For more information Email Rosemarie Russo

Related: Can Economy Bear What Gas Prices Have In Store?

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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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from BoycottRush.org

Send a message to Rush Limbaugh’s advertisers: Tell them it’s time to stop supporting his anti-woman hate speech.

So far seven (7) national advertisers have pulled out of the Rush Limbaugh radio show and you can follow the action on Twitter using the hashtag #stoprush or by following the link above.

Update Monday March 5 11:51 Mountain:

Monday, March 5, 12:13 p.m.: Rush Limbaugh just lost another advertiser.

AOL on Monday became the eighth company to pull its ads from Limbaugh’s radio talk show in the wake of his inflammatory comments about a 30-year-old Georgetown law student who advocated for President Obama’s contraception policy.

“At AOL one of our core values is that we act with integrity,” the company said in a statement on its Facebook page. “We have monitored the unfolding events and have determined that Mr. Limbaugh’s comments are not in line with our values. As a result we have made the decision to suspend advertising on The Rush Limbaugh Radio show.”

Rush in Denver on KOA AM850

ClearChannel Communications syndicates the Rush Limbaugh show nationally. In Denver their outlet is KOA AM 850 ClearChannel doesn’t care what Limbaugh says as long as he delivers an audience and sponsors. To them it is strictly a business decision. If Rush Limbaugh starts costing them money they may decide to drop him.

The Gypsy Chief blog supports the national effort to boycott this toxic talker. Our effort focuses on the local level, so I have written to AM Sales Director Rosemary Bennett to let her know that I will never buy any product or service advertised on KOA during the Limbaugh show. Rosemary Bennett’s phone number is (303) 713 – 8355 according to their website. I have a daughter about the same age as Sandra Fluke. If anybody ever called my daughter the vile things Limbaugh called this 30 year old Georgetown Law student I would be after him with a horsewhip. … just sayin’

Courtesy www.gardnerpath.com

Last week, the U.S. House voted to pass one of the most radical oil
and gas drilling bills in recent memory — a Big Oil handout from House leadership that opens the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and some of our most sensitive coastal waters to dirty drilling.

Your U.S. Representative (rookie Congressman Cory Gardner) voted to sacrifice our natural heritage by supporting this terrible bill.

According to Defenders of Wildlife HR 3408 threatens…

* The Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: The
bill would open all 1.5 million acres of the pristine coastal
plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas
drilling — the biological heart of this special place. The
coastal plain is the most important onshore denning habitat for
America’s threatened polar bears, birthing grounds for the
Porcupine caribou herd, and nesting area to more than 100
species of migratory birds.
* The Pacific and Atlantic Coasts and Other Protected Waters: This
destructive bill mandates drilling across almost every acre of
the Pacific and Atlantic coasts and in protected areas of the
Gulf of Mexico and off Alaska’s Bristol Bay.
write your U.S. representative

Please write your U.S. Representative today to express your
disappointment in selling out polar bears, sea turtles and other
coastal wildlife to Big Oil.

The House vote was 237 aye – 187 no. Gardner was joined by Scott Tipton, Doug Lamborn, and Mike Coffman in voting yes. Dianna DeGette, Jared Polis, and Ed Perlmutter – all Colorado Democrats – voted no.

Bill Summary from Congressional Research Service

The following summary was written by the Congressional Research Service, a well-respected nonpartisan nonpartisan arm of the Library of Congress.
11/14/2011–Introduced.
Protecting Investment in Oil Shale the Next Generation of Environmental, Energy, and Resource Security Act or PIONEERS Act – Deems the final regulations regarding oil shale management published by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) of the Department of the Interior on November 18, 2008, to satisfy all legal and procedural requirements under any law, including the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, and the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Directs the Secretary of the Interior to implement those regulations, including the oil shale leasing program they authorize, without any other administrative action necessary. Deems the November 17, 2008, U.S. Bureau of Land Management Approved Resource Management Plan Amendments/Record of Decision for Oil Shale and Tar Sands Resources to Address Land Use Allocations in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming and Final Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement also to satisfy all legal and procedural requirements under any law. Directs the Secretary to implement the oil shale leasing program in those areas covered by the resource management plans amended by such amendments, and covered by such record of decision, without any other administrative action necessary. Directs the Secretary to hold a lease sale, within 180 days after enactment of this Act, that offers an additional 10 parcels for lease for research, development, and demonstration of oil shale resources under the terms offered in the solicitation of bids for such leases published on January 15, 2009. Requires the Secretary, by January 1, 2016, to hold at least 5 separate commercial lease sales, in multiple lease blocs, in areas of at least 25,000 acres each which: (1) have been nominated through public comment, and (2) are considered to have the most potential for oil shale development. Authorizes the Secretary to reduce temporarily any royalties, fees, rentals, bonus, or other payments for leases of federal lands for oil shale resources development and production as necessary to incentivize and encourage development of such resources, if the Secretary determines that such payments, otherwise authorized by law, are hindering production of such resources.

