In addition to Ed Kilgore’s excellent post on the “Chattanooga Labor Fiasco” below, you may want to take a gander at Chris Kromm’s Facing South post “3 lessons from the VW union defeat in Tennessee,” which notes, “If 44 workers at Volkwagen’s factory in Chattanooga, Tenn. — less than 3 percent of the plant’s 1,560 hourly employees — had voted “yes” instead of “no” in last week’s closely-followed union election, the United Auto Workers and labor would be celebrating a “historic” victory in the South.”
Kromm continues, noting “three takeaways” from the failed UAW campaign, abbreviated here:

1) Where Was the “Neutrality?”…Make no mistake, the UAW was operating in a hostile, anti-union climate…In the weeks leading up to the vote, Republican Tennessee lawmakers unleashed a steady stream of threats about the supposed economic consequences of voting in a union, variously claiming that, if the UAW were successful, VW would nix future plans to produce a mid-size SUV in Tennessee and that state lawmakers would halt business subsidies to VW. Nationally, an offshoot of GOP activist Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform sponsored billboards around Chattanooga warning that the UAW spends millions to elect liberal politicians including “BARACK OBAMA” and that “UAW Wants Your Guns.”…
2. Union Organizing Takes Time:…Interestingly, Tennessee is where labor made one of its first attempts to organize international auto makers, at the Nissan Motors plant in Smyrna. As The Christian Science Monitor reported, the Tennessee Nissan workers “voted by a 2-to-1 margin not to accept UAW representation,” 1,622 to 711…Compared to the Nissan campaign, the UAW did much better in Chattanooga last week, winning more than 47 percent of the vote in their first effort since VW opened the plant in 2011. While certainly a setback, the results suggest the UAW and other unions have a base of support they can build on — if they dig in for the long haul.
3) The Importance of Community and Education:..Given the deep resistance to unions among many Southern leaders, a key ingredient to most successful organizing campaigns in the region has been mobilizing community support. Building alliances with faith, civic and other leaders, creating a sense of movement that goes beyond the workplace, has been critical to winning many union drives in the South…One criticism leveled at the UAW is that organizers didn’t fully engage its allies in Tennessee. As Elk reports, some in Chattanooga felt the UAW was “lukewarm” in its relations with the broader community: “Community activists said they had a hard time finding ways to coordinate solidarity efforts with the UAW, whose campaign they saw as insular rather than community-based.”

And, as Kilgore notes “…Now the very existence of private-sector unions, a familiar part of the American landscape for most of the last century, is under attack from Republican politicians.” This gets at the crux of the problem. Democrats have got to get a lot more vocal on this topic. Republicans are able to do their worst because they are operating in a vacuum created by too much silence on the part of Democratic leaders.
It’s good that President Obama and a few other Dems have spoken out on the topic. And there certainly should be an investigation into violation of labor law in the VW vote. Our fortunes are inextricably tied to the future of the Labor movement. All of that said, it does appear that too many Democratic leaders have been a little mousey on the topic. It’s time for the lions to roar.

On Friday, February 14, in an inverse Valentine Day gift for labor, after an intensive anti-union campaign not by the employer but by local, state and national Republicans, workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, narrowly rejected a unionization bid by the United Auto Workers. Here was my initial reaction at WaMo:

I wish I could say I’ve never seen the likes of the campaign of intimidation that led to the vote against UAW representation at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee on Friday. But I did, as a child growing up in a Georgia textile company town in the early 1960s, where public schools began the year on Labor Day, the word “union” was not said out loud, and people still graphically remembered National Guardsmen being called out to break a strike at Callaway Mills back in 1935–the same year Congress enacted the National Labor Relations Act.
I’m a little rusty on my labor law, but I’m reasonably sure that any employer who issued the sorts of threats made by Republican politicians in Tennessee (including Sen. Bob Corker, Gov. Bill Haslam, and a variety of state legislators, backed by national conservative figures like Grove Norquist) against a unionization effort would have been in blatant violation of the NLRA. But that’s what makes the incident such a travesty: it wasn’t the employer fighting the union (VW by all accounts was neutral-to-positive towards unionization, which would have facilitated establishment of the kind of “work council” the company had set up at other international plants to help maintain good employer-employee relations). As Brent Snavely of the Detroit Free Press reported (probably incredulously):

The crusade by anti-union forces in Tennessee, including the state’s governor and senior senator, is as much a fight with Volkswagen management as with the UAW.
Not only are Republican legislators accusing Volkswagen of backing the UAW, some of their leaders on Monday threatened to withhold tax incentives for future expansion of the three-year-old assembly plant in Chattanooga if workers vote this week to join the UAW.

