Black Lives Matter: The Only Game in Town

There is a good story, sort of a roundup, on Black Lives Matter by John Eligon ("One Slogan, Many Methods: Black Lives Matter Enters Politics"). At this point, as I see it, Black Lives Matter is pretty much "the only game in town," if you exclude efforts to struggle in the Augean Stables of the duopoly. The $15 Now movement has largely been adopted by the mainstream. Efforts continue to raise the minimum wage at the city level and for large university systems, but by and large $15 Now has carried the day.

Ferguson, where Black Lives Matter took off, is now almost a year-and-a-half gone, but Black Lives Matter, as Eligon's piece makes clear, is still going strong. It has plenty of grass-roots mojo, as well as insider chops. In a potentially troubling sign, a Black Lives Matter super PAC is being set up, as Eligon reports, to raise money from wealthy Democrat funders:

“At this point, marching and protesting, it’s not going anywhere,” said Tarik Mohamed, treasurer and a founder of the super PAC. “So we’re trying to find new avenues of engaging people for change.” 

And, in a sign of its growing influence, the movement is attracting the attention of deep-pocketed Democratic donors, who met with activists in Washington this week to discuss how they can support the budding movement.

*** 

The Black Lives Matter Super PAC, in addition to contributing to campaigns next year, hopes to capitalize on new technology, such as virtual reality software, to help people understand experiences like solitary confinement, Mr. Mohamed said.

Members of the Democracy Alliance, an influential club of liberal donors, met on Tuesday with groups allied under the Black Lives Matters banner — including ColorOfChange.org, Black Youth Project 100 and the Black Civic Engagement Fund — to discuss possibly directing funds to the movement, said Leah Hunt-Hendrix, an alliance member. The organizations represented only a sample of the groups that donors wanted to shed light on, she said.

“It was just a really real conversation about the complexities of funding movements and the need for more infrastructure, especially black-led infrastructure,” said Ms. Hunt-Hendrix, who has inherited wealth from an oil company her grandfather started. 

Specific funding commitments were not made, she said, and it would be up to individual donors to follow up with organizations they want to support.

“We don’t want to raise expectations that this is a secretive group of donors hoping to raise tons of money,” she said.

As soon as "gee whiz" whiz-bang technology is trotted out as a growth strategy for a social movement run for the hills, preferably the Sierra Maestra.

Nonetheless, Black Lives Matter has been around now and is organizing, growing and influencing perception and governance longer than Occupy Wall Street, an organization I thought would be able to successfully redefine itself with its Occupy Sandy volunteerism after its main encampment was demolished. No such luck,

There needs to be an egalitarian mass movement that is not appropriated by one of the two devilish hands of the duopoly. Obama's legacy will be that he proved adept at suckering people back into belief and participation in a corrupt and failed political system. There are no avatars of the mainstream who will better our lot because the mainstream is choked with lies and is sped along by warfare and concentrated wealth.

There is a powerful, expanding understanding that the system has failed. Black Lives Matter so far has walked the talk.

A Few Rays of Possible Sunshine, Greece & Ferguson, in a Darkening Sky

A few rays of sunshine were evident last week. It became apparent that eurozone finance ministers led by Jeroen Dijsselbloem were not completely successful in vanquishing the Syriza-led Greek government. Greece's finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, continues to insist he has not caved in on Syriza's campaign pledges to roll back troika-dictated austerity. Tomorrow, technical talks begin between Greece and the troika (James Kanter and Niki Kitsantonis, "Greece’s Tense Talks With Its Creditors Escalate to the Next Phase"). The troika says no money will be released until Greece makes good on implementing structural adjustment. Greece needs to makes payments on or refinance €6 billion this month. It is make or break time. Varoufakis got himself into some trouble when he suggested a referendum might be a possible way out of the impasse with the troika:

In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera on Saturday, Mr. Varoufakis said Greece could call elections or a referendum in the event that its proposed overhauls are rejected by international creditors. As the Greek news media feverishly speculated over the weekend about a possible referendum on the country’s membership in the eurozone, the government accused the newspaper of distorting the minister’s comments, saying he had not suggested Greece would hold a referendum on the euro but on the country’s economic program and fiscal policy. 

Panos Kammenos, Mr. Tsipras’s junior coalition partner and the defense minister, also suggested on Saturday that a referendum could be an option. 

Antonis Samaras, the former prime minister, on Sunday rejected a potential referendum as a “very bad development,” saying it would allow the government to shirk its responsibilities. The criticism continued on Monday with central members of Mr. Samaras’s conservative party describing Mr. Varoufakis as “dangerous” because of both the referendum idea and his proposal to employ Greeks and tourists as undercover agents to bolster a tax evasion crackdown. 

