Author: chasdarwin

Active in Americans United, Center For Inquiry, and ACLU

GOP Grapples With The Unsettling Fear That Obamacare May Succeed

Happy Days are Here Again!

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Source: TPM

Author: Sahil Kapur

N.B.: see http://acasignups.net/

“In light of Obamacare achieving its goal of 7 million initial insurance sign-ups, William Kristol’s 1993 memo urging his party to block health care reform at all costs seems prescient. In it, the then-GOP operative’s message was remarkably candid: it’s a “serious political threat to the Republican Party.”

Kristol argued that it would cast Democrats as protectors of the middle class and “strike a punishing blow” to GOP ideals about the evils of government.

“[T]he long-term political effects of a successful Clinton health care bill will be even worse — much worse,” Kristol wrote. “It will relegitimize middle-class dependence for ‘security’ on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.”

Two decades later, Democrats have achieved their century-long dream, defeating the GOP’s revived Kristol-esque strategy to destroy health care reform at all costs. Obamacare unexpectedly crossed its first big milestone last week with 7 million sign-ups on the exchanges. While the law still faces many challenges, conservatives who broadly predicted it would collapse under its own weight are forced to reckon with the unsettling fear that health care reform might succeed.

Few understood the dilemma better than Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who made it his personal mission to kill health care reform from its inception in 2009. His aggressive whip operation led to unanimous GOP opposition to the effort and a variety of scorched-earth tactics aimed at scuttling it. But the bill passed anyway. And in a cruel twist, it is performing especially well in his home state, cutting Kentucky’s uninsured rate by 40 percent. But McConnell, who faces re-election this year, isn’t relenting: upon news of the 7 million signups, he maintained that the law was a “catastrophe.”

Conservative policy wonks are more shaken, conceding that the law appears able to sustain itself and warning that simply repealing it is no longer feasible because it would strip away benefits from up to millions of Americans. Variations of that argument have been made by the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, conservative health care consultant Avik Roy, National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru and Kristol himself, who is now the editor of the Weekly Standard.

These conservatives are confronting the realities of Obamacare, which include roughly 7 million signed up on the exchanges, 3 million new Medicaid enrollees and 3 million young adults on their parent’s plan. They argue that the benefits are popular and can’t simply be taken away without a political backlash. But elected Republicans now face a difficult choice: rescind these benefits or demoralize their right-wing base, which remains animated for total destruction of the health law. And so GOP lawmakers haven’t flinched in their quest for repeal as reporters force them to confront the impracticality of undoing Obamacare.

“I don’t buy that for a second,” said House Budget Chair Paul Ryan (R-WI), maintaining that “the architecture of this law is so fundamentally flawed that I think it’s going to collapse under its own weight.” Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said Obamacare “continues to wreak havoc on American families” and vowed that House Republicans “will continue to work to repeal this law.”

The GOP’s political inclination to dig in runs deeper than keeping conservatives energized for the November congressional elections. It’s about preserving their party’s brand. Even minor concessions of Obamacare’s potential for success would gravely damage their credibility after relentless warnings for years that the law was fatally flawed, irreparably damaging to the health care system and ruinous to economic freedom. They don’t have a good option other than to stay the course and keep highlighting Obamacare’s downsides and flaws — of which there are plenty — at least through the 2014 election, where the fundamentals so strongly favor them that they’re unlikely to pay a price.

Indeed, Obamacare remains a vulnerability for Democrats in the mid-terms, threatening to damage incumbent senators in red states where the law remains unpopular. Republicans have cushioned the near-term blow by uniting against Obamacare in an unparalleled way, which has kept their base voters animated.

The long-run, however, is a different story. By 2016, the political cost of repeal will skyrocket as Obamacare is projected to cover 30 million Americans. Republicans were somewhat fortunate that Social Security and Medicare — which they also fought tooth and nail at the time, echoing rhetoric they use against Obamacare — weren’t named after a Democratic president. If the Affordable Care Act succeeds, the public will know who to attribute it to.

Kristol didn’t respond to a request for comment on this article. His 1993 memo emphasized the political potency of health care reform for Democrats.

“‘Health care will prove to be an enormously healthy project for Clinton… and for the Democratic Party.’ So predicts Stanley Greenberg, the president’s strategist and pollster,” he wrote. “If a Clinton health care plan succeeds without principled Republican opposition, Mr. Greenberg will be right.”

 

Emphasis Mine

See:

Building Organizations or Creating Movements? How Two Theories on Change Can Work Together

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Source: Alternet

Author: Mark Engler and Paul Engler

“Although Saul Alinsky, the founding father of modern community organizing in the United States, passed away in 1972, he is still invoked by the right as a dangerous harbinger of looming insurrection. And although his landmark book, “Rules for Radicals,” is now nearly 45 years old, the principles that emerged from Alinsky’s work have influenced every generation of community organizers that has come since.

The most lasting of Alinsky’s prescriptions are not his well-known tactical guidelines — “ridicule is man’s most potent weapon” or “power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.” Rather, they are embedded in a set of organizational practices and predispositions, a defined approach to building power at the level of local communities. Hang around social movements for a while and you will no doubt be exposed to the laws of Chicago-style community organizing: “Don’t talk ideology, just issues. No electoral politics. Build organizations, not movements … Focus on neighborhoods and on concrete, winnable goals.”

Veteran labor writer David Moberg recently offered this list when reflecting on the work of National People’s Action, or NPA, one of today’s leading coalitions of community-based groups. Given that NPA’s dynamic executive director, George Goehl, was trained by Shel Trapp — a prominent Alinsky disciple — it is no surprise that traditional community organizing principles are still reflected in the bottom-up, door-to-door methodologies of NPA affiliates in 14 states.

At the same time, under Goehl’s leadership, National People’s Action is also doing many things differently. His coalition is now embracing a big-picture vision (talking about cooperative ownership of business and public control of finance), and it is making forays into electoral politics (forming a lobbying arm to do legislative advocacy and possibly even to run candidates). In pushing beyond Alinsky’s traditional rules, Goehl is motivated not only to win concrete reforms within the existing political system but to develop, Moberg writes, the “vision, strategy, and full arsenal of political weapons needed to roll back decades of corporate conservative victories and to create a more democratic economy and government.”

Goehl’s ambition is not unique. Other community organizers who experienced the Occupy movement were impressed by the massive momentum for change it created — even if much of ts force proved fleeting. Efforts such as the 99% Spring and Occupy Our Homes were steps by community-based groups toward integrating their traditional organizing models with the social movement energy that had blossomed in Zuccotti Park and beyond.

The desire to re-examine maxims such as “build organizations, not movements” is an exciting development — one that opens the door to interaction between those focused on building long-term “people’s organizations,” as Alinsky called them, and those exploring the dynamics of strategic nonviolence and disruptive mass mobilization.

It is also one that Alinsky himself may well have supported.

Looking back at the origins of many foundational principles associated with the Alinskyite organizing tradition, it becomes clear that some were not as deeply rooted in the founder’s thinking as others — and that he might have pressed for reconsideration of certain commandments that have grown hallowed since the 1960s. These discrepancies raise an intriguing question: If Alinsky were alive today, would he be breaking his own rules?

* * *

In recent years, Saul Alinsky has become known for of his connections to prominent figures inside Washington, D.C. In the 1980s, Barack Obama cut his political teeth as an organizer in an Alinskyite community organization, an initiative on the South Side of Chicago known as the Developing Communities Project. Hillary Clinton’s undergraduate thesis at Wellesley College was entitled, “There is Only the Fight: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.” Because of these links, Glenn Beck featured Alinsky prominently on his maps of leftist conspiracy in America, and Newt Gingrich regularly used the organizer as a foil on the campaign trail in 2012.

There is some irony to these beltway associations, given that Alinsky built his reputation as an anti-establishment radical working squarely outside the domain of electoral politics. A Chicago native and son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Alinsky got his start organizing in the 1930s, inspired by CIO and United Mine Workers leader John L. Lewis. In spite of mentoring from Lewis, Alinsky was convinced that the labor movement had grown lethargic and that American democracy needed “people’s organizations” based outside the workplace — citizens’ groups with roots in local communities.