So addicted are Tennessee Republicans to the “race to the bottom” approach to economic development that they are willing to risk the good will of an existing employer in their zeal to make sure their own people are kept in as submissive a position as possible. President Obama’s reported comment during a Democratic retreat last week that the pols involved in this union-busting effort are “more concerned about German shareholders than American workers” is one way to put it; I’d say they’ve internalized the ancient despicable tendency of the southern aristocracy to favor the abasement of working people as an end in itself.
This incident is also a pretty good symptom of the radicalization of the Republican Party. It’s one thing to oppose collective bargaining rights for public employees, or to defend “right-to-work” laws that interfere with the contracting rights of employers and employees and create “freeriders” who benefit from union collective bargaining without paying dues. But now the very existence of private-sector unions, a familiar part of the American landscape for most of the last century, is under attack from Republican politicians.

In her NYT article “On Health Act, Democrats Run to Mend What G.O.P. Aims to End,” Ashley Parker notes, “…Party leaders have decided on an aggressive new strategy to address the widespread unease with the health care law, urging Democratic candidates to talk openly about the law’s problems while also offering their own prescriptions to fix them…The shift represents an abrupt change from 2010, when House Democrats tried to ignore the law entirely and “got their clocks cleaned,” said Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, referring to the more than 60 seats that Republicans picked up to regain control of the House…”Part of what we learned in 2010 is that this is a real issue of concern to voters and you can’t dodge it, you have to take it on, and I think Democrats are much more ready and willing to do that in 2014,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster who has done surveys for Democrats on the law. “We certainly have enough evidence now that this is not a fight you can win if you are in a defensive crouch.”
At The Fix, Sean Sullivan reviews — and shows — “…the four distinct types of Obamacare ads flooding the airwaves.”
The New Republic’s “Want to Realize the Civil Rights Act’s Dream? Apply it to Union Rights, Too” by Richard D. Kahlenberg and Moshe Z. Marvit leads with “It’s the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act and here is what it needs as a birthday present: a big push to strengthen unions–the institutions best positioned to help African American and Latino workers more fully enjoy the American Dream.”
Robert Reich explains “America’s ‘We’ Problem.”: “The pronouns “we” and “they” are the most important of all political words. They demarcate who’s within the sphere of mutual responsibility, and who’s not. Someone within that sphere who’s needy is one of “us” — an extension of our family, friends, community, tribe — and deserving of help. But needy people outside that sphere are “them,” presumed undeserving unless proved otherwise.”
At The Cap Times, Jesse Opoien reports on “A musical marketing campaign to encourage people to sign up for health insurance has entered its next phase: the remix…In November, a group of local musicians and music promoters recorded a song called “Sing Forward,” with Wisconsin-themed lyrics promoting the Affordable Care Act’s new health insurance exchanges.”
In their New York Times article “Trade Pact With Asia Faces Imposing Hurdle: Midterm Politics,” Mark Landler and Jonathan Weisman probe the politics of pending trade agreements and note the challenge Dems face in formulating a winning trade policy in the context of the 2014 elections: “Trade has long divided Democrats, pitting their business-friendly moderate wing against key allies in organized labor. And in the midterm elections, when key Democratic voting blocs tend to stay home, the party badly needs the unions to get out the vote in November.”
in his post, “How the Government Blows Away the “Private Sector” in Delivering Services Cities like Tulsa, San Diego and Minneapolis are turning the tide back to public ownership,” Alternet’s David Morris shreds a much-treasured GOP myth.
WaPo’s Dan Balz and Philip Rucker ask “For Democrats looking to post-Obama era, how populist a future?” and they offer a number of interesting observations, including “”We’ve seen a gender gap for two decades now, but what we saw in 2012 was a larger step toward women voters standing with the Democrats in a much, much larger way,” said Stephanie Schriock, president of Emily’s List, a group that helps elect pro-choice Democratic women. “There’s such a contrast right now between the two parties on issues impacting women and families.”
Mark Blumenthal’s “HUFFPOLLSTER: Do Polls Find Support For Obama Executive Orders? It Depends On How Pollsters Ask” shows how inherent bias in poll questions can skew results.

