Notes from the Left Coast

Drummond Pike’s Blog

Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You

I was thinking a lot this past Sunday about my lapsed involvement in matters of faith. From a childhood and teenage engagement with the Episcopal Church, I came away with something that has guided my life since I can remember. It’s called the Golden Rule. Karen Armstrong – the marvelous soul who used her TED Prize to promote the Charter for Compassion – argues that all significant faiths on the planet have compassion at their core: my version went something like this, "Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You.”

For some odd, quirky reason I don’t quite understand, thinking about this basic tenet of moral behavior brought me to the most recent escapade of the Acorn Sting-meister, James O’Keefe, now awaiting arraignment on felony charges of conspiring to do something to Senator Mary Landrieu’s phones in a federal office building. Somehow, I think his parents, with whom the Judge has required him to live during the legal proceedings, failed Mr. O’Keefe in this most basic of moral instructions. How possibly could a faithful, moral conservative, as Mr. O’Keefe purports to be, engage in illegal and highly damaging acts intent on bringing down his perceived political opponents? I mean, have they no trust in the basic idea of democracy? Who would choose to have others do to them what Mr. O’Keefe is alleged to have done? Who would want, for any purpose, to be secretly taped without their knowledge? Not many, I’d wager.

I’ve supported Acorn for many years and in many ways. It is a good organization that has tried very hard to bring justice to poor communities. They haven’t done everything right, but I don’t think their foibles justify their fate at the hands of malevolent pranksters whose antics are now the subject of multiple inquires by prosecutors. Even so, it seems uncertain that the organization will ever again thrive as a voice for poor people in America.

It is clear to many that Mr. O’Keefe’s highly edited and illegally obtained videos have been the undoing of Acorn. It makes me sad beyond words to see how easily a dishonest kid of debatable morals with a video camera has been able to bring the rough-hewn organization, built out of the efforts of thousands of our most disenfranchised citizens, to its knees. And, Lord knows what his plans were for Senator Landrieu, a Democrat in a difficult state up for re-election this fall. One is thankful that, unlike in the Acorn case, the judicial system is already at work unraveling the conspiracy and holding the individuals accountable long before Fox News had an opportunity to promote even more fiction. I mean news. Uh, do they know the difference?

What I can say with assurance is that in the fascinating legal case that is about to begin, Mr. O’Keefe will be given what none of the objects of his efforts have been afforded – a fair chance to be heard without a presumption of guilt.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the effort to extend the current Estate Tax regime through next year has failed. As part of the Bush tax cuts, the exemption, above which taxes are due, has been slowly rising. The Conservative plan, put in place in 2001, phases out the tax entirely next year, and then, in the following year, reverts to the 2001 rates and much lower exemption. They couldn’t make it permanent then, as they wanted to do, because it simply cut too much revenue out of the equation, even for the then-dominant Republican leadership on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Beneath the din of the healthcare debate, and Joe Lieberman’s stunning profile in cowardice and betrayal of his constituency, the inexorable process of displacing taxes from the super-wealthy to the middle class continues its stealthy pace. It is stunning to me that in these particularly dire economic times, the progressive majority in both the House and Senate has squandered the opportunity to extend current year provisions into next year. Neither the House nor the Senate could muster the will to adopt the extension. Lieberman-type leadership at its best?

And the conservatives – wow, they are a whole other kettle of fish. Cynical beyond measure, they figure a bankrupt government is better than no government at all. (Remember that stellar statement by neo-conservative, Grover Norquist: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” So helpful in tough times.)

But this Estate Tax matter is really serious for the non-profit sector – not that you’d really understand that from the way many in philanthropy have used their considerable resources. The Council on Foundations, for instance, does support making permanent the current estate tax regime, though the matter shows up way down their list of public policy priorities, and one has rarely if ever heard the Council’s leadership making the case for the Estate Tax. Even with the more broadly-based, and often far more insightful, Independent Sector, this issue has not really achieved traction with the membership despite the best efforts of its leadership to remind us all of its importance.

Best estimates suggest that the sector will lose $25 billion each year, if the estate tax is abolished. The incentives for the creation of new foundations or the making of very large testamentary gifts to churches and non-profit organizations shift from financial to purely altruistic. In other words, without the tax deductions, people give less. And it means that if a billionaire expires during the next calendar year, she will pass down that entire fortune to her children or other beneficiaries intact. No taxes. No obligation to share with the society that enabled the accumulation of that fortune in the first place. As Bill Gates, Sr. has often commented, these huge fortunes are not easily assembled in other parts of the globe. The infrastructure, educational systems, regulated financial markets (okay, so we still have some work to do!), transportation systems, and everything else that contributes to the creation of successful businesses needs to be supported somehow, and the Estate Tax is a valuable tool for this.

