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In Obama Win, a Triumph of Community Organizing |
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Tuesday, 13 November 2012 15:10 |
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Jones writes: "Community organizers around the country worked overtime to hand the election to President Barack Obama. Now we need him to stand up for our values and vision."
Van Jones at San Francisco's Green Festival. (photo: Luke Thomas/Fog City Journal)
In Obama Win, a Triumph of Community Organizing
By Van Jones, YES Magazine
13 November 12
Community organizers around the country worked overtime to hand the election to President Barack Obama. Now we need him to stand up for our values and vision.
 resident Obama's big win last Tuesday was a victory for the middle class, a rejection of trickle-down economics, and a statement from a new generation of Americans that they are a force to be reckoned with.
But most of all, it was a vindication for the much-maligned community organizer.
Remember all those folks on the right who mocked the organizers who work patiently and tirelessly in communities across the country? The way they tried to tar President Obama for passing up lucrative opportunities to instead take a job as an organizer on the South Side of Chicago? Recall, if you can bear it, Sarah Palin declaring that a small-town mayor is "sorta like a ‘community organizer,' except that you have actual responsibilities"?
It turns out, community organizers got the last laugh.
In the last days of the election, I argued that the pundits were making far too much of the so-called "enthusiasm gap." They were missing the determination of voters, and the work on the ground that was flying below the radar. When Tuesday rolled around, the proof was in the vote count: The 2008 coalition, wrongly regarded as a mere flash in the pan, had held. And it was community organizers like these who made it happen:
- Ben Jealous and the NAACP registered and turned out more than a million new African-American voters on election day. In Ohio, the black vote went from 11 percent of the electorate in 2008 to 15 percent in 2012. In swing state after swing state, the percentage of black voters in the electorate either increased or held steady, even as the number of voters overall increased. It was a testament to the power of deep community organizing in the black community.
- Hoodie Vote, Vote Mob, the Dream Defenders and scores of other organizations by and for young people organized campuses and neighborhoods across the country. Before the election, I said that if young people failed to turn out, the president was "toast." But turn out they did - in fact, the percentage of the electorate under 30 actually went up from 18% in 2008 to 19% in 2012!
- The Obama campaign invested in the ground game as no campaign had before. In contrast, Karl Rove sunk hundreds of millions of rich folks' money into attack ads that had basically no effect and emerged as one of the cycle's biggest losers. On Wednesday, veteran political journalist John Avlon at CNN said he would scoff at "field" organizing no longer.
There are some important lessons to be gleaned from this.
President Obama relied on his base - and now his base is relying on him. We won't sit back. But we're counting on him to represent our values and speak up for the folks who got him re-elected. The president should refuse any budget deals that preserve massive tax breaks for the rich. He should also save programs that middle class and poor folks rely on from the budget axe.
We also need to remember that progressives don't hold a monopoly on community organizing. The right-wing support centers FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity invested millions in talented young evangelists who built deep networks and helped elevate the Tea Party into a movement that made Washington pay more attention to the long-term debt problem than the immediate jobs crisis.
Finally, we progressives haven't always embraced the power of community and collaboration in our own organizations. Too often, we're boring and bossy. We demand another signature on a petition, or that folks fall in line behind what Congress will vote for instead of the big change and big ideas that inspired us to get involved in the first place. We can't put down deep roots in a community to get folks to the polls, and then turn around and try to get things done in Washington with the same old insider-y game.
Instead, let's fire some lobbyists and hire some organizers. Let's build communities, not just lists. Let's empower and connect our members, instead of just activating them. Then let's listen to them. It won't just make our movement more powerful. It will be a constant reminder that no cuts and fair taxes is nothing more than a good start. There is also a housing crisis to end, roads and bridges to repair, and new sustainable industries to unlock. A generation with too much debt and too few opportunities needs to be put back to work, and an economy with too much Wall Street and too little Main Street needs to be rebuilt from the bottom up.
In short, the lesson of the 2012 election was this: Don't mess with community organizers. And don't forget that organizing isn't just for elections.
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The Grand Bargain Is a Grand Lie |
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Tuesday, 13 November 2012 15:05 |
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Uygur writes: "The Grand Bargain is a Grand Lie. Anyone who argues for it is either a fool or a charlatan. There is nothing wrong with compromise, but this isn't compromise. This is a robbery."