This is a follow-up rejoinder by Brookings Institution scholar and TDS Founding Co-Editor William Galston as a supplement to the joint American Prospect/Democratic Strategist forum, Progressive Perspectives on the Future of the New Deal/Great Society Entitlement Programs. It is cross-posted from the Prospect.
It would be neither edifying nor productive to respond in kind to Bob Kuttner’s critique. Instead, I’d like to identify some of the key analytical points that divide us, in the hope that focusing on them will elevate the debate.
But let me begin with where we agree. Kuttner points that that between 1973 and 2011, productivity soared while wages stagnated. It may surprise him and others to learn that this development is the focus of my most recent weekly column in the Wall Street Journal. I cite and discuss an OECD study showing that this trend has been pervasive throughout the developed world in recent decades. I advocate a new American social compact to close the gap between compensation and productivity, which I call the central economic challenge of our time.
Kuttner points out, again rightly, that beginning during the Great Depression and continuing after World War II, we forged a social settlement that restrained inequalities of wage and salary income. But here’s the problem: that settlement could be sustained only in the special circumstances that prevailed for the quarter century following the war. The U.S. economy was completely dominant, and almost as completely closed. U.S. firms depended on purchasing power in the domestic market, and they faced almost no international competition. In these circumstances, firms could raise wages and pass on the increased costs to consumers. And because our market was closed, increased household incomes raised demand for US products. Within a wide range, this system of negotiated wages and take-it-or-leave-it prices was not zero-sum but rather mutually beneficial.
Those days are gone, and they are not coming back. The arrangements that served us well in the post-war period are no longer workable. The challenge (which we have not yet begun to meet, intellectually or politically) is replacing them with new arrangements consistent with new realities, which include global markets and a post-industrial technological revolution that shows no signs of abating. ATMs have largely replaced bank tellers; automated counters are in the process of replacing supermarket checkout clerks; computerization makes it possible to produce steel with only a fraction of the labor input required a generation ago. We have a range of possible responses to these new facts. What we cannot do is ignore them or pretend that they are transient.
Another crucial issue is the relationship between spending on social insurance programs and on public investment. I pointed out the obvious: right now, the correlation of political forces has spared social insurance at the expense of basic research, education, job training, and infrastructure. When you get right down to it, Republicans won’t push to reduce Social Security and Medicare, and Democrats won’t fight very hard to preserve public investments. If President Obama’s 2013 budget had been adopted with no changes, we would be on track to the lowest level of domestic discretionary spending–out of which public investments are financed–since at least 1947. The recent budget agreement, which loosens restraints on discretionary spending for the next two years, does nothing to change the longer-term trajectory. I’m not alone in thinking that this path endangers our future.
Kuttner thinks I’m naïve for suggesting that changes in social insurance programs consistent with the principle of progressivity would free up needed resources for public investments. I’m not in favor of leaving this to chance; it would have to be negotiated. And if it couldn’t be, I’d walk away from the table. I’ll leave it to readers to decide whether Kuttner’s alternative–do more of everything and finance it with huge tax increases–is more or less realistic than mine.
In the end, Kuttner and I agree (I think) on a core proposition I articulated: In the absence of much more vigorous economic growth the fruits of which are widely shared, the United States will find it increasingly difficult to sustain the arrangements that assist the poor and vulnerable and secure a decent retirement for elderly Americans. Nearly five years after the official end of the Great Recession, unemployment remains elevated, long-term unemployment is shockingly high, workers’ compensation is stagnant, and household incomes languish below the level of the late 1990s. If we can’t figure out how to do better than this, the debate that Kuttner and I are having will remain moot. That’s why serious discussion of social insurance and public investment must start by addressing the challenge of growth. Within this framework of shared ends, let’s argue about means. I’m confident that a discussion along these lines is more likely to lead to productive results.

