The Progressive Era – Time For A Revival

by Gene TeSelle

Recently I have been looking into the Progressive Era, because for the churches a hundred-year anniversary is coming up. In 1908 the Federal Council of Churches was organized, and at that time it adopted, without dissent, a statement that came to be called “the Social Creed of the churches.”

This document dealt with issues of labor and industry that are still with us, and many Protestants have felt that a “new Social Creed” is needed for the hundredth anniversary. The United Methodists have drafted one that is in song form, especially appropriate for our post-print era. The Presbyterians have drafted what is basically an adaptation and expansion of the 1908 document, and it is to be voted on at the General Assembly in June, 2008. The National Council of Churches (successor to the Federal Council) has already adopted a slightly different version.

We cannot help noting the similarities between 1908 and 2008. Inequalities of income and wealth in the U.S. are now greater than they have been since the “Gilded Age” of the late nineteenth century. Corporate and government scandals are approaching the same level, too. There seems to be something about American enterprise that encourages sharp dealing and political corruption.

There are also significant differences. Back then, the two major political parties were quite diverse, regionally and ideologically. Progressive leaders emerged from both the Democrats and the Republicans. And of course the Populists and then the Socialists had strength at the polls. Now the parties are much more homogeneous, diametrically opposed on most issues.

Furthermore, the problems addressed by the Social Creed were national in scope. Because these problems could not be solved adequately at the local or state level, new kinds of federal legislation were advocated and eventually adopted. In our own day we see a further broadening of scope as the much-celebrated globalization of the economy brings all the workers of the world into potential competition with each other and requires a new kind of global response.

Just because there are similar problems, it does not mean that they will be addressed any more effectively than a hundred years ago. And by “addressing” I mean a number of different things – awareness, public agitation, theoretical proposals, legislation introduced, passed, signed, and upheld by the Supreme Court.

The Progressive agenda took at least three decades to be realized during the New Deal, and since that time we have seen it not only expanded but whittled away or repealed or silently subverted, not only by Republican administrations but by Democratic.

That’s why it is important to be aware that it happened slowly and through struggle, not all at once.

In the course of looking at the Progressive Era I have arrived at a generalization, or a theory, or a thesis: that it happened in three phases. This may be typical of reform movements, and if so it may be instructive for us today.

1. The period from the Civil War to the turn of the century saw a growth in industrial capacity, the size of corporations, and opportunities for employers to put new pressures on industrial and railroad workers, farmers, and small businesses.

We know especially about Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1879), Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890), and Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? (1897). Many people credited Henry George with turning them around. These and other writings altered the framework within which people looked at social problems.

This first phase, from 1880 to 1900, did not bring much change; its importance was in raising consciousness, outlining often utopian solutions, and demonstrating that those affected were ready to organize and express their indignation, often militantly.

2. The second phase began around 1900. The reform agenda that had been building since the 1880s became effective when new political leaders caught the public’s attention and captured its loyalties – Robert La Follette, a Republican; William Jennings Bryan, a Democrat; and especially Theodore Roosevelt, a maverick who was sidelined into the office of Vice-President to keep him out of trouble but soon became President after the assassination of McKinley. And then Woodrow Wilson, who began as a Southern conservative, adopted the progressive agenda. His candidacy in 1912 helped Southerners think more positively about that agenda. His election was the beginning of a party realignment in which the Democrats became more progressive and the Republicans more conservative.

In addition, the new mass-circulation periodicals brought investigative and advocacy journalism to a high pitch, which helped radicalize the moralistic middle class. They had their heyday during the Roosevelt administration, whose reforms were fueled by stories in the popular press, even though he also coined the term “muckrakers” to criticize them (as a political strategy, we should note). Upton Sinclair, whose novel The Jungle was an instant sensation in 1906 and led within months to the passage of the Meat Inspection and Pure Food and Drug Acts, reflected later in the same year that he had aimed at the public’s heart but by accident hit it in the stomach (Cosmopolitan, October 1906).

There is a long list of legislative achievements during the Progressive Era, as well as four constitutional amendments: income tax, direct election of senators, prohibition, and woman suffrage. But many of the new laws were overturned by a conservative Supreme Court; the list of the Court’s decisions is amazing and disappointing.

3. Now the third phase: discovery of what the legislative program could not do. It was a time of cultural innovation of many kinds, in art and architecture, poetry, a revolt against middle class morality, a development of alternative communities. It was also the time when Christianity saw the growth not only of the Social Gospel but of the Holiness and Pentecostal movements, as well as fundamentalism and millennialism. Obviously politics did not satisfy all needs. There are a number of books that deal with this “cultural” aspect of the Progressive Era, the latest of which is Michael McGerr’s A Fierce Discontent (2002).

As we try to frame a progressive vision for our own time, these lessons are probably worth pondering. A vision, even a utopian vision, seems to be necessary. But it does not get translated into legislation without organized movements – or without leaders who have high visibility as symbols of those movements. And we need to be reminded, finally, that any legislative accomplishments are likely to be limited, perhaps even ambivalent in their impacts. That’s why cultural movements must also have a place, and it may often turn out that we find our fulfillment there rather than in the political world.

Pondering Tennessee’s Future

by Gene TeSelle

Lots of people are watching Tennessee. And lots of people are also looking to Tennessee as a site for travel, residence, and investment.

We in TAP find that national groups interested in organizing for social justice are watching Tennessee, too. The Progressive Radio Network is now highlighting various public issues in Tennessee. The Common Message Project, funded by the Ford Foundation and implemented through the Center for Community Change, has funded a project that is administered by TAP. We’re not resting with that. TAP has a number of grant applications pending with various funds, focusing on the theme “Vision and Values.”

Why is Tennessee so interesting?

For one thing, voting patterns in the state have been closely balanced between Democrats and Republicans, so that it is never a foregone conclusion which party will win the legislature, the governor’s office, the Congressional delegation, and our eleven votes in the Electoral College. It is, furthermore, the home of two “dark horses” for the 2008 presidential elections, Al Gore and Fred Thompson.

Demographically it is not Deep South. West Tennessee comes closer to fitting that pattern, but East Tennessee is traditionally white and Republican, and Middle Tennessee is highly diverse. The old agrarian traditions have not quite died out, but they are being replaced by manufacturing and commerce, more directly dependent on national and international currents.