Even more compelling to me, though, are the tragic social and economic consequences evolving from the advent of a new, permanent Upper Class. Declining family size almost ensures that fortunes of $100 million or more can become self-perpetuating fiefdoms in economic terms. In a manner similar to the nobility of the Middle Ages, who reigned over their lands with impunity through primogeniture (i.e. the oldest son gets the whole thing), the new economic elite will become sequestered and insulated from the broader society. Taxes on the income or realized gains from a large fortune will hardly dent its ability to be self-perpetuating. I just fail to see how this benefits society, this diverse and dynamic set of economic and social forces that has created so much in the world. In Kevin Phillips’ Wealth and Democracy, the author draws out the inextricable tie between social equity and the vibrancy of our democratic practice. The fact is inescapable – government must dampen the accumulation of “super-wealth”, and use the proceeds to create opportunity for “the many,” for, after all, the latter is what has always produced the best that America has achieved.

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.

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A LETTER TO VAN…

Dear Van,

Thanks for taking one for the team. It is so unbelievably absurd to experience the power of the rightwing attack machine, especially when what you are doing is so basically decent, and smart, and intended to help everyone, even the morons who went after you.

We know one thing about dealing with these people. Facts don’t matter. Fear matters. Whatever they can do to twist things to make you into a scary force intent on destroying our way of life, they will do. And they will do it in what Charles Blow so aptly describes as “talking in bumper stickers.” These are the same people who deride the President as being racist, who belittle anyone who tries to address global warming or poverty (not to mention healthcare), and who have literally nothing to offer other than wild conspiracy theories of a vast leftwing plot, though a plot to do what is always vague.

Now that you have stepped down, I wonder whose turn it will be next for the sick game of character assassination directed at pretty much anyone advancing ideas of social justice or sustainability. I agree with many of the voices responding to your resignation – it’s time we stand up against the McCarthyism and hateful speech that’s being thrown our way – and especially yours. It is un-American and anti-democratic.

Anyway, here’s to you and all you stand for in this world. I know you will land somewhere very soon doing critically important work. In the meantime, sleep, rest, and play with the kids. While we all know you didn’t leave to “spend time with the family”, it’s not such a bad idea.

All the best, my friend
Drummond

For years, we’ve lived with this crazy idea put forth by conservatives that “class warfare” is a terrible thing that Democrats often fall back on and it only divides America. In January, 2003, then-President Bush decried critics of his tax cut proposals as agents of “class warfare,” despite the diminutive response the proposals were receiving from the opposition. It was an aggressive, in-your-face statement that set the stage for the bi-elections later that year. What would have been more appropriate would have been for him to be talking into a mirror, for few can now doubt what Bob Borosage of the Campaign for America’s Future has been arguing for years – namely that the signature accomplishment of the Bush years has been to drastically weaken the lot of working Americans. Everything from tax cuts that gave 90% of the benefits to the already wealthy to coddling of Wall Street at every possible opportunity that arose, most notably in the deregulating of the financial markets. 

In many ways, we have been at this since “supply-sider” Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency. He quite straightforwardly sought to shrink government while embracing the free market cheerleaders who believe in unfettered markets. Tax cuts became the answer to everything. Reduced federal spending was close behind. Outside of the military, real progress in the evolution of governance in America came to a standstill for the past 28 years. So perhaps it is no great surprise that the barons of Wall Street are having a bit of difficulty adjusting. One loves the story about John Thain, recently dethroned from Merrill Lynch after revelations that he spent $1.2 million of the firms money to “redo” his office about a year ago. While the meltdown hadn’t taken full force then, it was well understood that the financial giant was in trouble and had been losing money for some time. It has, of course, ended up in the dumps, recently purchased for a song by B of A. What I love about the story is the simple idea that he apparently thought the role to model (as all CEO’s realize that role modeling is a core requirement) was that of potentate not worker bee. Having an antique “commode” worth tens of thousands of dollars somehow conveyed a message he cared about. 

Thain is hardly alone. It seems as though the titans of industry, whose bonuses long ago departed any connection to the overall financial performance of their companies, view the ascension to pinnacle roles as a license to take all they can get away with. Reading that 2008 Wall Street bonuses amounted to some $18.4 billion in the worst financial period since the Great Depression is simply astonishing. If not illegal, it is certainly the moral equivalent of stealing. So, I say a pox on all their houses. Let’s “claw back” everything we can, but let’s also bring these people back to earth. Maybe establish a legal limit on the ratio of highest paid to lowest paid employees? In my organization that ratio is about 8 to 1. So the non-profit world is a bit different. Let’s set it for 20 to 1 in the for profit world. I bet there would be a lot more well paid folks on the low end of the scale. So, what was wrong with the idea of class warfare?

