Kick the Shutdown Extortionists Out of Office!

By Joan Walsh, Salon

18 October 13

The left needs a Karl Rove to target the 144 House GOPers and 19 senators of the Default Caucus. Look out, Ted Cruz

h dear God, here it comes: Another delusional media cycle in which we'll be tortured by "thoughtful" analytic pieces about how the GOP is going to learn from its mistakes, part a zillion. Spare me.

Politico has an interesting read today about how Republican donors are frightened by their crazy Congressional dependents, who almost blew up the world economy, and are looking for ways to rein them in. That would be nice, except it only quotes three big donors on the record, and one of them weighs in to say he's 100 percent behind the party. AP and the Washington Post report that the GOP "establishment" wants to take back the party from Tea Party crazies. Except AP quotes Iowa Gov. Terry Branstead as an "establishment" figure who sees Rep. Paul Ryan as a reasonable emerging leader.

Yes, that's the Paul Ryan who tried to remove the contraception mandate from the Affordable Care Act, as part of the shutdown/default hostage negotiations, and who voted against the final Congressional compromise - which means he voted for default.

Next we'll learn Reince Priebus is doing an autopsy of his autopsy. Yes, Priebus is trying to sound reasonable now too, even though he cast his lot behind Tailgunner Ted Cruz, the man who was ready to destroy the country in order to save it. Priebus said he "would stand behind Ted Cruz anyday." Clearly donors who disagree shouldn't be funding the RNC. But Politico didn't find one donor who would say on the record that he or she was going to punish Priebus and Co.

Even worse, Politico reports that hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer is one of the upset donors - but Singer doesn't have a problem with the Tea Party "per se." In fact, Singer is a big supporter of the Club for Growth, which helped drive this train; the group just announced it will support a primary challenge to ultra-right Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran after he voted for the default-avoidance deal.

It should be clear: The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun to the head of the global economy is a good guy who makes it unthinkable for the bad guy to use the gun, and that requires Democrats to stay as tough as they've been in this fight.

And probably get even tougher. I'm wishing for a Democratic Karl Rove who'll run ads in the home districts of all 144 Republicans who voted against Wednesday's deal, to make clear that their representative voted to default. Oh, sure, the pearl-clutchers at Politifact might not like it, but that's what they did. There was no time to negotiate an alternative bill; the Treasury ran out of money the next day. A vote against the bill was a vote in favor of defaulting. Democrats need to hammer that home.

Short of that, I'm pleased that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who deserves enormous credit for stiffening his party's spine this time around, is insisting there will be no "entitlement" cuts just to replace the sequester slashing. I also enjoyed Reid flat out declaring to the Huffington Post that Sen. David Vitter, prostitute patron turned slasher of Congressional employee benefits, "is not playing with a full deck." Reid pointed to his head and said, "Something is wrong there."

Something is very much wrong there, and throughout the Republican Party.

Over in the Senate, most of the 19 men who voted against the bill - and they were all men, the Senate's 20 women all voted to save the global economy - come from reliably red states and probably won't face much backlash for their destructive vote. But there are a few exceptions. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is known to want to run for president in 2016. That's good, because he's up for re-election to the Senate that same year, and given his shameful vote to pauperize Florida's senior citizens with a default that would have stopped their Social Security checks, he should face defeat.

Likewise, in the purple state of Wisconsin, Sen. Ron Johnson tried to have it both ways during the October stalemate. Sure, he'd criticize his colleague Cruz once in a while. But Johnson emerged as a leading Default Truther, insisting that hitting the deadline would have merely been a "cash management" problem well within the power of Treasury Secretary Jack Lew to handle. Ultimately, Johnson too voted for default. Wisconsin can do better, and especially with Johnson, like Rubio, running in a presidential election year, it ought to be able to send Johnson home to manage his own cash, not ours. (Pennsylvania's Pat Toomey, up the same year, should be on the same train.)

Even Ted Cruz ought to worry. He's probably running for president, but if he doesn't, or if he runs and loses (as he surely would), by 2018 his Texas Senate seat shouldn't even be safe any more. Democrats should play their hand well enough to turn Texas blue again.