Statement from Defenders of Wildlife.

WASHINGTON (February 16, 2012) – The following is a statement from Jamie Rappaport Clark, president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife:

“Today, the House approved the most radical drilling-bill we have seen in recent memory. This fiscal boondoggle would industrialize the pristine coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, home to iconic wildlife like polar bears and the Porcupine Caribou herd, exposing thousands of miles of coastline to chronic pollution from offshore drilling and potential oil disasters like the Deepwater Horizon.

“Yesterday’s exploratory well explosion on Alaska’s North Slope demonstrates once again that drilling is a dangerous business. We can’t afford to take those risks with some of our most pristine and fragile places, some of which may never recover should a drilling accident occur. The Senate should reject this funding scam and look for realistic ways to meet our transportation needs without sacrificing the health of our environment.”
###

Contact(s): Caitlin Leutwiler, (202) 772-3226

Defenders of Wildlife is dedicated to the protection of all native animals and plants in their natural communities. With more than 1 million members and activists, Defenders of Wildlife is a leading advocate for innovative solutions to safeguard our wildlife heritage for generations to come. For more information, visit www.defenders.org.

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From DeadlyClear Blog

An electronic database called MERS has created defects in the chain of title to over half the homes in America. Counties have been cheated out of millions of dollars in recording fees, and their title records are in hopeless disarray. Meanwhile, foreclosed and abandoned homes are blighting neighborhoods. Straightening out the records and restoring the homes to occupancy is clearly in the public interest, and the burden is on local government to do it. But how? New legal developments are presenting some innovative alternatives.

John O’Brien is Register of Deeds for Southern Essex County, Massachusetts. He calls his land registry a “crime scene.” A formal forensic audit of the properties for which he is responsible found that:

• Only 16% of the mortgage assignments were valid.
• 27% of the invalid assignments were fraudulent, 35% were “robo-signed,” and 10% violated the Massachusetts Mortgage Fraud Statute.
• The identity of financial institutions that are current owners of the mortgages could be determined for only 287 out of 473 (60%).
• There were 683 missing assignments for the 287 traced mortgages, representing approximately $180,000 in lost recording fees per 1,000 mortgages whose current ownership could be traced.

At the root of the problem is that title has been recorded in the name of a private entity called Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems (MERS). MERS is a mere place holder for the true owners, a faceless, changing pool of investors owning indeterminate portions of sliced and diced, securitized properties. Their identities have been so well hidden that their claims to title are now in doubt. According to the auditor:

What this means is that . . . the institutions, including many pension funds, that purchased these mortgages don’t actually own them . . . .

The March of the AGs

When Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley went to court in December against MERS and five major banks—Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and GMAC—John O’Brien said he was thrilled. Coakley says the banks have “undermined our public land record system through the use of MERS.”

Other attorneys general are also bringing lawsuits. Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden is going after MERS in a suit seeking $10,000 per violation. “Since at least the 1600s,” he says, “real property rights have been a cornerstone of our society. MERS has raised serious questions about who owns what in America.”

Biden’s lawsuit alleges that MERS violated Delaware’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act by:

• Hiding the true mortgage owner and removing that information from the public land records.
• Creating a systemically important, yet inherently unreliable, mortgage database that created confusion and inappropriate assignments and foreclosures of mortgages.
• Operating MERS through its members’ employees, whom MERS confusingly appoints as its corporate officers so that they may act on MERS’ behalf.
• Failing to ensure the proper transfer of mortgage loan documentation to the securitization trusts, which may have resulted in the failure of securitizations to own the loans upon which they claimed to foreclose.

Legally, this last defect may be even more fatal than filing in the name of MERS in establishing a break in the chain of title to securitized properties. Mortgage-backed securities are sold to investors in packages representing interests in trusts called REMICs (Real Estate Mortgage Investment Conduits). REMICs are designed as tax shelters; but to qualify for that status, they must be “static.” Mortgages can’t be transferred in and out once the closing date has occurred. The REMIC Pooling and Servicing Agreement typically states that any transfer after the closing date is invalid. Yet few, if any, properties in foreclosure seem to have been assigned to these REMICs before the closing date, in blatant disregard of legal requirements. The whole business is quite complicated, but the bottom line is that title has been clouded not only by MERS but because the trusts purporting to foreclose do not own the properties by the terms of their own documents.