In his first attempt to create such a group he founded the Back-of-the-Yards Neighborhood Council, an effort to organize the ethnically diverse workers who lived behind the meatpacking plants featured in Upton Sinclair’s muckraking 1906 novel, “The Jungle.” To fight the slum conditions facing this community, Alinsky packed the offices of bureaucrats with hundreds of residents and routed marches past the homes of local officials. “Many confrontations and several months later,” author Mary Beth Rogers writes, “Back of the Yards claimed credit for new police patrols, street repairs, regular garbage collection, and lunch programs for 1,400 children.”

By 1940, with the help of funding from wealthy liberal Marshall Field III, Alinsky had created a nonprofit known as the Industrial Areas Foundation, or IAF, tasked with spurring organization in other urban neighborhoods. In the 1950s, Alinsky and Fred Ross worked through the IAF-supported Community Service Organization to improve living conditions for Mexican-Americans in California; there, Ross recruited a young organizer in San Jose named Cesar Chavez and another in Fresno named Dolores Huerta. (Only after years of training did Chavez and Huerta leave to form what would become the United Farm Workers.)

Among Alinsky’s other prominent campaigns, he would work in the 1960s with black residents in Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood to fight exploitative landlords and to challenge school overcrowding, and he would help community members in Rochester, N.Y., compel the Eastman Kodak Company to create a hiring program for African American workers.

Alinsky taught through stories, usually exaggerated, always entertaining. In 1971 writer Nat Hentoff stated, “At 62, Saul is the youngest man I’ve met in years.” Playboy interviewer Eric Norden agreed. “There is a tremendous vitality about Alinsky, a raw, combative ebullience, and a consuming curiosity about everything and everyone around him,” Norden wrote. “Add to this a mordant wit, a monumental ego coupled with an ability to laugh at himself and the world in general, and you begin to get the measure of the man.”

Alinsky’s first book, “Reveille for Radicals” became a bestseller when published in 1946; it blasted liberal-minded charity efforts and called for an indigenous American radicalism based in citizen action. “Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals” came in 1971, near the end of Alinsky’s life, and remains popular. It was recently circulated by Republican Dick Armey’s organization FreedomWorks to Tea Party members curious about the book’s methods, even if they are opposed to its goals. Its first chapter begins: “What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. ‘The Prince’ was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. ‘Rules for Radicals’ is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

Frank Bardacke, author of a sweeping history of the United Farm Workers, recounts how Alinsky’s principles for building power solidified into an identifiable organizing tradition: “With Saul as the fountainhead, community organizing has become a codified discipline, with core theoretical propositions, recognized heresies, disciples, fallen neophytes, and splits.” He quotes Heather Booth, founder of the Midwest Academy, an Alinskyite training center for organizers, who calls Alinsky “our Sigmund Freud.”

“What Booth means is that both Freud and Alinsky founded schools of thought,” Bardacke explains, “but there is another, deeper link: the role of training and lineage. Just as psychoanalysts trace their pedigree back to the grand master (they were either analyzed by Freud or by someone who was analyzed by Freud, or by someone who was analyzed by someone who…), so Alinskyite and neo-Alinskyite organizers trace their training back to Alinsky himself.”

Alinsky’s influence today is felt not just in the IAF or Goehl’s NPA — whose member groups range from Community Voices Heard in New York, to POWER in Los Angeles, to Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement. It is also present in networks such as PICO, DART, USAction/Citizen Action, the Gamaliel Foundation, and the former branches of ACORN. Collectively these organizations claim several million members, and the tradition has spread internationally as well, with organizing trainings taking place in Europe, South Africa and the Philippines. Each of the networks, writes sociologist David Walls, is “indebted, in greater or lesser degree, to Alinsky and his early organizing programs in Chicago through IAF.”

The principle of “no electoral politics” took hold in the Alinskyite tradition based on the idea that community organizations should be pragmatic, nonpartisan, and ideologically diverse — that they should put pressure on all politicians, not express loyalty to any. Historian Thomas Sugrue writes that Alinsky “never had much patience for elected officials: Change would not come from top-down leadership, but rather from pressure from below. In his view, politicians took the path of least resistance.” Alinsky himself was not anti-state — as sociologist P. David Finks writes, for him “the problem was not so much getting government off our backs as getting it off its rear end” — but the focus of his efforts was outside the electoral arena. The IAF’s lingering pride in its “independent, nonpartisan” status reflects its desire to recruit members from across the political spectrum in any given community, not merely to engage the usual suspects of progressive activism.

This “nonpartisan” avoidance of ideology also relates to perhaps the most interesting precept in the Alinskyite tradition: the one which distances community organizing from mass mobilizations. As Rutgers sociology professor and former ACORN organizer Arlene Stein wrote in 1986, “community organizers today tend generally to shun the term movement, preferring to see themselves engaged in building organization.”

Why would someone promoting social change see themselves as wary of movements? There are several reasons, and the way in which the terms “movement” and “organization” are understood connect to some defining aspects of the Alinskyite model.

Ed Chambers, Alinsky’s successor as IAF director, expresses an aversion to movements as a part of his long-term commitment to community members. As he writes in his book “Roots for Radicals,” “We play to win. That’s one of the distinctive features of the IAF: We don’t lead everyday, ordinary people into public failures, and we’re not building movements. Movements go in and out of existence. As good as they are, you can’t sustain them. Everyday people need incremental success over months and sometimes years.”

Alinsky, too, saw a danger in expecting quick upheavals. He argued, “Effective organization is thwarted by the desire for instant and dramatic change. … To build a powerful organization takes time. It is tedious, but that’s the way the game is played — if you want to play and not just yell, ‘Kill the umpire.’” Before entering a neighborhood, Alinsky planned for a sustained commitment. He would not hire an organizer unless he had raised enough money to pay for two or more years of the staffer’s salary.

Beyond setting expectations for timeframe, a dedication to “organizations not movements” is reflected in several other Alinskyite norms. These include the tradition’s connection to churches and other established institutions, its selection of bottom-up demands rather than high-profile national issues, and its attitude toward volunteers and freelance activists.

Alinsky believed in identifying local centers of power — particularly churches — and using them as bases for community groups. The modern IAF continues to follow this principle, serving as a model of “faith-based” organizing.

Instead of picking a galvanizing, morally loaded, and possibly divisive national issue to organize around — as would a mass movement — Alinsky advocated action around narrow local demands. Mark Warren’s “Dry Bones Rattling,” a study of the IAF, explains: “As opposed to mobilizing around a set or predetermined issues, the IAF brings residents together first to discuss the needs of their community and to find a common ground for action.” Practicing what is sometimes called “stop sign organizing,” those working in this vein look for concrete, winnable projects — such as demanding that city officials place a stop sign at a dangerous intersection. The idea is that small victories build local capabilities, give participants a sense of their power,and spur more ambitious action.

They also meet some of the immediate needs of the community — far preferable, in Alinsky’s view, to social movements’ far-off calls for freedom and justice. Throughout his career, Alinsky spoke the language of self-interest. He looked to build democratic power among community members seeking to improve the conditions of their own lives. He was suspicious of volunteer activists who were motivated by abstract values or ideology, people drawn to high-profile moral crusades. That movements were full of such people did not sit well with the Alinskyites. As Chambers writes: “Activists and movement types are mobilizers and entertainers, not democratic organizers. Their script is their persona and their cause. They tend to be overinterested in themselves. Their understanding of politicalness is superficial or media-driven. They lack disinterestedness.”

Moreover, Chambers contends, movement activists’ expectations for change are far too short-term: “Their time frame is immediate. ‘What do we want?’ ‘Freedom.’ ‘When do we want it?’ ‘Now!’ ‘No justice, no peace,’” he explains dismissively. “Movement activists appeal to youth, frustrated idealists, and cynical ideologues, ignoring the 80 percent of moderates who comprise the world as it is. … Organizing is generational, not here today, gone tomorrow.”

Chambers’s view may seem harsh, but it is not atypical of those drawn to community organizing. As Stein explains, “[T]he revival of Alinsky-style organizations in the 1970s and 1980s often defined itself against the social movements of the previous decade — especially the civil rights, women’s, and student antiwar movements — which it tended to view as promoting collective identity formation over the achievement of strategic goals.”

Patient base-building, long-term strategy, incremental local wins. These ingredients would contribute to a lasting and influential organizing model. They would also, in the turbulent 1960s, put Alinsky at the center of an activist culture clash.

* * *

At the same time that Alinsky became a popular speaker on 1960s campuses, his vision of organizing put him at odds with many of the era’s leading activists — both its student militants and its more high-profile leaders, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1965 and 1966, tensions between “organization” and “movement” surfaced when King and his Southern Christian Leadership Council came to Chicago, Alinsky’s home turf, to mount their first Northern civil rights drive.

