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FOCUS: The Revolt of Small Business Republicans |
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Thursday, 21 May 2015 10:02 |
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Reich writes: "Can it be that America's small businesses are finally waking up to the fact they're being screwed by big businesses?"
Robert Reich. (photo: Richard Morgenstein)
The Revolt of Small Business Republicans
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
21 May 15
 an it be that America’s small businesses are finally waking up to the fact they’re being screwed by big businesses?
For years, small-business groups such as the National Federation of Independent Businesses have lined up behind big businesses lobbies.
They’ve contributed to the same Republican candidates and committees favored by big business.
And they’ve eagerly connected the Republican Party in Washington to its local business base. Retailers, building contractors, franchisees, wholesalers, and restaurant owners are the bedrock of local Republican politics.
But now small businesses are breaking ranks. They’re telling congressional Republicans not to make the deal at the very top of big businesses’ wish list – a cut in corporate tax rates.
“Given the option, this or nothing, nothing is better for our members,” the director of legislative affairs at Associated Building Contractors told Bloomberg News. (Associated Building Contractors gave $1.6 million to Republicans in the 2014 midterm elections and nothing to Democrats.)
Small businesses won’t benefit from such a tax deal because most are S corporations and partnerships, known as “pass-throughs” since business income flows through to them and appears on their owners’ individual tax returns.
So a corporate tax cut without a corresponding cut in individual tax rates would put small businesses at a competitive disadvantage.
And since a cut in the individual rate isn’t in the cards – even if it could overcome the resistance of Republican deficit hawks, President Obama would veto it – small businesses are saying no to a corporate tax cut.
The fight is significant, and not just because it represents a split in Republican business ranks. It marks a new willingness by small businesses to fight against growing competitive pressures from big corporations.
In case you hadn’t noticed, big corporations have extended their dominance over large swaths of the economy.
They’ve expanded their intellectual property, merged with or acquired other companies in the same industry, and gained control over networks and platforms that have become industry standards.
They’ve deployed fleets of lawyers to litigate against potential rivals that challenge their dominance, many of them small businesses.
And they’ve been using their growing economic power to get legislative deals making them even more dominant, such as the corporate tax cut they’re now seeking.
All this has squeezed small businesses – undermining their sales and profits, eroding market shares, and making it harder for them to enter new markets.
Contrary to the conventional view of an American economy bubbling with innovative small companies, the rate that new businesses have formed has slowed dramatically.
Between 1978 and 2011, as big businesses expanded and solidified control over many industries, the pace of new business formation was halved, according to a Brookings Institution study released last year.
The decline occurred regardless of the business cycle or which party occupied the White House or controlled Congress.
Contributing to the drop was the deregulation of finance – which turned the biggest Wall Street banks into powerhouses that swamped financial markets previously served by regional and community banks. Not even Dodd-Frank has slowed the pace of financial consolidation.
In consequence, many small businesses can’t get the financing they once got from state and local bankers. Over the past two decades, loans to small businesses have dropped from about half to under 30 percent of total bank loans.
That means the Fed’s rock-bottom interest rates haven’t percolated down to many small businesses.
Tensions have also grown between giant franchisors – restaurant chains, fast-food corporations, auto manufacturers, giant retailers – and their franchisees.
Franchisees have found themselves trapped in contracts that siphon off profits to parent companies, give franchisors the right to unilaterally terminate the agreements, and force franchisees into mandatory arbitration of disputes.
Complaints are mounting about parent corporations closing successful franchisees for minor contract violations in order to resell them at high prices to new owners.
Meanwhile, small businesses are feeling the same financial pinch the rest of us endure from big corporations whose growing market power is letting them jack up prices for everything from pharmaceuticals to Internet connections.
So the willingness of small business groups to take on big business on its top legislative priority could mark the start of a political realignment.
If small businesses were willing to ally themselves with consumer, labor, and community groups, they could press for stronger antitrust enforcement against giant corporations.
As well as for breaking up Wall Street’s biggest banks and strengthening community banks.
They could also get legislation banning take-it-or-leave-it contracts requiring mandatory arbitration.