And then the state has had good fortune economically. Its location at the intersection of transportation routes going in all directions makes it a good distribution center. It also has an exceptional supply of water, and a variety of other resources.

Even in an era of privatization, Tennesseans appreciate the constructive role that government can play, specifically through TVA. While legislators in some states want to weaken TVA, Tennesseans consistently see its value.

A generation ago, corporations were closing their factories in the North and moving them to Tennessee and other Southern states where there was a “good business climate” and a “disciplined work force.” Today those factories are being exported to Mexico or to Asia.

The new growth industry is corporate headquarters, and several have moved to Tennessee. The not-so-subtle sales pitch is that it has “low taxes” (meaning not sales taxes, which are among the highest in the country, but income taxes, which are non-existent except for the Hall Tax on investments). Instead of an income tax, our opinion-makers, and the voters who listen to them, have opted for a diversionary tactic, trying to solve the state’s revenue needs with a lottery.

And let’s not forget another growth industry – tourism (more formally, the “visitor industry”). Because of its accessibility, its natural beauty, and its rich cultural heritage (folk, country, and blues, as well as some fine architecture), people like to come here. Clever economists point out that conventions wring much more money out of visitors than casual tourism; hence the campaign to construct a bigger convention center in Nashville, appealing to a larger share of the convention market. Already a third of local sales taxes are collected from visitors, they say, and a new convention center could bring in even more.

Nashville is home to two other “growth industries” – Hospital Corporation of America and Corrections Corporation of America. Investors are making money off the suffering of others in hospitals and prisons, areas which traditionally have been off- limits to commercial exploitation.

So that’s the situation. We seem to be doing well by taking advantage of our location, our cultural traditions, our supposedly low taxes (“low” at least for those high on the economic ladder), and our “disciplined work force.” Recruiting of corporate headquarters seems to be going well. Convention centers can bring in new dollars. And if the state budget needs more money, the lottery seems to be the most acceptable solution.

What’s wrong with this picture?

For one thing, it could easily lull us into thinking that everything is going well (or at least “well enough”) so that we don’t need a broad-based discussion of public policy.

And then it is largely an attempt to take advantage of current economic trends. It is a passive approach, responding to other people’s desires and trying to curry favor with them. It leaves us highly vulnerable to changes in the economy and in transportation.

And it is an elitist approach, putting the destiny of the state and its people in the hands of political and economic brokers who in turn will reap most of the rewards.

Even if this strategy continues to work “well enough” for the time being, there is much that it leaves out of consideration. The TAP principles can help to remind us of further issues and suggest an alternative approach.

Social and economic responsibility demands that we pay attention to issues of poverty, health, and education that are often ignored. When we do so, we diminish our investment in our own future.

Democratic principles demand that people from all walks of life participate in public decisions and keep office holders and corporations accountable to their communities.

Stewardship of our resources (natural, built, and cultural) requires both appreciation for what we have and attentiveness to the consequences of policy decisions.

Through the vision of TAP and its allies, Tennessee might become a state that is genuinely interesting and watchable, a significant model in the national political debate about the direction of the whole country.

Political pendulum may be swinging in a more progressive direction

By NELL LEVIN

Tennessee Voices
For thirty years, our country has been engaged in a cultural war between conservatives and progressives about how American society should be organized.

The pillars of conservatism are strong defense, free markets, lower taxes, smaller government, and family values. Linguist George Lakoff says conservatism is based on the patriarchal family model with a strict father whose role is to protect and support the family in a dangerous world and teach his children right from wrong, using punishment if necessary.

Conservatives don’t believe government should intervene in people’s lives (except on “moral” issues like gay marriage and abortion). Social programs are immoral because they give people things they haven’t earned and remove the incentive of people to discipline themselves. Government programs should be eliminated or turned over to private companies. Government’s role is to protect the country (the military), protect lives and private property (the police) and de-regulate the economy to benefit private enterprise.

Because of skillful use of talk radio and other media, conservative terminology now dominates public debate.

Progressives have been on the defensive for the last thirty years as conservatives have systematically worked to destroy the legacy of FDR, to dismantle Social Security, Medicaid, student loans and safety net services that helped to build the middle class in this country.

The melding of conservative ideology, big business and government has resulted in crumbling school buildings, the destruction of New Orleans, forty-seven million Americans without health care, stagnating wages, outsourcing of jobs, and a growing wealth gap between the rich and the rest of us. Power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few, seriously threatening our democracy.

Progressives have largely failed to educate the public about what they are for rather than what they are against.

So what are the pillars of progressivism? They are equity and opportunity (if you work hard and play by the rules, you should be able to have a decent standard of living), equality for all, democracy (maximize citizen participation, minimize corporate power), government for a better future, ethical business, and a values-based foreign policy.

Lakoff calls progressivism the nurturing family model: it empathizes with and protects its child, wants the child to be a happy, fulfilled, prosperous person with opportunities and freedom. Fairness, trust, honesty, cooperation, and respect for others are also goals.

Paul Waldman, author of Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success, defines progressivism as “We’re All In This Together” as opposed to the conservative philosophy of “You’re On Your Own.”

Waldman was in Nashville on Saturday April 14 at the Compass IV Conference at Cohn Adult Learning Center. Waldman believes we have reached the tipping point in the conservative ascendancy and that Americans are now moving in a new, more progressive direction. He urges citizens to come together to create a movement for social change that can rectify the damage of years of conservative governing and restore people’s faith in the ability of government to work for the common good.

Nell Levin is Coordinator for Tennessee Alliance for Progress (www.tennesseeallianceforprogress.org). She can be reached at info@tennesseeallianceforprogress.org.