During the campaign, Nicholas von Hoffman, a close Alinsky lieutenant, had a chance encounter with King in Memphis, Tenn., in the hospital where activist James Meredith had been taken after being shot while marching in support of black voter registration. Von Hoffman gave King his advice about Chicago: “I told him I thought it could succeed if he was prepared for trench warfare, which would demand tight, tough organization to take on the Daley operation,” von Hoffman writes. “I added it could not be done in less than two years.”

Von Hoffman was not convinced that King was listening. He knew that the SCLC — coming off of mobilizations in Birmingham and Selma — had grown accustomed to much shorter campaigns, sometimes lasting just months. Nor was he impressed by King’s decision to move his family into an apartment in one of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods, which von Hoffman dismissed as a “dramatic gesture” of little utility. “Organizing is akin to stringing beads to make a necklace,” von Hoffman argued. “It demands patience, persistence, and some kind of design. King’s campaignin Chicago was short on beads and bereft of design.”

Alinsky and von Hoffman regarded the SCLC leader as a “one-trick pony” who relied too heavily on media-seeking marches, and they held his team in low regard. As von Hoffman contended, King and the outsiders he brought into Chicago “were, as far as I could tell, a hodgepodge of young white idealists, college kids, and summer soldiers, most of whom had no knowledge of the people they were supposed to recruit. In the South the youthful white idealists were useful civil rights cannon fodder; in Chicago they were dead weight.”

Von Hoffman noted the contrast with his tradition. “It was the antithesis of an Alinsky operation where outside volunteers were generally shooed away not only because they got in the way but also because they didn’t have any skin in the game,” he noted. “Laudable as it is to volunteer to help other people wrestle with their problems, effective organizations are built with people who have direct and personal interest in their success.”

This type of analysis reflected Alinsky’s broader critique of civil rights organizing. In a 1965 interview he argued, “The Achilles’ Heel of the civil rights movement is the fact that it has not developed into a stable, disciplined, mass-based power organization.” He believed the movement’s victories owed much to uncontrollable world-historical forces, to “the incredibly stupid blunders of the status quo in the South and elsewhere,” and to the contributions of church institutions.

He added, with King as his unnamed subject: “Periodic mass euphoria around a charismatic leader is not an organization. It’s just the initial stage of agitation.”

For Alinsky, stressing the importance of strong organization was also a matter of bridging a generation gap. Those yelling “kill the umpire,” in his view, were the members of the New Left. Alinsky felt that people his age were partially responsible for the youths’ ignorance. In writing “Rules for Radicals,” he sought to communicate with 1960s activists whom he saw as suffering from a lack of mentoring — the result of a missing generation of organizers. “Few of us survived the Joe McCarthy holocaust of the 1950s,” Alinsky wrote, “and of those there were even fewer whose understanding and insights had developed beyond the dialectical materialism of orthodox Marxism. My fellow radicals who were supposed to pass on the torch of experience and insights to a new generation just were not there.”

As a consequence, young leftists were too easily seduced by quick fixes, Alinsky believed. In an afterward to a 1969 reissue of his first book, “Reveille for Radicals,” he wrote, “The approach of so much of the present generation is so fractured with ‘confrontations’ and crises as ends in themselves that their activities are not actions but a discharge of energy which, like a fireworks spectacle, briefly lights up the skies and then vanishes into the void.”

The creation of an alternative methodology — what Stein describes as “a highly structured organizing model specifying step-by-step guidelines for creating neighborhood organizations” — was an understandable response, and one that has shown great strengths. But, in recent decades, we may have seen its limitations as well.

The question is whether too close an adherence to a hardened model has created missed opportunities — chances to integrate structure-based organization and momentum-driven movements, and to harness the power of both.

It turns out that many of the rules of the Alinskyite tradition come less from the founder himself and more from his successors’ subsequent codification of his ideas.

After Alinsky’s death, IAF leaders Ed Chambers, Richard Harmon, and Ernesto Cortes sat down to assess the factors that contributed to the failure of earlier organizing drives. As author Mary Beth Rogers writes, they identified several “patterns that created instability, ineffectiveness, and eventual dissolution.” Among them: “Movements that depended on charismatic leaders fell apart in the absence of the leader;” “organizations formed around a single issue died when the issue lost its potency;” and “organizations that played to the public spotlight confused their desire for media attention with their strategy for change.”

Clearly, the IAF heavyweights were critical of the social movements of the New Left. But, more surprisingly, their assessment also indicted Alinsky’s own work.

While the founding father had planted seeds for organizations throughout the country, only a handful survived for longer than three years. As IAF organizer Michael Gecan writes in his book “Going Public,” “Alinsky was extraordinarily effective as a tactician, writer, speaker and gadfly. He was the first theorist and exponent of citizen organizing in urban communities.” But, “While Alinsky had many gifts and strengths … he did not create organizations that endured.”

This challenge would be left to his successors, in particular Ed Chambers. “That was Chambers’s critical contribution to the world of citizens organizing and to America as a whole,” Gecan writes. “He had a talent for teaching people how to organize power that lasted.” Chambers’ systemization of the Alinsky model would involve formalizing processes for recruiting and grooming organizers, relying less on large foundations for funding, improving working conditions to reduce burn-out, and strengthening ties to faith-based groups. Other networks of community organizations would further the model by bringing local groups into national coalitions and creating their own training programs to refine and spread the rules of grassroots power-building.

In many respects, these were necessary changes. Yet they may have come at the cost of some of Alinsky’s original creativity. In their focus on building for the long term and creating strong organizational structures, subsequent community organizing leaders have grown less sensitive than their tradition’s founder to the potential of exceptional moments of mass mobilization.

In truth, Alinsky was far less rigid than the “rules” attributed to him might suggest. Nicholas von Hoffman, in a memoir about his time with Alinsky, describes his former mentor as “one of the least dogmatic and most flexible of men. Alinsky believed that liberty was to be redefined and rewon by every generation according to its circumstances and the demands of the time.” For his part, Alinsky liked to tell a story, possibly apocryphal, of sitting in on a university exam designed for students of community organization. “Three of the questions were on the philosophy and motivations of Saul Alinsky,” he claimed. “I answered two of them incorrectly!”

This flexibility affected his view of elections. Alinsky’s biographer, Sanford Horwitt, notes that the organizer had plans to run a candidate for Congress in a 1966 election on Chicago’s South Side, and he sent staffers from Woodlawn to serve on the campaign staff of an anti-machine challenger. Horwitt quotes von Hoffman, who says, “A lot of people, especially those who turned ‘community organizing’ into a kind of religion, now take it as gospel from Saul Alinsky … that one never gets directly involved in electoral politics. Well, he never thought that.”

More importantly, Alinsky’s take on mass mobilization was not one-dimensional. One of the most interesting moments in his career came when he attempted to integrate the energy of a social movement with the work of one of his community organizations.

While organizing in the Woodlawn neighborhood in early 1961, von Hoffman got a call from a civil rights activist taking part in the Freedom Rides, a protest designed to challenge segregated interstate busing in the South. The riders were violently attacked in Alabama — one of their buses was burned in Anniston, and they were beaten by a mob in Montgomery. Having just been released from a New Orleans hospital, the activist and some of his fellow participants contacted von Hoffman to express interest in making their first public appearance in Chicago.

Von Hoffman was initially hesitant — wary that the event would not advance local organizing and mindful of previous civil rights rallies in Chicago that drew only a handful of picketers. Yet he arranged for a talk to be held in a large gymnasium in St. Cyril’s Church. As Horwitt writes, “On a Friday night, two hours before the program was to start, the gym was empty and von Hoffman was nervous — his initial fears seemed about to be confirmed. An hour later, an elderly couple arrived, and then, to von Hoffman’s total amazement, so many people turned up that there was no room left in the gym, in the foyer, or on the stairs.”

Von Hoffman arranged for loudspeakers to broadcast the talk to the hundreds of people in the streets outside the venue. Later, he left the event reeling. Far more people had come than his group could have possibility mobilized through its organizational structures, and the issue had generated a profound energy in the community. He woke up Alinsky with a middle-of-the-night phone call and explained what happened. Von Hoffman said, “I think that we should toss out everything we are doing organizationally and work on the premise that this is the moment of the whirlwind, that we are no longer organizing but guiding a social movement.”