Courts Are Taking Notice

The title issues are so complicated that judges themselves have been slow to catch on, but they are increasingly waking up and taking notice. In some cases, the judge is not even waiting for the borrowers to raise lack of standing as a defense. In two cases decided in New York in December, the banks lost although their motions were either unopposed or the homeowner did not show up, and in one there was actually a default. No matter, said the court; the bank simply did not have standing to foreclose.

Failure to comply with the terms of the loan documents can make an even stronger case for dismissal. In Horace vs. LaSalle, Circuit Court of Russell County, Alabama, 57-CV-2008-000362.00 (March 30, 2011), the court permanently enjoined the bank (now part of Bank of America) from foreclosing on the plaintiff’s home, stating:

[T]he court is surprised to the point of astonishment that the defendant trust (LaSalle Bank National Association) did not comply with New York Law in attempting to obtain assignment of plaintiff Horace’s note and mortgage. . . .

[P]laintiff’s motion for summary judgment is granted to the extent that defendant trust . . . is permanently enjoined from foreclosing on the property . . . .

Relief for Counties: Land Banks and Eminent Domain

The legal tide is turning against MERS and the banks, giving rise to some interesting possibilities for relief at the county level. Local governments have the power of eminent domain: they can seize real or personal property if (a) they can show that doing so is in the public interest, and (b) the owner is compensated at fair market value.

The public interest part is obvious enough. In a 20-page booklet titled “Revitalizing Foreclosed Properties with Land Banks,” the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) observes:

The volume of foreclosures has become a significant problem, not only to local economies, but also to the aesthetics of neighborhoods and property values therein. At the same time, middle- to low income families continue to be priced out of the housing market while suitable housing units remain vacant.

The booklet goes on to describe an alternative being pursued by some communities:

To ameliorate the negative effects of foreclosures, some communities are creating public entities — known as land banks — to return these properties to productive reuse while simultaneously addressing the need for affordable housing.

States named as adopting land bank legislation include Michigan, Ohio, Missouri, Georgia, Indiana, Texas, Kentucky, and Maryland. HUD notes that the federal government encourages and supports these efforts. But states can still face obstacles to acquiring and restoring the properties, including a lack of funds and difficulties clearing title.

Both of these obstacles might be overcome by focusing on abandoned and foreclosed properties for which the chain of title has been broken, either by MERS or by failure to transfer the promissory note according to the terms of the trust indenture. These homes could be acquired by eminent domain both free of cost and free of adverse claims to title. The county would simply need to give notice in the local newspaper of an intent to exercise its right of eminent domain. The burden of proof would then transfer to the bank or trust claiming title. If the claimant could not prove title, the county would take the property, clear title, and either work out a fair settlement with the occupants or restore the home for rent or sale.

Even if the properties are acquired without charge, however, counties might lack the funds to restore them. Additional funds could be had by establishing a public bank that serves more functions than just those of a land bank. In a series titled “A Solution to the Foreclosure Crisis,” Michael Sauvante of the National Commonwealth Group suggests that properties obtained by eminent domain can be used as part of the capital base for a chartered, publicly-owned bank, on the model of the state-owned Bank of North Dakota. The county could deposit its revenues into this bank and use its capital and deposits to generate credit, as all chartered banks are empowered to do. This credit could then be used not just to finance property redevelopment but for other county needs, again on the model of the Bank of North Dakota. For a fuller discussion of publicly-owned banks, see http://PublicBankingInstitute.org.

Sauvante adds that the use of eminent domain is often viewed negatively by homeowners. To overcome this prejudice, the county could exercise eminent domain on the mortgage contract rather than on title to the property. (The power of eminent domain applies both to real and to personal property rights.) Title would then remain with the homeowner. The county would just have a secured interest in the property, putting it in the shoes of the bank. It could then renegotiate reasonable terms with the homeowner, something banks have been either unwilling or unable to do. They have to get all the investor-owners to agree, a difficult task; and they have little incentive to negotiate when they can make more money on fees and credit default swaps on contracts that go into default.

Settling with the Investors

What about the rights of the investors who bought the securities allegedly backed by the foreclosed homes? The banks selling these collateralized debt obligations represented that they were protected with credit default swaps. The investors’ remedy is against the counterparties to those bets—or against the banks that sold them a bill of goods.

Foreclosure defense attorney Neil Garfield says the investors are unlikely to recover on abandoned and foreclosed properties in any case. Banks and servicers can earn more when the homes are bulldozed — something that is happening in some counties — than from a sale or workout at a loss. Not only is more earned on credit default swaps and fees, but bulldozed homes tell no tales. Garfield maintains that fully a third of the investors’ money has gone into middleman profits rather than into real estate purchases. “With a complete loss no one asks for an accounting.”