House Speaker John Boehner and President Obama must come together on a deal if Washington is going to avoid the fiscal cliff. (photo: Saul Loeb/Getty Images)
The Grand Bargain Is a Grand Lie
By Cenk Uygur, The Young Turks
13 November 12
Why the scheme being negotiated in Washington is one-sided and totally unfair
 irst of all, let's establish that no one in Washington actually cares about balancing the budget. If they did, they would love this so-called Fiscal Cliff. It raises taxes and cuts spending, so it would massively reduce the deficit. Isn't that what all of Washington has been pretending to care about all of this time?
Second, understand that this so-called compromise they are talking about in order to avoid this supposed calamity is a trick. In fact, it'll be the greatest robbery in American history. Think about it - they say they are worried about all those tax increases and spending cuts. But that's not true. The Grand Bargain would dramatically increase spending cuts, not alleviate them. So, in fact, the only thing they care about is paying less taxes, as always.
Right now, according to the sequester $1.2 trillion in spending cuts are set to take place if nothing happens. Half of that would come from defense. Of course, this is the real problem because there's no way the defense contractors are going to allow that. Whenever people in Washington complain about spending cuts they mean spending cuts that would affect defense contractors. They want to massively increase spending cuts everywhere else in the budget.
President Obama has proposed that the Grand Bargain include $4 trillion in savings. He has said over and over again that the ratio would be $3 in spending cuts to $1 in tax increases. This is before his legendarily disastrous negotiating begins. So, let's do some quick math. According to the president's own plan that would be $3 trillion in spending cuts, which is significantly higher than the current plan of $1.2 trillion in spending cuts.
Let me add one other fact, if all you do is let the Bush tax cuts expire for people making over $250,000, you would already have $1 trillion in tax increases. And we were told because of this election that was already non-negotiable. That's what we fought to make sure would happen and the president has guaranteed it. So, what exactly do progressives gain out of this Grand Bargain?
The reality is that this is cost shifting. They are going to move the spending cuts away from defense and on to the middle class and poor by hacking away at Medicare and Medicaid. This is defined as courageous in Washington. What a load of crap. What would be courageous is taking on the rich and the powerful and the large political donors, which is the exact opposite of what's going to happen.
President Obama has already promised corporate tax cuts (from 35 percent to 28 percent). Think about that. Why are we doing tax cuts if we are trying to reduce the deficit? The administration tells us not to worry because they will close some loopholes and make it revenue neutral. But wait a minute, I thought the whole point was not to make it revenue neutral. I thought we were trying to raise revenue.
There's a good chance they'll pull this same kind of crap on income taxes, after all, if they wanted to raise a trillion in revenue all they would have to do is do nothing. Once the Bush tax cuts expire, you re-instate the middle class tax cuts and voila, you're done. That way, you don't have to give up anything in return!
Yet, the White House is planning to give up at least $3 trillion in spending cuts anyway. If you were progressive, if you cared about the middle class, if you were honest, why in the world would you do that? The reality is that this robbery is indefensible and my math here is irrefutable, that's why they will do this deal as quickly as possible. The more people think about it, the more they have a chance to get enraged. The Democrats and Republicans have to agree to this deal in the lame duck session before the public realizes their pocket has been picked.
They're going to raise the Medicare eligibility age even though Medicare costs less than private insurance to the country overall. That's not going to save us any money; it's going to cost us money. But it will shift money from the middle class who would get the benefits of those years of Medicare to private insurance companies and to the rich in the form of extra tax cuts they finance in the federal budget.
If you think these politicians have your best interest in mind, then you're living in an alternate reality. And are you telling me that no one else in the media did the simplest math in the world on this? They also don't want you to know (they don't want to know themselves, that's why they avoid thinking about the obvious problems in this charade), because they're also rich and powerful. The money gets shifted to them. So, why would they want to tell you about how you are about to get robbed?
The Grand Bargain is a Grand Lie. Anyone who argues for it is either a fool or a charlatan. If President Obama was anything but the establishment hack that he is, he would never consider it. There is nothing wrong with compromise, but this isn't compromise. This is a robbery.
