Notes from the Left Coast

Drummond Pike’s Blog

At Tides, we have long been on the receiving end of rightist critiques of our many activities and programs. Full of innuendo, remarkably bad conspiracy theories, untruths, and half-truths, their theory seems to be that our commitment to sustainability, human rights, and social justice makes us highly suspect at best, and downright anti-American at worst. The latest examples, of course, are these bizarre constructs being promoted by FOX’s Glenn Beck insinuating that Tides is promoting a communist and/or socialist agenda on the unsuspecting public according to a grand plan. It’s all part of the scorched earth approach that Paul Krugman alluded to in his recent column.

We’ve considered various ways of responding, legally and otherwise, and invariably receive the advice that its just better to continue on our way and not get bogged down in a fruitless effort to set the record straight.

While I’ve developed a fairly thick skin as a result of the frequent screed directed at us, and at me individually, I find myself deeply saddened by the condition of current social policy debate in this great country of ours. In all of our years of supporting progressive ideas and organizations, I don’t think we (Tides) ever lost respect for the views of others. And for most of our 33 years, conservatives have held the reins of government, and, until recently, the support of many voters. But in the tradition of a loyal opposition, we have always thought that advancing alternative views was central to the democratic process. It is in this spirit that we hosted the recent Momentum 2009 conference. Videos of all the speakers are available to all to view, consider, and, if moved, comment upon, in the hopes of fostering intelligent dialog about solutions to the difficult problems of our day. There is no secret agenda. We simply invite an open exchange of ideas. The question is, though, is that still possible?

There are many voices, particularly in some corners of the broadcasting world, that seem to believe the best way to prevail is to silence your counterparts by trashing them personally, often without any factual basis. Just bully them out of the way. I’ve been on the receiving end of this, in my small way, as a result of this blog. One recent comment gives a flavor of what one can expect these days: “Hey, Drummond, how’s it feel to be hit on the head with a shovel? Get used to it. There’s more coming.”

I’m too old to have my feelings hurt by such things, but it is a sad thing to see that our political discourse has dropped into the gutter in this way. Much in the tradition of “yellow journalism” practiced in the late 1800’s, the anonymity of the Internet invites extremists to vent. In response, many simply cringe. And, as we have seen recently in Kansas, some resort to violence.

Politics has always been a rough and tumble game, not for the faint of heart. But during most of my adult life, there has always been a parallel experience where rational minds come together to wrestle out where the common ground lies. In the best cases, they try to develop palatable solutions that most can agree upon. Many would argue this has been the source of much human progress. While I’d not argue that progressives start in that middle ground, the gargantuan problems facing us in so many realms suggest that we need to find this path as we seek the solutions we so desperately need to find.

Irving Kristol’s passing reminds us all of the tradition that he founded that many call “neo-conservatism.” In his approach, and that of William F. Buckley and perhaps our generation’s David Brooks, intellectual rigor, rational thought, and facts mattered in constructing conservative positions and proposals. Propaganda and character assassination had no place. Buckley, for instance, would face off against smart people with differing views in the most intelligent exchanges one can imagine. Quoted in a Salon.com article a decade ago, Kristol’s son William said this about Buckley, “Buckley really believes that in order to convince, you have to debate and not just preach, which of course means risking the possibility that someone will beat you in debate.”

Fatalists sometimes argue that the rising seas will put out the fires of human conflict and the few survivors will have no choice but to cooperate or die. Even the figuratively shovel-wielding commenter noted above might agree that civil discussion has some merit in contrast, especially if we can actually begin to work together to solve humanity’s problems.

After a couple of days to recover from Momentum 2009, Tides’ terrific conference on ideas for progressives…

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, on Green For AllJohn A Powell, on Opportunity and Race

