This item by J.P. Green was originally published on May 25, 2012.
Yesterday I flagged an AlterNet post by Leo W. Gerard, international president of the United Steelworkers union about a coalition of shareholders, workers and public interest groups mobilizing to address outrageous executive pay, environmental and worker safety concerns. I expressed hope that this coalition would also address corporate contributions to political campaigns.
Having just read a New Republic article, “Reining In Corporate $$, The Back Door Approach,” I can report that such stockholder’s campaigns are already well underway. According to the author, Alec MacGillis, here quoting from a WaPo article by Tom Hamburger and Brady Dennis:

…Reformers have decided that their best hope for trying to rein in secret spending is to straight to corporations. As The Post reports: “One of the most polarizing fights over money in politics has been unfolding this spring at annual corporate meetings, where shareholders are mounting an intensifying effort to push companies to disclose the money they spend on lobbying and political campaigns. The transparency push, playing out at shareholders meetings from coast to coast this spring, has received cheers from campaign finance reformers and some corporate governance experts. It has drawn ridicule from critics such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who see the effort as an attempt by liberal groups to squelch the voice of the business world….

MacGillis adds:

…The Sustainable Investments Institute, a Washington nonprofit that tracks shareholder resolutions, found that 109 — nearly a third of those up for votes at annual meetings in 2012 — sought more disclosures about spending on politics and lobbying….To date, 101 major companies have agreed to disclosure and board oversight of some of their political spending, according to Bruce Freed, president of the Center for Political Accountability, which rates companies on the issue. Freed and others argue that disclosure can help executives and directors avoid reputational risk to their firms.

Naturally big business leaders and their journalistic apologists are in an uproar about the shareholder movements for disclosure of political donations, even though most of the resolutions have been defeated. But some companies, like Microsoft, are beginning to see the upside of transparency of their political donations.
As Dan Bross, Microsoft’s senior director of corporate citizenship, puts it, “As a company, we believe in openness, transparency and accountability…We are doing what we believe is right.”
As MacGillis notes, the shareholder movement does nothing to directly force more transparency among wealthy individuals or privately-held companies. However, he adds that “the momentum toward encouraging disclosure from corporations is as good as any place to start when the other avenues are blocked.” It seems to me that, by setting a higher standard of accountability, the shareholder movement may yet have a positive effect on individuals and privately-held companies.
The shareholder campaigns should not be considered a substitute for legislation and litigation to compel transparency in political donations. But they can contribute to public awareness that transparency of corporate political donations is both desirable and possible.

This item is by Ed Kilgore is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it was originally published on May 22, 2012.
In the two months since Eric Fehrnstrom’s “etch-a-sketch” gaffe, many political observers have waited for the iconic moment when Romney would move to the center or distance himself from the toxic conservative ideological battles of the primary season. But without much notice, that etch-a-sketch moment has already happened.
No, Romney has not shifted positions. Nor has he disrespected the conservative activists whose votes and trust he sought so relentlessly since 2007. What his campaign has done, however, is radically narrow its focus to a single message, one particularly attractive to swing voters: that this election is purely and simply a referendum on Obama’s economy. This focus comes at the expense of the philosophical, social, and cultural topics that dominated the primary season from beginning to end. There’s one problem though: His party’s conservative base may not let him get away with it.
Barely an hour goes by these days without a Romney surrogate staring into a camera and intoning like an incantation that the election is about nothing other than Obama’s responsibility for a poor economy. As Jonathan Chait recently noted, even the much-asked question on Romney’s poor standing with Hispanic voters is routinely answered by citing the economic sufferings of Hispanics and the certainty that they, too, will ignore every other factor and vote for Mr. Fix-It.
The narrow focus of Romney’s campaign makes it easier for him to deal with right-wing efforts to drag the campaign discourse into dangerous areas. This was evident in last week’s brouhaha over reports that billionaire Joe Ricketts and star GOP consultant Fred Davis were discussing a $10 million super PAC ad campaign resurrecting the president’s relationship with Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Romney’s campaign quickly repudiated the proposed ad, but just as quickly, RNC chairman Reince Priebus brought things back on message, accusing the Obama campaign of using criticism of the proposed ads to distract from the only issue that matters: Obama’s responsibility for a poor economy.
So long as his campaign doesn’t look like it’s on the verge of losing–as McCain looked in the fall of 2008 when conservatives began openly protesting his reluctance to bring up Jeremiah Wright–Romney can probably avoid visible conservative criticism for failing to raise a broader, cultural critique of Obama as a secular-socialist elitist whose association with Wright and Bill Ayers shows he hates America.
But there are other, less controversial, issues important to conservative voters that don’t nicely fit into a monomaniacal focus on the unemployment rate or monthly job figures. Romney is fortunate that Republicans agree that debts, deficits, and the size of government are all highly germane to the case for “firing” Obama on purely economic grounds. But many conservatives are concerned about these themes not because they affect the country’s short-term economic prospects, but for more ideological reasons: because they are morally offended by federal programs that “redistribute” wealth, or by the very idea of progressive taxation, or by the religious implications of environmentalism.
And unsurprisingly, many conservatives want their ideological motivations to be reflected in the Romney campaign’s rhetoric. As a result, Romney has been all but forced to endorse Paul Ryan’s budget, which makes explicit the conservative desire to abandon the Great Society safety net and to reverse any public-sector policies that alter the “natural” market-based distribution of wealth. In that way, the Romney campaign has the economic themes of a “centrist” campaign, but, in order to placate the concerns of his base, the details of speeches and other communications sometimes often veer into fringe territory. It is an open question how long the candidate can finesse this tension.
Beyond the cluster of economic-fiscal issues, there are a host of cultural issues which Romney’s campaign is trying to avoid, but which both conservative activists and the Obama campaign may insist he discuss. One of these is “religious liberty”–defined as the right for conservative religious organizations to discriminate against gays and lesbians or against reproductive rights for women. Another is same-sex marriage, an increasingly unavoidable campaign issue that pulls the campaign away from its focus on the economy. Conservative activists will also be eager to campaign against Obamacare, particularly if the Supreme Court forces the issue directly into the center of the presidential contest.
And even if conservative activists–and the Obama campaign–don’t succeed in broadening Romney’s economic focus, another factor may intervene: The economy could improve. more than is currently projected between now and November. Chait’s article on the Romney campaign’s economic monomania suggests it will shift to a “Plan B” argument that the economy is just not improving enough. But instead, they may be forced to refocus on all those broader ideological issues–religious liberty, same-sex marriage, and health care, and perhaps more–that they’re currently trying to avoid. If that happens, then both conservative activists and their enemies in the Obama campaign will get something they want, and the etch-a-sketch will shake up the message yet again.

