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Nebraska governor signs off on new Keystone XL pipeline route; TransCanada laughs maniacally

by HartkePoundstone568 Posted on January 22, 2013

Nebraska governor signs off on new Keystone XL pipeline route; TransCanada laughs maniacally

By Philip Bump

Somewhere in Canada, a TransCanada executive has a big checklist on his wall. At the bottom, circled in red: “Approval of Keystone XL!!!!” Until today, only two checkboxes remained unchecked. But now, there’s only one, because he’s put a big fat X next to “Get OK from Nebraska.” The Times reports:

Gov. Dave Heineman of Nebraska approved on Tuesday a revised route for the Keystone XL pipeline through Nebraska, brushing aside vocal opposition from some citizen groups and putting final approval of the pipeline project squarely in the hands of the Obama administration.

Governor Heineman, a Republican, said in a letter to Mr. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that his state’s review found that the new route avoided sensitive lands and aquifers. Mr. Obama had rejected the previous route last January on the grounds that construction of the pipeline threatened Nebraska’s Sand Hills region and that a spill could contaminate the critical Ogallala Aquifer.

Thomas Beck Photo

For now, anyway.

This was basically the bare minimum of what TransCanada needed to demonstrate: that a spill wouldn’t permanently ruin a critical source of water used for irrigation. Last October, the state’s Department of Environmental Quality OK’d the new proposed route. Last month, hundreds of Nebraskans attended a public meeting to dispute those findings — and to suggest that any spill would be hugely problematic.

The governor has a response for that.

Mr. Heineman said that the pipeline’s operator, TransCanada, had assured him and state environmental officials that the chances of a spill would be minimized and that the company would assume all responsibility for a cleanup in case of an accident.

Pipeline spills are like pregnancy. There’s only one guaranteed way to prevent them: abstinence. But tell Nebraska that you’ll always be there for it, and the state is ready to be screwed.

It wasn’t just TransCanada’s VP of Checkbox Checking that was giddy.

The American Petroleum Institute, a strong advocate of the project, applauded Nebraska’s action, saying that it removed a critical hurdle to completion of the pipeline.

“With the approval from Nebraska in hand, the president can be confident that the remaining environmental concerns have been addressed,” said Marty Durbin, the oil lobby’s executive vice president. “We hope President Obama will finally greenlight KXL as soon as possible and get more Americans back to work.”

Though not as many Americans as the industry likes to pretend.

So there’s only one last checklist item. TransCanada still needs approval from the Obama administration to build Keystone XL across the Canadian border. The decision ostensibly lies with the State Department, but, ultimately, it’s with the president himself. Yesterday, he pledged to combat climate change, in stronger language than he’s used in years. Whether or not the Keystone pipeline meets his standard for combat remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, that guy at TransCanada HQ has his marker hovering over that tantalizingly empty box.

Source

Nebraska Governor Approves Keystone XL Route, New York Times

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Nebraska governor signs off on new Keystone XL pipeline route; TransCanada laughs maniacally

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Obama Gets Political, Kelly Clarkson Wows ‘Em

by Pauline80x Posted on January 21, 2013

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I’d say that this was a more explicitly political inauguration speech than usual, with lots of shoutouts to specific political goals and partisan disagreements. I expect the Fox News set to hate it. Here are a few key excerpts:

Our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.

The commitments we make to each other — through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security — these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.

Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law — for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well. Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote. Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity.

Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it.

Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for, and cherished, and always safe from harm.

Also: that was a helluva performance of America from Kelly Clarkson, wasn’t it?

UPDATE: Sure enough, the Fox News commenters seem distinctly unhappy with this speech. Brit Hume is complaining that the economy is still terrible. Chris Wallace says Obama didn’t reach out to conservatives at all. Bret Baer thinks it was basically a challenge to Republicans not to try and mess with the welfare state. Megyn Kelly says that even the Washington Post thinks Obama is too liberal. And so far, we’ve only heard from the relatively moderate wing of Fox pundits. I can hardly wait to see what Karl Rove and Sean Hannity have to say about it.

UPDATE 2: Now they’re chattering about whether it’s OK to say that Beyonce is an attractive woman.

UPDATE 3: Now they’re back to arguing that Obama is the real obstructionist, not Republicans. I think I’ll tune out now. I imagine they can keep up this schtick pretty much forever.