To his surprise, Alinsky responded by saying, “You’re right. Get on it tomorrow.”

The Woodlawn organization subsequently held its own version of the Freedom Rides — a bus caravan to register black voters. The event, Horwitt recounts, produced “the largest single voter-registration ever at City Hall,” startled the city’s power-brokers, generated much greater publicity than Woodlawn’s typical actions, and set the stage for further civil rights activism by the group. In criticizing Martin Luther King several years later, Alinsky was not trying to write off the civil right movement as a whole. A devotee of headline-grabbing direct action, he recognized its accomplishment. And yet he sought to present its leaders with the challenge of institutionalization — a question which King himself grappled with in his later years and which is vital in thinking about how organizing models might be integrated.

* * *

Alinsky understood something important when he embraced “the moment of the whirlwind.” He saw that using mass mobilization to produce spikes in social unrest is a process that follows a different set of rules than conventional organizing. Many of its principles — embracing demands with wide symbolic resonance, channeling energy and participation from a broader public, articulating self-interest in moral and visionary terms — are the opposite of the principles that drive local community organizing. And yet Alinsky was willing to experiment with their possibilities.

Former ACORN organizer Stein argues that such openness became a rarity among Alinsky’s disciples. The Alinskyite organizations of recent decades, she writes, “often fail to grasp the possibilities of mobilization when they occur.” Because of this, they have unduly limited themselves. “The great social movements of American history — labor, populist, civil rights, women’s (to name some of the most important ones),” Stein argues, “captured the interest and imagination of vast numbers of people by offering them material benefits as well as the experience of communal solidarity in an individualistic American culture. In placing ‘organization’ahead of ‘movement,’ ACORN and groups like it” miss this. They discount modes of organizing that tap the transformative possibility of going beyond the most local, concrete or winnable demands.

Whether it is the global justice protests of 1999 and 2000, the massive immigrant rights marches of 2006, or the rapid spread of Occupy Wall Street across the country in 2011, veteran organizers are often caught off guard by movement outbreaks. As a result, they have few ideas for how to guide and amplify these efforts — or how to harness the energy of peak moments in order to propel their ongoing organizing.

Fortunately, in the wake of Occupy, an increasing number of people are interested in precisely this challenge. Those now seeking ways to combine structure- and momentum-based organizing models have much fertile terrain to explore. This will mean opening dialogue between the worlds of “resource mobilization” and “disruptive power”; and it will involve allowing those immersed in labor and community organizing cultures to compare their methods with the insights into mass mobilization that come out of traditions of strategic nonviolence and civil resistance.

In pursuing this work, they can take inspiration from a master of radical pragmatism. For while the split between organizations and movements is real, the true spirit of Alinsky is in breaking the rule that keeps them divided.

Mark Engler is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus, an editorial board member at Dissent, and a contributing editor at Yes! Magazine.Paul Engler is founding director of the Center for the Working Poor, in Los Angeles. They are writing a book about the evolution of political nonviolence. They can be reached via the website www.DemocracyUprising.com.

Emphasis Mine

See: http://www.alternet.org/activism/saul-alinsky-building-organizations-not-movements?akid=11690.123424.8kQMXW&rd=1&src=newsletter978792&t=13

10 Reasons to Raise the Minimum Wage

Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would create economic prosperity and put more money into the pockets of hard-working Americans.

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Source: Alternet

Author: Cap Action War Room

There have been rumors lately that Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) is trying to broker a smaller minimum wage increase. The offer is  a non-starter for Democratic leaders, and would in fact lock low-income workers into poverty wages for the indefinite future. Here at CAP Action, we agree. The Senate’s plan to vote on a minimum wage increase has been pushed back several times, but what matters most is that it stays at $10.10. Here are ten reasons why raising the minimum wage to $10.10 is the right thing for America’s workers and for our economy:

1. It Will Put Money Into The Pockets Of Hard-Working Americans. Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 will raise wages for 28 million workers by  $35 billion in total. Since many of those workers will turn around and spend that money, that is a huge boost for the economy.

2. It Will Reduce Income Inequality. The average CEO shouldn’t make 933 times more than a full-time minimum wage worker.

3. It Won’t Hurt Job Creation. States have raised the minimum wage 91 times since 1987 during periods of high unemployment, and in  more than half of those instances the unemployment rate actually fell. Over  600

1. It Will Put Money Into The Pockets Of Hard-Working Americans. Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 will raise wages for 28 million workers by  $35 billion in total. Since many of those workers will turn around and spend that money, that is a huge boost for the economy.

2. It Will Reduce Income Inequality. The average CEO shouldn’t make 933 times more than a full-time minimum wage worker.

3. It Won’t Hurt Job Creation. States have raised the minimum wage 91 times since 1987 during periods of high unemployment, and in  more than half of those instances the unemployment rate actually fell. Over  600 economists signed a letter agreeing that a minimum wage increase doesn’t hurt job creation.

4. It Is Unlikely To Significantly Impact Prices. A higher minimum wage would mean a DVD at Walmart will cost just one cent more.

5. It Would Help People Get Off Of Food Stamps. A study by the Center for American Progress found that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would help  3.5 million Americans get off food stamps.

6. It Will Save The Government Money. The same CAP study found that, in conjunction with helping people get off of food stamps, raising the minimum wage would save the government  $46 billion over 10 years in spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) as people earn enough on their own to no longer qualify.

7. It Will Improve People’s Economic Security. It is no longer the case that the people making the minimum wage are largely teenagers. In fact, now more than half of workers earning under $10.10 an hour are forced to support themselves on that as their primary income.

8. It Will Lift People Out Of Poverty. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office states that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would  lift 900,000 people out of poverty. For full time workers earning the federal minimum wage, this bump would give them a raise of over $4,000 dollars — enough to take a family of three out of poverty.

9. Businesses Recognize That They Will Also Benefit. Many successful businesses, such as Gap and Costco, already pay their employees wages above $10.10 so they can “ attract and retain great talent“. And  60% of small business owners recognize that their businesses would benefit if we raise the wage.

10. Millions Of Children Will Be More Secure. If we raise the minimum wage to $10.10, 21 million children will have at least one parent whose pay will go up.

BOTTOM LINE: Simply put, it’s an economic no-brainier for Congress to raise the minimum wage to $10.10. It will put more money into the pockets of hard-working Americans and will not negatively impact businesses and job creation. Raising the wage is a critical step in creating an economy that works for everyone, not just the wealthy few.

Emphasis Mine

See: http://www.alternet.org/economy/10-reasons-raise-minimum-wage-charts?akid=11689.123424.VoY5ec&rd=1&src=newsletter978617&t=9

5 Things Conservatives Lie Shamelessly About

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Source: AlterNet

Author: Amanda Marcotte

Mark Twain once famously said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Twain wasn’t praising lies with this comment, of course, but modern-day conservatives seem to think he was dishing out advice instead of damning the practice of dishonesty. Conservatives have figured out a neat little rhetorical trick: One lie is easy for your opponents to debunk. Tell one lie after another, however, and your opponent’s debunkings will never catch up. By the time the liberal opposition has debunked one lie, there’s a dozen more to take its place.

Science educator Eugenie Scott deemed the technique the “Gish Gallop,” named for a notoriously sleazy creationist named Duane Gish. The Urban Dictionary defines the Gish Gallop as a technique that “involves spewing so much bullshit in such a short span on that your opponent can’t address let alone counter all of it.” Often users of the Gish Gallop know their arguments are nonsense or made in bad faith, but don’t particularly care because they are so dead set on advancing their agenda. Unfortunately, the strategy is so effective that it’s been expanding rapidly in right-wing circles. Here are just a few of the most disturbing examples of the Gish Gallop in action.

1. Creationism. It’s no surprise creationists inspired the coining of the term Gish Gallop, as they have perfected the art of making up nonsense faster than scientists can refute it. The list of false or irrelevant claims made by creationists, as chronicled by Talk Origins, numbers in the dozens, perhaps even hundreds, and more are always being spun out. Trying to argue with a creationist, therefore, turns into a hellish game of Whack-A-Mole. Debunk the lie that the speed of light is not constant, and you’ll find he’s already arguing that humans co-existed with dinosaurs. Argue that it’s unconstitutional to put the story of Adam and Eve in the science classroom, and find he’s pretending he was never asking for that and instead wants to “teach the controversy.”