Big $$ for Progressive Politics

by ARI BERMAN

from the October 16, 2006 issue of The Nation, available at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061016/berman

On December 13, 2004, a month after the re-election of George W. Bush, twenty-five of the wealthiest donors in the progressive community gathered at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington for an important strategy session. The group had collectively poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the effort to defeat Bush–and had nothing to show for it. Yet the despair of John Kerry’s defeat provided an urgent call to arms. “The US didn’t enter World War II until Japan bombed Pearl Harbor,” Erica Payne, a New York political consultant who helped organize the gathering, told the donors. “We just had our Pearl Harbor.”The time had come for the donors to think differently about how to spend their money, just as conservatives had done forty years earlier when they launched a counteroffensive against liberalism and pushed the Republican Party far to the right. The meeting was led by Rob Stein, a former official in the Clinton Administration, who’d spent the last year and a half developing a PowerPoint presentation vividly mapping the rise of the conservative movement. He’d convened the meeting to encourage progressives to emulate the conservative funders by investing in the “guts” of politics–leaders and ideas and institutions that would last beyond one election. A month later the Democracy Alliance officially came into existence, as an exclusive collective of donors and one of the progressive community’s most ambitious undertakings yet.

Almost two years along, the Alliance’s 100 donors have distributed more than $50 million to center-left organizations and activists–a lot of money, yet still largely symbolic given the deep pockets of its members. Even as the donors pour millions into a new political infrastructure, however, problems have emerged that mirror many of the problems of the Democratic Party today and the progressive movement in general.

The first is determining what, exactly, the group stands for and wants to accomplish. Unlike the money guys who underwrote the right, members of the Alliance seem to lack strong ideological conviction about what the future ought to look like. And they do not have the militant perspective of outsiders eager to disrupt and overrun the party establishment. The right-wingers developed a core set of principles and stuck to them with an insurgent sense of persistence and aggressiveness. The wealthy liberals, in contrast, are still debating among themselves how to spend their money. Do Alliance members just want to be in the club or do they intend to change it? Do they want to stick with the party’s stars–Bill and Hillary Clinton and their cadre of influential aides, who are preaching “moderation”–or are they ready to listen to new voices? Are they really committed, and prepared, to fund long-haul change?

To its credit, the Alliance has largely ignored the 2006 elections in favor of developing a five-to-ten-year strategy. But the much bigger presidential election season just around the corner will test the donors’ long-term resolve. When the Alliance took an informal survey, the greatest fear among partners was that if a Democrat captured the presidency the organization wouldn’t survive. Rob Johnson, an early board member, says the tension in the Alliance is between “party subsidizers” and “climate changers”–those who want to fund organizations that work toward more effectively electing candidates versus those who aspire to change the fundamental nature of political debate with a stronger set of governing principles.

A secondary problem is the struggle these well-meaning wealthy Democrats have had in getting their own house in order. Since its inception, the Alliance has been unabashedly elitist, while also poorly run. The criteria for choosing winners have been maddeningly opaque and the grants themselves contradictory. Far from speeding up the funding of progressive organizations, the Alliance has slowed certain things down. To stabilize the organization internally after almost a year of early stumbles, the partners chose as its managing director Judy Wade, a member of the elite firm McKinsey & Company, consultants to multinational corporations. The appointment perhaps reflected the group’s uncertainty about its goals as well as the economic proclivities of its members. Wade normalized the Alliance operationally but further blurred its identity, increasing the likelihood that it will uphold the economic and political status quo.

“There’s a cautious pathway that traditional Democrats take, and it’s been hard to break that,” says Johnson. If partners propose to fund the liberal Campaign for America’s Future, they must also support its archrival, the DLC’s Progressive Policy Institute (neither has received funding so far). A newly elected board led by members of the Alliance’s progressive wing could make the group more adventurous. But an emphasis on collegiality indicates that risk aversion may well be the order of the day.

It’s too soon to draw any conclusions about the Alliance. But sixty interviews conducted over the past five months suggest that it’s not too early to worry that what began as a bold initiative may end up with as little to show as the earnest but largely ineffective philanthropy it was meant to supplant–which did good but didn’t alter power. Indeed, the Alliance could bolster a timid Democratic Party establishment instead of transforming it. Of all the lessons from the right, the Alliance has forgotten arguably the most important: It takes both money and conviction to achieve victory. “It doesn’t make sense to develop a strategy without a vision,” says James Piereson, longtime executive director of the John M. Olin Foundation, which was one of the key half-dozen funders on the right. “It’s a mistaken analogy that conservatives succeeded because of our tactics. I always thought conservatives were successful because of the ideas we were trying to sell.”

It Started With the Phoenix

The Democracy Alliance began in the offices of the New Democrat Network (NDN) and on the computer of Rob Stein, who’d served as chief of staff to Clinton’s Commerce Secretary Ron Brown. In 2002 and 2003 NDN, a creatively centrist Washington think tank, undertook a strategic review to figure out what the “higher purpose” of the organization and larger progressive movement should be. It called the effort the Phoenix Group, named after the mythical bird that rises from its own ashes and inspired by a character in a Harry Potter book. In the spring of 2003, NDN president Simon Rosenberg and Payne saw Stein’s PowerPoint presentation, which he’d titled “The Conservative Message Machine Money Matrix.”

“The narrative was not new,” Rosenberg says. “But the degree of research and how he pulled it all together was the best explanation I’d seen of how we are where we are today.” Namely, out of power. It wasn’t a question of money–the five largest liberal foundations outspent their conservative counterparts annually by a 10-to-1 ratio–but rather how it was being spent. Back in the 1960s and early ’70s, a handful of wealthy conservative businessmen like John Olin and Richard Mellon Scaife began generously bankrolling an array of policy centers, grassroots mass-based organizations, leadership institutes and intellectuals to beat back what the funders viewed as liberalism’s assault on traditional structures like the family, the free market and the military. Major Democratic Party fundraisers and large foundations like Ford and Rockefeller mounted no similar coordinated defense of liberalism. It was this problem that Stein hoped to address through his presentation.

Payne set up a series of meetings for Stein on the East Coast with prominent Democratic Party donors. Stein presented his research using a lexicon the millionaires and billionaires understood. He called the largest conservative donors “philanthropic venture capitalists.” The leaders of the conservative movement, such as Paul Weyrich and Grover Norquist, were “political investment bankers.” The presentation helped convince the wealthy liberals that the Republican Party’s recent successes were a logical outcome of determined movement building, not an accident of history.