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FOCUS | FBI's Abuse of the Surveillance State Is the Real Scandal |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=7181"><span class="small">Glenn Greenwald, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Tuesday, 13 November 2012 13:16 |
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Greenwald writes: "It appears that the FBI not only devoted substantial resources, but also engaged in highly invasive surveillance, for no reason other than to do a personal favor for a friend of one of its agents, to find out who was very mildly harassing her by email."
The real story in the Petraeus scandal may be overzealous FBI surveillance. (illustration: Time Magazine)
FBI's Abuse of the Surveillance State Is the Real Scandal
By Glen Greenwald, Guardian UK
13 November 12
That the stars of America's national security establishment are being devoured by out-of-control surveillance is a form of sweet justice
 he Petraeus scandal is receiving intense media scrutiny obviously due to its salacious aspects, leaving one, as always, to fantasize about what a stellar press corps we would have if they devoted a tiny fraction of this energy to dissecting non-sex political scandals (this unintentionally amusing New York Times headline from this morning - "Concern Grows Over Top Military Officers' Ethics" - illustrates that point: with all the crimes committed by the US military over the last decade and long before, it's only adultery that causes "concern" over their "ethics"). Nonetheless, several of the emerging revelations are genuinely valuable, particularly those involving the conduct of the FBI and the reach of the US surveillance state.
As is now widely reported, the FBI investigation began when Jill Kelley - a Tampa socialite friendly with Petraeus (and apparently very friendly with Gen. John Allen, the four-star U.S. commander of the war in Afghanistan) - received a half-dozen or so anonymous emails that she found vaguely threatening. She then informed a friend of hers who was an FBI agent, and a major FBI investigation was then launched that set out to determine the identity of the anonymous emailer.
That is the first disturbing fact: it appears that the FBI not only devoted substantial resources, but also engaged in highly invasive surveillance, for no reason other than to do a personal favor for a friend of one of its agents, to find out who was very mildly harassing her by email. The emails Kelley received were, as the Daily Beast reports, quite banal and clearly not an event that warranted an FBI investigation:
"The emails that Jill Kelley showed an FBI friend near the start of last summer were not jealous lover warnings like 'stay away from my man', a knowledgeable source tells The Daily Beast. . . .
"'More like, 'Who do you think you are? . . .You parade around the base . . . You need to take it down a notch,'" according to the source, who was until recently at the highest levels of the intelligence community and prefers not to be identified by name.
"The source reports that the emails did make one reference to Gen. David Petraeus, but it was oblique and offered no manifest suggestion of a personal relationship or even that he was central to the sender's spite. . . . v"When the FBI friend showed the emails to the cyber squad in the Tampa field office, her fellow agents noted the absence of any overt threats.
"No, 'I'll kill you' or 'I'll burn your house down,'' the source says. 'It doesn't seem really that bad.'
"The squad was not even sure the case was worth pursuing, the source says.
"'What does this mean? There's no threat there. This is against the law?' the agents asked themselves by the source's account.
"At most the messages were harassing. The cyber squad had to consult the statute books in its effort to determine whether there was adequate legal cause to open a case.
"'It was a close call,' the source says.
"What tipped it may have been Kelley's friendship with the agent."
That this deeply personal motive was what spawned the FBI investigation is bolstered by the fact that the initial investigating agent "was barred from taking part in the case over the summer due to superiors' concerns that he was personally involved in the case" - indeed, "supervisors soon became concerned that the initial agent might have grown obsessed with the matter" - and was found to have "allegedly sent shirtless photos" to Kelley, and "is now under investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility, the internal-affairs arm of the FBI".
[The New York Times this morning reports that the FBI claims the emails contained references to parts of Petraeus' schedule that were not publicly disclosed, though as Marcy Wheeler documents, the way the investigation proceeded strongly suggests that at least the initial impetus behind it was a desire to settle personal scores.]
What is most striking is how sweeping, probing and invasive the FBI's investigation then became, all without any evidence of any actual crime - or the need for any search warrant:
"Because the sender's account had been registered anonymously, investigators had to use forensic techniques - including a check of what other e-mail accounts had been accessed from the same computer address - to identify who was writing the e-mails.