Not only homes and neighborhoods but 400 years of property law are being destroyed by banker and investor greed. As Barry Ritholtz observes, the ability of a property owner to confidently convey his property is a bedrock of our society. Bailing out reckless financiers and refusing to hold them accountable has led to a fundamental breakdown in the role of government and the court system. This can be righted only by holding the 1% to the same set of laws as are applied to the 99%. Those laws include that a contract for the sale of real estate must be in writing signed by seller and buyer; that an assignment must bear the signatures required by local law; and that forging signatures gives rise to an actionable claim for fraud.

The neoliberal model that says banks can govern themselves has failed. It is up to county governments to restore the rule of law and repair the economic distress wrought behind the smokescreen of MERS. New tools at the county’s disposal—including eminent domain, land banks, and publicly-owned banks—can facilitate this local rebirth.

Ellen Brown is an attorney and president of the Public Banking Institute, http://PublicBankingInstitute.org. In Web of Debt, her latest of eleven books, she shows how a private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her websites are http://WebofDebt.com and http://EllenBrown.com.

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Source: CMD

Bank Fraud Investigation

President Obama did exactly what hundreds of thousands of us [ed note: MoveOn activists] have been calling on him to do—he announced a federal investigation into Wall Street. Here’s what he said:

“I am asking my Attorney General to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorneys general to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis. This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners, and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans.”

MoveOn Press Release Continues

The best part is, progressive champion New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is co-chairing the investigation and will make sure it stays on track.

Just weeks ago, this investigation wasn’t even on the table, and the big banks were pushing for a broad settlement that would have made it impossible. Your work changed all that.

This is truly a huge victory for the 99% movement. Hundreds of thousands of us signed petitions, made calls, and held signs outside in the cold to make this issue something that President Obama couldn’t ignore. Here’s some of what MoveOn members and our allies did to bring about this victory:

• Over 360,000 of us signed a petition calling on President Obama to fully investigate the banks.
• We delivered that petition at over 150 events last Thursday around the country at Obama for America campaign offices.
• Our pressure on state attorneys general stopped the rush to a sweetheart deal that would have precluded this investigation.
• And we’ve called, Facebooked, and tweeted at the White House repeatedly to ask the president to launch this investigation.

Progressive victories don’t come that often, and there’s so much more to do. But this is a very big one. Thank you for all you did to make it happen!

–Elena, Emily, Lenore, Robin, and the rest of the [MoveOn]team

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An Occupy Los Angeles protester at the camp outside City Hall in Los Angeles, November 30, 2011. (Photo: Ted Soqui / The New York Times)

Imagine a democratic alternative to police evictions of Occupy encampments across America’s cities and towns. What if the decision to evict or not had been made by referendum? Voters could have determined whether to continue the long overdue public debates over inequality, injustice and capitalism that were launched and sustained above all by the Occupy encampments.

But that never happened in a society where private corporations own parks, lots and other possible Occupy sites. The corporate shareholders and boards of directors of those sites – a tiny minority of the population – could shut down Occupy encampments by invoking property rights. That tiny minority never wanted a national debate that questioned its disproportionate wealth and power. Private property enabled a minority with 1 percent of the wealth and income to make decisions affecting everyone regardless of what a 99 percent majority might want.

In the “public” sites chosen by occupiers, much the same happens. There, tiny numbers of politicians decide to evict, and usually for the same reasons. In New York City, for example, the billionaire mayor who bought his way into politics and power boasted publicly about “his” authority to evict occupiers from Zuccotti Park. In most cases, local politicians, dependent on donations from corporations and the 1 percent and on mass media owned by them, make the same decisions. No surprise there.

Public opinion polls consistently showed majorities of Americans in sympathy with the Occupy Wall Street movement and its basic goals of correcting the inequalities of wealth, income and power in our society. Yet capitalism’s distribution of wealth empowered the 1 percent to overrule those majorities.

The solution for this denial of democracy is to Occupy the Corporation. In one important sense, the workers inside every corporation already occupy it. They are the majority inside every corporation, while the board of directors comprises one small minority and the major shareholders another. If the workers occupied the corporation in the different sense of democratizing it, they would transform corporate capitalist enterprises into democratic, workers’ self-directed enterprises. Then the workers as a whole – a workplace community – would democratically make all the decisions now reserved for corporate boards of directors and their major shareholders. The self-directed workers would then decide what, how and where to produce and what to do with the profits. And they would collaborate with the residential communities that interact with them to build a society far more genuinely democratic than anything that now exists. Such worker self-directed enterprises would have considered, and likely arranged, a democratic decision about Occupy movement encampments.