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Obama Gets Political, Kelly Clarkson Wows ‘Em

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7 Gun Groups That Make the NRA Look Reasonable

by f45 Posted on January 19, 2013

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On Saturday, January 19, an alliance of pro-gun groups is commemorating the very first Gun Appreciation Day, encouraging Americans to head to their local gun shows, stores, and ranges to prove their support for the 2nd Amendment. The fake holiday is a call to arms to conservative gun owners as well as a direct rebuff to President Obama’s push for gun legislation in the wake of mass shootings like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary. “Scheduled to send a message to Washington two days before Obama’s second inauguration, the ‘Gun Appreciation Day’ is expected to rival ‘Chick-fil-A Day‘ as a public statement of protest against government policies,” a blast email from the organizers reads.

Some of the organizations promoting Gun Appreciation Day are so extreme that even the NRA won’t go near them. (One of the now-disavowed official sponsors was a hardcore white nationalist political party.) These groups are smaller, far less powerful, and do not enjoy anything close to the NRA’s hundreds of millions of dollars in annual fundraising. Here’s a look at five groups that are hyping up the occasion—and two more of their ilk:

revolution pac

RevolutionPAC.com

This super-PAC—run by Lawrence Hunter, a Forbes columnist and ex-adviser to the Reagan White House—was influenced by the tea party and libertarian fixture Rep. Ron Paul. Pet causes include raging against antidepressants as deadly and dangerous and equating the president to Hitler and other dictators:

Revolution PAC

Second amendment foundation

Founded by conservative author Alan Gottlieb in 1974, the Second Amendment Foundation is the country’s oldest legal-action group focusing on gun rights. It claims about 650,000 members. It is known for its flurry of federal lawsuits, including a pair filed in conjunction with the NRA. The foundation also runs a series of magazines, including Women & Guns:

womenshooters.com

Women Warriors pac

Facebook

Speaking of women and guns: Women Warriors PAC was formed during the past election season to support “strong Conservative Women fighting the Obama political machine’s ‘war on women’ message”—women like Mia Love. (It emphasizes that its members are “warriors not helpless minions!”) The PAC only has a few hundred dollars on hand, but what it lacks in funds and publicity, it makes up for in enthusiasm:

Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

ccrkba.org

Alan Gottlieb also serves as chairman for this nonprofit that started in 1971. Its tax forms show that it rakes in less than $70,000 annually. However, it does have this bit of gun-enthusiast cred: CCRKBA is credited as having coined this wildly popular slogan:

JEWS FOR THE PRESERVATION OF FIREARMS OWNerSHIP

jpfo.org

Unlike the previous four, this group isn’t listed as an official Gun Appreciation Day sponsor. But that hasn’t stopped them from cheerleading for the event.

This Wisconsin-based organization was founded in the late ’80s by ex-arms dealer Aaron Zelman. Over the decades, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership has made some high-profile friends, including musician and anti-Obama gun-toting zealot Ted Nugent (whom Zelman praised for his “talent, success, wit, and celebrity“). The group has criticized the NRA for its incessant “kowtowing to authoritarian police bureaucrats.”

Perhaps more than any other group, JPFO likes to push the idea that gun control always leads to totalitarianism and/or genocide: It’s known for selling posters and bumper stickers tying Nazism to gun laws. Zelman even wrote a book in the ’90s that supposedly contains “startling evidence that the Gun Control Act of 1968 was lifted, almost in its entirety, from Nazi legislation”:

jpfo.org

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7 Gun Groups That Make the NRA Look Reasonable

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The Case Against (Temporarily) Abolishing Taxes

by nension Posted on January 18, 2013

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Matt Yglesias argues that since the federal government can borrow money at negative interest rates, it should borrow instead of taxing:

You’re the mayor of a city. A storm strikes and ruins a whole bunch of your police cars. Now you need to buy new ones. You have two options for paying for the cars—you can borrow the money and pay the bill ten years from now, or you can raise taxes and pay right now. The case for paying later is pretty clear. In ten years’ time your city’s overall economic output will be higher so the burden of paying off the loan then will be lessened. On the other hand, the case for paying now is also pretty clear—lenders generally expect interest payments in exchange for their loans so the total cost of the debt option is higher. But wait! The city’s accountants show up and point out that it’s currently possible for the city to borrow at a negative real rate. Suddenly the interest costs are off the table as a reason to prefer paying sooner.

So what’s left? Nothing. The city will be richer in ten years, so pay then. The logic becomes especially compelling when you recognize that the city’s income will grow more rapidly under the lower-tax regime that encourages more investment in residential and commercial property and more business activity.