Some officials of the Syriza-led government also expressed reservations about a referendum, which the prominent legislator Alexis Mitropoulos described as “naïve and thoughtless.” 

At his news conference late on Monday, Mr. Varoufakis denounced the way his comments had been presented in Corriere della Serra as part of a “process of misinformation.” Mr. Varoufakis said any reference that he made to a referendum had been entirely “hypothetical” because he was referring to the improbable circumstance that European lenders rejected all of Greece’s proposed reforms. 

Opinion polls consistently indicate that most Greeks want the country to remain in the eurozone, but a majority continue to back the government’s tough stance against creditors.

Varoufakis likely floated the idea of a referendum to Corriere della Sera in the hopes of creating a little leverage in the upcoming negotiations with the troika. But when he backtracked it made him look unprepared and vacillating.

The outcome Jeroen Dijsselbloem wants to see is Syriza implementing all the austerity diktats -- pension cuts, privatization, tearing up labor agreements -- as the troika dribbles out the cash in small allotments. This Varoufakis will not do. I am still confident of this. So some sort of rupture is coming, hopefully, by the end of this week. The troika is certain it can break Syriza. I think a referendum is a fine idea.

The second ray of sunshine visible last week was the Department of Justice report on the Ferguson Police Department in the wake of the Mike Brown shooting last summer. The DOJ lays out how Jim Crow works nowadays. "Driving while black" is a chief income source that suburban municipalities like Ferguson rely on to balance their books.

The first scalp of that report was raised yesterday (Eli Yokley and John Eligon, "Missouri Court Assigns a State Judge to Handle Ferguson Cases") when it was announced by the Missouri Supreme Court that the Missouri Court of Appeals would take over Ferguson's municipal court and "current municipal judge, Ronald J. Brockmeyer, who was repeatedly cited in the Justice Department report for abusive practices, announced his resignation after holding the position for more than a decade."

The problem is that what happened to Ferguson needs to happen in municipalities throughout the United States, and there is no indication that this is in the offing.

In fact, there is every indication that we are at the "creative destruction" tipping point in the United States. In by far the best story I read this morning -- the best, but easily the most depressing -- is Monica Davey's "Unions Suffer Latest Defeat in Midwest With Signing of Wisconsin Measure."

In describing Scott Walker's "shot heard 'round the world" declaration for a 2016 White House run, the Wisconsin governor presiding over the creation of a new right-to-work law in his state, Davey lines out the the present political history of the United States, the death of its unions, and the projected path forward for American-style neoliberalism -- full on cannibalization.

Key to Davey's synopsis of present political history is the GOP landslide of 2010 (At that time a national party that just two years earlier was thoroughly disgraced and in free fall successfully recreated itself by lurching hard to the right with its Tea Party re-branding, the core of which is white supremacy):

Central to the new momentum behind the laws were sweeping Republican victories in state elections in 2010, when the party got full control — in the chambers and the governor’s office — of states that included Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana. Republicans made more gains in 2014, now controlling 68 of the 98 chambers around the country and the most state legislative seats since 1920. But it was the victories in 2010 that set off a new flood of right-to-work legislation in the Midwest, which had rarely seen it.

Soon after taking office, Mr. Walker pressed for a bill that cut collective bargaining for most public sector workers and removed requirements that they pay fees if they chose not to join unions that represented them. Republicans elsewhere followed suit, but not all of those measures flew through. Ohio, where Republicans had taken sole control of state government, passed a measure limiting collective bargaining, but it was rejected months later in a statewide ballot measure. 

Then, for right-to-work advocates, there came an even more memorable turning point: In November 2012, voters in Indiana (where a law was repealed in the 1960s) re-elected Republican legislative majorities even after labor leaders pledged to defeat them for passing a right-to-work law earlier in the year. On the same election night, voters in Michigan rejected a labor-backed ballot measure to enshrine collective bargaining rights in the State Constitution. 

“The combination sent a clear message to elected officials in the region: You can end forced dues by passing right-to-work, and voters will reward you for it,” said Patrick Semmens, a spokesman for the National Right to Work Committee, who keeps a copy of The Indianapolis Star outside his office from the day after the law passed there.

A month after the 2012 election, the Republican-held Legislature in Michigan, a cradle of the American labor movement, passed a right-to-work measure, which was promptly signed by Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican who had said the matter was not on his agenda. 

Lee Saunders, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, called it “a concerted effort by the folks who have a lot of wealth and power to get more wealth and power.” 

“They’ve had these plans a long time, and now they’ve come to fruition,” he said.