During the fall of 2004, big donors were consumed with trying to oust Bush from office. But after Kerry’s defeat, the nascent Alliance moved full speed ahead, officially beginning its existence in January 2005. Only the most committed and well-to-do donors were accepted into the high-priced club. Those joining included billionaires George Soros, Peter Lewis and Herb and Marion Sandler; major Clinton fundraisers Mark and Susie Buell and Bernard Schwartz; New York venture capitalist and longtime Clinton supporter Alan Patricof; Hollywood celebrities Rob Reiner and Norman Lear; wealthy high-tech Californians such as Working Assets founder Michael Kieschnick; and the AFL-CIO and the SEIU.

 

Joining the Club

Members, known as “partners,” were required to pay a $25,000 entry fee, $30,000 in annual dues and a minimum of $200,000 per year to organizations recommended by the Alliance. The Alliance would not dole out money itself, but collectively the partners would meet twice a year through its auspices to decide which organizations to fund, forming working groups based on four priority areas: ideas, media, leadership and civic engagement. The working groups would present their recommendations to an investment committee made up of members of the board, who would pass them on to the entire group. Partners could then give money to the organizations they favored, voting with their checkbooks. An Alliance recommendation meant a valuable gold star for prospective progressive organizations. (The Alliance also put a premium on secrecy to protect the anonymity of its donors, actively discouraging members from speaking to the media and forcing grantees to sign nondisclosure agreements. Thus, of the dozens of partners and heads of organizations interviewed for this article, only a small number agreed to speak in detail on the record.)

In April 2005 fifty-plus partners arrived in Phoenix for a three-day conference. Stein, who announced at the outset of the 2004 Washington conference that he didn’t want to run the organization, led the meetings on an interim basis. Even before Phoenix it had been decided that the Alliance would represent an ideological big tent of centrist Democrats, progressive Democrats and even a few disaffected Republicans. As a result, partners and staff, few of whom had known one another before or had a long track record in politics, downplayed their differences and agreed to govern by compromise–never an easy thing, especially among the rich. “We need infrastructure,” says Rodger McFarlane, an adviser to Colorado multimillionaire Tim Gill, describing the views of the Alliance. “The right has taken over. That we agree on. Everything else is in play.”

In those early days, much of the focus–and most of the problems–were internal, as chairman of the board Steven Gluckstern, a retired investment banker from New York, searched for a leader of the group. Meanwhile, for would-be recipients, the process of applying for money was bewildering: completely secret and seemingly changing all the time. Four days before the first round of funding, the board offered the plum $400,000-a-year title of managing director to Robert Dunn, president emeritus of Business for Social Responsibility. When Dunn declined they turned to Judy Wade, who’d been encouraged to run by former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, although she had no prior experience in politics.

At an October 2005 meeting at the Château Élan Winery & Resort in Atlanta, Alliance partners agreed to give $28 million to nine groups. A few were smaller, edgier, more progressive organizations, like Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a legal watchdog that made headlines by drafting an ethics complaint against Representative Tom DeLay. But the bulk of the money went to familiar names on the DC circuit, like the Center for American Progress (CAP), a think tank run by Podesta, and Media Matters for America, which monitors right-wing media and media bias, headed by former conservative journalist David Brock.

The small number of groups chosen, some of whom were already well funded, and the secrecy of the process infuriated organizations excluded from the club. No one knew exactly why the nine groups had been picked. Funding progressive infrastructure was all well and good, but no one bothered defining precisely what “progressive” meant. The partners themselves, with their business backgrounds, focused on the process by which groups were funded, not what they would do with the money. “There was an almost complete lack of actual substance,” one adviser to a major donor said of the Atlanta meeting. The groups were selected to mirror the right but were far less anti-establishment than their conservative counterparts.

In preparation for the second round of grants, the Alliance began to open up. Wade normalized the selection process so that groups could apply for grants. To appease angry partners, she decided that funding would be determined by a changing menu of issue areas, not based on gaps compared with what the right has funded.

From a morale perspective, the next gathering, in Austin, Texas, the following May, was notably more successful than the one in Atlanta. Leaders of the progressive movement, like labor leader Andy Stern, were invited for panels on economics, foreign policy and media. Heads of organizations mingled freely with partners. And the groups themselves were noticeably more diverse than the initial gathering in Phoenix, where sixteen of seventeen presenters were white males. “I’ve made it a mission to hate the Democracy Alliance,” the head of one prospective organization told me, “and I was pleasantly surprised.”

The funding choices themselves presented more of a mixed bag. As a result of inside maneuvering by partners to fund their favorites, less money went to more groups–$22 million to sixteen organizations, with much of it only for one year. Grassroots organizations working on racial and economic justice issues that probably would have been overlooked in the first round, such as the Center for Community Change, USAction and ACORN, made the cut. On the other hand, the issue areas targeted for spring funding–voter mobilization (known as “civic engagement”), youth outreach, Hispanic media and religious left activism–while all deserving, seemed chosen specifically to coincide with upcoming elections. And some of the larger groups funded, such as EMILY’s List and the Sierra Club, hardly needed the money. The Alliance was created to think long-term and to fund gaps in progressive infrastructure. But with two major elections coming up, short-term electoral needs were bubbling to the surface.

Asurprise guest at the meeting was Bill Clinton, whose agenda seemed to be protecting his wife. But things didn’t work out quite as planned. When Guy Saperstein, a retired lawyer from Oakland, asked Clinton if Democrats who supported the war should apologize, the former President “went fucking ballistic,” according to Saperstein. Forget Hillary, Clinton said angrily during a ten-minute rant; if I was in Congress I would’ve voted for the war. “It was an extraordinary display of anger and imperiousness,” Saperstein says.

The willingness to challenge Clinton at least temporarily reassured progressive Democrats that partners in the Alliance had a spine and wouldn’t be a front group for “Hillary ‘08.” But Clinton’s response was a not-so-subtle warning to partners to avoid divisive issues, like the war, that might harm his wife in the next presidential election. Hillary herself has had a number of one-on-one sit-downs with members of the board, as has Howard Dean.