If corporations became worker self-directed enterprises, many other decisions would likewise be made very differently from how they are made today. For example, workers would not likely overpay a few of their fellow self-directors at the expense of all the others. That would sharply reduce today’s personal wealth inequalities, which corrupt our politics. Likewise, worker self-directors would not have stopped raising real wages in the United States after the 1970s while productivity kept rising. That made sense for capitalist boards of directors to enrich themselves and their shareholders, but it would not have made sense for worker self-directors. Had real wages risen steadily after the 1970s (as they had for the previous century), there would have been no need for the vast growth in workers’ debts since the 1970s. That would not have been good news for private megabanks issuing credit cards and mortgages, but it would have better served the interests of a working class now mired in unsustainable debt. Occupy the Corporation is also a solution for the economic crisis now devastating this country and the globe, making “middle-class disappearance” a common term and generating mounting political and social conflict.

Capitalism’s current crisis needs to be treated differently from the last one, the Great Depression of the 1930s. Then, reforms and regulations (including heavy taxation of corporations and the rich) were the preferred cure. Millions of Americans took to the streets and union halls in successful campaigns to change President Roosevelt’s policies and win a New Deal of reforms and regulations, overcoming corporate resistance. But in the last half-century, corporations’ boards of directors and major shareholders used the profits gathered into their hands – and the power those profits buy – to undo the New Deal. The liberals and left wing of the Democratic Party proved unable or unwilling to prevent corporations from achieving that goal.

If we had occupied the corporations decades ago – reorganizing them as cooperatives directed democratically by their workers – they would not have undone the reforms and regulations that so many people worked so hard to put into place in the 1930s. The lesson of the undoing of the New Deal is this: We cannot respond to this latest capitalist crash with another set of reforms and regulations that leave the organization of enterprises unchanged. If we do, we will have ourselves to blame as we watch corporate boards of directors and major shareholders undo them yet again. Only this time, it well happen faster, because they have had so much practice since the 1930s. The lesson of America’s painful struggles with capitalism’s instability is this: Occupy the corporations and democratize them.

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

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Image: Center for Media and Democracy

On Monday, Bank of America (BofA) stocks briefly traded for under $5. Yes, you could buy a share of BofA for less than the noxious debit card fee they tried to force down your throat.

BofA is massive, with assets equivalent to 15 percent of U.S. GDP. So why is it trading for the price of a latte?

Because Wall Street’s dirty little secret is that BofA is a zombie bank. Now the reek is getting too strong to ignore.

The Most Dangerous Bank In America?

In 2008-2009, BofA publicly took $45 billion in TARP bailout funds and secretly took another $91 billion in emergency Federal Reserve loans. According to Bloomberg News, it made $1.5 billion in profits off of those loans. Yet, several analysts predict that BofA is woefully short of capital reserves.

A recent study by NYU’s Stern School of Business ranks BofA as the most systemically risky firm in the United States. These analysts use public information and focus on the capital shortfall that would be experienced by the bank in the event of another crisis. BofA’s weak condition means it is in a position to “create or extend” such a crisis.

As if this were not enough, recent news reports indicate that BofA is trying to move $22 trillion in derivatives out of its Merrill Lynch subsidiary into its FDIC-insured bank. The Fed favors the move (naturally). The FDIC, which provides insurance to depositors if a bank fails, does not.

In this pile of derivatives could be all sorts of problems, including bad European debt, the same kind of debt that brought down Jon Corzine’s derivatives firm, MF Global. Taxpayers don’t backstop MF Global. We do backstop BofA through the FDIC and the Fed.

Obama Promised to End the Era of Big Bank Bailouts

While public rage focused on the $700 billion TARP bailout bill at the height of the crisis, we have learned that far more went out the door from the Fed to aid the big banks. The Center for Media and Democracy tallies the bailout at $4.7 trillion under 35 federal programs. Bloomberg News puts the number closer to $7.7 trillion in loans plus guarantees, which generated $13 billion in profits for the banks.

With European Union countries teetering on the verge of default and no resolution in sight, the U.S. government needs to take decisive action to prevent another bailout of a major American firm – a move sure to generate explosive controversy in an election year.

When President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill in 2010, he promised:

“It will end taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street firms.”

Yet, the “resolution authority” included in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill requires a joint decision by a group of bank regulators to break up a systemically risky institution. Unfortunately, bank regulators like Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke, strongly prefer zero accountability and unlimited bailouts.