Such an alliance might even become a powerful voice for campaign-finance reform, containing the political clout of giant corporations.
Don’t hold your breath. Small business groups have done the bidding of big business for so long that the current conflict may be temporary.
But the increasing power of big corporations cries out for new centers of countervailing power.
Even if the political realignment doesn’t happen soon, small businesses will eventually wake up – and could play a central role.
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Our Mr. Brooks: How Humility Insists on Deceit |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Thursday, 21 May 2015 08:38 |
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Pierce writes: "It seems that Brooks has noticed that people are talking again about the war for which he so enthusiastically shook his moneymaker back during the Avignon Presidency. So, naturally, it's time for a Professor of Humbleology to cover his own sad-sack ass."
David Brooks. (photo: Bryan Bedder/The New York Times)
Our Mr. Brooks: How Humility Insists on Deceit
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
21 May 15
This weekend, at a graduation ceremony, I heard David Gergen quote David Brooks. At which moment, I believe, human existence passed over the event horizon of white-guy faux-wisdom. Everything went beige and I woke up in the middle of a road.
 resent Day:
A slim envelope on letterhead from The Young Fogies Club slipped through the mail slot on this rain-sweetened afternoon in mid-May. I hadn't heard for a while from Moral Hazard, the Irish setter owned for photo-op purposes by The New York Times columnist David Brooks. Last I'd heard, he was running around a farm in northern Pennsylvania, hard by the New York border. He'd sounded happier than he'd seemed in a very long time. This note, however, described how he'd been moved back to the YFC, and how he'd removed himself to his old spot in the kitchen by the door to the fire escape.
"Listen," his note said, "This is horrible. It's like I never left. In fact, it's like it's 2002 all over again, and that was a nightmare. Everybody, dressed up in toglike Vikings, eating with their hands, screaming imprecations to Jupiter and mumbling in Latin about Carthage. I thought we were done with that. I thought that was part of Master's going off to teach Humility to undergraduates. What a nightmare. I'm going out on the fire escape and lick my balls for an hour. MH"
It seems that Brooks has noticed that people are talking again about the war for which he so enthusiastically shook his moneymaker back during the Avignon Presidency. So, naturally, it's time for a Professor of Humbleology to cover his own sad-sack ass. (Especially since Paul Krugman kicked said ass pre-emptively yesterday.) Mistakes, it seems, were made. The spectacle is ungainly and obscene.
There's a fable going around now that the intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was all cooked by political pressure, that there was a big political conspiracy to lie us into war. That doesn't gibe with the facts. Anybody conversant with the Robb-Silberman report from 2005 knows that this was a case of human fallibility. This exhaustive, bipartisan commission found "a major intelligence failure": "The failure was not merely that the Intelligence Community's assessments were wrong. There were also serious shortcomings in the way these assessments were made and communicated to policy makers."
This is a dodge unworthy of a grounded eighth-grader. Nobody ever said all the intelligence was faked or stovepiped. (Also, the Robb-Silberman Report was specifically designed not to explore the question of ginned-up intel: Silberman does not mention that the commission he chaired did not even investigate whether the Bush administration manipulated intelligence: Senate Republicans refused to allow the commission to investigate this matter, fearing it would harm Bush's reelection prospects. Indeed, Silberman himself wrote in the report at the time, "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry.") The fraud and deception was baked into the whole process, and the fraud and deception was deployed only in specific instances when it was most dearly required. And what Brooks utterly fails to confront is the contempt for actual expertise played into the rosy scenarios promulgated by know-nothings like David Brooks. The whole enterprise was an exercise in deceit and unreality. He ate it up with a spoon. It is time for Brooks and for people like him to shut up about it. Rand Paul, god help us, is right about this.
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Nuclear War Is Not Likely Over Ukraine, US Tries to Reassure World |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Wednesday, 20 May 2015 14:01 |
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Boardman writes: "Expressing official US policy, Rose Gottemoeller, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, told the Russian daily Kommersant on May 13 that the White House does not believe that the Ukraine conflict will lead to nuclear war, because there is no need for the use of nuclear weapons."