This is a follow-up rejoinder by Prospect co-editor Robert Kuttner as a supplement to the joint American Prospect/Democratic Strategist forum, Progressive Perspectives on the Future of the New Deal/Great Society Entitlement Programs. It is cross-posted from the Prospect.
I take exception to most of the assumptions and conclusions in William Galston’s piece. For starters, the debate about entitlement programs is needs to be located within a larger debate about the mixed economy.
Galston begins by asserting:
I take it we agree that suitably structured and regulated markets generate wealth more effectively than other economic systems but do not reliably produce either a reasonable distribution of prosperity’s fruits or an adequate level of security against life’s physical and financial vicissitudes. It is for that reason, we agree, that since the 1930s the United States has developed a web of programs to assist the poor and vulnerable, to make work pay and provide protection against unemployment, and to ensure older Americans a decent retirement.
In other words, let the market generate wealth and then redistribute as necessary after the fact. But depending on whether markets are in fact “suitably structured and regulated,” the welfare-state part of the system can complement the market part or be destroyed by it.
For two decades, the New Democrat wing of the progressive coalition has been complicit in policies that deregulated capitalism and liberated speculative finance. All of that contributed mightily to the deficits that now become the pretext for weakening the welfare state. All piled more fiscal burdens onto the welfare state than it can reasonably sustain. So shoring up transfer programs begins with rebuilding a more equitable form of regulated capitalism.
The social settlement forged in the Great Depression and refined after World War II regulated labor and capital markets so that the primary (wage and salary) income distribution would be relatively equal. The state redistributed after the fact, with socialized programs of retirement, health care, and special help for the poor.
But if the structure of wages and salaries becomes ever more unequal, the welfare state cannot possible do enough redistribution after the fact to compensate, without destroying itself fiscally and politically. Increased productivity and growth per se, though necessary, are not sufficient–because productivity in fact rose 80 percent between 1973 and 201l, while median wages were almost flat because so much went to the very top.
Galston subscribes to the premise that we need growth and good jobs, but his version emphasizes the concern that:

[I]t is important to structure and finance entitlement programs so as to minimize potential negative impacts on growth and employment. For example, employers compare the marginal cost of adding workers to the gains at the margin that those workers could produce. In making that comparison, they look at total compensation, not just money wages. There are limits, then, as to how high payroll taxes (and health insurance premiums) can rise before they discourage employers from hiring.

There are two problems with this. First, it leaves out all of the other sources of what influences creation of good jobs, such as expansive macro-economic policy, full employment, labor-market regulation, collective bargaining, trade policy, adequate regulation of finance, and public investment. The minor disincentives created by payroll taxes pale compared with these other factors. At periods of full employment, payroll taxes were no obstacle to employers adding good jobs.
Second, his presumption here is that health costs and costs of pensions necessarily must be financed mainly by payroll taxes. In fact they could be financed in part by general revenues, as President Roosevelt originally proposed in 1935 for Social Security once the system was mature.
Galston goes on to argue that the economy needs other social outlays but entitlements are crowding out public investment. The naïve premise that reducing social insurance would free up money for other public spending plays into the hands of the austerity coalition. The same political forces that want to gut Social Security and Medicare also oppose increased public investment generally. The savings would simply be used for deficit reduction.
The fact is that the U.S. has more impoverished programs of social insurance than any other advanced industrial nation. Social Security is about one percentage point of GDP out of long-term actuarial balance. That could easily be remedied with either general revenue or by raising the $117,000 cap income subject to payroll taxes (which would not affect job creation since most workers are well under the cap).
If we are serious about fiscal reform, bringing Social Security into long term balance without benefit cuts is not difficult. Indeed, as Elizabeth Warren has pointed out, with the collapse of private pension systems, we should be increasing Social Security, not cutting it.
Our health system is indeed inefficient, but that is because it is overly commercialized, fragmented, and subject to middleman profiteering and not because Americans are getting coddled. Galston also contends that if we counted the roughly half of health care outlays spent in the U.S. through the private sector, much of the public spending gap between the US and Europe would disappear. We spend a total of about 17 percent of GDP on health care, and leave tens of millions of people uninsured. Europe spends an average of 10 percent, covers everyone, and has better health outcomes.
Surely, that gap makes the case for a more comprehensive public system of health insurance and not for cutting social outlays. To compare Europe’s relatively efficient socialized systems with our wasteful and more heavily commercialized one and then argue that America’s private health outlays should be counted as de facto public ones is to confuse apples and oranges. The U.S. also spends far more of its GDP on the military, which is not part of the welfare state.
Galston then embraces the most misleading argument of all–generational equity. This mantra, also promoted relentlessly by the austerity lobby, has the cause and effect backwards. If we want the next generation to have decent economic prospects, we need to restore both economic growth and a more equitable distribution of wage and salary income that reflects rising productivity growth. There is no evidence whatever that cutting social insurance programs will do either. In fact, the reduction in public outlay undertaken to date, according to the C.B.O., has reduced, not increased the rate of recovery from recession and has reduced GDP growth.
Galston, in making the case for Social Security cuts, writes:

There is broad agreement across party lines that any changes in Social Security and Medicare should honor the legitimate expectations of individuals at or near retirement and that individuals now ages 55 and over should be held harmless.

Note the sleight of hand. This assertion implies that there is also agreement across party lines that it’s okay to cut benefits for people under 55. But there is nothing of the sort. Most Democrats are committed to preserving the system intact, for younger as well as older workers and retirees.
I agree with some of Galston’s proposals to increase Social Security’s revenues. But he is wrong to endorse backdoor cuts in Social Security benefits disguised as technical adjustments or improvements in the system’s progressivity. By all means, let’s increase Social Security benefits at the bottom–but not at the expense of the middle class. Social Security benefits are far from lavish but make up a large fraction of total retiree income, well up the income ladder.
Rather than fragmenting these core programs, if we want to shore up their finances and make them more progressive in their incidence, I commend the progressive income tax. The Los Angeles Times’s Michael Hiltzig has calculated that only about $1 billion a year of Social Security benefits go to millionaires. It’s not hard to tax that money back via progressive income taxation.
Fixing Medicare is indeed harder. But the cure for Medicare’s imbalances is much broader reform of the health system. Except for the very well off, Medicare is a life-saver. It is a huge programmatic and political mistake to further fragment Medicare by income-testing it for the affluent and creating different ground rules for them, as Galston suggests. That remedy undermines Medicare’s necessary political coalition.
Galston is also mistaken to characterize Medicare as the poor subsidizing the rich. It is nothing of the sort. Like all health insurance, it is the (temporarily) well subsidizing the sick. Because Medicare taxes have no income cap, they are progressively financed, and the rich pay in substantially more than the poor.
Voucher proposals are particular mischief, since they would leave people who couldn’t afford to supplement the voucher with private means with vastly inferior health insurance that failed to cover many medical needs. The cost crisis of Medicare is leading to a fork in the road, where we either move to true universal public health insurance or fiscal pressures will force us into vouchers.
Let’s return to the politics of all this. Social Security is justifiably the most popular of all social insurance programs. It is widely seen as an earned benefit, even though it is also a hugely important anti-poverty program. Social Security is practical reinforcement of the premise of the core philosophy of the modern Democratic Party–that we need government to counterbalance the inefficiencies and injustices of a pure laissez-faire economy. It is practical evidence that government can work to serve regular people.
For eighty years, a core defining difference between Republicans and Democrats has been that Democrats can be counted on to defend your Social Security and Republicans can’t. Galston’s proposed cut in benefits for people under 55 would blur this key distinction. Both parties would become agents of reducing Social Security, at a time when seniors are already skeptical of President Obama’s defense of Medicare.
It’s distressing to see centrist policy intellectuals, ostensibly in defense of social insurance, echoing many of the same spurious arguments of foes of regulated capitalism such as the Concord Coalition, Fix the Debt, the Peterson Foundation, the Bipartisan Policy Center, and the conservatives on the Bowles-Simpson Commission. In truth, cutting social insurance will have no positive impact on growth, good jobs, public outlay, or the life prospects of future generations. I take Galston at this word that his goal is to preserve social insurance for the next generation, but his proposals would undermine its political logic and vital essence.