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on May 22, 2012.
If you were unaware of the stakes in the upcoming Wisconsin recall election on June 5th, John Nichol’s report in The Nation provides some perspective:

…Wisconsin is witnessing the most ambitious set of recall elections in American history: not just the executive branch but the most powerful legislative chamber could be flipped from Republican to Democratic control. If Walker and his allies are removed from office, the results will be seen across the country as a rejection of the false premise that cutting taxes for the rich while attacking unions and slashing services will somehow spur job growth. Walker promised that his policies would create 250,000 jobs. Instead of growth, the governor’s austerity agenda has brought about what the Bureau of Labor Statistics identifies as the worst pattern of job losses in the nation…

Democrats have a solid, well-experienced alternative to Scott Walker’s polarizing leadership:

…Walker’s Democratic challenger, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, argues that the governor abandoned fiscal common sense and “created an ideological civil war…in the State of Wisconsin….Former Senator Russ Feingold hails Barrett, a former Congressman, as “a lifelong progressive [who]… stood with me in voting against the deregulation that led to the Wall Street crash, opposing the Patriot Act, and reforming our system of campaign finance.” Barrett also broke with Democratic and Republican presidents to oppose NAFTA and champion labor rights. But the Democrat is not just ideologically distinct from Walker. Whereas Walker’s a my-way-or-the-highway pol, Barrett is known for getting people to work together. Though his pragmatic approach to balancing budgets frustrated some local unions in Milwaukee and led to a split in the labor movement over whom to back in the primary, Barrett has now united unions and the party in the campaign to defeat Walker.

In terms of economic resources for Barrett’s campaign, progressives face a tough reality:

…Barrett spent around $1 million to win his primary; Walker has already burned through $21 million, and his billionaire backers have spent millions more on “independent” ads. The unprecedented spending on behalf of Walker and his allies has made these recall elections an example of what campaigning has come to look like in the Citizens United era: Democrats can’t hope to match the staggering level of corporate cash raised by the GOP, so they will have to accelerate grassroots organizing and get-out-the-vote drives. Wisconsin will test the prospect that people power might yet beat money power…

Dems and progressives have a big edge in ‘feet on the ground’ in the WI race, and both sides agree that this election will likely come down to turnout mobilization. But recent polls show Walker surging, so Walker’s money edge could prove decisive. Clearly, Tom Barret could use some help. If your Democratic governor is in good shape politically and/or financially, or if the governor’s race in your state is a done deal, or if there is no governor’s race at all in your state, consider a donation to Tom Barrett’s campaign at his ActBlue page right here.
The important thing for Dems to keep in mind about June 5th is that it’s not just about Wisconsin and public unions. If Walker wins, it will green-light intensified union-bashing by Republicans across the country and ultimately threaten living standards even for unorganized workers. But if Barrett wins, it will help rebuild the labor movement, check big money in politics and energize progressives for the November elections.