MoJo Blogs and Articles | Mother Jones

Tea Party Lobby Day: Weak Brew

Stephanie Mencimer — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 22:02:55 +0000

On Tuesday afternoon, anti-health care reform Tea Party activists were buzzing inside a cramped 10-by-10 foot meeting room in the Capitol Hill Suites Hotel, a few blocks from the Capitol dome. This “war room” had previously been set up by conservative new media activist Michael Patrick Leahy, author of Rules for Radical Conservatives, a book based on the grassroots organizing tactics of Saul Alinksy. Volunteers have been staffing the room since March 9 and said they plan to be there until March 31 to help coordinate a grassroots lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill to kill the health care bill.

The room was crowded this day, thanks to the "People’s Surge"—a protest organized by FreedomWorks and various Tea Party leaders. Several thousand people were storming the Hill to attend anti-health care reform events, including a "code red" rally featuring Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.). And lots of them made the pilgrimage to the war room, seeking cookies, wi-fi, and congressional lobbying assignments. Inside, a volunteer stood next to a flip chart listing House members in order of lobbying priority and notations about constituents who'd paid them visits. But the Tea Partiers who stopped by for marching orders highlighted one of the movement’s biggest challenges in fighting the health care bill: they didn't have anyone to lobby.

One elderly Michigan couple, after checking out the flip chart, looked troubled and eventually asked the volunteer in charge if they could be teamed up with someone who lived in the district of a representative who was "on the fence." They noted that their own congressman was already voting against the bill, so they were at a loss for how to proceed. It was a common dilemma for the Tea Partiers who swarmed the Hill. Even Robin Stublen, the Punta Gorda, Florida, organizer who came up with the idea of this "people's surge" wasn't racing in to see anyone in the Capitol. His own congressman, Tom Rooney, was already a solid "no" vote. It turns out that most of the Tea Partiers participating in this protest seem to hail—no surprise—from conservative districts represented by Republican legislators opposed to the health care bill.

Dressed in a tweed jacket, red tie and red baseball cap, a grey-bearded Tom Whitmore, from the Washington DC Tea Party, was staffing the war room. He conceded that the effort was attracting a lot of people whose representatives already planned to vote "no" on the health care bill. "We've had lots of people wanting to see Stupak," he offered, referring to Rep. Bart Stupak, the major anti-abortion Democratic hold-out on the legislation. Indeed, the Michigan couple had already been to see him, just to "make sure he was still going to vote against the bill."

Unlike in December, when Tea Partiers flooded the Senate office buildings trying to persuade their senators to vote against health care reform, Tuesday’s lobbying events were focused solely on the House—a far more parochial institution. And all of the potential for vote-changing lay with a small number of Democrats. After all, House Republicans are firmly committed to a no vote. And while Tea Party leaders like to insist that they are a nonpartisan bunch, most of the people who had flocked to DC for these events appeared to be die-hard Republicans from GOP districts. This made their lobby day rather anticlimactic.

Big corporations avoid this problem by hiring lobbyists from both political parties, but the Tea Partiers don't really have that option. The war room organizers tried to get around their dilemma—more lobbyists than targets—by creating teams that included one constituent and a bunch of hangers-on who could at least get in the door of the office of somebody's congressman.

Still, Whitmore was trying to coach activists on how to talk to members of Congress from outside their own districts. He recommended that the Tea Partiers ask legislators to refuse donations from outside their districts if they decline to meet with their visitors. And if that doesn't work, he suggested another no-so-sophisticated strategy: give the member of Congress ten bucks, call it a donation, and then demand an audience. After all, he said, the health care bill, "takes over one-sixth of the economy," making it a national issue that will affect all Americans, not just those in a single congressional district.

But Whitmore himself wasn't in a great position to advise activists on bipartisan lobbying strategies that could help them reach undecided or wavering Democrats. Though he identified himself to reporters as a Tea Partier, Whitmore also happens to hold a leadership position in the Prince William County Republican Party in Virginia. As for the "Listen to Me!" buttons worn by volunteers and the signs littering the war room, those were paid for by—who else?—the Republican National Committee.