A month after the Austin meeting, a group of partners from the Alliance’s progressive wing were elected to the board on an informal reform slate. They included Gara LaMarche of Soros’s Open Society Institute, Anna Burger of SEIU, Drummond Pike of the Tides Foundation and Rob McKay, Taco Bell heir and president of the McKay Family Foundation. Many of these foundations have been at the forefront of funding progressive initiatives, like the campaign in California to pass a living wage. At a July retreat in Boulder, Colorado, McKay and Burger were elected chair and vice chair of the board. “This is the first really elected board,” says Burger, a longtime union organizer. “It gives it legitimacy. People will feel more comfortable acting.”

Unclear Priorities

But if McKay and Burger are to move the Alliance toward more effective progressive funding, they will have to rethink its priorities, starting with how many groups it funds and for how long. For the first round of grants, Alliance staff repeatedly stressed the importance of following four basic funding principles: Give organizations enough money to compete with conservatives; fund organizations over the long haul so they can achieve financial security and give them flexibility about how they use the money; make sure the groups work together; and urge the groups to use the money to affect public policy or engage with the political process.

In the second round of funding, however, the Alliance fell into the common liberal trap of needing to be all things to all people. After two grant cycles the Alliance is overextended. Wade says she hopes the Alliance, in conjunction with other funding coalitions, will eventually be able to direct an ambitious $500 million annually in grants. But with twenty-five groups under its tent, the Alliance will have to keep growing, by either recruiting new partners or convincing existing ones to give more, to be able to continue to fund those groups it has already agreed to assist. As a consequence, Alliance partners have cut back on some key priority areas, such as foreign policy, economics and media, in preparation for its third round of funding in Miami this November.

Of these, the media cutbacks are the most problematic. Conservatives have aggressively recruited and funded an array of authors, scholars and publications who have formulated controversial ideas. Then they marketed those ideas, through media, to wider audiences with the goal of changing public policy. To date the Alliance hasn’t been deeply involved in idea creation in the same way conservatives have been, but at least initially it expressed interest in funding better ways of getting a progressive message out.

At the first meeting in Phoenix, Alliance partners agreed that funding media would be a front-and-center priority. Instead, says one early member of the media committee, “it keeps getting shuttled to the back, over and over.” Partly that was because at the beginning of the process few members were familiar with progressive media. In time, the media committee developed a plan to fund bloggers, investigative reporting and media reform efforts. Now, in the run-up to Miami, says another media committee member, that plan has been slashed in half. Media Matters did receive an $11 million commitment over three years–but it only tracks right-wing media rather than producing original content. Air America Radio was supposed to receive between $5 million and $8 million from the Alliance, but after months of negotiations it still has received no money. Other efforts, such as The American Prospect magazine and the start-up Progressive Book Club, are also in limbo.

A funding shortfall only partially accounts for the Alliance’s inattention. There are philosophical reasons as well. Idea creation takes time, media development is expensive and both are risky. And the Alliance is highly risk-averse.

Many of the right’s premier ideas–welfare reform, rolling back détente with the Soviet Union, school vouchers–started off as a “riverboat gamble,” as former Senate majority leader Howard Baker labeled Ronald Reagan’s massive 1981 tax cut. “We did a lot of things at the beginning that we didn’t know would work,” says the Olin Foundation’s Piereson. “If we needed a consensus it would’ve never gotten done.” A conference of law students and professors partly underwritten by Olin in 1982 launched the Federalist Society, the right’s premier legal organ. A $25,000 grant to the obscure social scientist Charles Murray led to his influential book on welfare reform, Losing Ground. And so on.

Risk aversion is also reflected in the Alliance’s preference for underwriting organizations that won’t upset the economic status quo. Podesta’s CAP has been keen to avoid trade and globalization issues that separate the party elite from the rank-and-file Democratic base. While CAP won a $5-million-per-year commitment from the Alliance over three years, the unabashedly progressive Economic Policy Institute received a small, $250,000 planning grant. (The other economic organization funded generously by the Alliance, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, does research on issues like poverty in a nonpartisan fashion.)

The same topics that are off-limits in the Democratic Party–US policy on Israel, the bloated military budget, the role of big money in both parties, the grip of corporations–are shunned by the Alliance. Groups like MoveOn.org that target corporate Democrats, as the Club for Growth does to moderate Republicans, are brushed aside. “MoveOn.org scares a lot of these people,” says an important partner.

Alliance staff originally conceived of an “innovation fund” to funnel smaller amounts of money (between $25,000 and $250,000) to newer ventures, such as the blogs and MeetUp-type gatherings, at the discretion of the managing director. That concept, too, has yet to get off the ground. Instead of directing the fund Wade, with her McKinsey background, appointed yet another committee to oversee it, reinforcing the inside joke that the Alliance at times resembles a “let’s have a meeting about having a meeting” self-parody. The inability to move quickly and take risks in areas like media has persuaded a number of progressive donors to stay out of the Alliance, most notably Silicon Valley venture capitalists Andy and Deborah Rappaport, whose New Progressive Coalition is specifically aimed at finding and funding under-the-radar policy entrepreneurs and down-ballot candidates at the state and local levels. Joining the Alliance, Deborah Rappaport says, “would have constrained our ability to jump on new things as they appear.”

McKay says he’d like the Alliance to be more decisive, but it’s hard to tell whether that’s possible. Taking a chance isn’t easy when you need to get approval from 100 millionaires and billionaires. “It’s tough to herd cats,” former Alliance chair Steven Gluckstern liked to say, “but herding fat cats is harder.”

Between 1972 and 1999, conservatives created at least sixty new organizations with mission statements modeled after that of the Heritage Foundation, a radical think tank at the time of its founding: “free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.” When pollster Celinda Lake asked a group of white Midwestern swing voters in 2004 what conservatives stood for, most of them repeated those catchphrases. When she asked the same question about liberals, half the voters responded, “I don’t know.”

In its early stages the Alliance, following the lead of Heritage, attempted to hammer out a mission statement for the organization. A year later the document is still a work in progress. Wade says the goal of the Alliance is to strengthen democracy. “That means an actively engaged citizenry…real solutions to critical issues…and a democracy not dominated by the far right,” she says. Laudable goals, but hardly a road map for changing public policy. “There are pragmatists and there are activists,” partners say Wade frequently tells them, “and I’m a pragmatist and that’s where this organization should be.” Needless to say, the early conservative activists, whether at National Review or on Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign, couldn’t have disagreed more.