Time for a Redo

While some on Wall Street frame the financial crisis as events of the distant past, the 99% understand that the crisis hasn’t ended for millions of Americans out of work. It hasn’t ended for small businesses who can’t get credit. It hasn’t ended for the millions of Americans facing foreclosure. And now we learn that a new bailout of BofA could be in the works.

We learned from Ron Suskind’s new book Confidence Men that President Obama ordered the breakup of Citibank at the height of the crisis, but was stonewalled by Tim Geithner. The President’s instincts were good. Now he has an opportunity for a redo.

Most American’s have had it with bailouts of the big banks on Wall Street when so little has been done for Main Street.? ?Banks that are “too big to fail” are too big to exist.

Tell President Obama it’s time to break up Bank of America before it breaks us

~~ Mary Bottari

Related: Move Your Money Roundup

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History suggests that it will take significant hard-core organizing lasting years if not decades to create the infrastructure for a new movement.

Don’t ‘Occupy the Democratic Party’ By Les Leopold

The public understands correctly that Wall Street’s financial elites dominate politics. How else can we account for the fact that the financial sector was rewarded for gambling our economy into debt and killing 8 million jobs in a matter of months?

At the same time, wages are stagnant, benefits are being cut right and left, public sector workers are under attack, and unemployment remains above 8 percent. No wonder Americans believe that both parties are beholden to the 1 percent.

To be sure, the 99 percent framework, so magnificently popularized by Occupy Wall Street, will be deployed by just about everyone to energize the base. Yet, we’re hearing arguments that Occupy Wall Street should occupy the Democratic Party. George Lakoff, for example, writes:

Whatever Occupiers may think of the Democrats, they can gain power within the Democratic Party and hence in election contests all over America. All they have to do is join Democratic Clubs, stick to their values, speak out very loudly, and work in campaigns for candidates at every level who agree with their values. If Occupiers can run tent camps, organize food kitchens and cleanup brigades, run general assemblies, and use social media, they can take over and run a significant part of the Democratic Party.

George, get real! It’s not going to happen. Nor should it.

If Occupy Wall Street has anything at all to do with the 2012 elections, I hope it will organize large demonstrations at both conventions to dramatize the well-documented fact that both parties care more about financial elites than they do about the 99 percent. Of course there are worthy Democrats who have shown the gumption to take on Wall Street. But their power is muted as the Democratic Party overall defers to Wall Street’s lobbyists and campaign funds.

Related: President Obama Richly Deserves to be Dumped

But won’t it always be the lesser of two evils?

For over a generation, we’ve watched the Democratic Party move steadily to the right and increasingly accommodate the top 1 percent. (In case you have any lingering doubts, read Winner Take All Politics, by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson.) The Wall Street orgy of the last 30 years was built upon the deregulatory push initiated by Jimmy Carter and then accelerated by Bill Clinton.

Wall Street–friendly policies continue today, actualized by Obama’s appointment of Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary. Even after the enormous crash, born and bred on Wall Street, the needs of the financial elites still come first. The banks who caused the crash, we recently discovered, had access to $7.77 trillion in secret bailouts, while the real economy languished.

Nevertheless, labor and progressive organizations see no other option save the Democrats. They believe it’s a fool’s errand even to consider a political alternative because, they argue, third parties always fail, sometimes miserably. (They feel particularly burned by Ralph Nader’s run, which they believe put G.W. Bush into office.)

So what’s to be done?

Learning from the Populist Movement

For starters, we should investigate carefully the last massive movement that explicitly challenged the one percent and that demanded a democratization of high finance — the Populists of the late 1880s.

Sounds ancient and irrelevant? No so. This made-in-America movement grew out of the horrendous conditions faced by small farmers, especially in the South. In order to survive through the winter, farmers had to pledge their future crops to one dominant local merchant in exchange for food and supplies. The merchant (then called “The Man”) would charge outrageous interest rates, insuring that eventually farmers would have to sign over title to their land in order to settle their debts. As a result, thousands of independent farmers turned into impoverished sharecroppers.

All the necessities of farming, from the grain elevators to farm implements to the railroads were run by monopolies that squeezed the farmers dry. To compound these problems, the U.S. money supply was limited to a fixed quantity of gold, as demanded by Wall Street. This insured that as the population grew, the money supply would remain fixed, leading to enormous downward pressures on farm prices. It was a continuous rural depression as black and white farmers drifted into peonage. (Will rising student loans do something similar to the next generation? Will all of us be indebted to a handful of Wall Street banks?)

Yet, even in this state of misery, farmers’ alliances formed to build cooperatives designed to get them out from under the monopoly structures. They eventually linked together into the National Farmers Alliance that developed “sub-alliances” in thousands of counties in the South and Midwest. At great peril, black farmers also organized and joined in the movement.