Manuel Pastor, on Majority-Minority Economics

Jacquette M. Timmons, on the Economic Collapse…I returned from the mountains Sunday to the normal backlog of hundreds of emails, calls, and correspondence – all demanding attention. Somehow, I missed the Fox sting operation (Correction, 9/18/2009: The incident I’ve referred to was not a “Fox sting operation” as I wrote. Fox did not create the video, they broadcasted it. Several individuals unconnected with Fox shot the video) on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) that has been raging through the airwaves. What a story. A couple of “gotcha journalists” posing as a pimp and a prostitute sought financial and housing help from one of ACORN’s many offices around the country that serve the poorest of the poor. And they found one or two where part-time counselors with poor judgment were taken in and supposedly tried to help them game the system. It would be interesting, of course, to see what would happen if they had similarly set up “stings” with payday lenders, tax refund lenders, and other parasites out there who prey on the poor, but Fox, with an ideological agenda to reduce its antagonists to their knees went after ACORN.That the secret taping violated laws and ethics seems overlooked and, to most, irrelevant. The immediate firing of the employees by ACORN also seems unimportant to most. What matters is the smear – very successful, very American. To be associated with a scandal, even one invented for the sole purpose of harming an organization of poor people, not to mention one that is not real, is the door to obscurity in American social and political life, and ACORN, according to some, is headed through that door.I wonder how many nonprofit organizations – even big, well-heeled ones like the Nature Conservancy or the Red Cross – could withstand the kind of media assault and unscrupulous tactics deployed by Fox? I doubt many could. Night after night, the Fox mouthpieces babble on about ACORN. According to them, it’s some incredible scramble of a fascistic criminal enterprise foisting communism and socialism on an unsuspecting public. And people buy this drivel. The Senate yesterday passes a bill to ban ACORN from funding they use to counsel low-income people on housing as a result. One fake prostitute and pimp has managed to do what Bill Riley and Glenn Beck couldn’t do for a decade.

Of course, in the ways of modern media wars, it matters not that ACORN was decrying predatory lending (read subprime insanity) for years before the meltdown. Yes, they believed banks should lend to low income people, but no, they argued strenuously that subprime perpetrators should be prevented from issuing loans that were unaffordable to the low income borrowers. If regulators and Senators had listened to them, we might have avoided the entire mess. But Fox has a better idea: kill the messenger.

Tides Momentum Conference
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It’s only been a week since we called to order the 2009 Momentum Leadership Conference that began 2 and a half days of non-stop exploration by some four hundred intrepid progressive donors and leaders from across the country. And, no, Stephen Colbert never did show up, the chicken. We’ve been trying to figure out how to superimpose a flapping chicken over his overused, and decidedly undeserved, eagle. Know any video hackers out there?

More seriously, the Conference exceeded our expectations remarkably. People came, people listened, and then people engaged on a panoply of topics from climate change to the economy to the role of race in America. The idea of Momentum is to provide a venue for some of the best, most innovative, thinking emerging from the progressive community. With this in mind, I was asked many times did I think we had succeeded. My answer? It was a simple, “you tell me. Did you meet someone you didn’t know, hear about something new and exciting to you, and did you come away with a different perspective on a topic of interest to you? If the answer was yes to any of those questions, we succeeded. If the answer was yes to ALL of those, then we are happy beyond measure.”

We’re fortunate to have partnered with FORA.tv which has been diligent and quick to post the videos of the 20 minute talks. Here are three of my favorites: Larry Mishel, who heads up the Economic Policy Institute in DC, gave one of the most cogent, coherent analyses of the economic meltdown and what we need to do about it. Just brilliant. Second, Kate Kendall spoke about the freedom to marry in the most compelling way I’ve heard. Finally, Sony Kapoor held forth about the abuses in the international financial sector, and the prescriptions to the problem, in terrific form.

A special evening greeted the participants seven nights ago: Alexis McGill interviewed Congresswoman Donna Edwards and NAACCP President Ben Jealous on the challenges facing young, emerging leadership in the African American community. It was a frank, earthy conversation that had the room buzzing.

We are now beginning to think about the next round. I hope you will suggest speakers, topics, ideas, and tools that you think we should feature at Momentum 2010. Email me at drummond@tides.org or post a comment here.

One cannot escape the media frenzy about the sweet young 11 year old girl kidnapped for 18 years by some wacko in Antioch. Details cannot be minute enough to elude broadcast — what the tents looked like, the vacant stare of the victim’s daughter, fathered by the wacko, the way the victim answered phone calls for his printing business, and all the rest.

In contrast, we can’t seem to find an article that accurately analyzes the benefits that the proposed reforms of the broken healthcare system might produce, or the damages brought down on us by the unwieldy patchwork that is the current system. Instead, we seem deluged by scary stories about “death panels” and how “the government is going to pull the plug on grandma” and the like. Fox News, of course, treats this drivel as fact. The rest seem to treat it as reasonable debate with virtually not a word about how the current system does much worse.

Tides Momentum Conference Website

Crystal Hayling,
Roger Hickey, Anthony Wright, and Jacob Hacker, Momentum presenters.

At our Momentum Conference, beginning this coming Monday afternoon, we hope to bring some rationality to the conversation about healthcare. Last year, Jacob Hacker (author of the “public option” idea) laid out his view of the prospects for real reform if Obama were to win the General Election. Now that we are there, and this is the highest thing on the President’s agenda, we’ve witnessed, as we have so often, the devolution of an intelligent policy debate into a mud-slinging contest in which alarmists are decrying things that don’t exist (death panels and plug pullers) and progressives — ever the earnest ones — are trying to convince people through complicated rational arguments.