Wade Rathke has done something some would never have predicted. Resigned as ACORN’s Chief Organizer. Who ever would have imagined?

I met Wade in 1972, as best I can recall. Marge Tabankin and I were running the Youth Project (she was my boss) and had developed a bit of a competition to find the most impressive new organizers “out there.” The YP, begun in the Center for Community Change’s basement, was an operation to leverage foundation $$ into community organizing that involved young people – an attempt to bring the national movements of the day down into the everyday lives of disenfranchised communities. I came up with Mike Miller from Organize, Inc. in SF – a skilled, talented follower of Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation approach: parish based, working class organizing. Alinsky had defined the field in many ways and his Rules for Radicals was found on the shelves of an entire college generation at the time. Margie’s choice was this kid named Wade Rathke.
(more…)

There has been a battle raging in the philanthropic rag, “Chronicle on Philanthropy” that was inspired by a fear-mongering conservative named William Schambra of the Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal at the Hudson Institute. He started with the worst of fear-mongering which you can derive from the title to his prominent editorial, “Philanthropy’s Jerimiah Wright Problem.” The article basically tried to equate Wright’s outlandish rhetoric (albeit taken out of context) with a body of very thoughtful work being done by a number of non-profits and foundations that addresses an emerging analysis called structural racism. (more…)

From the front page of the NY Times today described the first day of the economic policy debate that will likely dominate the upcoming presidential campaigns. Why? Simple: folks are hurting. For all the good and bad things happening in the world, it’s pretty clear that no amount of social “wedge issues,” like gay marriage, choice, or whether America is a “Christian country” or not, will obscure the pain of the subprime meltdown or $4 gasoline. Cooper and Rohter in the Times wrote, “It is a battle between Republican supply-side economics and a Democratic tradition that uses government levers to try to reduce inequality and spur the economy.” Indeed, this may well emerge as the clearest ideologically-based choice voters have had since 1932.

We have had for nearly 3 decades an unchallenged rhetoric that argues that we have to “free up” capital by lowering taxes on investments (capital gains) in order to stimulate the economy. While progressives have been shouting unheard into the media wind that real wages have been flat for YEARS and that letting the rich get richer doesn’t really help working people, somehow the notion hasn’t gotten traction that the economic policy elite wasn’t really moving on the right set of tracks. Some, like ex-Nixon speech writer Kevin Phillips, have been decrying the emergence of a new Golden Age, more similar to the 1890’s or 1920’s when the rich were fabulously so, while ordinary folks wallowed unable to get ahead. This disparity between the rich and the poor, he argued in Wealth and Democracy, threatens democracy at its roots when the wealthy gain unfettered access to the power of government, turning it to their purposes.

So, have Naomi Klein’s “disaster capitalists” been hiding out in the candy store after hours, gorging themselves on no-bid contracts, crop subsidies, military cost overruns, and government policy aided media monopolies? Sure seems so. Just listen to Larry Lessig on the toxic power of lobbyists, or Dan Rather on why corporate interests, particularly conglomerates that own some media but also a lot of other things, have everything to gain from a muzzled media. News has become all-Paris Hilton all the time. And meanwhile, who has noticed the corruption that seems to have broken out in DC?

Let’s hope the people have, and maybe that’s why folks are finally looking so closely at the economy as we enter this election process. How refreshing!

Someone to watch closely on this: Jason Furman, the new economic policy guy in the Obama campaign. Labor folks are unhappy with his strong ties to Robert Rubin, the bigtime Wall Street insider and former Secretary of the Treasury under Clinton.

I read this morning that the Honorable Tom Tancredo, Representative to Congress from Colorado’s 6th District, has found His Holiness the Pope wanting with regard to his sympathetic, supportive stance regarding immigrants. From today’s NY Times:

Accusing the pope of “faith-based marketing,” Mr. Tancredo said Benedict’s comments welcoming immigrants “may have less to do with spreading the Gospel than they do about recruiting new members of the Church.” Mr. Tancredo, a former Catholic who now attends an evangelical Christian church, said it was not in the pope’s “job description to engage in American politics.”

Representative Tancredo is but the most recent example of the remarkable American trait of generational amnesia. All four of his grandparents immigrated to the US from Italy, part of some 4 million Italians who arrived here between 1880 and 1920. As a third generation American, Mr. Tancredo has adopted another uniquely American trait – “we got here first, so you stay away.” A quick review of the history of American Immigration Law reveals repeated exclusions of immigrants based largely on race: Chinese, Japanese, South Asians, and Filipinos all can claim their own special Congressionally approved bans, each in place for years before repeal. The racial underpinnings of our evolving immigration laws will confound any remaining skeptics of the concept of structural racism. Race has clearly been the basis of immigration policy over and over again, and especially so during the period that Mr. Tancredo’s grandparents were making their way to the US.