To aid in the organizing, the Alliance sent out over 4,000 “lecturers” who held give and take sessions about how to build cooperatives and how to reform the economy. But after nearly a decade of organizing, it became clear that the farmer cooperatives could not succeed, because the monopolies deliberately denied them badly needed credit, and because the money supply was enormously constricted by Wall Street. (There was no Federal Reserve to do the dirty work for them.)

This led the populist movement to develop its most radical and original idea — the creation of a democratized monetary system independent of Wall Street. In their plan, farmers could bring their crops to federally sponsored warehouses and get federal paper currency as credit until their crops were sold at decent prices.

This “sub-treasury” system, as they called it, would dramatically inflate the money supply, making it easier for farmers to retire their debts. It also would totally undermine the hard metal monetary system that was owned and operated by a handful of Wall Street banks. If ever there was a battle between the 99 percent and the 1 percent, this was it. (Contrary to popular lore, the Populist movement was not about “free silver.” That was an import from liberal Democratic politicians like William Jennings Bryan, who rejected the more radical Populist platform, including the sub-treasury system.)

By 1890, after a decade of grass roots organizing, the Farmers Alliance realized that it must engage directly in politics in order to keep its cooperatives and their farms from ruin. The South, at the time, was dominated by white Bourbon Democrats — the merchants, planters, and other elites who used terror and ballot stuffing to maintain their racist grip on post-Reconstruction political power. In the North and West, the Republicans were the party of the gilded elites and maintained their power by “waving the bloody flag” of the Civil War against the Southern Democrats and their Northern Catholic immigrant allies. Both parties were completely in the grip of the new industrial and financial elites.

Out of these conditions grew the People’s Party, one of the most powerful third party alternatives in U.S. history. But it didn’t end well. In 1896 the People’s Party was hijacked by a group of ambitious politicians who rammed through a fusion ticket behind the Democratic presidential nominee, William Jennings Bryan. That retreat, combined with Bryan’s defeat, alienated the farmer base within the National Farmers Alliance. With the failure to achieve political power, the cooperative movement was starved to death due to lack of credit and faded away. More and more small farmers lost their land and slipped into abject poverty as the elites tightened their grip on political power and held it, with few exceptions, until the New Deal. (See Lawrence Goodwin’s The Populist Moment for a definitive account.)

There were four essential movement building components of populism that perhaps provide a way for us to measure where we are today and where we need to go:

1. Shared Movement Experiences: The populist cooperatives provided the day-to-day shared experiences that bound the movement together on a local, state, and national level. People worked together and struggled together against powerful opponents, often having to suffer vigilante violence to protect their budding cooperatives that stored produce and livestock, and that sold food, supplies, and farm implements. These shared experiences built up the courage and self-respect of millions of participants. They felt part of something big and important. They shared the common identity of populism.

   And today? While there are thousands of cooperatives and progressive nonprofit organizations in the country today, they are not linked in substantial ways. It’s also not clear if they are creating the common experiences necessary for movement building.

   The Occupy Wall Street encampments certainly are (or were) creating such communities, but as currently conceived and constructed, they just aren’t suitable for those who don’t want to encamp. Also it’s not clear if the encampments will survive the current round of evictions.

   Some unions also have developed powerful internal collective cultures. But unfortunately, union density continues to decline. As it does, the focus often narrows to internal collective bargaining issues. The Wisconsin campaign in defense of public sector workers’ rights was a new moment that certainly created a shared sense of movement. Yet, it seems destined to flow into the Democratic Party.

   The environmental campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline also has the potential to build a common collective experience among its participants. But it may have difficulty as it collides with unions and politicians who claim the pipeline will create badly needed jobs.

   The obvious point is that at the moment these efforts, and many others that could be listed, are fragmented and unconnected. We have a long way to go to build a common collective experience that matches the power of the populist cooperative movement.

2. Systematic Education:The populist lecturing system also was key to movement building as it developed a dialogue with everyday farmers about how the economic system really worked and what the movement should stand for. The base of the movement, not just the leadership, became financially literate as it debated and understood the need for a radical restructuring of the financial system based on the “sub-treasury plan.”

   And today? We don’t as yet have anything like a “lecturer” system to engage the American public in an educational discussion. But one could be built in a hurry. There are plenty of us who could link together to build a “Economics for the 99 Percent” program. But it may need something larger to get it going and give it purpose.

3. Independent Media: The populist movement was well-supported with a rag-tag collection of small, but vital newspapers and journals — about 100 of them — throughout the country. These media outlets provided continual news about the key economic and political issues of the day. Its editors ran their journals on a shoestring in order to maintain their independence and the clarity of their message.