“Teaching the controversy” is a classic Gish Gallop apology. The conservative wants to make it seem like he’s supporting open-minded debate, but instead he just wants an opportunity to dump a bunch of lies on students with the knowledge that they’ll never have the time and attention to carefully parse every debunking.

2. Climate change denialism.This strategy worked so well for creationism it makes perfect sense that it would be imported to the world of climate change denialism. Climate change denialists have many changing excuses for why they reject the science showing that human-caused greenhouse gases are changing the climate, but what all these reasons have in common is they are utter nonsense in service of a predetermined opposition to taking any action to prevent further damage.Skeptical Science, a website devoted to debunking right-wing lies on this topic, has compiled a dizzying list of 176 common claims by climate denialists and links to why they are false. Some of these lies directly contradict each other. For instance, it can’t both be true that climate change is “natural” and that it’s not happening at all. No matter, since the point of these lies is not to create a real discussion about the issue, but to confuse the issue so much it’s impossible to get any real momentum behind efforts to stop global warming.

April 2, 2014  |

3. The Affordable Care Act. It’s not just science where conservatives have discovered the value in telling lies so fast you simply wear your opposition out. When it comes to healthcare reform, the lying has been relentless. There are the big lies, such as calling Obamacare “socialism,” which implies a single-payer system, when in fact, it’s about connecting the uninsured with private companies and giving consumers of healthcare a basic set of rights. In a sense, even the name “Obamacare” is a lie, as the bill was, per the President’s explicit wishes, written by Congress.

But there are also the small lies: The ACA funds abortion. Under the ACA, old people will be forcibly euthanized. Obamacare somehow covers undocumented immigrants. Congress exempted itself from Obamacare (one of the lies that doesn’t even make sense, as it’s not a program you could really get exempted from). Healthcare will add a trillion dollars to the deficit.

The strategy of just lying and lying and lying some more about the ACA has gotten to the point where Fox News is just broadcasting lies accusing the Obama administration of lying. When it was reported that the administration was going to hit its projections for the number of enrollments through healthcare.gov, a subculture of “enrollment truthers” immediately sprang up to spread a variety of often conflicting lies to deny that these numbers are even real. It started soft, with some conservatives suggesting that some enrollments shouldn’t count or arguing, without a shred of evidence, that huge numbers of new enrollees won’t pay their premiums. Now the lying is blowing up to the shameless level, with “cooking the books” being a common false accusation or, as with Jesse Watters on Fox, straight up accusing the White House of making the number up. Perhaps soon there will be demands to see all these new enrollees’ birth certificates.

4. Contraception mandate.The ACA-based requirement that insurance plans cover contraception without a copay has generated a Gish Gallop so large it deserves its own category. Jodi Jacobson of RH Reality Check chronicled 12 of the biggest lies generated by the right-wing noise machine in just the past couple of years since the mandate was even announced. It is not “free” birth control, nor is it “paid for” by employers. The birth control coverage is paid for by the employees, with benefits they earn by working. The mandate doesn’t cover “abortifacients,” only contraception. No, birth control doesn’t work by killing fertilized eggs, but by preventing fertilization. It’s simply false that the prescriptions in question can all be replaced with a $9-a-month prescription from Walmart, as many women’s prescriptions run into the hundreds and even thousands a year. No, it’s not true that the contraception mandate is about funding women’s “lifestyle”, because statistics show that having sex for fun instead of procreation is a universal human behavior and not a marginal or unusual behavior as the term “lifestyle” implies.

5. Gun safety. The gun lobby is dishonest to its core. Groups like the NRA like to paint themselves like they are human rights organizations, but in fact, they are an industry lobby whose only real goal is to protect the profit margins of gun manufacturers, regardless of the costs to human health and safety. Because their very existence is based on a lie, is it any surprise that gun industry advocates are experts at the Gish Gallop, ready to spring into action at the sign of any school shooting or report on gun violence and dump so many lies on the public that gun safety advocates can never even begin to address them all?

A small sampling of the many, many lies spouted by gun industry advocates: That guns prevent murder, when in fact more guns correlates strongly with more murders. That gun control doesn’t work. That gun control is unpopular.  That any move to make gun ownership safer is a move to take away your guns. That a gun in the home makes you safer when it actually puts your family at more risk. That guns protect against domestic violence, when the truth is that owning a gun makes abuse worse, not better. Even the standard line “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is a distracting bit of dishonesty, since most gun deaths aren’t murders but suicides.

How do you fight the Gish Gallop, when trying to debunk each and every lie is so overwhelming? There are a few tactics that help, including creating websites and pamphlets where all the lies can be aggregated in one place, for swift debunking. (Bingo cards and drinking games are a humorous version of this strategy.) A critical strategy is to avoid lengthy Lincoln-Douglas-style debates that allow conservatives to lie-dump rapidly during their speaking period, leaving you so busy trying to clean up their mess you have no time for positive points of your own. Better is a looser style of debate where you can interrupt and correct the lies as they come. I’ve also found some luck with setting an explicit “no lies” rule that will be strictly enforced. The first lie receives a warning, and the second lie means that the debate is immediately terminated. This helps prevent you from having to debunk and instead makes the price of participation a strict adherence to facts.

Amanda Marcotte co-writes the blog Pandagon. She is the author of “It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments.”

Emphasis Mine

See: http://www.alternet.org/5-things-conservatives-lie-shamelessly-about?akid=11677.123424.pmD4Yc&rd=1&src=newsletter978221&t=2

The Dangers of Extreme Wealth Concentration

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Source: NY Times

Author: Paul Krugman

As inequality has become an increasingly prominent issue in American discourse, there has been furious pushback from the right. Some conservatives argue that focusing on inequality is unwise, that taxing high incomes will cripple economic growth. Some argue that it’s unfair, that people should be allowed to keep what they earn. And some argue that it’s un-American — that we’ve always celebrated those who achieve wealth, and that it violates our national tradition to suggest that some people control too large a share of the wealth.

And they’re right. No true American would say this: “The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power,” and follow that statement with a call for “a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes … increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.”

Who was this left-winger? Theodore Roosevelt, in his famous 1910 New Nationalism speech.

The truth is that, in the early 20th century, many leading Americans warned about the dangers of extreme wealth concentration, and urged that tax policy be used to limit the growth of great fortunes. Here’s another example: In 1919, the great economist Irving Fisher — whose theory of “debt deflation,” by the way, is essential in understanding our current economic troubles — devoted his presidential address to the American Economic Association largely to warning against the effects of “an undemocratic distribution of wealth.” And he spoke favorably of proposals to limit inherited wealth through heavy taxation of estates.

Nor was the notion of limiting the concentration of wealth, especially inherited wealth, just talk. In his landmark book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” the economist Thomas Piketty points out that America, which introduced an income tax in 1913 and an inheritance tax in 1916, led the way in the rise of progressive taxation, that it was “far out in front” of Europe. Mr. Piketty goes so far as to say that “confiscatory taxation of excessive incomes” — that is, taxation whose goal was to reduce income and wealth disparities, rather than to raise money — was an “American invention.”

And this invention had deep historical roots in the Jeffersonian vision of an egalitarian society of small farmers. Back when Teddy Roosevelt gave his speech, many thoughtful Americans realized not just that extreme inequality was making nonsense of that vision, but that America was in danger of turning into a society dominated by hereditary wealth — that the New World was at risk of turning into Old Europe. And they were forthright in arguing that public policy should seek to limit inequality for political as well as economic reasons, that great wealth posed a danger to democracy.

So how did such views not only get pushed out of the mainstream, but come to be considered illegitimate?

Consider how inequality and taxes on top incomes were treated in the 2012 election. Republicans pushed the line that President Obama was hostile to the rich. “If one’s priority is to punish highly successful people, then vote for the Democrats,” said Mitt Romney. Democrats vehemently (and truthfully) denied the charge. Yet Mr. Romney was in effect accusing Mr. Obama of thinking like Teddy Roosevelt. How did that become an unforgivable political sin?

You sometimes hear the argument that concentrated wealth is no longer an important issue, because the big winners in today’s economy are self-made men who owe their position at the top of the ladder to earned income, not inheritance. But that view is a generation out of date. New work by the economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman finds that the share of wealth held at the very top — the richest 0.1 percent of the population — has doubled since the 1980s, and is now as high as it was when Teddy Roosevelt and Irving Fisher issued their warnings.