Rose Gottemoeller stated the White House does not believe that the Ukraine conflict will lead to nuclear war. (photo: Pacific Press/picture alliance)
Nuclear War Is Not Likely Over Ukraine, US Tries to Reassure World
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
20 May 15
“We don't think the Ukrainian conflict is a nuclear crisis.”
 hat comment is a recent example of a US State Department diplomat deploying standard diplo-speak in order to engage in nuclear saber rattling by denying there’s any need to rattle any of the roughly 10,000 nuclear sabers that already worry the entire sentient world. The world can plainly see that the two most heavily nuclear-armed countries (between them, the US and Russia have about 95% of the global nuclear stockpile) are in a confrontation over Ukraine that shows no significant signs of compromise or de-escalation.
Expressing official US policy, Rose Gottemoeller, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, told the Russian daily Kommersant on May 13 that the White House does not believe that the Ukraine conflict will lead to nuclear war, because there is no need for the use of nuclear weapons. The day before she spoke, Russia and China began a joint operation, Sea Cooperation 2015, ten days of naval exercises with live fire in the Mediterranean and Black seas. This is the first such Russian-Chinese military exercise, albeit of limited scale, with seven Russian and two Chinese warships.
That would be two nuclear-armed countries playing naval war games on the home waters of four other nuclear-armed countries: Israel, France, GB and the US. The headquarters ship for these naval activities is the Russian missile cruiser Moskva, part of the Black Sea Fleet based at Sevastopol, Crimea. In good non-saber rattling fashion, Russian vice-admiral Alexander Fedotenkov said the military exercises were “not aimed against a third country.”
Others are less delicate. In France on May 13, Ukraine prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk (called “prime minister of war” by the Czech president) warned that Ukraine and Russia are on the verge of a nuclear confrontation, even though Ukraine has no known nuclear weapons. Yatsenyuk has, for months, been promoting the perception that Ukraine and Russia are “in a state of war.” (With the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, Ukraine was left in possession of hundreds of nuclear weapons that its government surrendered, as did Belarus and Kazakhstan.)
Is the risk of nuclear war worth taking for any reason?
However close any nuclear-armed state actually is to using those weapons, the actions of those states do little to ease global anxiety. Both the US and Russia have lately increased their nuclear weapons stockpiles. The nuclear Doomsday Clock maintained by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists since 1947 represents the assessment of a panel that includes 18 Nobel laureates as to how close, metaphorically, the world is to midnight, nuclear apocalypse. The Doomsday Clock has been re-set 22 times, most recently in January 2015, when it was moved to three minutes to midnight. This is the closest to midnight the clock has been since 1953, when it was at two minutes (it was last at three minutes during the US build-up in 1984). Announcing the Doomsday Clock re-set, the Bulletin’s executive director Kennette Benedict said in part:
Today, unchecked climate change and a nuclear arms race resulting from modernization of huge arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity. And world leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe. These failures of leadership endanger every person on Earth.
The grand failure of human leadership on climate change and nuclear disarmament is mirrored in smaller scale by the failure of human leadership in Ukraine and a host of other places – but among these, only Ukraine is an obvious and certain flashpoint that could unleash nuclear war.
For more than 20 years now, US policy toward Ukraine has been relentlessly aggressive in pushing nuclear-armed NATO ever closer to Russia’s borders. This is a policy that makes imperial economic sense only so long as its base remains rock solid denial of the most obvious global risk: the assumption that pushing Russia to the limit on its vital interests would not ever lead to a nuclear attack or counterattack.
That combination of aggressive policy and denial was alive and well at the high level NATO/Russia meeting May 19 in Brussels. This was the first such meeting since February and, by its own account, only NATO made demands. NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg later told reporters he had reiterated the “very strong NATO position” that Russia should leave Crimea and disengage from the rebels in eastern Ukraine:
I restated the very strong NATO position on the illegal annexation of Crimea, but also on the very serious situation we see in eastern Ukraine. I also called upon Russia to withdraw all its forces and support for the separatists.