The irony is that as the Alliance attempts to articulate its agenda, the old phase of conservative philanthropy–rich families like Olin and Scaife funding political change–is coming to an end and the conservative movement and Republican Party are running empty on ideas. Signature proposals, such as privatizing Social Security (and everything else) or eliminating the Education Department, have been widely discredited. “Obviously the left, if they can get themselves in position, can make a move,” says Piereson.

The Bush era has jolted liberal philanthropists into action. No matter what the Alliance does, the impetus behind it will find other outlets. State-based donor collectives modeled after the Alliance have started in Washington, California, Ohio, Wisconsin and Colorado. Donors disaffected with the Alliance, like the Rappaports, have created their own organizations. Together these endeavors can create a market for entrepreneurs shopping ideas, just as conservatives did forty years ago. The notion of doing what wasn’t getting done–thinking broadly, taking gambles, going beyond electoral politics and cultivating ideas and institutions and leaders–drew many of the partners to the table in the first place. Perhaps the best plan for the Alliance’s future is remembering why it was started–and why conservatives won.

A Belief in Things Not Seen: Building a Movement for Social Change in Tennessee

By Nell Levin
Coordinator, Tennessee Alliance for Progress

“Hope in the face of difficulty.
Hope in the face of uncertainty.
The audacity of Hope! In the end,
That is God’s greatest gift to us, the
Bedrock of this nation: A belief in
Things not seen. A belief that there
Are better days ahead.”_
Barack Obama
Democratic National Convention
July 24, 2004

“The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Is Transforming Tennessee a Lost Cause?

It is easy to write off Tennessee as a lost cause if you look at the results of the 2004 election and the statistics. George W. Bush won in our state by a sizeable majority. Tennessee is at or near the bottom nationally in education, environmental protection and the condition of children and women. It has the highest sales tax in the nation and our Governor has instituted the largest healthcare dis-enrollment in the nation’s history.

Despite these statistics (or maybe because of them), Tennessee has played a significant role in the history of social change in this nation. It was the 36th state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920 that gave women the right to vote. The sit-ins of the early 1960s in Nashville helped to launch the civil rights movement. Highlander School in east Tennessee has played an historic role by training Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks and many others in non-violent civil disobedience as well as economic and environmental justice.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was organizing the Poor People’s campaign when he was shot in Memphis in 1968 during the sanitation workers strike. King realized that getting the vote was but the first step in empowering and liberating people. The next step was passing laws that would make it possible for all Americans to earn a decent living.

Although it has been almost 40 years since King was shot, many of the problems that King saw in American society have not yet been eradicated: poverty, lack of affordable housing, lack of health care, inadequate public schools, a toxic environment, wars and violence, a flawed criminal justice system and a growing wealth gap.

In the words of Gene Nichol, dean of the University of North Carolina School of Law “The South has proved to be the native home of American poverty. It continues to sustain the highest poverty rate and the lowest average income of any section of the country. Nearly 14 percent of Southerners are poor and our income levels fall thousands of dollars below national averages ….Yet, ironically, we frequently elect public officials who pander to the wealthy and cripple the social structures available to the poor. Southern leaders often seem to specialize in undermining democracy while giving the back of their hands to meaningful equality. We produce more poverty and more politicians who are untroubled by it than the rest of the nation.” (Where We Stand: Voices of Southern Dissent, p. 62-63).

Today, here in Tennessee, we are faced with the challenge of continuing to carry on the work that was started by Martin Luther King, Jr. Is there something that we can do that would make our work more effective? Is there a way for us to come together around a common vision? What would it take to create an effective network that could move the state in a new direction?

The Challenges of Building a Statewide Movement in Tennessee

Tennessee is a long, narrow state divided into three distinct regions, east, middle and west Tennessee, each with its own culture and political history. Appalachian East Tennessee, agrarian, dominated by the coal and timber industries, has been traditionally Republican and predominantly white. Middle Tennessee, where the capital of Nashville is located, is the wealthiest area of the state. It used to be predominantly Democratic but has been moving in a more conservative direction as the ring of suburbs around Nashville grows. West Tennessee, location of Memphis, the state’s largest city, has a large African American population and is part of the Delta region that has been historically dominated by the Mississippi River and the cotton trade. It has mostly voted Democratic. Efforts to organize a statewide coalition must deal with this historic, geographic and cultural diversity.

Although our governor is a Democrat (albeit a businessman who earned his millions in the health care industry), the state appears to be moving in a more conservative direction. The wedge issues of abortion and gay marriage were successfully used in the 2004 election to give George W. Bush a victory and win a Republican majority in the state Senate for the first time since Reconstruction.

Approximately one child in five lives in poverty in Tennessee and the numbers are higher in the African American community. Over 40% of TennCare enrollees are African American. Although the black middle class has grown since the days of the civil rights movement, the legacy of racism in Tennessee continues to manifest itself in black poverty, black/white health disparities and the disproportionate number of blacks in the penal system. We cannot build a true movement for social change in our state without dealing with these issues.

Tennessee used to be a manufacturing state and although it is a “right to work” (or as some call it “a right to get fired”) state, unions used to have a larger presence here than they do now. Nationally unions are now 9 percent of the private-sector workforce whereas they were 38 percent in the fifties. “Take your average white male voter: in the 2000 election they chose George W. Bush by a considerable margin. Find white males who are union members, however, and they voted for Al Gore by a similar margin.” (Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas, p. 246.

Many socially conservative, religious Tennesseans vote against their own economic interests. Ignoring one’s economic self-interest can be viewed as “an act of noble self-denial, a sacrifice for a holier cause.” (Frank, p. 168). “It is claimed that 35 percent of the populace thinks that they are, or someday will be, in the top 1 percent [income bracket]… People do not necessarily vote in their self-interest. They vote their identity. They vote their values. They vote for who they identify with.” (George Lakoff, Don’t Think of An Elephant, p. 19. ) Americans vote their aspirations, not their circumstances.

The Tennessee legislature continues to be run by a “good old boy” network that is slow to move in a progressive direction. There is no “liberal” caucus in the Tennessee legislature. The closest thing to this is the Black Caucus, but it can be easily dismissed as a “special interest” group. Obviously, if we are going to get progressive legislation passed, we need to elect some progressive legislators.