We don’t know how much of that wealth is inherited. But it’s interesting to look at the Forbes list of the wealthiest Americans. By my rough count, about a third of the top 50 inherited large fortunes. Another third are 65 or older, so they will probably be leaving large fortunes to their heirs. We aren’t yet a society with a hereditary aristocracy of wealth, but, if nothing changes, we’ll become that kind of society over the next couple of decades.

In short, the demonization of anyone who talks about the dangers of concentrated wealth is based on a misreading of both the past and the present. Such talk isn’t un-American; it’s very much in the American tradition. And it’s not at all irrelevant to the modern world. So who will be this generation’s Teddy Roosevelt?

Emphasis Mine

See: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/28/opinion/krugman-americas-taxation-tradition.html?_r=1

All of the Arguments Against Raising the Minimum Wage Have Fallen Apart

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Source: Nation of change

Author: Joshua Holland

“Conservatives should be on the front line of the battle to raise the minimum wage. Work is supposed to make one independent, but with the inflation-adjusted federal minimum down by a third from its peak, low-wage workers depend on billions of dollars in public assistance just to make ends meet. Just this week, Rachel West and Michael Reich released a study conducted for the Center for American Progress that found raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour would save taxpayers $4.6 billion in spending on food stamps.

And even if you break your back working in today’s low-wage economy, it’s exceedingly difficult to raise yourself up by the bootstraps; it’s all but impossible to put yourself through school or save enough money to start a business if you’re making anything close to $7.25 an hour.

But those predisposed to defending the interests of corporate America – including retailers and fast-food restaurants – oppose any increase. That’s tough given that 73 percent of Americans – including 53 percent of registered Republicans – favor hiking the minimum to $10.10 per hour, according to a Pew poll conducted in January.

So those opposed to giving low-income workers a raise offer a number of claims suggesting it would be a supposedly bad idea. Unfortunately for their cause, all of their arguments fall apart under close scrutiny. Here are the ones deployed most frequently.

“It’s a monstrous job-killer”

Big business conservatives crowed when a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that a hike to $10.10 might cost the economy 500,000 jobs – never mind that it would have raised the incomes of around 17 million Americans. But a number of economists disputed the CBO finding. One of them, John Schmitt from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, studied years of research on the question, and found that the “weight of that evidence points to little or no employment response to modest increases in the minimum wage.”

We also have real-world experience with higher minimums. In 1998, the citizens of Washington State voted to raise theirs and then link future increases to the rate of inflation. Today, at $9.32, the Evergreen State has the highest minimum wage in the country – not far from the $10.10 per hour proposed by Barack Obama. At the time it was passed, opponents promised it would kill jobs and ultimately hurt the workers it was designed to help.

But it didn’t turn out that way. This week, Bloomberg’s Victoria Stilwell, Peter Robison and William Selway reported: “In the 15 years that followed… job growth continued at an average 0.8 percent annual pace, 0.3 percentage point above the national rate. Payrolls at Washington’s restaurants and bars, portrayed as particularly vulnerable to higher wage costs, expanded by 21 percent. Poverty has trailed the U.S. level for at least seven years.”

“It will hurt mom-and-pop businesses”

Another argument is that it would disproportionately hurt small businesses – giving the Wal-Marts of the world an unfair advantage over mom and pop. But a poll of 500 small business owners from across the country released on Thursday undermines that talking point. The survey, conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for Small Business Majority, found that small business owners support a hike to $10.10 per hour by a 57-43 margin. Eighty-two percent of those surveyed say they already pay their employees more than the minimum and 52 percent agreed that if the wage floor is raised, “people will have a higher percentage of their income to spend on goods and services” and small businesses “will be able to grow and hire new workers.”

“Major costs will be passed along to consumers”

Opponents also claim that higher wages would mean significantly higher prices and that those cost increases would effectively eat up whatever extra earnings low-wage workers ended up taking home. But a 2011 study conducted by Ken Jacobs and Dave Graham-Squire at the UC-Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education and Stephanie Luce at CUNY’s Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies estimated that raising the minimum wage to $12 per hour – two bucks more than what’s currently on the table – would increase the cost of an average shopping trip to Wal-Mart by just 46 cents – or around $12 per year. And another paper published last September by economists Jeannette Wicks Lim and Robert Pollin estimated that a hike to $10.50 an hour would likely result in the price of a Big Mac increasing by only a dime, from $4.50 to $4.60, on average.

If the minimum wage had kept pace with inflation since its inception in 1968 (??), it would now stand at $10.74 per hour. With the share of our nation’s output going to workers’ wages at an all-time low — and inequality on the rise — it’s easy to understand why the idea of raising it to $10.10 is so popular. And despite opponents’ dire warnings, there’s really no good reason that we shouldn’t do so.”

Emphasis Mine

See: http://www.nationofchange.org/print/43566

The Real Truth About ObamaCare

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Source: RSN

Author:Robert Reich

“Despite the worst roll-out conceivable, the Affordable Care Act seems to be working. With less than two weeks remaining before the March 31 deadline for coverage this year, five million people have already signed up. After decades of rising percentages of Americans’ lacking health insurance, the uninsured rate has dropped to its lowest levels since 2008.

Meanwhile, the rise in health care costs has slowed drastically. No one knows exactly why, but the new law may well be contributing to this slowdown by reducing Medicare overpayments to medical providers and private insurers, and creating incentives for hospitals and doctors to improve quality of care.

But a lot about the Affordable Care Act needs fixing — especially the widespread misinformation that continues to surround it. For example, a majority of business owners with fewer than 50 workers still think they’re required to offer insurance or pay a penalty. In fact, the law applies only to businesses with 50 or more employees who work more than 30 hours a week. And many companies with fewer than 25 workers still don’t realize that if they offer plans they can qualify for subsidies in the form of tax credits.

Many individuals remain confused and frightened. Forty-one percent of Americans who are still uninsured say they plan to remain that way. They believe it will be cheaper to pay a penalty than buy insurance. Many of these people are unaware of the subsidies available to them. Sign-ups have been particularly disappointing among Hispanics.

Some of this confusion has been deliberately sown by outside groups that, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision, have been free to spend large amounts of money to undermine the law. For example, Gov. Rick Scott,  Republican of Florida, told Fox News that the Affordable Care Act was “the biggest job killer ever,” citing a Florida company with 20 employees that expected to go out of business because it couldn’t afford coverage.

None of this is beyond repair, though. As more Americans sign up and see the benefits, others will take note and do the same.

The biggest problem on the horizon that may be beyond repair — because it reflects a core feature of the law — is the public’s understandable reluctance to be forced to buy insurance from private, for-profit insurers that aren’t under enough competitive pressure to keep premiums low.

But even here, remedies could evolve. States might use their state-run exchanges to funnel so many applicants to a single, low-cost insurer that the insurer becomes, in effect, a single payer. Vermont is already moving in this direction. In this way, the Affordable Care Act could become a back door to a single-payer system — every conservative’s worst nightmare.

Emphasis Mine

See:http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/22724-focus-the-real-truth-about-obamacare

The Koch Brothers Are Accidentally Advertising the Benefits of Obamacare

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Source: New Republic

Author: Jonathan Cohn

Some new advertisements attacking the Affordable Care Act actually show why the law is working.

The ads are running in Colorado and Louisiana, two states where incumbent Democratic senators face difficult reelection fights. They come from Americans for Prosperity, the conservative organization backed by the Koch Brothers. And in the spots, a woman makes some fairly sweeping claims about how Obamacare is hurting average Americans: “Millions of people have lost their health insurance, millions of people can’t see their own doctors, and millions are paying more and getting less.”

The statements leave out critical context, as Politifact has observed. But the interesting thing about the ads is their style. The narrator isn’t claiming these things happened to her or, for that matter, to any particular person. It’s all very broad and unspecific.

That’s a change and it’s probably because so few “Obama-scare” stories have held up to media scrutiny. Remember “Bette in Spokane”? House Republicans claimed she had to pay twice as much for her new coverage. Reporter David Wasson, a local reporter with the Spokesman-Review, tracked her down and determined that Bette could actually save money if she bought Obamacare coverage on Washington state’s online marketplace. Then there was Whitney Johnson, a 26-year-old with multiple sclerosis, who claimed that she’d have to pay $1,000 a month for her new insurance in Texas. That didn’t sit quite right with journalist and policy expert Maggie Mahar. Mahar dug into the details and, in an article for healthinsurance.org, revealed that Johnson had actually found coverage for about $350 a month—what Johnson had been paying previously. Maybe the best-known story is the one of Julie Boonstra, a Michigan cancer patient who said that her new insurance policy was “unaffordable.” A series of reporters, first at the Washington Post and then at the Detroit News, determined that Boonstra is probably saving money because of Obamacare—all while keeping the physicians who provide her cancer care.