2 Comments | Post Comment

Abramoff's Favorite Think Tank Schools Tea Partiers on Health Care

Stephanie Mencimer — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:41:06 +0000

On Tuesday, tea partiers and other activists who came to Capitol Hill to protest the health care bill were armed with the usual array of signs demanding that Congress "Kill the Bill," comparing Obamacare to socialism and the usual rhetoric. But many of them were also toting a slick, hefty tome called, "Shattered Lives: 100 Victims of Government Health Care" that was being distributed at the rallies by the National Center for Public Policy Research. The report features an introduction by talk show host Mark Levin, the author of Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, and is essentially a compilation of media health care horror stories--everywhere but in the U.S., which, of course, could provide tomes worth of material about the failures of the private health care system.

The "Shattered Lives" stories come from Great Britain, Japan, Russia and South Africa, and read together, they do offer up some pretty horrible details about national health care. There's the British six-year-old whose brain tumor went undiagnosed for years because the National Health Service insisted in giving him painkillers for his headaches but not a brain scan. There's one about the guy who ended up pulling his own tooth with a rusty pair of plyers because he couldn't find a dentist.

It's a gripping read, and the production values suggest that someone put up a big chunk of money to produce and distribute it to tea party activists far and wide. (Rally participants on Tuesday got free bound copies that cost $14.95 on Amazon.) There's reason to be suspicious. After all, NCPPR isn't just any public policy group. You might recall that not only has it done stealth research for tobacco companies, but it was also one of the nonprofit groups accused of helping the disgraced uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff pimp his clients in exchange for big donations. The report doesn't say who paid for the work, but it has all the hallmarks of the usual corporate suspects.

3 Comments | Post Comment

Are Americans Giving Up On The Environment?

Nikki Gloudeman — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:19:56 +0000

Two new Gallup polls reveal Americans are becoming less concerned about the state of the environment.

A survey released yesterday shows just 34 percent of the public is worried a "great deal" about the environment, down from 40 percent the year before. Meanwhile, a poll published today reveals Americans are less troubled about pollution, global warming, deforestation, and animal and plant extinction than at any point in the past 20 years.

There are two ways to decipher these numbers. One is that the public is more content with environmental progress than before, so they have less to gripe about. Obama is certainly a more eco-friendly president than Bush, the climate bill is a buzzed-about legislative possibility, and the stimulus was a relative boon for the planet.

But the statistics may also indicate public indifference or even apathy. Thanks in large part to partisan bickering and scandals such as Snowpocalypse and ClimateGate, confusion over global warming has reached a fevered pitch. At the same time, the economic slump is swallowing the public's attention. What we may be witnessing is an endemic shift in prioritization, which raises the question: What, if anything, can instill a renewed sense of purpose?

1 Comment | Post Comment

Feds Call Out the Climate Bucket Brigade

Kate Sheppard — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 19:20:00 +0000

There are "significant gaps" in the government's ability to deal with climate change, according to a new report released by the White House on Tuesday. The study found that federal, state, and local governments aren't adequately prepared for the future consequences of global warming—or even the environmental changes that they are already experiencing.

The report was authored by the Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force, a joint project of the Council on Environmental Quality, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). CEQ Chair Nancy Sutley told reporters that while regulating greenhouse gases remains the administration's top priority, "we also believe we must prepare for the inevitable effects of climate change."

Climate change "is affecting, and will continue to affect, nearly every aspect of our society and the environment," the report concludes, adding that wildfires, flooding, droughts and heat waves are already "affecting the ability of federal agencies to fulfill their missions."

President Barack Obama created the task force last October with an executive order directing it to draw up recommendations for domestic and international adaptation to climate change impacts within a year. This study is just an interim report, which focuses on broad bureaucratic goals, before the task force's more specific recommendations will be released later in the year.

NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco pointed out that communities need more information—and more detailed data—about particular environmental changes they may be forced to grapple with in the near future. Rather than gazing 50 or 100 years ahead, she said, governments need reliable information on climate impacts that will occur in the next decade. By way of illustration, Lubchenco pointed to a report issued last summer by the US Global Change Research Program that compiled the work of 13 different government agencies on climate impacts. The report looked at climate impacts by region and economic sector, noting anticipated effects like more than 100 days of 100-degree temperatures in Texas and the disappearance of some of the Florida Keys by the end of the century.