This is true. We should be borrowing more now, when interest rates are negative, and taxing less, since that slows down an already fragile economy.

However, this was written in the context of replying to a critic who thought it was crazy to suggest that we simply not tax at all. But the critic is right. The financial case for borrowing 100% of our budget might be sound, but the political economy case isn’t.

One of the fundamental reasons for taxation is that it provides a constraint on democratic governments. If you want to appropriate a certain amount of the productive capacity of the country, you need to get permission from the citizens of the country, and you need to make that permission painful in some way. Otherwise the government will seize an ever bigger portion of the economy essentially by stealth. This is bad juju.

Borrowing is simply too easy. Politicians will always be attracted to it, because the money doesn’t have to paid back until they’re long out of office. This is one reason that so many states have burgeoning pension problems: politicians would rather hand out pension increases than pay increases, because the pension increases don’t come due until they’re long gone. Pay hikes, by contrast, require them to either raise taxes or else cut back on other spending.

But that kind of pain is useful. Societies do have to make tradeoffs, and human nature being what it is, those tradeoffs will only be made if the costs are fairly clear and fairly sharp. That’s why maintaining the discipline of taxation is important even when borrowing costs are low.

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Will Conservative Media Give the GOP Cover to Make A Deal on Immigration?

by greenenergy4 Posted on January 18, 2013

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After non-white Americans voted overwhelmingly for Democrats in the 2012 election, prominent conservative pundits like Sean Hannity and Charles Krauthammer began signalling a willingness to shift on immigration reform. At the time, Republicans were still sitting shiva for Mitt Romney’s campaign, so it’s possible all the talk of compromise was just post-election despair. But the right wing media’s reaction to Florida GOP Sen. Marco Rubio’s new immigration proposal—a plan that resembles the one put forth by the White House—suggests conservatives may really be changing their tune on immigration reform.

As Rubio elaborated on his pitch for immigration reform, which would include a pathway to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants already in the US, to Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly Wednesday, O’Reilly listened and said “that seems pretty fair.” Likewise, when Rubio showed up on Laura Ingraham’s show Wednesday, Ingraham sought to put distance between Rubio and the White House saying, that “Obama’s going to seek citizenship in one fast push,” whereas Rubio’s plan would be more “piecemeal.” (Ingraham’s wrong: How long any undocumented immigrant would have to wait for citizenship under either plan actually remains undetermined.) Meanwhile, Rubio, in both instances, said he didn’t really know where the White House stood on the issue. Rubio also appeared on Sean Hannity’s radio show Thursday, and Hannity called Rubio’s immigration plan “the most thoughtful bill I have heard heretofore.”

Here’s why this is important: When George W. Bush sought to pass immigration reform, his plan was killed by the GOP base, who had been whipped up by conservative media and talk radio. Hannity himself was key to the effort. With some exceptions, conservative media seems more inclined to cover for Rubio this time around. That could all change pretty quickly, but given how much influence Fox News and talk radio have on the conservative base (remember when they convinced Republicans Mitt Romney was on the verge of a landslide victory?), how the right-wing media approach this issue could determine whether immigration reform actually has a chance of passing. For the moment, conservative pundits are playing up a distance between Rubio’s proposal and the Democrats that doesn’t really exist. That could make a potential compromise seem more palatable to the Republican base. “Why do I think regardless of what you propose that would solve the problem Democrats are going to demagogue it?” Hannity asked Rubio Thursday. “Well, that may be the case,” Rubio replied solemnly.

Immigration reform advocates have noticed—and are elated by—conservative media’s new tone on immigration. “It shows the power of the messenger,” says Frank Sharry, who runs the pro-immigration reform group America’s Voice. “It’s going to be hard for the right-wing echo chamber to get whipped up the way they did in 2007.”

Contra Hannity, Democrats have already signalled they’re willing to work with Rubio. “I expect that the Judiciary Committee will devote most of our time this Spring working to pass comprehensive immigration reform,” Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt) said during an appearance at the Georgetown University Law Center Wednesday. “I have a lot of respect for Marco Rubio,” Leahy added. “We disagree on some things, but we agree on others, but I found him to be very open in his views and I’ll seek that.”

Rubio told Ingraham yesterday that “I’ll work with anybody” on immigration reform. That claim will be tested in the next few months.

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Will Conservative Media Give the GOP Cover to Make A Deal on Immigration?