The conservatives’ struggle to find more airtight stories might seem mystifying, given that there’s no shortage of people with real and serious complaints about the Affordable Care Act. Quite a few Americans, probably numbering in the low millions, lost their old policies and are now paying more for replacements—usually because the old plans lacked benefits like maternity and mental health or because insurers can no longer avoid the sickest and most expensive beneficiaries. You’ve read about some of those people in these pages. These people are not happy and it’s easy to see why: The president and his allies promised that everybody who liked their olds plans could keep them. But, as Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik has observed, these stories inevitably have a lot of nuance. These are people who, almost by definition, are healthy enough to have gotten cheap insurance before or make enough money that they don’t qualify for the Affordable Care Act’s insurance discounts. That makes their tales less dramatic.

(Read More: How Obamacare Is Changing Health Insurance Premiums)

A better subject for future conservative advertisements might be people with serious, even life-threatening diseases who need access to very specific specialists or hospitals—and are now having difficulty, because their new plans have very narrow networks of providers. But even these stories have mitigating circumstances that media attention would reveal. Most of these people can find their way to comparable, albeit different, doctors and hospitals—and at least some can keep the old ones if they’re able and willing to pay more for it. Also, this kind of thing was a problem long before Obamacare came along. And that’s not to mention the fact that, previously, many of these people lived in fear of losing their insurance altogether.

In short, these stories may generate sympathy but they are rarely the stuff of tragedy. And that’s because of the protections Obamacare provides—which is to say, the very things that Koch-funded right-wingers want to gut.

After all, it’s Obamacare that sets a minimum standard for insurance, so that all policies include comprehensive benefits and set limits on out-of-pocket spending. It’s Obamacare that puts coverage within financial reach of many more people than before, by offering those subsidies and then, for some people, reducing out-of-pocket expenses even more. In the old days, it wasn’t so hard to find tear-jerker anecdotes: People without insurance or with inadequate insurance were filing for bankruptcy, losing their homes, and missing out on essential medicine. Now those stories are less common and, for the most part, they are among people who had these same problems previously. Telling the stories of these people would be a rationale for expanding the Affordable Care Act, not repealing it.

At some point, conservatives will find some tragic stories that are real. It’s a big country, and a complex law, and there are bound to be a few people for whom the new changes work out really badly. But there are also good news stories—lots of them. And while those stories inevitably have complications of their own, some are pretty dramatic. Democrats may not have figured out the politics of Obamacare. But it looks increasingly like they got the policy right.

Emphasis Mine

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Neocons’ Ukraine-Syria-Iran Gambit

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Source: Consortium news, via RSN

Author: Robert Parry

“You might think that policymakers with so many bloody fiascos on their résumés as the U.S. neocons, including the catastrophic Iraq War, would admit their incompetence and return home to sell insurance or maybe work in a fast-food restaurant. Anything but directing the geopolitical decisions of the world’s leading superpower.

But Official Washington’s neocons are nothing if not relentless and resilient. They are also well-funded and well-connected. So they won’t do the honorable thing and disappear. They keep hatching new schemes and strategies to keep the world stirred up and to keep their vision of world domination – and particularly “regime change” in the Middle East – alive.

Now, the neocons have stoked a confrontation over Ukraine, involving two nuclear-armed states, the United States and Russia. But – even if nuclear weapons don’t come into play – the neocons have succeeded in estranging U.S. President Barack Obama from Russian President Vladimir Putin and sabotaging the pair’s crucial cooperation on Iran and Syria, which may have been the point all along.

Though the Ukraine crisis has roots going back decades, the chronology of the recent uprising — and the neocon interest in it – meshes neatly with neocon fury over Obama and Putin working together to avert a U.S. military strike against Syria last summer and then brokering an interim nuclear agreement with Iran last fall that effectively took a U.S. bombing campaign against Iran off the table.

With those two top Israeli priorities – U.S. military attacks on Syria and Iran – sidetracked, the American neocons began activating their influential media and political networks to counteract the Obama-Putin teamwork. The neocon wedge to splinter Obama away from Putin was driven into Ukraine.

Operating out of neocon enclaves in the U.S. State Department and at U.S.-funded non-governmental organizations, led by the National Endowment for Democracy, neocon operatives targeted Ukraine even before the recent political unrest began shaking apart the country’s fragile ethnic and ideological cohesion.

Last September, as the prospects for a U.S. military strike against Syria were fading thanks to Putin, NED president Carl Gershman, who is something of a neocon paymaster controlling more than $100 million in congressionally approved funding each year, took to the pages of the neocon-flagship Washington Post and wrote that Ukraine was now “the biggest prize.”

But Gershman added that Ukraine was really only an interim step to an even bigger prize, the removal of the strong-willed and independent-minded Putin, who, Gershman added, “may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad [i.e. Ukraine] but within Russia itself.” In other words, the new hope was for “regime change” in Kiev and Moscow.

Putin had made himself a major annoyance in Neocon World, particularly with his diplomacy on Syria that defused a crisis over a Sarin attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013. Despite the attack’s mysterious origins – and the absence of any clear evidence proving the Syrian government’s guilt – the U.S. State Department and the U.S. news media rushed to the judgment that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad did it.

Politicians and pundits baited Obama with claims that Assad had brazenly crossed Obama’s “red line” by using chemical weapons and that U.S. “credibility” now demanded military retaliation. A longtime Israeli/neocon goal, “regime change” in Syria, seemed within reach.

But Putin brokered a deal in which Assad agreed to surrender Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal (even as he continued to deny any role in the Sarin attack). The arrangement was a huge letdown for the neocons and Israeli officials who had been drooling over the prospect that a U.S. bombing campaign would bring Assad to his knees and deliver a strategic blow against Iran, Israel’s current chief enemy.

Putin then further offended the neocons and the Israeli government by helping to facilitate an interim nuclear deal with Iran, making another neocon/Israeli priority, a U.S. war against Iran, less likely.

Putting Putin in Play

So, the troublesome Putin had to be put in play. And, NED’s Gershman was quick to note a key Russian vulnerability, neighboring Ukraine, where a democratically elected but corrupt president, Viktor Yanukovych, was struggling with a terrible economy and weighing whether to accept a European aid offer, which came with many austerity strings attached, or work out a more generous deal with Russia.

There was already a strong U.S.-organized political/media apparatus in place for destabilizing Ukraine’s government. Gershman’s NED had 65 projects operating in the country – training “activists,” supporting “journalists” and organizing business groups, according to its latest report. (NED was created in 1983 to do in relative openness what the CIA had long done in secret, nurture pro-U.S. operatives under the umbrella of “promoting democracy.”)

So, when Yanukovych opted for Russia’s more generous $15 billion aid package, the roof fell in on him. In a speech to Ukrainian business leaders last December, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, Victoria Nuland, a neocon holdover and the wife of prominent neocon Robert Kagan, reminded the group that the U.S. had invested $5 billion in Ukraine’s “European aspirations.”

Then, urged on by Nuland and neocon Sen. John McCain, protests in the capital of Kiev turned increasingly violent with neo-Nazi militias moving to the fore. Unidentified snipers opened fire on protesters and police, touching off fiery clashes that killed some 80 people (including about a dozen police officers).

On Feb. 21, in a desperate attempt to tamp down the violence, Yanukovych signed an agreement brokered by European countries. He agreed to surrender many of his powers, to hold early elections (so he could be voted out of office), and pull back the police. That last step, however, opened the way for the neo-Nazi militias to overrun government buildings and force Yanukovych to flee for his life.

With these modern-day storm troopers controlling key buildings – and brutalizing Yanukovych supporters – a rump Ukrainian parliament voted, in an extra-constitutional fashion, to remove Yanukovych from office. This coup-installed regime, with far-right parties controlling four ministries including defense, received immediate U.S. and European Union recognition as Ukraine’s “legitimate” government.

As remarkable – and newsworthy – as it was that a government on the European continent included Nazis in the executive branch for the first time since World War II, the U.S. news media performed as it did before the Iraq War and during various other international crises. It essentially presented the neocon-preferred narrative and treated the presence of the neo-Nazis as some kind of urban legend.