Tennessee is 79.2 percent white and 16.4 percent African American, according to the 2000 census. Tennessee is changing demographically with the recent surge of the state’s Latino immigrant population, which has more than tripled since 1990. At this time, the Latino population has not allied itself with either party.

Tennessee, like the rest of the nation, is becoming more of a service economy rather than a manufacturing economy. Wal-Mart is the poster child for the new global economy – low wages, no unions, 10,000 Wal-Mart employees on TennCare, selling cheap goods made in China. Corporations like Wal-Mart are multi-national. It is increasingly difficult for states or even nations, to regulate them and this poses a whole new set of problems. Many Tennesseans have lost decent jobs to NAFTA. Areas that we might explore include the creation of new “green” environmentally sustainable jobs in Tennessee and supporting legislation that would raise Tennessee’s minimum wage.

Is Economic Reform the Main Issue?

Rabbi Michael Lerner, in Politics of Meaning, argues that our nation is facing a moral and spiritual crisis. Elites of wealth and power have convinced many middle-class Americans that they should identify with the wealthy and the powerful instead of with those who are less fortunate. This ethos of selfishness and materialism has allowed many people to accept cuts in social programs as the price for cutting their own taxes and those of the rich.
Jim Wallis of Soujourner magazine calls budgets moral documents. Budgets codify the predominant values of our society or at least the values of those who are in a position to influence public policy. When the Tennessee legislature failed to pass tax reform and instead chose to increase the sales tax — thereby placing an inequitable tax burden on lower-income people while allowing our richest citizens to escape paying their fair share — that was a moral decision.

A visionary, like Barack Obama, believes in “things not seen,” in the possibility of a new and different world, in social transformation. The visionary supplies the juice that excites and moves people, namely hope. A visionary plays a different role in society than a “realist.” The choices a realist makes will be limited by what is possible in the moment, what is doable, what can be achieved within the context of the current political landscape. The visionary,on the other hand, may be less interested in winning an election than on shining a light on the issues and calling on people to take action to change the status quo. Both roles are necessary in social change movements.

The Actors

The old joke goes: What is a liberal firing squad? Answer: A circle.

Social movements require a cast of characters that all play a role in the success of the movement. Often there is a tendency among activists and advocates to denigrate the role of their natural allies and to proclaim that their way is the only way, or the “right” way, to achieve success.

Bill Moyer (not to be confused with journalist Bill Moyers) developed the Movement Action Plan (MAP) model as a result of 40 years of working in and with social movements. It clarifies the nature and dynamics of social movements and provides a framework for organizing and building them.

Moyer identifies four different roles activists and social movements need to play in order to successfully create social change: The citizen, rebel, change agent, and reformer.

“Social movement activists need first to be seen by the public as responsible citizens. They must win the respect and, ultimately, the acceptance of the majority of ordinary citizens in order for their movements to succeed. Consequently, citizen activists need to say “Yes” to those fundamental principles, values, and symbols of a good society that are also accepted by the general public. At the same time, activists must be rebels who say a loud “No!” and protest social conditions and institutional policies and practices that violate core societal values and principles. Activists need to be change agents who work to educate, organize, and involve the general public to actively oppose present policies and seek positive, constructive solutions. Finally, activists must also be reformers who work with the official political and judicial structures to incorporate solutions into new laws and the policies and practices of society’s public and private institutions. Then they must work to get them accepted as the new conventional wisdom of mainstream society.” (Moyer, Doing Democracy The MAP Model for Organizing for Social Movements, p. 21).

Moyer goes on to say that “both individual activists and movement organizations need to understand that social movements require all four roles and that participants and organizations can choose which ones to play depending on their make-up and the needs of the movement. Understanding a social movement’s need to have all four roles played effectively can also help reduce antagonism and promote cooperation among different groups of activists and organizations.”

Social Change

“What have ‘rights’ been historically in the United Sates if not an evolving social sense of justice and entitlement, won, always, in political struggle (frequently undergirded by various intellectual efforts)? The rights of slaves… of women… workers… the Civil
Rights movement of the 1960s—in all of these instances, the appeal was to a higher sense of justice, to fundamental principles of a democracy, and to foundational documents embodied in the creation of our country.” Chester Hartman, Poverty and Race Research Action Council

Social change can be defined as:
* Organizing and action led by people working to control their own lives;
* Educating communities about the root causes of oppression and injustice;
*Working to eliminate the barriers to full participation in society (such as racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, ageism, ableism);
* Focusing on efforts to change cultural, social, political and economic; systems and institutions that create, accommodate and perpetuate social injustice;
* Creating and modeling democratic cultural, social, political and economic systems;
* Connecting local issues with national and global concerns;
* Networking, collaborating and cooperating with other change agents working toward similar goals;
* Carrying out the values within your organization that you espouse for the outside world (humane treatment of people, non-discrimination, democratic, etc.);
* Incorporating individual change into a movement for social change.

Concerning the last point, the famous quote by Gandhi is apropos: “We must become the change we wish to see in the world.” A few guiding principles might be: We will treat each other with respect and kindness, recognizing that we are all doing the best we can in the present moment and that no one possesses the truth exclusively. We will not demonize those who disagree with us. We will seek to find ways to amicably resolve the inevitable conflicts and power struggles that come up when organizations work together.

The hundreth monkey theory can explain how social change happens. When a new idea is introduced to the public it is generally dismissed or ignored by the majority, since the majority is usually moderate or conservative. “Cultural creatives” (Margaret Mead’s “small group of concerned citizens” that change the world) tend to be on the cutting edge of new ideas in society. It takes a while for the rest of society to catch up. Eventually, monkey-by-monkey, the new idea is spread. By the time 100 monkeys have caught on to the idea, there is a paradigm shift and change truly begins to take place. The challenge, of course, is converting those 100 monkeys.

