As Take Back America wraps up today, on the fifth anniversary of the day we began military operations in Iraq, and I have mixed feelings about what the conference tried to accomplish. The whole idea behind the conference was to network, build relationships, and begin cooperation among all the leftist groups: environmentalists, social justice advocates, policy wonks, campaign managers, bloggers, youth groups, economists, and civil rights leaders. I think they took a step in the right direction, but the thing is that the audience and a lot of the panelists were mostly aging white baby boomers.
Sure, they brought in Majora Carter, Donna Edwards, Jesse Jackson, Van Jones, Pam Spaulding, and Roger Wilkins. But they still stuffed a youth coalition building workshop in a tiny room were there was standing room only. A panel targeting economic inequality starring Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Gates, Sr. talked mainly of the estate tax and didn’t make much of the increasing debt loads of youth.
Broad coalition building is a good thing. Take Back America will be considered a success, and it should be. It was a well run conference with a lot of really great speakers. Even with everyone willing to work together – and not everyone is – there’s no way we’ll become a comprehensive movement in just two and a half days. It will take a lot more work to accomplish that.
The coming of the second Gilded Age is a panel about inequality. Chuck Collins, from Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy, said that "the data [of inequality] is no longer in dispute." He referenced the infamous Richistan, fantastic satire of the fact that the upper class doesn't even fell the tremors of a collapsing economy. His prescriptive agenda is that 1) we need to talk about the inequality and constantly push it forth in the public discussion and 2) return to an era of progressive taxation and public investment.
Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, promised she wouldn't use words like "unfair" or "obscene." I'd never seen her before in person, but she's hilarious. Instead, she said, she would find the objective "problems" with the poor. One of the biggest problems, she said, is that this lowest class of people has depressed consumption -- they're not doing their American duty to shop! "The poor isn't holding up it's own," she said to a room full of laughter. The credit crisis was caused, in essence, by poor people. The lower class of people in this country "is actually a tripwire." So then she flipped this paradigm of the poor being a burden on society on its head. She talked about how the superrich squeeze us as consumers and spenders. She also says the ultrarich are "hogging all the good scenery in America." It turns out the rich are a burden on society. "When you have some people that can barely afford to buy groceries and you have other people that can buy congressman," she said eloquently, "You're not talking about democracy anymore, you're talking about plutocracy."
William Gates Sr. spent a lot of time over the last couple years campaigning against the repeal of the estate tax. He targets this as the real source of inequality in America and the biggest winnable political battle on inequality.
In the Q&A portion, Ehrenreich wisely debunks the "American dream." She noted that everyone wants to believe that they will graduate from college with a $60,000 starting salary, but the reality is that they will spend many years of working as a barista followed by a series of layoffs.
At a press conference this afternoon which is intended to announce a large coalition of progressive groups that are coordinating money and resources to voter turnout for both the presidential race as well as congressional races. Among the groups that made announcements are A.F.L.-C.I.O. and Change to Win, Acorn, Women’s Voices Women Vote, Rock the Vote and the National Council of La Raza. I'm not really breaking any news here, since it's already up on the New York Times's Caucus blog. The spending by these groups is estimated to far surpass any previous election cycle.
Well so what? Some groups are working together to further the outcome of an election. This is hardly surprising, given the fact that this election has been deemed the highest of stakes. But the idea behind it is instead of all putting forth independent efforts, these groups that, for the most part, want the same end of putting forth progressive issues, values, and ultimately progressive candidates into office. I guess the story here is that this time around, like the right did long ago, the left is trying to work together.
At a blogging panel with Terrance Heath, Pam Spaulding, Digby, Tracy Russo, Chris Bowers, and Ari Melber, the message seems to be that the blogosphere's role has become not that of the watchdog, but more like a dogwalker with a very long leash. When the media tends to go out too far on a limb -- one example that keeps coming up is Chris Matthews' sexist commentary -- the blogosphere tends to rally around that cause, writing and encouraging the readers to take action. Eventually, the dog (media) runs out of rope and (hopefully) comes snapping back, tail between its legs.
Heath began to talk about how there's not just The Blogosphere, but there are many smaller orbits that focus around an issue or identity. Some stories just wouldn't exist if these small orbits didn't exist. Bowers noted that linking patterns indicate there are many different blogospheres. The spheres themselves have become more diverse.