The following article by Dermocratic strategist Mike Lux, author of “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
The executive order President Obama signed today on the minimum wage increase for workers employed by federal contractors is a very big deal, far bigger than even most progressives realize. Substantively, symbolically, politically, this policy change will have ripple effects for years to come, which will only widen if a Democrat stays in the White House after Obama’s term ends.
I say this as someone who has been disappointed with some of Obama’s economic policies. His administration has been far too weak on holding Wall Street accountable, has opposed a much-needed financial transactions tax, and could have done far more to force write-downs of underwater mortgages. His proposal to cut Social Security benefits are wrong, as is his willingness to make federal workers take pay freezes and pension cuts. His embrace of so much in the way of domestic budget cuts has been disappointing. His policies on international trade are downright awful. In general, his record in terms of taking on income inequality has often fallen far short of his rhetoric.
But on this executive order, the president has done it right. This wasn’t just a simple provision raise the minimum wage: On decision after decision within the document, the president made the right call. It indexes the minimum wage for these workers to inflation, meaning there will be yearly wage increases. It covers individuals with disabilities, ending the practice of many government contracts going to companies that pay those with disabilities a sub-minimum. Most importantly, given the big numbers of fast food companies that contract with the federal government, and given the extreme exploitation due to the $2.13 minimum that waitresses and waiters get paid if they get tips, the executive order includes specific provisions helping food industry workers by raising the tipped minimum wage.

Read more…

From Ed O’Keefe’s WaPo article “House Democrats plot strategy against long odds to win back chamber“:

…Democrats are likely to crow about how House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) relied overwhelmingly on Democrats to approve an extension of federal borrowing authority. Just 28 Republicans voted for the measure, joined by all but two voting Democrats.
“This feels like ‘Alice in Wonderland’ — totally upside down,” said Rep Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. “The majority is supposed to be the party that moves us forward because they run the ship.
“If Republicans shirk their responsibility as the majority party in the House of Representatives, we’re ready to be responsible, we’re ready to lead,” he added.
Rep. Jim Larson (D-Conn.), who preceded Becerra as caucus chairman, said that Democratic unity will give voters a clear choice this year. “More years of obstruction or at least two more years of a presidency where there’s a shot to get something done,” he said.

Not a bad pitch. Still winning 17 or more seats in the House during an Administration’s second midterm election has proven to be a daunting challenge. O’Keefe didn’t discuss the possibility of an anti-incumbent wave, which would help Dems in the House, while hurting them in the Senate. Nor did he get into the Democrat’s growing edge in ground game voter-targeting, demographic transformations or recent public opinion trends indicating that high-tuirnout seniors, particularly senior women may be souring on the GOP.
O’Keefe quotes House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer, who told reporters this week that “GOP divisions and his party’s impressive fundraising totals “give me great optimism that we’re going to win back the House.” While the Koch Brothers may give the GOP a fund-raising edge leading up to election day, it does seem as if Republicans’ internal divisions are on track to widen, rather than narrow.
It’s not like the Republicans can impress voters with their charismatic candidates or creative policy ideas. Indeed, their confidence about keeping a House majority rests almost entirely on historical precedent, continued economic decline and worsening Obamacare problems, as well as denial of their identity as the party of gridlock. Given all of that, a Dem pick-up of 17 House seats doesn’t seem so impossible, especially if Dems get a break or two in the months ahead, such as an economic uptick and an improved image for Obamacare.

At Daily Kos Lefty Coaster quotes Daniel Rothberg’s warning in the L.A. Times article J.P. Green cited in his strategy notes yesterday:

If you support Democratic Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick’s bid for reelection, stay away from annkirkpatrick.com. The site might greet visitors with a welcoming photo of the Arizona congresswoman and a screaming “Kirkpatrick for Congress” logo, but that design belies its true agenda

Lefty asks, “How can these deceptive web sites be even remotely legal?, and lets Rothberg elaborate:

The National Republican Congressional Committee bought up hundreds of URLs ahead of the 2014 election cycle and has created nearly 20 websites appearing to support Democratic candidates in all but the small print, a spokesman for the campaign confirmed Thursday…The websites include donation forms that accept credit cards and encourage viewers to contribute up to $500, but instead of money going to the Democratic candidates, it goes to the NRCC.

Lefty concludes with his own warning:

Be very careful this election year when you donate money to Democrats over the internet. If you’re not careful your money may go to a bunch of Republican Rat Bastards instead of Democratic Candidates who need your help.