They need to make clear: The 144 House members and 19 Senators are the Default Caucus, and they can't be trusted to do the right thing for the country. We already know this: "responsible" Republicans can't be trusted to do the right thing and stop their colleagues. We've already seen how well that worked in 2012.

The Bay Area's 1 Percent Forces Out the 99

By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News

18 October 13

n the movie "Boyz in the Hood" with Ice Cube and Lawrence Fishburne, Fishburne's character, Furious Styles, explains gentrification to members of his community in South Central Los Angeles.

"It's called gentrification. It's what happens when the property value of a certain area is brought down. You listening? They buy all the land at a lower price, then they move all the people out, raise the property value, and sell it for profit."

On a sunny Sunday afternoon, the bustling foot traffic of Market Street in San Francisco slowed for over a hundred people playing chess all over the block. The San Francisco Police Department recently took all of the community chess tables on Market Street that the homeless community frequently used to play chess games, and the community, along with homeless allies, organized a "chess-in" to show that people have the right to have a harmless way of passing the time without being hassled by the city. Most of the foot traffic consisted of wealthy white people hoisting bags festooned with the names of clothing and shoe designers, spending their excess income in droves at the stores that lined the street.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian highlighted how speculators and hedge funds have figured out ways to game the system to their benefit by exploiting a loophole in housing law. Apartment complexes can declare they're "going out of business" and get bought out by one of the big hedge funds like REO Homes LLC (a key REO investor is Tom Steyer, who has hosted Democratic Party fundraisers). They then sell it to developers for a profit, and the building re-opens as condominiums for sale instead of apartments for rent.

"It's gotten too expensive to live in San Francisco," said Leslie Dreyer, a community activist living in Oakland. "Rent for a basic one-bedroom apartment is close to $3,000."

Dreyer organized an anti-gentrification action at the Oakland pride parade. Her group rented a bus with "Gentrification and Eviction Technologies OUT" written on it in a font imitating Google's homepage. They were protesting the fact that Twitter, Google and other major tech companies received a 6-year tax break from the city of San Francisco for $22 million as an incentive to get them to relocate. Twitter is relocating to the Market Street district, where all the chess tables were recently removed.

"After this tax break passed, we warned that low-income and working class people were going to be evicted and people thought we were crazy," said Tommi Avicolli Mecca, counseling director for the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco (HRCSF). "Now they're buying up places for cheap where the rent is low and evicting all the tenants. This mainly affects seniors, the disabled, Latino working families, artists, and others who can't afford high rent."

The 54 tenants of 1049 Market Street, most of whom are lower-income and artistically-inclined, and who pay low-market rent, are one of the many recently targeted by eviction. Tommi said eviction defenses have been organized to save that space along with others spaces on Market Street where 120 more tenants are subject to eviction. The HRCSF also organized a successful eviction defense on behalf of the Lee family, an elderly couple with a disabled daughter who had their Jackson street eviction postponed after enough people put their bodies on the line to stop the eviction.

"Big money is coming into our town to make even bigger money," Mecca said. "And they're getting away with it, because the people at the tech companies will pay anything to live in San Francisco. We don't currently have the votes on the city council to count on them to do anything about it, or a mayor who is radical enough to do it." For Mecca, an acceptable solution would be for the city to declare a state of emergency for housing, whereby city officials could call for an immediate moratorium on evictions.

"This is forcing people to leave the city, increasing homelessness, and changing the diversity of our community," Mecca said. "We're seeing a lot of lesbian bars and alternative bookstores be replaced with overpriced cafes and coffee shops."

I asked Mecca if he had heard about Richmond mayor Gayle McLaughlin's attempts to fight evictions and foreclosures by threatening to seize underwater mortgages from the banks with eminent domain, and about her requirements for developers to include low-income housing in all projects for the city.

"There are people who work inside the system, and I won't put them down, because we need to do this on multiple fronts to succeed," Mecca said. "But I personally believe in agitating outside the system. Because of our action for the Lee family, the city was backed up into a corner. What else could the mayor do, except call the landlord and postpone the eviction?"

Representatives of REO Homes LLC and the city of San Francisco could not be reached for comment on this story.

Carl Gibson, 26, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin. You can contact him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , and follow him on twitter at @uncutCG.

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.