I'm blogging about a panel about blogging. Whoa. Meta.
The morning opened today with a panel on learning lessons from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement. The panel included former presidential candidate and Rev. Jesse Jackson, Pulitzer Prize winner Roger Wilkins, and King biographer Taylor Branch. Read More »
Anthony Daniels, a gifted speaker who I've written about before here, started the Millennials Rising: Young Voters Revitalizing Democracy panel by saying, "As we've seen, voting is cool again. ... The youth can put you in office and they can take you out again." Read More »
The Media Reform and High-Speed Internet for Everyone panel, moderated by Josh Silver of Free Press, talked about the not-so-sexy topic of increasing access to broadband technology. A sparsely attended panel is one of the lower profile movements that has large impacts on the things a lot of people take for granted -- access to affordable broadband Internet, assurance that some websites won't be charged more than others by Internet providers (an issue known as net neutrality), and lobbying the Federal Communications Commission to stop so-called deregulation from killing popular Internet radio stations like Pandora from getting killed.
Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein (D-SD) talked about how increasing access to the internet has broader impact than initially thought. Such access can decrease costs to health care, through something called telemedicine. This can increased doctor-patient care and vastly lower costs.
Debbie Goldman, from Communications Workers of America, said if you use the FCC's definition of broadband, about 200 kbps, fewer than half of Americans are connected. Goldman talked about a survey in which if only a small bit of information about the benefits of broadband that include health care and public safety, more than 60 percent of respondents supported full broadband access. Not to mention that the rural/urban divide is abysmal. While about 63 percent of suburban registered voters have regular high-speed Internet access, only about 32 percent of rural voters do.
It's a hugely popular issue, once people are aware of it, but this isn't an issue that many people think a lot about. Some of the things that may piss you off about media the most -- the dumbing down of the media and the disappearance of your favorite indy media -- all have a lot to do with regulation in the FCC. It's a federal commission that has a lot of control, and is supposed to be accountable to the public, but as long as the president gets to appoint commissioners, the balance is tipped in favor of big media.
Update: Free Press is hosting a conference on media reform in Minneapolis on June 5-6.
At the Health Care for All panel, there were leading health care wonks: Jacob Hacker, who has released his own health care reform plan, Maya Rockeymoore from Global Policy Solutions, and Ezra Klein from The American Prospect.
Hacker spent a great deal of time talking about the underinsured -- those that have health insurance but have high deductibles and will delay treatment if they're sick. He talked about how these underinsured, presumably a politically successful demographic, look "just like us." The underinsured make more than $50,000 a year, are white, employed full time, and are well educated.
Rockeymoore, a woman of color, spent a great deal of time talking about how disproportionate health care costs are. She noted as she began Global Policy Solutions, she became an employer and noted that health care costs for women were much higher than those for men. Additionally, she noted that whites have the lowest uninsured rate in the country. Blacks are much more dependent on government-provided health care than whites. "The health care system," Rockeymoore said, "is broken."
Klein (full disclosure: Ezra is a friend of mine), fully endorses Hacker's plan, but notes that Hacker's component of controlling costs will be a "tough sell" in Congress, especially the Senate where "you need 60 votes." Klein called methods of discriminating "crazy."
Hacker Rockeymoore, and Klein are all saying that health care, as it is today, is an injustice and it is, at it's core, about a kind of discrimination. Insurance companies, while going after a higher profit margin, are trying to minimize risks by saying no to those with pre-existing conditions, with lack of employment, with less of a social safety net. Usually, this means the poor, the non-white, and the poorly educated. These are the ones that are paying the greatest costs for our broken health care system.
Donna Edwards was more or less the star at the opening plenary here at Take Back America. The Democratic nominee for the fourth congressional district of Maryland -- who outed an eight-term incumbent known for corruption -- noted that in the weekend before the fifth anniversary of Iraq, the Washington Post's Sunday edition had only one story on Iraq. She enlisted attendees to write to their papers and put Iraq "back on the front page."
As Matt noted over the weekend, media coverage of Iraq has declined dramatically in the last couple of months, contributing to the notion that the surge is working, even if the reality is that it's not.
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