Translated, Stoltenberg was demanding that Russia accede to the US-backed coup that seized control of Ukraine from its duly-elected government in February 2014. Unfortunately, it’s perfectly natural for a military alliance like NATO to seek victory by any means necessary, but that’s a far cry from acting honestly and in good faith in negotiating hard questions with merit on more than one side. Stoltenberg reinforced his apparently non-negotiable demands with a bit of oblique nuclear saber rattling on behalf of NATO, which has nuclear weapons well within range of every part of Ukraine (not to mention Russia). Stoltenberg’s argument was that Russia has been having too many military exercises on short notice and should treat NATO with “more transparency and predictability” to avoid creating an incident that could “spiral out of control.”
Stoltenberg’s Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, made no public comments about the meeting.
Will Gottemoeller tell Stoltenberg not to rattle those nuclear sabers?
Our general view is that nuclear saber rattling is unwarranted. There's simply no threat out there that would warrant nuclear saber rattling, and nuclear countries have come a long way since the Cuban Missile Crisis and what went on at that point, and it's all been to the good in terms of enhancing stability, predictability, and mutual understanding.
That’s what Under Secretary Rose Gottemoeller told the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in an interview published May 14. She was on the same message in April to Kyodo News of Japan in which she engaged in nuclear saber rattling by denying she was engaging in nuclear saber rattling and, at the same time, pretending that nuclear saber rattling wasn’t inherent in every move made by her country, the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons.
To say that there’s “no threat out there that would warrant nuclear saber rattling” is to express a purely America-centric view that is, like Stoltenberg’s, a view without honesty or good faith. The question evaded is also a question the US has forced upon the Russians: what would you do if you had a nuclear armed alliance like NATO pressing your borders for decades?
If you were the president of Russia and felt you’d been put on the defensive, you might well nuclear saber rattle, as Vladimir Putin has done with regard to NATO and Ukraine since early 2014, to little or no avail. In Kiev, Putin’s comments serve as a reason for Euromaidan Press to call for NATO to arm Ukraine to the teeth, at least with conventional weapons, a call made by too many American senators and congressmen.
Despite Gottemoeller’s official optimism, years of “enhancing stability, predictability, and mutual understanding” are getting frayed and may be over for now. The 185 or so nuclear-weapons-free states who want to see progress on the promise of the nuclear weapons states to move toward disarmament have been watching that hope fade at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) conference that ends May 22 at the United Nations:
The NPT is a landmark international treaty whose objective is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology, to promote cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and to further the goal of achieving nuclear disarmament and general and complete disarmament. The NPT represents the only binding commitment in a multilateral treaty to the goal of disarmament by the nuclear-weapon States.
New nuclear arms race, new cold war, and honoring the Holocaust?
As the UN makes clear, there is no other hope for nuclear disarmament, short of a spontaneous outbreak of profound international good will. In reality, every nuclear weapons state is presumably continuing to improve and expand the effective destructiveness of its arsenal. The next non-proliferation treaty conference will be held five years from now.
Rose Gottemoeller’s carefully calibrated but meaningless objections to nuclear saber rattling have at least one very clear propaganda purpose: to set up Russia as the scapegoat for further failures in cooperation on nuclear weapons. A corollary purpose of Gottemoeller’s happy talk is that the US is working hard for world peace and disarmament. That is fundamentally a lie, as Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group notes in response to Gottemoeller in the Bulletin:
The truth is that this administration isn't retiring warheads on a net basis any more, but rather keeping them. Obsolete warheads retired under GW Bush and before are being dismantled, but there are no plans to dismantle post-2009 warheads until new factories are up and running in the late 2020s.
The Obama administration continues to pretend that US-Russian relations remain reasonable despite tensions over Ukraine. But the administration so far shows no willingness to abandon the aggressive NATO expansion policy that is the source of those tensions. In another sign of deteriorating relations, the Russians have now closed a military supply route that NATO has been using since 2010 to support NATO forces in Afghanistan. The official Russian reason for closing the NATO supply route was that the UN mandate for troops in Afghanistan expired months earlier, in December 2014. There is also Russian resentment of sanctions over Ukraine and Russian concern that US troops may be in Afghanistan permanently as the Obama administration keeps extending the mission.