What’s intriguing about the son of a son of an immigrant becoming the Chief Immigrant Baiter among right wing politicians who collectively seem intent on blaming Spanish-speaking immigrants for every ill, is that it so clearly reflects an element of self-hatred. When Italians came in droves to the big cities of America a century ago, they were termed “Birds of Paradise” arriving to earn some money and return home, just as many, if not most, of our current undocumented workers wish to do (and have done for decades). The irony, of course, is that the conservative response to date, dampened only by the change in Congressional majorities two years ago, has been to erect barriers that prevent transit across the borders, thus effectively trapping these “remittance workers” here indefinitely when they used to return home seasonally.

As a Californian, the issue of immigration imbues both current and historical politics. This state, originally a part of Mexico, has inarguably been built on the labor of its immigrants. What few recall in the current debate, is that California is the only state in the nation that attempted to prevent immigration from other states. In 1937, California enacted the so-called “Anti-Okie Law” which was not overturned until 1941. It’s purpose? – stem the tide of Okies, Arkies, ‘Texicans’, and other predominantly white refugees from the famed Dust Bowl of the thirties in the mid-west. Just as Mexican and Central American migrant laborers do today, they largely came west to pick crops and scrape out a meager living, having suffered through one of the worst environmental calamities to afflict modern America. Okies were demonized more than Arabs are today throughout the media, that is until John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath was made into one of Hollywood’s greatest films.

There is no suitable response to Tancredo’s critique of the Pope other than to quietly say that freedom in America means that even really stupid, rude, wrong things get said at times. That the sayer is a Member of Congress ought to be deeply embarrassing to those Coloradans living in the 6th District, just south of Denver. It surely is to me.

Have you ever met Ms. American Express? Or, Mr. Exxon? No, neither have I, but the odd thing is that under the law, they are, roughly speaking, the same as any normal sentient person. This is the result not of a Supreme Court decision, but rather a Supreme Court Reporter’s description of a decided case – a statement without precedential value – that has been disputed ever since. That the reporter was a retired railroad executive and the plaintiffs were rail companies in the late 1800’s, seems to have been left in the dust of history. The rail companies, you see, were trying to reinterpret the 14th Amendment that was passed shortly after the end of the Civil War; its purpose was to address the history of slavery in the south by precluding a state’s right to pass any law that “abridge[d] the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States…” In short, if held to be a legal “person,” a corporation could argue that a state couldn’t individually regulate its affairs; only the federal government could. In any event, by chicanery or innocent error, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad became the means that turned corporations into legal “people.”

There is more than a modicum of irony in this, since many of the rail corporations that benefitted from the 1886 decision, and they did so handsomely, also readily embraced the Jim Crow laws of the post Civil War period that continued the subjugation of most ex-slaves and their progeny for a hundred years. I doubt they ever made the connection between their economic advantage and the use of the Amendment intended to ensure freedoms to those freed by the passage of the 13th Amendment banning slavery.

What inspired this line of thought? I read in today’s NY Times that over recent years, the US Justice department has been signing dozens of “deferred prosecution agreements.” These have them paying fines, opening themselves to ‘outside monitors,’ and otherwise not admitting responsibility. Many of these agreements are secret, to boot, so we don’t even know about them. Now, that’s what I call having your cake and eating it, too, because I don’t think real people get anywhere near that kind of a break. No, we seem perfectly content to lock real people up or – at the very least – have them plead guilty to a lesser charge. Criminal cases don’t have “settlement agreement” options…unless you are a corporate “legal person.”

Think of all the money we could save if we allowed people indicted for crimes to have “deferred prosecution agreements.” None of those Enron guys would have gone to jail – they’d just have bought themselves out of the jam just like Monsanto evidently did. In the Times article, they described Monsanto’s deed: knowingly bribing an Indonesian official in return for looser regulations for those using their modified crop strains. The company knew about and approved the bribe (not some maverick executive, to be clear), but they never faced criminal charges of the kind that drove Authur Anderson out of business. Ah, the new era of “free market capitalism” seems to have been given a new meaning for “free.”

Evidently the current administration’s perspective is that free market corporations ought to have a permanent “get out of jail free” card. Any idea where I can get one of those?

Oh, one more thing. Remember John Ashcroft, our former Attorney General who oversaw the Justice Department? Well his firm just got a $50 million deal to monitor a “deferred prosecution agreement” between Justice and a medical services company. Sweet, huh? Just kinda makes one want to go into public service….and then jump into the greenback-lined “post-prosecutorial era.”