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You Need to See These 5 Shocking Facts About Money in the 2012 Elections

by RubinkJoseph Posted on January 17, 2013

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Not since the years before the Watergate scandal has a small cadre of mega-donors influenced our elections as much as wealthy givers such as casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson, DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, Texas homebuilder Bob Perry, and Chicago media mogul Fred Eychaner did in 2012. These men and a few dozen others pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into super-PACs and shadowy nonprofits and raised tens of millions more for presidential and Congressional campaigns.

Now, a new report titled “Billion-Dollar Democracy” by the Demos think tank and the US Public Interest Research Group, both left-of-center groups, distills all the fundraising and spending on last year’s elections and spits out an array of eye-popping factoids about where all the money came from (or most of it, at least) and how it was spent. It is vital information as reporters, activists, and others try to make sense of an election season full of firsts—the first full cycle since the 2010 Citizens United decision, the first $1 billion campaign (Obama), and the first presidential race in which both major candidates rejected public financing.

I’ve plucked out five must-see highlights from the report, with graphics courtesy of Demos and US PIRG:

32

It took just 32 of the biggest super-PAC donors to match the total giving—$313 million—by every single small-dollar donor to Barack Obama’s and Mitt Romney’s campaigns combined. Donors who give less than $200 aren’t disclosed, but it’s at least 3.7 million people.

Source: Demos and U.S. PIRG Education Fund analysis of FEC and Sunlight Foundation data.


159 donors

A tiny sliver of the American population supplied most of the money super-PACs used during the 2012 campaign season. How tiny? Sixty percent of all super-PAC donations came from just 159 people.

Source: Demos and U.S. PIRG Education Fund analysis of FEC and Sunlight Foundation data.


31%

Of the $1.03 billion outside groups spent last election cycle, 31 percent was “dark money,” meaning we don’t know who gave the money or where it came from.

Source: Demos and U.S. PIRG Education Fund analysis of FEC and Sunlight Foundation data.


58%

Dark money fueled a huge chunk of those TV attack ads you noticed during commercial breaks for Parks and Recreation. Fifty-eight percent of outside groups’ TV spending on the presidential race was funded by dark money.

Source: The Washington Post, “Mad Money.”


322,000 average Americans

It would take 322,000 middle-income Americans—say, the entire population of Anaheim, Calif., minus a few thousand folks—giving 0.37 percent of their net worth to match casino magnate Sheldon Adelson’s $91.8 million, which was 0.37 percent of his net worth. Forbes estimates Adelson’s fortune at $20.5 billion.

Source: DÄ&#147;mos and U.S. PIRG Education Fund analysis of FEC and Sunlight Foun- dation data.

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You Need to See These 5 Shocking Facts About Money in the 2012 Elections

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Idle No More: A primer on the indigenous green movement

by sreg2 Posted on January 16, 2013

Idle No More: A primer on the indigenous green movement

By Susie Cagle

fifth_business

A December 30, 2012 round dance in Toronto.

Over the last three months, Idle No More has taken North America by storm, blocking roads and trains, and flash-mobbing in community squares and shopping malls (and being summarily arrested for it in some places).

The movement is a response to hundreds of years of environmental rape and pillage by European settlers, who have generally shown themselves to be shitty stewards of this land (okay, “shitty” is generous). So why now?

Well, why not?

Idle No More has been particularly outspoken against tar sands pipelines in Canada and the U.S. But the movement actually began this past fall in reaction to Canada’s effort to weaken the Navigable Waters Protection Act so that it would protect only 97 bodies of water; it currently safeguards tens of thousands of them. It’s expanded beyond Canada, but its roots are still up north.

Gyasi Ross at Indian Country wrote a primer on the movement, its motivations and its goals:

It’s not a Native thing or a white thing, it’s an Indigenous worldview thing. It’s a “protect the Earth” thing. For those transfixed on race, you’re missing the point. The Idle No More Movement simply wants kids of all colors and ethnicities to have clean drinking water.

Idle No More, though at times militant, has taken an explicitly non-violent tack. “We are here to ensure the land, the waters, the air, and the creatures and indeed each of us, return to balance and discontinue harming each other and the earth,” movement founders wrote on Monday. “To keep us on this good path, we ask that you, as organizers create space for Elders or knowledge/ceremonial keepers to assist in guiding decisions as we move forward. It is up to each of us to see that this movement respects all people, the environment, and our communities and neighbours.”

lafemmeforster

Idle No More is gearing up for another global day of action on January 28. “This day of action will peacefully protest attacks on Democracy, Indigenous Sovereignty, Human Rights and Environmental Protections when Canadian MPs return to the House of Commons on January 28th.” Protests are planned in Arizona, California, Colorado, New York, South Dakota, and across Canada.