Virtually across the board, from Fox News to MSNBC, from the Washington Post to the New York Times, the U.S. press corps fell in line, painting Yanukovych and Putin as the “black-hat” villains and the coup regime as the “white-hat” good guys, which required, of course, whiting out the neo-Nazi “brown shirts.”

Neocon Expediency

Some neocon defenders have challenged my reporting that U.S. neocons played a significant role in the Ukrainian putsch. One argument is that the neocons, who regard the U.S.-Israeli bond as inviolable, would not knowingly collaborate with neo-Nazis given the history of the Holocaust (and indeed the role of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators in extermination campaigns against Poles and Jews).

But the neocons have frequently struck alliances of convenience with some of the most unsavory – and indeed anti-Semitic – forces on earth, dating back to the Reagan administration and its collaboration with Latin American “death squad” regimes, including work with the World Anti-Communist League that included not only neo-Nazis but aging real Nazis.

More recently in Syria, U.S. neocons (and Israeli leaders) are so focused on ousting Assad, an ally of hated Iran, that they have cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s Sunni monarchy (known for its gross anti-Semitism). Israeli officials have even expressed a preference for Saudi-backed Sunni extremists winning in Syria if that is the only way to get rid of Assad and hurt his allies in Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Last September, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren told the Jerusalem Post that Israel so wanted Assad out and his Iranian backers weakened, that Israel would accept al-Qaeda operatives taking power in Syria.

“The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc,” Oren said in the interview. “We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.”

Oren said that was Israel’s view even if the other “bad guys” were affiliated with al-Qaeda.

Oren, who was Israel’s point man in dealing with Official Washington’s neocons, is considered very close to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and reflects his views. For decades, U.S. neocons have supported Netanyahu and his hardline Likud Party, including as strategists on his 1996 campaign for prime minister when neocons such as Richard Perle and Douglas Feith developed the original “regime change” strategy. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “The Mysterious Why of the Iraq War.”]

In other words, Israel and its U.S. neocon supporters have been willing to collaborate with extreme right-wing and even anti-Semitic forces if that advances their key geopolitical goals, such as maneuvering the U.S. government into military confrontations with Syria and Iran.

So, while it may be fair to assume that neocons like Nuland and McCain would have preferred that the Ukraine coup had been spearheaded by militants who weren’t neo-Nazis – or, for that matter, that the Syrian rebels were not so dominated by al-Qaeda-affiliated extremists – the neocons (and their Israeli allies) see these tactical collaborations as sometimes necessary to achieve overarching strategic priorities.

And, since their current strategic necessity is to scuttle the fragile negotiations over Syria and Iran, which otherwise might negate the possibility of U.S. military strikes against those two countries, the Putin-Obama collaboration had to go.

By spurring on the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s elected president, the neocons helped touch off a cascade of events – now including Crimea’s secession from Ukraine and its annexation by Russia – that have raised tensions and provoked Western retaliation against Russia. The crisis also has made the continued Obama-Putin teamwork on Syria and Iran extremely difficult, if not impossible.

Like other neocon-engineered schemes, there will surely be much collateral damage in this latest one. For instance, if the tit-for-tat economic retaliations escalate – and Russian gas supplies are disrupted – Europe’s fragile recovery could be tipped back into recession, with harmful consequences for the U.S. economy, too.

There’s also the certainty that congressional war hawks and neocon pundits will press for increased U.S. military spending and aggressive tactics elsewhere in the world to punish Putin, meaning even less money and attention for domestic programs or deficit reduction. Obama’s “nation-building at home” will be forgotten.

But the neocons have long made it clear that their vision for the world – one of America’s “full-spectrum dominance” and “regime change” in Middle Eastern countries opposed to Israel – overrides all other national priorities. And as long as the neocons face no accountability for the havoc that they wreak, they will continue working Washington’s corridors of power, not selling insurance or flipping hamburgers.

Emphasis Mine

see: http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/22671-focus-neocons-ukraine-syria-iran-gambit

Wingnuts are gullible! How GOP’s bubble of ignorance keeps leading to humiliation

Why does the right keep falling for false stories about poverty and social programs? Hint: An ideological fixation

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Source: Salon.com

Author: Brian Buetler

“Looking back on the events of last week, I’m struck by how lucky Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., was to be awarded the uncoveted early-Thursday speaking slot at CPAC Thursday morning.

Because though kicking things off at a three-day event like CPAC means speaking to smaller audiences and fewer cameras, it also means that there are three days of intensifying stagecraft ahead of you to distract attention from whatever errors you might make.

And Paul Ryan made a doozy of an error. It attracted plenty of coverage anyhow, but probably would’ve attracted more if it hadn’t happened before all the jousting began. In case you missed it, Ryan recounted a story he heard secondhand about a poor child who felt bad about being on a subsidized school lunch program while other kids brought their lunches to school in brown bags, to serve the argument that parents who can’t afford to bag their children’s lunches for them don’t care about their kids as much as better-off parents do.

The view he expressed is strange enough. Being an impoverished parent isn’t actually coterminous with being a “poor” parent, in the normative sense of the word. And even though children on school lunch programs are surely stigmatized by their peers in some communities, the solution is to combat the stigma, not to moot it by just letting those kids go hungry.

But as you’ve probably heard by now, the story he told never happened. He recapitulated the erroneous testimony of a fellow social spending scold without vetting her story, which she had taken from some pro-social spending literature and tortured beyond recognition.

For someone like Ryan who often treats politics as a contest of character, that’s a pretty epic blunder. He’s since apologized for not checking his facts, which undoes some of the damage. But that mainly just changes the frame of the story. In addition to making an incredibly questionable moral argument, he also exposed the depths of his most politically problematic ideological fixation. Either he doesn’t care about truth, or his faith in the ubiquity of poverty traps and dependency and so on is so strong that he sees no reason to doubt any corroborative anecdotes, no matter how apocryphal.

This is a familiar epistemic problem, but I’m bringing it up now because it has metastasized into a national campaign strategy.

If you’re sure your ideas are correct and confident your solutions are the right ones you’ve already erected a significant barrier to self-examination. And when admitting error carries enormous financial, personal and ideological risk, it feels easier not to check. You’re shocked when your candidate loses, because none of your friends voted for the other guy. And you just pass along stories they tell you about the soul-crushing nature of welfare, or the horrors of the Affordable Care Act, without bothering to apply a smell test.

Combine that instinct with a well-heeled, amoral campaign apparatus and you get a bunch of Americans for Prosperity ads that wither under scrutiny.

For instance: “A Dexter cancer patient featured in a conservative group’s TV ad campaign denouncing her new health care coverage as ‘unaffordable’ will save more than $1,000 this year under the plan, The Detroit News has learned.”

(They’re referring to Julie Boonstra, whose story we’ve examined multiple times, and have confirmed what I and others long suspected.)

That’s not to diminish the annoyance and uncertainty she felt when her old plan was eliminated, but to say that the premise of her complaint about her new plan is wrong. AFP probably doesn’t care; it’s just as likely that they never bothered to check. Here’s what Boonstra had to say.

When advised of the details of her Blues’ plan, Boonstra said the idea that it would be cheaper “can’t be true.”

“I personally do not believe that,” Boonstra said.

Of possible relevance to her incredulity: “Boonstra is the ex-wife of Mark Boonstra, the former Washtenaw County GOP chairman whom Gov. Rick Snyder appointed to the Michigan Court of Appeals in 2012.”

Back East, AFP found similar ACA victims. “Two New Hampshire women featured in a major television advertising buy critical of Democratic Reps. Carol Shea-Porter and Ann Kuster’s support for the Affordable Care Act are state Republican activists.”

Again, I don’t think the collapse of these stories suggests that nobody is genuinely worse off because of Obamacare. Slate’s Dave Weigel found some that seem to fit the bill in Florida just last week! But there aren’t as many as Republicans would have you believe, and inconveniently they are unlikely to be older people with preexisting conditions, because the law is designed to make sure people like that aren’t left behind. Conservatives aren’t venturing very far outside of the movement to find them, though. Because on the right, a story about a child who feels unloved due to his family’s poverty must be true, in the same way that a story about Obamacare hurting a cancer patient can’t possibly be false.”

Brian Beutler

Brian Beutler is Salon’s political writer. Email him at bbeutler@salon.com and follow him on Twitter at @brianbeutler.

Emphasis Mine

See: http://www.salon.com/2014/03/11/gops_sick_welfare_obsession_how_a_bubble_of_ignorance_keeps_leading_it_astray/