair market value of the property — wherever they are legally able to do so. A recent report from ACCE, the Center for Popular Democracy and the Home Defenders League suggests that foreclosing on the more than 11,600 California homes currently in Wells’s foreclosure pipeline — which are concentrated in poor and non-white communities — would cost the state approximately $3.3 billion due to the decreased value of the foreclosed properties, decreased value of homes in the surrounding communities and lost tax revenues. In contrast, a comprehensive program of principal reduction would stabilize households, increase tax revenues and boost the economic vitality of distressed communities. (Modifications also happen to be better for the investors who hold the mortgage, but unfortunately banks that service the mortgages — like Wells Fargo — can often make more money by foreclosing.)

A second key demand by ACCE members was that Wells Fargo report its data on principal reductions, short sales and foreclosures by race, income and zip code. Last year, the bank reached a $175 million settlement with the Department of Justice for allegedly charging African-American and Latino borrowers higher rates and fees and steering them into subprime loans when they should have qualified for regular loans.

“Our members want to make sure Wells isn’t still preying on communities of color,” said Weeks.

NEDAC presented a resolution for an independent investigation of Wells Fargo’s business practices in order to ensure that they don’t violate any fair lending or fair mortgage laws. Although the resolution was voted down, Weeks said it received more discussion than any other resolution presented to the shareholders.

“ACCE members — but also people we didn’t know — were all voicing concerns about Wells Fargo’s mortgage practices,” said Weeks.

According to Weeks, when Stumpf tried to move onto “business as usual,” Makayla Major, an ACCE member from East Oakland, stood up and shouted, “John Stumpf, you’re a liar and a crook. You are stealing too many homes in my neighborhood!” Weeks said that the room was lined with “forty or fifty” security guards and that “six or seven” immediately moved in to “make her be quiet.”

Then ACCE member Manuela Alvarez — who has been trying unsuccessfully to modify her subprime loan since her husband was injured on the job — said, “You are trying to steal my home, like you’ve stolen the homes of tens of thousands of other hard-working families. It’s time for you to be held accountable!”

She, too, was quickly surrounded by security.

ACCE member Melvin Willis then began reading a “Citizens Arrest Warrant” for Stumpf for “the following crimes: illegally foreclosing on millions of homeowners nationwide; intentionally targeting communities of color with predatory, high-cost loans; and gouging students with predatory student loans — usury.”

“He was immediately swarmed and at that point we were all escorted out of the room and the hotel,” said Weeks. “But John Stumpf and the shareholders definitely heard our message, and we made it clear that they can’t ignore these issues.”

Wells Fargo made $19 billion in profits last year and record profits last quarter. None of this would have been possible without the bank bailout and continued borrowing of taxpayer money at zero percent interest from the Federal Reserve (which Wells Fargo and the other big banks then turn around and loan to state and local governments at much higher rates).

ACCE and its allies showed up in Salt Lake City to take a stand against a wealth-stripping machine. There will be more actions ahead against Bank of America (May 9), Sallie Mae (May 30) and Walmart (June 7). Sign up to stay informed.

“The message from the banks is that the foreclosure crisis is over, and a lot of the general public is hearing that,” said Weeks. “But we see on the ground that that’s far from true, and that Wells Fargo continues to profit at the expense of our communities. That’s why we’re keeping up the pressure of this campaign. We’re going to fight for our communities as hard as we possibly can.”

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.

On this week’s Moyers & Company, Francine Wheeler and Peter Yarrow discuss with Bill the power of music to create change, and their mission to protect children and adults from gun violence in communities across America. We also see excerpts from the concert, soon to appear on many public television stations. Later, the conversation continues as David Wheeler joins his wife to talk about what can be done and if the gun issue can be addressed in a way that includes diverse viewpoints and bypasses partisan brinkmanship.