Council of Canadians

Idle No More is in it for the long haul, but they’re a little sensitive to comparisons to that other decentralized grassroots movement that came and went over the last year. Ross again:

We’re Native… Hello? You’re not going to scare us off with the cold weather.

Or the riot cops’ hot pepper spray, I hope.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Idle No More: A primer on the indigenous green movement

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Congressional Democrats Unveil New Bills to Battle Big-Money Donors

by BakenKesselring341 Posted on January 16, 2013

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On Wednesday, Democrats in Congress took their first big step of the 113th Congress toward staunching the flow of money into US political campaigns. A group of House Democrats unveiled a trio of political money-themed bills, each proposing to establish new public campaign financing that would reward candidates for hauling in lots of small donations instead of fewer, larger ones, by matching small-dollar donations with public funds and tightening the rules governing super-PACs.

The 2012 presidential election marked the first time since the post-Watergate creation of public financing system that neither party’s candidate accepted public money to fund his campaign. And little surprise why: Had they accepted public financing, Obama and Romney would’ve received a paltry $45.6 million for the primary season and $91.2 million each for the general election. Instead Obama raised roughly $1.2 billion overall and Romney raised more than $900 million.

In addition to revamping the public financing of federal elections to encourage more courting of small donors, the “Empowering Citizens Act,” introduced by Reps. David Price (D-N.C.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), would beef up rules banning coordination between super-PACs and campaigns, which critics say aren’t strong enough right now. Congressional Democrats point to super-PACs such as Restore Our Future, which spent $152 million solely to elect Romney, and Priorities USA Action, which spent $74 million to elect Obama, as evidence of the blurry lines between candidate-specific super-PACs and the candidates’ campaign. For instance, Romney appeared at a fundraiser for Restore Our Future, and top Obama advisers such as David Plouffe and David Axelrod spoke at Priorities events. (Conservatives dismiss the notion that this constitutes coordination and say Democrats just want to restrict the speech of outside groups with whom they don’t agree.)

Another of the new bills, the “Grassroots Democracy Act” offered by Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.), would create a small-donor matching system as well as a “People’s Fund,” which would send additional federal money to candidates in races flooded with outside money and, in Sarbanes’ words, “the voices of grassroots candidates are being drowned out.” The third bill, the “Fair Elections Now Act” introduced by Reps. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) and Chellie Pingree (D-Me.), would provide a 5-to-1 match of donations of $100 or less from in-state donors in the primary and general elections.

In the weeks ahead, House Democrats say, they plan to hash out a compromise bill that incorporates what they believe are the best ideas of the three bills introduced on Wednesday. Of course, with Republicans in control of the House, any legislation aimed at reforming money in politics is dead-on-arrival. But with the ebb and flow of Congressional control, Democrats will inevitably find themselves back in charge of the House in two or four or six years, and when they do, Democrats and reform advocates say they want a tough, comprehensive campaign finance bill ready to grab off the shelf and put into play.

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Congressional Democrats Unveil New Bills to Battle Big-Money Donors

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Russ Feingold: Democrats Sold Out in 2012 and Need to Quit Big Money

by NielPostma231 Posted on January 10, 2013

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President Obama’s decision to let his 2013 inauguration committee accept corporate cash and million-dollar donations marks quite a reversal for the president: for his first inaugural in 2009, he capped individual donations at $50,000 and banned corporate money. The Associated Press calls the decision “part of a continuing erosion of Obama’s pledge to keep donors and special interests at arm’s length of his presidency.” But for former Sen. Russ Feingold, it’s yet another sell-out by his friends in the Democratic Party to the big-money forces so dominant in politics today.

No Democrat has so publicly ripped his own party for embracing super-PACs and dark-money nonprofits than Feingold. In a new article for the journal Democracy, Feingold, who co-wrote the 2002 McCain-Feingold Act, the last major campaign finance restriction in the US, takes Democrats to the mat. He calls 2012 “a big step” back for Democratic-led efforts to get big money out of politics, and singles out Obama’s reversal on super-PACs. In February 2012, the president encouraged his donors to give to Priorities USA Action, the super-PAC backing him, while allowing his top deputies to appear at Priorities events. On the PBS NewsHour, top Obama strategist David Axelrod defended Obama by saying that the president hadn’t warned at all toward super-PACs but had to play by the rules of the game. You heard that a lot from Democrats in 2012. Yet with statements like that, Feingold says, Democrats were posing as a pro-reform party while tripping over themselves to “exploit any avenue to accept unlimited, corporate dollars to fund elections.”