"Eventually they identified Ms. Broadwell as a prime suspect and obtained access to her regular e-mail account. In its in-box, they discovered intimate and sexually explicit e-mails from another account that also was not immediately identifiable. Investigators eventually ascertained that it belonged to Mr. Petraeus and studied the possibility that someone had hacked into Mr. Petraeus's account or was posing as him to send the explicit messages."
So all based on a handful of rather unremarkable emails sent to a woman fortunate enough to have a friend at the FBI, the FBI traced all of Broadwell's physical locations, learned of all the accounts she uses, ended up reading all of her emails, investigated the identity of her anonymous lover (who turned out to be Petraeus), and then possibly read his emails as well. They dug around in all of this without any evidence of any real crime - at most, they had a case of "cyber-harassment" more benign than what regularly appears in my email inbox and that of countless of other people - and, in large part, without the need for any warrant from a court.
But that isn't all the FBI learned. It was revealed this morning that they also discovered "alleged inappropriate communication" to Kelley from Gen. Allen, who is not only the top commander in Afghanistan but was also just nominated by President Obama to be the Commander of US European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe (a nomination now "on hold"). Here, according to Reuters, is what the snooping FBI agents obtained about that [emphasis added]:
"The U.S. official said the FBI uncovered between 20,000 and 30,000 pages of communications - mostly emails spanning from 2010 to 2012 - between Allen and Jill Kelley . . . .
"Asked whether there was concern about the disclosure of classified information, the official said, on condition of anonymity: 'We are concerned about inappropriate communications. We are not going to speculate as to what is contained in these documents.'"
So not only did the FBI - again, all without any real evidence of a crime - trace the locations and identity of Broadwell and Petreaus, and read through Broadwell's emails (and possibly Petraeus'), but they also got their hands on and read through 20,000-30,000 pages of emails between Gen. Allen and Kelley.
This is a surveillance state run amok. It also highlights how any remnants of internet anonymity have been all but obliterated by the union between the state and technology companies.
But, as unwarranted and invasive as this all is, there is some sweet justice in having the stars of America's national security state destroyed by the very surveillance system which they implemented and over which they preside. As Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation put it this morning: "Who knew the key to stopping the Surveillance State was to just wait until it got so big that it ate itself?"
It is usually the case that abuses of state power become a source for concern and opposition only when they begin to subsume the elites who are responsible for those abuses. Recall how former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman - one of the most outspoken defenders of the illegal Bush National Security Agency (NSA) warrantless eavesdropping program - suddenly began sounding like an irate, life-long ACLU privacy activist when it was revealed that the NSA had eavesdropped on her private communications with a suspected Israeli agent over alleged attempts to intervene on behalf of AIPAC officials accused of espionage. Overnight, one of the Surveillance State's chief assets, the former ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, transformed into a vocal privacy proponent because now it was her activities, rather than those of powerless citizens, which were invaded.
With the private, intimate activities of America's most revered military and intelligence officials being smeared all over newspapers and televisions for no good reason, perhaps similar conversions are possible. Put another way, having the career of the beloved CIA Director and the commanding general in Afghanistan instantly destroyed due to highly invasive and unwarranted electronic surveillance is almost enough to make one believe not only that there is a god, but that he is an ardent civil libertarian.
The US operates a sprawling, unaccountable Surveillance State that - in violent breach of the core guarantees of the Fourth Amendment - monitors and records virtually everything even the most law-abiding citizens do. Just to get a flavor for how pervasive it is, recall that the Washington Post, in its 2010 three-part "Top Secret America" series, reported: "Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications."
Equally vivid is this 2007 chart from Privacy International, a group that monitors the surveillance policies of nations around the world. Each color represents the level of the nation's privacy and surveillance policies, with black being the most invasive and abusive ("Endemic Surveillance Societies") and blue being the least ("Consistently upholds human rights standards"):
And the Obama administration has spent the last four years aggressively seeking to expand that Surveillance State, including by agitating for Congressional action to amend the Patriot Act to include Internet and browsing data among the records obtainable by the FBI without court approval and demanding legislation requiring that all Internet communications contain a government "backdoor" of surveillance.
Based on what is known, what is most disturbing about the whole Petraeus scandal is not the sexual activities that it revealed, but the wildly out-of-control government surveillance powers which enabled these revelations. What requires investigation here is not Petraeus and Allen and their various sexual partners but the FBI and the whole sprawling, unaccountable surveillance system that has been built.