The White House introduced that report last June in the heat of the climate debate in the House, which narrowly passed after months of painful wrangling. Nearly a year later, the Senate hasn't moved on a bill, and the legislation that senators are talking about may deal with climate only as an afterthought. The task force efforts are a reminder that while the Senate fiddles, Rome burns—and the federal government is already calling out the bucket brigade.

No Comments | Post Comment

Our Apathetic Investor Class

Kevin Drum — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 19:11:14 +0000

Atrios today:

I think the reaction to the Lehman scandal (not particularly strong generally) is very telling. The investor class should, much more than me, care that a major company was engaged in accounting fraud and should worry, much more than me, that other companies are doing the same. That they aren't says a lot about how the game really works.

It's true. When it comes to the general public, the lack of interest is pretty understandable: Lehman's collapse is old news, the whole "Repo 105" scam is hard to explain, and everyone already assumes that Wall Street bankers are a bunch of crooks anyway.

But the investor class is a different story. They understand Lehman's accounting trick perfectly well, and even the ones that never invested with Lehman know that this same kind of thing can bite them in the ass if someone else does it.

So why don't they care more? It's obvious why banks don't want more banking regulation — who wants to be regulated, after all? — but there are lots of wealthy investors out there who ought to be screaming for it. But they don't seem to be. Part of this might be a result of the rentier class solidarity I mentioned earlier today, but it's hard not to think that all the government bailouts and Fed programs are part of it too. Basically, rich investors just didn't lose enough. When the banks got bailed out, a lot of them did too. So they aren't really all that angry about what happened. And anyway, they might want to use a similar scam themselves someday. Memories are short and Congress is powerless, after all. It's every mogul for himself.

15 Comments | Post Comment

Chamber Targeting Banking Senators

Andy Kroll — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:45:32 +0000

The US Chamber of Commerce, in its battle to defeat a new consumer protection agency and other "burdensome" financial reforms, is aiming a multimillion-dollar ad campaign at influential senators tasked with shaping the Senate's financial overhaul. In a press conference with reporters today, David Hirschmann, president and CEO of the Chamber's Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness, said his organization planned to spend $3 million on ad campaigns to push its financial reform message, which mainly consists of defeating a consumer agency. That money will be focused in Tennessee, Montana, South Dakota, Indiana, Virginia, and Arkansas.

Why those six states? Well, they just so happen to be the homes of six crucial—and mostly undecided—lawmakers with a hand in deciding the fate of the Senate's Wall Street overhaul. Five of them sit on the powerful banking committee tasked with writing new financial reforms:

Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) was the GOP's lead negotiator on financial reform until late last week. No doubt he'll continue to figure largely into the Senate's negotiations;
Jon Tester (D-Mont.) has staked out a liberal position on financial reform, but has fielded intense criticism for backing Senate Democrats' financial reform efforts like a consumer protection agency;
Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) is the second-ranking Democrat on the banking committee, but, as a centrist, is seen as less likely to rally alongside Sen. Chris Dodd's Wall St. overhaul. It doesn't help that Citigroup, one of the world's largest banks, has major operations in Johnson's home state;
Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) hasn't taken much of a stand during the Senate's financial reform talks—which means he's more likely to be swayed by constitutients' concerns about a new consumer agency;
Mark Warner (D-Va.) has played a leading role in crafting a bipartisan solution with Corker on ending too big to fail banks and creating a bank "resolution," or euthanization, process. Warner's state, however, is hardly a liberal hotbed in lockstep behind the idea of a consumer agency;

The final senator, Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), isn't on the banking committee. She is, however, the chairwoman of the Senate agriculture committee, which will help craft future regulation of derivatives. Lincoln, who's facing a tough reelection battle this fall, could use derivatives reform as a way to curry favor with big business in her state. (Businesses who use derivatives for risk management or hedging purposes—known as "end users"—want an exemption from derivatives regulation; if Lincoln delivered that exemption, she'd score points and potential campaign cash with the business community.)

The Chamber has already spent more than $3 million on ads and other messaging efforts to influence Wall Street reform. With this new focused push, keep your eye on these six senators to see whether the Chamber's efforts pay off.