   And today? We do indeed have our rag-tag newsletters, journals, and thousands of websites, with Alternet.org being one of the best. Running on a shoestring is nothing new to them. But at the moment, there is little coordination or shared identity. But that could come as a movement grows.

4. The Peoples’ Government: And finally the populist movement’s base and its leadership truly believed that the American government belonged to them — they should be able to run political institutions just like the founding fathers had promised. As true democrats, they were not intimidated by money or power. They were decidedly not anti-government.

   And today? We are much more ambivalent about our relationship to governing than our forefathers ever were. Do we still feel capable of collectively exercising power to stop the financial predators from running the country? The jury is out.

These comparisons, although superficial, suggests that we’ve got a long haul ahead. Wall Street will not concede either its power or its wealth unless confronted with an enormous 99 percent movement. They’re not worried about neutering the Democratic Party. But they are concerned that something new and unforeseen might emerge.

“99 Percent Clubs”

It seems that many of us are hoping that somehow Twitter and Facebook messages will spontaneously explode into a new movement with a million people in the streets just like in Cairo. But, history suggests that it will take significant hard-core organizing lasting years if not decades to create the infrastructure for a new movement.

One way to start is by forming decentralized “99 Percent Clubs.” Any group of individuals could form a club and then develop activities to popularize and dramatize the 99 percent framework. Some clubs might be aggressive by helping to prevent evictions in their area or by directly supporting Occupy Wall Street actions. Others might engage in more educational activities like passing out material about financial elites in front of banks. Still other 99 percent clubs might work on national efforts to forgive student loans. But the point is, we need shared spaces where the 99 percent can work with each other to share experiences and build a shared identity. We need a common club with a common identity rather than just continuing our good works inside our issue silos.

I realize that it would probably take an organizational miracle to pull this off. But imagine if a thousand 99 Percent Clubs sprung up around the country in the next several months. We’d be well on our way to building a vast network that could create a tactile presence for the 99 percent. Add a little Twitter and Facebook to the mix, and you could even imagine common actions that linked the thousand clubs. And we certainly could count on Occupy Wall Street to lead the charge in provocative ways.

But let’s be very clear. Even such a miraculous organizing effort will not get us to a political alternative by 2012. It will take years and years of hard work, of trial-and-error activities, of experiments in linkages, of many attempts to forge and test a common program, and so on. We’re either in it for the long haul, or it won’t happen at all.

Dream on? Maybe. But we really do need an alternative vehicle to the two dominant political parties. Otherwise, we’ll be voting for the lesser of two evils for yet another generation as we suffer through outrageous levels of unemployment and round after round of social safety-net cuts. It won’t be pretty as Wall Street’s “markets” demand fiscal austerity to protect their booty.

At this point, I’ll settle for a modest beginning. Let’s hope we can muster up the vision and the patience at least to discuss and imagine an alternative political path.

Les Leopold is the executive director of the Labor Institute and Public Health Institute in New York, and author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street’s Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity — and What We Can Do About It (Chelsea Green, 2009).

Posted by Gypsy Chief

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There was one remark in last night’s GOP debate that we here at PFAW whole-heartedly agreed with. Asked about his view on judicial appointments, Mitt Romney said:

Let me note that the key thing I think the president is going to do, is going to be with the longest legacy. It’s going to be appointing Supreme Court and justices throughout the judicial system. As many as half the justices in the next four years are going to be appointed by the next president.

Judicial nominees will indeed be the most lasting legacy of the next president. And that’s why we can’t afford to hand over those decisions to Mitt Romney.

At last night’s debate, Romney joined his fellow candidates in praising Justices John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court’s ultra-conservative base. Under these justices, the Court has moved farther to the right than it has in decades, consistently privileging big corporations over individual Americans. When Romney declared this summer that “corporations are people, my friend,” he was summarizing, and approving of, the Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC.

But it’s not just that Romney wants more Alitos and Thomases on the Supreme Court. Romney sent a signal that he would move the federal courts even farther to the right than they are today when he took on Robert Bork as his campaign’s chief legal advisor. Bork’s conservativism is so extreme that a bipartisan majority of the Senate rejected him for the Supreme Court in 1987. He was against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He thought it was just fine to criminalize homosexuality. He was a professed fan of censorship. And since then, he has become even more extreme in his defense of corporate power and dismissal of individual rights. But not, apparently, too extreme for Mitt Romney.

Romney is absolutely right that appointing judges will be “the key thing” the next president will do. And it’s exactly the reason why he shouldn’t be president.

More on Robert Bork … here

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