What seems to command attention on Fox are these senior citizens who want to “keep the government out of the health insurance business” but even more adamantly demand that Congress keep its hands off Medicare…one of those government-run healthcare programs. That media really don’t say that much in response to such irrational debate is fascinating…and sad.

First thing next Tuesday, we are convening three very different folks to bring us up to date on where we stand — Anthony Wright leads Health Access California and has led numerous state and local campaigns for health reform; Crystal Hayling, CEO of Blue Shield of California Foundation and has worked tirelessly on healthcare delivery especially to women and children, and Roger Hickey, co-Director of Campaign for America’s Future, a leading advocate for national reform. It should be a refreshing session, especially if you are a Fox News watcher.

Why is it, I cannot help but wonder, that the current folks entrusted to oversee most covered people are getting off the hook in the midst of this swirling debate? The insurance companies are no one’s friend. Anyone you know who has dealt with a serious medical situation would hardly argue for the current system. These companies engage in terrible practices, trying desperately to pursue their business model that says they should collect as much money as possible and pay out as little as possible. How can anyone think this is going to lead to good health outcomes. Nor can anyone explain how having these companies provide health insurance to everyone will change anything. Yes, they may be forced to accept pre-existing conditions, but, bottom line, they will collect as much as they can, pay out as little as possible, and pocket the rest. The French, with their excellent single payer system, are laughing their heads off. Hopefully, though, we’ll move on from town hall meetings and get this thing done in some acceptable form. Tuesday morning at Momentum, we’ll be trying to figure out how that might be possible.

I sit here watching two high performance sailboats getting ready to race on this crystal clear day in San Francisco. It’s a wonderful time of year in the late summer, when the fog retreats and the people come out to the shore. Absolutely glorious. But me? I’m hunkered down in front of my screen trying to sort through my opening remarks for Momentum, our fourth conference highlighting the best of new ideas to advance progressive public policy.

Don Hazen, the character who conceived of and has built AlterNet, the wonderful aggregator of progressive news and commentary, has asked me a couple of provocative questions about Momentum. Several revolved around the idea that progressives are confused about how to speak to the new Administration. Are we supporters or critics? Have we already been so burned by the healthcare debate that we are ready to turn on the new team, or what? He wanted to know if our conference, very nearly sold out, much to our surprise in this most difficult of years, was going to answer some of these questions.

As I told him in response, that’s not really our role. First, the progressive community is larger — much larger — than the 300 plus folks who will assemble on Monday afternoon at the W (SF). One would have to be seriously delusional to think we might speak for the entire progressive community, although to hear Glenn Beck talk about us, well maybe we do! However, I digress.

News people, like Hazen, want a story, and they are very good at getting them. At Momentum, though, we are looking for what might become a story in the future. All good political stories begin with ideas that somehow take flight, get traction, and sometimes become policies, or at least political fights about policy, that really are newsworthy. At Momentum, we concentrate on the ideas. Last year, for instance, Jacob Hacker held forth on the transition from our current broken healthcare system and argued brilliantly for an approach that saw a "public option" as a pivotal tool that would help move the chances for change forward. Little did he know that his "compromise" position might so quickly have become the lightning rod for the debate we see this year.

One voice on this year’s program that should be galvanizing is Sony Kapoor from Europe. He will be talking in very direct and compelling ways about the critical need for international financial reform, picking up from last year’s speaker Rob Johnson who sharply depicted an "oligopoly" comprised of 6 firms that traded derivatives among themselves while telling all it was a "marketplace." Some of us, of course, wish we’d paid just a tad more attention to Johnson. We could have avoided much of the meltdown, but that’s another story. Kapoor, who worked in the belly of the beast, will describe how the problem is really much bigger than the U.S. Solving it, needless to say, will take more than reforms in Washington. And speaking of that fair city, we’ll also be hearing from Laura Quinn about Catalist, one of the most important new tools for progressive advocacy and voter engagement groups in a generation. Then, early Wednesday, we’re delighted to have John Kao (author of Innovation Nation) talk about what is needed to truly foster imagination and innovation in society. It’s all going to be quite a ride.

So, this all is probably not a very good answer to Mr. Hazen, but what I can assure him is that if he spends a couple of days next week with us, he will likely take away more than a few ideas that he probably hasn’t heard before. For change really to happen, isn’t that where it all begins?