Related Notes
(1) One of the claims made over the last week was that Broadwell, in public comments about the Benghazi attack, referenced non-public information - including that the CIA was holding prisoners in Benghazi and that this motivated the attack - suggesting that someone gave her classified information. About those claims, a national security reporter for Fox reported:
"that a well-placed Washington source confirms that Libyan militiamen were being held at the CIA annex and may have been a possible reason for the attack. Multiple intelligence sources, she also reported, said 'there were more than just Libyan militia members who were held and interrogated by CIA contractors at the CIA annex in the days prior to the attack. Other prisoners from additional countries in Africa and the Middle East were brought to this location.'"
Though the CIA denies that "the agency is still in the detention business", it certainly should be investigated to determine whether the CIA is maintaining off-the-books detention facilities in Libya.
(2) I've long noted that Michael Hastings is one of the nation's best and most valuable journalists; to see why that is so, please watch the amazing 8-minute clip from last night's Piers Morgan Show on CNN embedded below, when he appeared with two Petraeus-defending military officials (via the Atlantic's Adam Clark Estes). When you're done watching that, contrast that with the remarkably candid confession this week from Wired's national security reporter Spencer Ackerman on how he, along with so many other journalists, hypnotically joined what he aptly calls the "Cult of David Petraeus".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRXZ0GntrtM
(3) I gave a 40-minute speech this summer on the Surveillance State and the reasons it is so destructive, which can be viewed on the video below; Alternet transcribed the speech here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCj7SmjSsGw
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FOCUS | Obama Should Aim High |
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Tuesday, 13 November 2012 11:16 |
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Reich writes: "I hope the President starts negotiations over a 'grand bargain' for deficit reduction by aiming high. After all, he won the election. And if the past four years has proven anything it's that the White House should not begin with a compromise."
Portrait, Robert Reich, 08/16/09. (photo: Perian Flaherty)
Obama Should Aim High
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
13 November 12
 hope the President starts negotiations over a "grand bargain" for deficit reduction by aiming high. After all, he won the election. And if the past four years has proven anything it's that the White House should not begin with a compromise.
Assuming the goal is $4 trillion of deficit reduction over the next decade (that's the consensus of the Simpson-Bowles commission, the Congressional Budget Office, and most independent analysts), here's what the President should propose:
First, raise taxes on the rich - and by more than the highest marginal rate under Bill Clinton or even a 30 percent (so-called Buffett Rule) minimum rate on millionaires. Remember: America's top earners are now wealthier than they've ever been, and they're taking home a larger share of total income and wealth than top earners have received in over 80 years.
Why not go back sixty years when Americans earning over $1 million in today's dollars paid 55.2 percent of it in income taxes, after taking all deductions and credits? If they were taxed at that rate now, they'd pay at least $80 billion more annually - which would reduce the budget deficit by about $1 trillion over the next decade. That's a quarter of the $4 trillion in deficit reduction right there.
A 2% surtax on the wealth of the richest one-half of 1 percent would bring in another $750 billion over the decade. A one-half of 1 percent tax on financial transactions would bring in an additional $250 billion.
Add this up and we get $2 trillion over ten years - half of the deficit-reduction goal.
Raise the capital gains rate to match the rate on ordinary income and cap the mortgage interest deduction at $12,000 a year, and that's another $1 trillion over ten years. So now we're up to $3 trillion in additional revenue.
Eliminate special tax preferences for oil and gas, price supports for big agriculture, tax breaks and research subsidies for Big Pharma, unnecessary weapons systems for military contractors, and indirect subsidies to the biggest banks on Wall Street, and we're nearly there.
End the Bush tax cuts on incomes between $250,000 and $1 million, and - bingo - we made it: $4 trillion over 10 years.
And we haven't had to raise taxes on America's beleaguered middle class, cut Social Security or Medicare and Medicaid, reduce spending on education or infrastructure, or cut programs for the poor.
Mr. President, I'd recommend this as your opening bid. With enough luck and pluck, maybe even your closing bid. And if enough Americans are behind you, it could even be the final deal.
Robert B. Reich, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock" and "The Work of Nations." His latest is an e-book, "Beyond Outrage." He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.
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