No Comments | Post Comment

China's Empty Threat

Kevin Drum — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:13:54 +0000

What should we do about China? The basic problem is simple: China runs a huge trade surplus — exporting way more stuff to the rest of the world than they import back — and that means the rest of the world runs a huge trade deficit with them. That includes the United States. And for us, the problem is even worse because we also run a big trade deficit with OPEC countries in order to satisfy our boundless thirst for oil. What to do?

In the case of oil, there's not much to do except use less of the stuff. In the case of China, however, our trade deficit is largely artificial: it only exists because Chinese goods are so cheap, and they're only as cheap as they are because China manipulates the value of its currency down, which in turn causes the dollar to be overvalued. Dean Baker:

This is of course unsustainable. The only way that this deficit can be corrected is by reducing the value of the dollar....This decision would mean that the United States could finally get its trade deficit down to a manageable level. The trade deficit has been the leading imbalance in the U.S. economy over the last decade. The large trade deficit required very low private savings and/or large budget deficits. This is an accounting identity. If the country is a net borrower from abroad (this is what a trade deficit means), then it must have low national savings. There is no way around this story.

In reality, China is pointing a water gun at our heads. We should beg them to become unhappy with our fiscal and monetary policies and stop investing in Treasury bonds. The improvement in the trade deficit that will result from the fall in the dollar will create ten times as many jobs as any "jobs bill" that President Obama can possibly get through Congress.

Paul Krugman agrees, but takes a different approach to explaining the problem. An undervalued renminbi is a symptom of the real problem, which is that China is buying too many U.S. treasury bills:

Although people don’t always think of it this way, what the Chinese government is doing here is engaging in massive capital export — artificially creating a huge deficit in China’s capital account. It’s able to do this in part because capital controls inhibit offsetting private capital inflows; but the key point is that China has a de facto policy of forcing capital flows out of the country....By creating an artificial capital account deficit, China is, as a matter of arithmetic necessity, creating an artificial current account surplus. And by doing that, it is exporting savings to the rest of the world.

....Notice that I didn’t mention the value of the renminbi at all in this account. It’s there implicitly: a weak renminbi is the mechanism through which China’s capital-export policy gets translated into physical exports of goods. But you want to keep your eye on the ball: it’s the artificial capital exports that are the driving force here.

Both posts are worth reading. Krugman and Baker both agree that China's threat to stop buying U.S. treasuries is not only hollow, it's something we should actively favor. If they started dumping their U.S. assets, China would lose money on the deal and the dollar would fall in value, which would help correct our trade deficit. What's not to like?

26 Comments | Post Comment

Collective Action in the Boardroom

Kevin Drum — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:36:16 +0000

Over at his new home at the Harvard Business Review, Justin Fox writes about the relative silence of nonbanking corporate executives on financial regulatory reform:

It's nonfinancial businesses, not financial firms, that create lasting wealth. This is not a moral distinction. It's just the way the world works. The finance sector enables wealth creation, but the innovations that make the economy grow over time come from elsewhere. The financial industry really ought to be seen, and treated, as a servant of the real economy. It's when finance takes the lead and begins to drive economic activity, as it did during the Internet stock bubble of the late 1990s and the mortgage lending craziness of 2003-2007, that we get into big trouble. And even when it's not blowing bubbles, the financial sector can be too successful for the rest of the economy's good.

....So while the rest of the business world needs a financial sector that's healthy enough to extend credit, it also ought to favor a regulatory structure that keeps the financiers from getting too big for their britches. Explicit restrictions on pay tend not to work, so the real goal should be to rein in financial-sector profits, especially the phantom profits that come from inflating speculative bubbles. That's where leverage limits come in, and restrictions (like the "Volcker rule" that's kinda/sorta included in the Dodd bill) that try to wall off riskier financial activities from those deemed so essential that they're backed up by government guarantees.