Beltway Democrats, Feingold argues, aren’t going to reform big-money politics from the inside; they’re addicted and they just can’t quit. The task of fighting for real reforms to money in politics, of building what Feingold—who now runs his own pro-reform nonprofit, Progressives United—calls a “permanent majority” for reform, falls instead to liberal donors and activists outside of Washington.

Feingold says the most important thing big donors can do is stop giving—to super-PACs or any of the other Citizens United-enabled fixtures of our big-money politics. “Donors hold more leverage to create a movement for reform than almost any other actor in the political system,” he says. If donors ignore super-PACs and nonprofits, “Washington will notice.” And as for the liberal activists out there, they should redirect all the energy they’ve invested into passing a constitutional amendment reversing the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and channel it into “achievable goals”—public financing of elections, disclosure of donors to dark-money nonprofits and shell corporations, overhauling the dysfunctional Federal Election Commission, the nation’s top elections cop.

The stakes are high, in Feingold’s view, for the Democrats. “Unless Democrats embrace election reform as a central tenet of our platform,” he writes, “we will face another era reminiscent of soft money—when the dominance of corporate interests meant that no matter what party held power, the influence of Big Money always won.”

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Russ Feingold: Democrats Sold Out in 2012 and Need to Quit Big Money

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Green and lefty groups band together, pledge millions to fight right-wing evildoing

by aleidasharrington Posted on January 10, 2013

Green and lefty groups band together, pledge millions to fight right-wing evildoing

By Lisa Hymas

Andy Kroll at Mother Jones writes about “the massive new liberal plan to remake American politics”:

A month after President Barack Obama won reelection, top brass from three dozen of the most powerful groups in liberal politics met at the headquarters of the National Education Association (NEA), a few blocks north of the White House. Brought together by the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Communication Workers of America (CWA), and the NAACP, the meeting was invite-only and off-the-record. Despite all the Democratic wins in November, a sense of outrage filled the room as labor officials, environmentalists, civil rights activists, immigration reformers, and a panoply of other progressive leaders discussed the challenges facing the left and what to do to beat back the deep-pocketed conservative movement.

At the end of the day, many of the attendees closed with a pledge of money and staff resources to build a national, coordinated campaign around three goals: getting big money out of politics, expanding the voting rolls while fighting voter ID laws, and rewriting Senate rules to curb the use of the filibuster to block legislation. The groups in attendance pledged a total of millions of dollars and dozens of organizers to form a united front on these issues—potentially, a coalition of a kind rarely seen in liberal politics, where squabbling is common and a stay-in-your-lane attitude often prevails. …

The liberal activists have dubbed this effort the Democracy Initiative. The campaign, Brune says, has since been attracting other members—and also interest from foundations looking to give money—because many groups on the left believe they can’t accomplish their own goals without winning reforms on the Initiative’s three issues.

As Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune puts it, “We’re not going to have a clean-energy economy if the same companies that are polluting our rivers and oceans are also polluting our elections.”

Shutterstock

Somebody’s gotta fight the bad guys.

The Democracy Initiative, which first started meeting last June, now includes 30 to 35 groups, and Brune expects that to soon swell to 50. “[A]ttendees at the December meeting included top officials from the League of Conservation Voters, Friends of the Earth, Public Campaign, the AFL-CIO, SEIU, Common Cause, Voto Latino, the Demos think tank, Piper Fund, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, People for the American Way, National People’s Action, National Wildlife Federation, the Center for American Progress, the United Auto Workers, and Color of Change.”

[Brune and other instigators] say the Democracy Initiative is no flash in the pan; they’re in it for the long haul, for more than just this election cycle and the one after it. It took four decades, these leaders say, for conservatives to shape state and federal legislatures to the degree that they have, and it will take a long stretch to roll back those changes. “The game is rigged against us; the corporate right has done such a good job taking over the Congress and the courts,” [says Greenpeace Executive Director Phil Radford]. “We’re saying we need to step back and change the whole game.”

The first order of business is pushing to change the Senate’s operating rules and curb use of the filibuster, which probably has to happen by Jan. 22 in order to take hold in this new Congress. Wondering why filibuster reform is so important? Grist’s David Roberts explains.

Source

Revealed: The Massive New Liberal Plan to Remake American Politics, Mother Jones

Lisa Hymas is senior editor at Grist. You can follow her on

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