Hopefully the FEC will take action against the latest Republican deception. Meanwhile Dems should amp up their protest to force the GOP leaders defend deceiving their constituents.

The following article by TDS Founding editor Ruy Teixeira is cross-posted from ThinkProgress:
President Obama has talked quite a lot about inequality lately, most recently in his State of the Union address. Progressives have gone after him for it, with some arguing that he’s distracting from jobs and others suggesting he isn’t talking about inequality enough. But they’re wrong on both counts: inequality really is a winning issue, and Obama’s couching of it in terms of “equal opportunity” makes the argument stronger, not weaker.
While the conservative backlash has been predictable, Obama’s emphasis on inequality has prompted some backlash from those arguing that the main problem today is jobs rather than inequality. Is this a fair criticism? It’s certainly true that in the short run jobs does look like the most serious problem. To boot, as Jared Bernstein and Mike Konczal have pointed out, there are few programs that would have more of a positive effect on inequality than achieving full employment.
So should we be talking mostly about jobs and stimulus and turning down the volume on inequality? Paul Krugman dissents, rightly arguing that progressives must “face up to an awkward political reality: moderate populism has a broad popular constituency, Keynesian macroeconomics doesn’t.”
A recent Pew poll bears out Krugman’s point. Sixty-five percent of Americans said the gap between the rich and everyone else in the US has been increasing the last 10 years, and by a 60-36 margin, respondents said the economic system in the country unfairly favors the wealthy, as opposed to being fair to most Americans. Americans think inequality is both unfair and getting worse.
That theme of “everyone else” versus the top is dramatically underscored by results from a recent Hart Research poll conducted for the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Americans today overwhelmingly believe that the single most important goal for the nation’s economic future is creating an economy that works for everyone, not just the wealthy few (the pollsters call this concept “everyone economics”). While voters also rate many other goals as priorities — job creation, a strong future for the next generation, a stronger middle class — none resonate nearly as strongly as having an economy that works for all Americans. And no other critique better captures Americans’ economic anxiety than the idea that our economic system now benefits only the wealthy and corporations, while the deck is stacked against everyone else.
This suggests that not only is populism the right approach for progressives to take, but that populism should be pitched in a particular way. Everyone economics is consistent with an inclusive populism, rather than favoring one class over another. Instead of merely replacing the rich with the middle income folk as America’s “most favored” class, progressives should pitch their policies as a means of leveling the playing field for everyone.
For Americans, this is a moral, as well as an economic, story. The public believes that virtuous behavior (especially hard work) is not being properly rewarded today because of barriers erected by the wealthy and powerful. Three-quarters agree that “the rules in America have changed — hard work and sacrifice are not rewarded anymore,” while for 63 percent,providing more opportunity to those who work hard and struggle to provide for their families is a high priority.
Obama has also received some pushback for framing much of his talk about inequality in terms of opportunity rather than redistribution. But it’s better to think about the opportunity language as complimentary, rather than opposed to, the inequality arguments he and other leading progressives often employ.
In fact, the Hart data suggests that opportunity talk is actually the most effective way to challenge inequality. It is unquestionably true that the reality of large and growing inequality in America is shaping Americans’ perception of what is wrong with their economy and how it needs to change. But the Hart survey shows clearly that the specific language of “equality” (and “inequality”) is not the best way to speak to these concerns. Instead, Americans want to see expanded opportunity, especially for those who demonstrate effort through hard work. What worries them is less the size of statistical gaps in income or wealth, and more their sense that the system is rigged in favor of the powerful to prevent average people from having opportunities to move up the ladder.
This is why Americans are more focused on providing opportunity to everyone than on narrowing income inequality per se. By a solid 26-point margin, voters say their priority is to make sure everyone in the country has a real opportunity to succeed more than reducing the gap between the richest 1 percent and the rest of the country. And while 38 percent cite “economic opportunity” as an important quality for today’s economy, just 21 percent say the same for “economic equality.”
The most effective way to sell the progressive vision for the economy is everyone economics language focusing on providing opportunity for those who lack it today, not simply taking from some and giving to others. That’s is precisely what Obama was seeking to do with his emphasis on “ladders of opportunity” and he was right to do so.