Now the path forward is quite clear: Right to work anywhere and everywhere. If you don't control the state legislature or the governor's office, pass it at the county level:

Battles over union fees are also emerging in other states. Republican legislators in Missouri and New Mexico are weighing similar measures. In Kentucky, where a split Legislature and a Democratic governor pose obstacles to a statewide bill, leaders in more than a dozen counties have approved or are weighing measures, officials there said on Saturday, and efforts in six other counties are awaiting final approval.

And in Illinois, a long-held Democratic territory with Democratic supermajorities in the legislature, the new Republican governor, Bruce Rauner, announced an executive order barring state workers who opt out of unions from being forced to pay fees based on a constitutional argument, offering a new model for states where split partisan politics have slowed right-to-work policies. 

Federal law already permits workers not to join unions. But these laws go further, permitting workers to not pay fees to them. Unions argue that the fees are fair for nonunion members who still benefit from the contracts they negotiate, and that without a requirement, their membership, financial support and very existence are threatened.

And where is the leadership of the international unions? Holed up in executive suites in Washington D.C. living well-remunerated lives of great privilege. Where is the plan to fight back? Don't hold your breath. There isn't one.

Choice Facing Voters in U.S. Duopoly: False Dem Promises of "Inclusive Capitalism" Vs. False GOP Guarantees of "Stimulative Tax Cuts"

There was a moment last night when I considered watching Obama's SOTU. I had the time. Home from work after running errands, I had about 45 minutes to an hour before I hit the hay. I weighed the decision for a moment, scanned some of the headlines on the speech, and then decided to watch The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Scorsese's homage to contemporary American values.

This morning a wonderful appraisal of Obama's State of the Union Speech can be found in Thomas Edsall's "Can Capitalists Save Capitalism?" The SOTU is a campaign document. As Edsall puts it in the last paragraph of his piece:

While the new agenda has no chance of passage in the Republican-controlled Congress, Democrats plan to use the tenets of inclusive capitalism in the 2016 elections. One Democratic goal in putting specific policies forward is to use them as wedge issues to force Republicans to choose between their affluent backers and their supporters in the white working class. This will be no easy task because a decisive majority of whites without college degrees has been voting against Democratic candidates for two decades, making it very difficult for the party to break what has been a Republican hammerlock since 1994.

"Inclusive capitalism" is the new marketing pitch crafted by former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers and Ed Balls, a top British Labor Party politician, in a report published by the Center for American Progress, a think tank run by Clintonista John Podesta. Podesta will be one of the helmsmen of the "Hillary for President" effort:

The Summers-Balls report – “The Report of the Commission on Inclusive Prosperity” – is the most comprehensive summary. This report, which uses the phrase “inclusive capitalism” more than a dozen times, was published by the Center for American Progress, a Democratic think tank founded by John Podesta – Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff who in February will join Hillary Clinton’s exploratory presidential campaign. 

Those pressing the Democratic Party to take more populist stands contend that the lack of a persuasive Democratic economic program contributed to, or drove, devastating losses in the 2014 elections in states as diverse as North Carolina, Maryland, Iowa and Colorado. According to an Oct. 13, 2014, Gallup pre-election survey, voters believed Republicans were better equipped to handle the economy than Democrats by 50 percent to 39 percent.

Obama in his SOTU fleshed out "inclusive capitalism" to include more taxes on the 1%:

In his State of the Union address, Obama put it this way: “Let’s close loopholes so we stop rewarding companies that keep profits abroad, and reward those that invest in America.”

His plan calls for the imposition of new taxes on the wealthy and on major financial institutions, totaling $320 billion over 10 years. The money would be used to finance tax cuts and credits for low-to-moderate-income men and women, and to make attendance at community colleges tuition-free.

Not only would Obama raise capital gains tax rates from 23.8 to 28 percent for couples making more than $500,000 in taxable income, but he would eliminate a provision in tax law that allows the very rich to avoid taxation on much of the wealth passed on to their children and he would end a current exemption from taxation on the increase in the value of stocks, bonds and other assets when passed on through inheritance.

This exemption, technically called the “stepped up basis,” is crucial to the unrestricted intergenerational transfer of wealth, a practice that many liberals, and even some conservatives, contend conflicts with equality of opportunity. The Obama plan additionally calls for a .07 percent fee on financial institutions with more than $50 billion in assets that would produce $110 billion in revenue over 10 years.

These are good ideas and should be implemented. Edsall quotes progressives Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute and Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research voicing their approval. The problem is they won't be implemented, not just because the GOP is in control of Congress, but because the Democrats are aligned with Wall Street.