In Ukraine, the Kiev government continues to press for war against the separatist eastern provinces where the ceasefire continues to hold most of the time. Yatsenyuk has virtually called for an invasion to take back Crimea. US assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland, one of Yatsenyuk’s strongest backers, visited Kiev May 16 to reaffirm, as the official statement put it:
... the United States’ full and unbreakable support for Ukraine’s government, sovereignty, and territorial integrity. We continue to stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Ukraine and reiterate our deep commitment to a single Ukrainian nation, including Crimea, and all the other regions of Ukraine.
There is no flexibility in this position. The US allied itself with an illegitimate government, ignoring the fascist elements that brought it into being and support its existence. The US is expressing “unbreakable support” for a government that passed a bill in April recognizing the World War I era Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a militia that collaborated with the Nazis. The Simon Wiesenthal Center has condemned the Ukraine’s government actions that “honor local Nazi collaborators and grant them special benefits turns.” The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has also condemned the Ukraine legislation.
But the US still stands “shoulder to shoulder” with those who still honor perpetrators of the Holocaust. How can any policy with such grotesque results end well?
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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FOCUS: Secretary Clinton, I Have Some Questions for You |
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Wednesday, 20 May 2015 11:52 |
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Galindez writes: "I have been in Iowa since February and have covered dozens of campaign events, some with over 100 reporters, but only one campaign has denied me access. In her second visit to Iowa since declaring her candidacy, Hillary Clinton is once again limiting access by the media and Iowa voters."
Hillary Clinton. (photo: AP)
Secretary Clinton, I Have Some Questions for You
By Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News
20 May 15
his past weekend I attended the Working Families Summit in Ames, Iowa. The event was sponsored by dozens of labor organizations and their allies. One of the things stressed to the attendees by more than one speaker, including former Labor secretary Robert Reich, was that voters should be asking the candidates tough questions. We should be looking for specific proposals and solutions, not settling for soundbites. I agree, and I have been asking tough questions to those who will take questions.
I have been in Iowa since February and have covered dozens of campaign events, some with over 100 reporters, but only one campaign has denied me access. In her second visit to Iowa since declaring her candidacy, Hillary Clinton is once again limiting access by the media and Iowa voters. The only people who get into the events are those handpicked by the Clinton campaign. On her first visit to Iowa after she announced last month, we got a few days’ notice to apply for credentials. I was denied because of the lack of space. This time around, the first event was pool only, and the pool reporters were forced to leave after she read a prepared statement. The second event, in Cedar Falls, allowed more press and I finally got credentials for it. Only 16 members of the public were allowed into the event, surrounded by at least 75 reporters. After the event,for the first time, Clinton took six questions from the press. Sadly, and I’m not blaming Hillary Clinton for this, the questions were not on topics that matter to the American people. That’s the media’s fault – they only want to know about Hillary Clinton’s emails and donations to the Clinton Foundation. Let’s see if Andrea Mitchell will let us read all of her emails.
On Monday, I received an email from the Super PAC supporting Clinton with this headline in bold letters: “PUTTING THE VOTERS FIRST, HILLARY ASKS THE QUESTIONS THAT REALLY MATTER.” The email attempted to counter the narrative that Clinton is not answering questions from the press, arguing that Clinton has answered 20 questions from everyday Americans, seven on her first trip to Iowa. What that argument fails to say is that there weren’t many more than 20 everyday Americans at any of her Iowa events, and they were handpicked by the campaign. So they were everyday Clinton supporters.
The Clinton campaign can argue all they want that they are designing these events to hear the voices of everyday Americans, but to do that they need to let everyday Americans into the events. The real result of these small events is that they have set up a bigger wall between Clinton and everyday Americans than did her 2007 events, when she would fly in and out on the “Hillocopter.” Arriving in the “Scoobyvan” has not increased access to the voters.