Justin argues that this corporate silence is basically an agency problem: Wall Street frothiness is actually good for top CEO pay even if it's bad for business as a whole. True. But I'd add another thing: business executives tend to stick together. Partly this is ideological — they really are a conservative bunch and they really do believe that excessive regulation is bad — and partly it's just plain logrolling. An airline executive might believe that financial sector reform would benefit the airline industry, but he also knows that someday he's going to want help fighting some kind of government regulation of the airline industry. The best way to ensure this is to stick together and oppose government regulation no matter which sector it's aimed at.

You see the same thing at work in healthcare. Most big corporations would benefit from healthcare reform — in fact, they'd benefit from a root-and-branch government takeover of healthcare — but ideologically they don't like the idea, and in any case they don't want to abandon their fellows in the healthcare industry. This kind of tribalism broke down a bit this time around, but not a lot. For the most part, corporate executives either stayed on the sidelines or actively opposed healthcare reform. In the corporate world, it's all for one and one for all.

12 Comments | Post Comment

Deem-ocrats?

Nick Baumann — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:11:08 +0000

Reporters mobbed House majority leader Steny Hoyer's (D-Md.) media briefing today, firing off question after question about "deem-and-pass," a parliamentary maneuver Dems may use to vote on the Senate health care bill and a package of "fixes" simultaneously. Republicans and the press have described the procedure as allowing Democrats to pass health care reform without voting on it—as I left Hoyer's briefing, the chyron on MSNBC read "No Votes Needed?"—but that's misleading.

In any case, "real Americans" don't care about "process" issues like deem-and-pass, Hoyer argued. "In the final analysis, what is interesting to the American public is what we do for them," Hoyer said. He defended deem-and-pass as "consistent with the rules" and "consistent with former practice," and he's right on that front: Republicans set new records for using the procedure when they last controlled the House. That makes the GOP "hypocritical at best" for criticizing Democrats on this front, Hoyer said.

But the criticism of the maneuver isn't coming just from Republicans. Left-leaning commentators—including The New Republic's Jon Chait, the Washington Post's Ezra Klein, and our own Kevin Drum—have also slammed the idea, mostly because they believe it's bad politics for the Dems. Interestingly, Hoyer left open the possibility of using a different procedure to pass the bill. He interrupted himself in the middle of defending "deem and pass" to clarify that his caucus hasn't settled on using it. "We haven't decided on a process at this point in time," he said. "That's being debated, what process we want to pursue." Indeed.

2 Comments | Post Comment

Ask Shamu: The U.S. Tortures Both Human and Animal Prisoners

James Ridgeway — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:06:07 +0000

The terms "torture" and "solitary confinement" have surfaced over and over again in articles and commentaries about Tilikum, the captive killer whale who drowned his trainer at Florida's SeaWorld last month. For the most part, the authors of these pieces have sought mercy for Tilikum. While the six-ton orca had been implicated in two previous human deaths, they argue, Tilikum's torturous life in capitivity rendered his behavior understandable, however horrific its results may have been.

Many of Tilikum's defenders highlight the rare intelligence and sensitivity of orcas and other dolphin species. And by way of mitigating circumstances, they point to his tragic youth, in which he was forcibly ripped from his family and community, and to the lonely and restricted life he has lived ever since, released from isolation in his tank only to perform or to breed.

While the FAQ section on SeaWorld's web site, called "Ask Shamu," emphasizes that the theme park often "rescue[s] sick, orphaned, or injured animals," Tilikum's history is far less benign. In the Harrisburg Patriot News, Karen Steinrock wrote:

Tilikum’s idyllic life came to an abrupt halt in November 1983 at the age of 2, when he was snatched from his mother and siblings off the coast of Iceland—a traumatic experience for any young orca. For the next 28 years, he learned to perform tricks for food in a confined "ocean" measured in feet instead of fathoms, circling endlessly with an artificial family... Holding a highly social creature in solitary confinement for decades and asking him to perform repetitious stunts in unnatural surroundings seems cruel.

One of the more compelling opinions of the SeaWorld tragedy came from Psychology Today contributing writer Gay Bradshaw, Ph.D. She specializes in human-animal relationships and trauma recovery… Bradshaw believes after suffering a violent and premature separation from his mother, Tilikum’s diagnosis conforms to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). "Tilikum suffered shock and relational trauma from the capture, disrupted development and chronic stress during imprisonment for three decades,” she writes.

6 Comments | Post Comment