Once again, what is driving this Democratic repackaging of a "kinder, gentler" capitalism is the 2016 presidential election and the massive erosion in support for the party among working-class whites (gay marriage is not enough to get Democratic constituents to the polls):

While none of the proposals, or their advocates, acknowledge this explicitly, one of the objectives of the evolving Democratic economic agenda is to get back support among whites without college degrees – the polling shorthand version of what is sometimes still called the white working class. 

In 2014, these voters, who made up 36 percent of the electorate, cast their ballots for Republican House candidates by a 30-point margin (64-34 percent). This was nearly double the 16-point Republican margin among white college graduates, 57-41.

Inclusive capitalism has its critics on the left, nicely summed up by the Guardian columnist Nafeez Ahmed. He argued last May that the inclusive capitalism movement represented “less a meaningful shift of direction than a barely transparent effort to rehabilitate a parasitical economic system on the brink of facing a global uprising.”

By now, after six years of Obama, I believe the voters are deaf to Democrat promises, promises which sound sweet with their tough talk that the rich should pay their fair share in taxes; but the promises are never kept. Eventually you are going to stop listening. And that is where we are at today.

That leaves Republicans in control of the field. All we need do is look to Kansas to see what that means: Taxes pared back so radically that basic governmental functions are at risk. John Eligon had an informative piece this past weekend, "Pressed by Budget Squeeze, Gov. Sam Brownback of Kansas Pulls Back on Tax Cuts," about the disastrous results of GOP legislative experiments in tax cutting. Brownback is having to walk some of them back:

TOPEKA, Kan. — Gov. Sam Brownback, who made cutting taxes and shrinking government the centerpieces of his government, proposed on Friday to close a huge projected shortfall in the state budget by increasing some sales taxes and sharply slowing his plan to gradually reduce the state income tax.

The move marks a significant turn for Mr. Brownback, a Republican who has tried to make his state a national model for conservative governance and who criticized calls from his Democratic opponent in last year’s campaign to scale back his income tax cut.

*** 

Under Mr. Brownback’s income tax cut, rates dropped this year to 4.6 percent on the top end and 2.7 percent on the low end. The lower rate was set to drop to 2.4 percent next year, but under the new budget proposal, it would fall only to 2.66 percent, while the higher rate would remain at 4.6 percent as scheduled. By 2018, the higher rate was supposed to dip to 3.9 percent, and the lower to 2.3 percent. But under the governor’s new proposal, the rates would remain at 2.66 percent and 4.6 percent. 

***

The big expenses in the state’s budget of more than $6 billion are pensions, Medicaid and K-12 education. With the deficit estimated at $650 million for the fiscal year beginning in July, Mr. Brownback proposed overhauling how each of those areas was funded. He also has called for cutting state agency budgets and making operations more efficient to save money. Most notably, he called on lawmakers to rewrite the school funding formula, which has been the subject of a hotly debated lawsuit that has bounced around the state’s court system.

While lawmakers contemplate how to rewrite the formula, the governor has suggested funding the schools over the next two fiscal years with block grants rather than through the traditional method. This has raised concern among some school advocates about whether districts would be shortchanged.

The GOP wants to repeal the 20th century; the Dems want to keep it around as a mirage to attract voters to the polls. The system is collapsing. That is apparent.

Ernie Chambers + Sol Yurick

There are a couple items in today's paper that are interesting.  John Eligon reports on Ernie Chambers' return to the the unicameral Nebraska Legislature after being term-limited out by a 2008 law.  Chambers was first elected in 1970.  I learned about Ernie Chambers almost a decade ago when my girlfriend at the time and I watched a video of A Time For Burning, a documentary nominated for an Academy Award in 1967.  The movie is about a Lutheran minister's attempts to foster a little interracial understanding in Omaha.  Ernie Chambers, who in the days before his long run as a state Senator was a barber by trade, gives the Black Power perspective as he cuts hair. It's a great film, intelligent and pretty to look at.

Also in today's paper is William Yardley's obit of Sol Yurick.  The obituary is oriented almost entirely around Yurick's 1965 novel The Warriors but one does comes away with a sense of another America that used to exist, a pre-digital one where progressive writers and intellectuals weren't so completely marginalized.  The only Yurick book I've read is Behold Metatron, the Recording Angel of which I remember hardly anything other than it was part of the Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series that I read religiously when I was in my early twenties.  The Semiotext(e) books were little black paperbacks that fit in one's back pocket.  When my ex-wife and I moved from Berkeley to New York City I remember making a special trip to the Columbia University campus address, 522 Philosophy Hall, that was listed inside each Foreign Agents Series book as the location for Semiotext(e).  In something reminiscent of a scene from a David Lynch movie all I found was an empty office in an empty building.