Since Hillary Clinton entered the race, she has answered a total of 19 questions from the press. Six of those questions came today in Cedar Falls, after the linked NPR story from May 13. Most questions have been shouted at her as she was walking past reporters, and if she heard a question she wanted to answer, she stopped and answered. If you click on the link, you will notice that it is a reach to say she answered the 13 questions. In Cedar Falls she took questions in an organized manner for the first time. While it is possible that this is the start of Hillary Clinton answering the media’s questions, it is also possible we will get more of the same for quite some time.
With the huge lead Clinton holds, one has to wonder: Does she think she needs the media? Is it a smart strategy to avoid gaffs like Jeb Bush’s handling of the Iraq question? How long can she avoid the media before voters start to turn?
Maybe this will have to be where I ask my questions. Here they are, Senator Clinton, these are the questions I would ask if you gave me the chance to ask them.
The first question is: Do you support the Trans-Pacific Partnership? When I asked Martin O’Malley prior to his campaign’s releasing a position on it, there was no hesitation. He immediately said, “I am opposed,” and explained why. Let’s compare that to Hillary Clinton’s and Jim Webb’s non-answers to the same question. “Well, any trade deal has to produce jobs, and raise wages, and increase prosperity, and protect our security. And we have to do our part in making sure we have the capabilities and the skills to be competitive,” Clinton said in one of her 13 answers to the press. So does she oppose or support the TPP? Webb was just as evasive.
My second question, and the one Robert Reich also wants answered, is: Will you break up the big banks? O’Malley and Sanders clearly support reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act and breaking up the banks that are too big to fail – or succeed, as O’Malley likes to say. We have no idea where Clinton stands and have had no chance to ask her.
Now some more questions that need to be answered. Secretary Clinton, what would you do to address student loan debt? You and Jeb Bush and others talk about the problem, but you have not offered a solution. Bernie Sanders introduced legislation to make college free at public universities. Not just at two-year colleges as in Obama’s plan, but at four-year universities as well.
Do you support raising the minimum wage to $15 dollars an hour? The Republican candidates are saying they will tackle income inequality, so we need to know how the candidates plan to address it. O’Malley and Sanders support $15 dollars an hour. What other steps will you take to address income inequality? We need specific answers. Again, Bernie has proposed massive infrastructure spending in the Senate. We know where Bernie stands.
Do you support or oppose the Keystone XL pipeline? As Secretary of State you had plenty of opportunity to kill the pipeline, but you didn’t. When it comes to climate change, Clinton, according to Grist Magazine, understands the issue but has the same disconnect as Obama when it comes to the solution. Grist pointed out that Clinton promoted fracking abroad while Secretary of State and “encouraged developing countries to sign deals with American fossil fuel companies to extract their shale gas through fracking.” In the same article, Grist reminds us she “has supported offshore oil drilling. In 2006, Clinton sided with Republicans and against climate hawks like Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) by voting in favor of a bill opening new Gulf Coast areas to offshore oil drilling.”
There are many more questions that need to be asked. Most of the media here in Iowa will not ask these questions, and perhaps Clinton is smart to not let my colleagues on the campaign trail pounce on her with questions that only serve to feed their tabloid journalism.
Let’s hope that once the “ramp-up phase” is over, Hillary Clinton will start answering these questions. Both the media and the voters have a role to play in the primary process. I hope no candidate gets to decide who can ask the questions. It’s not just the reporters that the Clinton campaign has avoided so far. They have also shielded her from the voters. To say that she is listening to real Iowans or real Americans in these staged events doesn’t hold water. She is only hearing from people the campaign allows in the room. So Secretary Clinton, we have questions – when can we ask them?
Scott Galindez attended Syracuse University, where he first became politically active. The writings of El Salvador's slain archbishop Oscar Romero and the on-campus South Africa divestment movement converted him from a Reagan supporter to an activist for Peace and Justice. Over the years he has been influenced by the likes of Philip Berrigan, William Thomas, Mitch Snyder, Don White, Lisa Fithian, and Paul Wellstone. Scott met Marc Ash while organizing counterinaugural events after George W. Bush's first stolen election. Scott will be spending a year covering the presidential election from Iowa.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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already knew that 