Building Power at the State Level

“In an effort to promote democracy, justice, peace, general social welfare, and ecological sustainability, progressive social movements need to challenge the excessive power and influence of the elite minority. “ (Bill Moyer, [not to be confused with TV journalist Bill Moyers] Doing Democracy, p. 12).
.
Building a long-term multi-issue, multi-race, multi-class movement for social change, starting at the state and local level, is imperative. As famed journalist Bill Moyers pointed out at the Take Back America Conference in June 2005, today’s Washington D.C. is overrun with corporate lobbyists. Influence is peddled and laws are passed in return for generous campaign contributions and other favors. Moyers urged activists to work at the state and local level where it will be easier to achieve results. He called states the incubators for democracy where socially experimental legislation will be tested and tweaked and then eventually passed at the federal level. This is why the work that we seek to do at the state level is so important.

Progressive Maryland, the Minnesota Alliance for Progressive Action, Iowa Citizen Action Network Education Foundation, Virginia Organizing Project, Progressive Leadership of Nevada, and Alabama Arise are examples of influential statewide progressive coalitions comprised of labor, church, issue advocacy and civic groups. Can progressives in Tennessee overcome the geographic, economic, cultural, issue and racial barriers that have historically kept us separated and come together around a common vision for the future of Tennessee? Can we develop a common progressive agenda that will have an impact on public policy at the state level?

The TAP board passed the Grassroots Mobilization Initiative on July 13, 2003. It follows.
TAP strives to be an organization that:
1) Builds strong and effective relationships & collaboration between diverse groups
2) Integrates a broad array of issues into a common progressive agenda
3) Develops collective power of constituents to implement this common agenda
4) Increases the capacity of under-represented constituencies to have greater impact on public policy and governance at the state level
5) Enhances the capacity of grassroots organizations to mobilize their members
6) Develops new public leaders representing & accountable to disadvantaged constituencies.

TAP’s sister organization, Tennessee Action for Progress, is a 501c4 organization that was designed to engage in electoral politics. Action for Progress would likely partner with Democracy for Tennessee, the Howard Dean offshoot that has become active in the electoral arena, training and running candidates in different parts of the state.

Race

If our goal is to build a multi-issue, multi-class, multi-race progressive network, we need to deal with the sticky issues of race and class. At this juncture, when it comes to race and class, TAP is a token organization.

According to the Dismantling Racism workbook, put out by the North Carolina-based organization, Changework, the characteristics of a token organization are:
* decisions are made by white people, in private and often in unclear ways;
* the budget is developed, controlled and understood by one or two white people;
* money comes from foundations and wealthy or middle-class college-educated white donors;
* white people in decision-making positions are paid relatively well, people at bottom or people of color in token positions with no power;
* organization is accountable to funders and board or staff;
* culture is top down although inclusivity is stressed;
* those in power assume their standards and ways of doing things are neutral and most desirable;
* emphasis on getting things done efficiently, usually at the expense of inclusive process;
* people expected to be highly motivated “self starters” requiring little supervision;
* no power analysis, conflict avoided, emphasis on everyone “getting along”;
* any discussion of race limited to prejudice reduction;
* those in power assume “we are all the same”;
* white people in organization unaware of privilege;
* located in white community;
* members are white people, and people of color with only a token ability to participate in decision-making;
* programs intent is to be inclusive, no or very little analysis about root causes of issues/problems;
* designed to help low-income people who have little or no participation in the decision-making;
* little value around power sharing.

Questions: How do you know your organization (if it is at this stage) is ready to bring in people of color? In other words, will people of color have a successful and empowering experience in your organization? How do you know? What have you done to prepare?

The Colorado Progressive Coalition (CPC) is an organization that has successfully taken on the issue of anti-racism and, in the process, has transformed itself. CPC has created a workshop entitled Building Multiracial Organizations: Anti-Racism Work and Confronting White Privilege.

This workshop is “not about diversity, nor is it about cultural sensitivity. What it is is a training on the specific responsibilities of white people to fight racism and the unique roles that white anti-racist allies must take on to effectively work with people of color…. If you are serious about sharing power and willing to be inclusive of the role of people of color in decision-making and in examining your own organizational culture, most likely, some major changes must happen… It is important to ensure that everyone in your organization understands why a commitment to confronting white privilege and anti-racism work has been made and what that means for the organization. …Bring as many people in from the beginning to engage them in the process to help create a sense of ownership. …Because this is a controversial move, many white people will feel targeted or excluded if this is not an up-front process. Everyone must have a chance to participate and contribute and be challenged” (Building Multiracial Organizations manual, p.2, p.4).

Class

We must also confront the issue of class. The prevailing myth is that America is a classless society. If one brings up the issue of class, the right wing brandishes the term ‘class warfare.’ American is supposed to be a ‘meritocracy’ in which intelligence and hard work determine success. But many Americans are unable to rise beyond their class of origin whereas other Americans are admitted to elite colleges because of their inherited wealth or family’s connections.

In her book, Class Matters: Cross-Class Alliance Building for Middle-Class Activists, Betsy Leondar-Wright talks about why we need cross-class alliances. She asks: Why have movements [such as the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movements, the women’s movement] disappointed visionaries who dreamed of deeper structural change? “Among other things, because all have had bases too small to shift the fundamental balance of power. Everyone who dreams of a fairer society would do well to aim to broaden our movements to include a larger percentage of the American people. But the American people have historically been too divided by race and class for a mass movement to cross many demographic lines.”

“Middle-class activists have won reforms but have failed to capture the imagination of the working-class majority and thus were limited by what they could accomplish… Movements initiated by working-class and low-income activists have also been limited in their accomplishments by the small amount of support they have gotten from middle-class and owning–class people.” (Class Matters, p. 10-11).

“The truth that we progressives of all classes have avoided facing for the last century is that we need each other. To fundamentally transform our society to be a fairer and more sustainable one, the movement we build will have to include people of every race, every age, every geographic area – and every class.”

“Middle-class activists in the US have a proud history of initiating, organizing, and supporting movements for progressive social change. We also have a not-so-proud history of overlooking potential allies from other classes, failing to come through for movements led by poor and working-class people and stepping on the toes of coalition partners through classist assumptions. “ (Class Matters, p. 12).

“Our movements will be stronger if they include the strengths of each class culture. Rather than reacting with judgment to activists of other class backgrounds, we should develop an attitude of welcoming gifts and giving a hand with limitations in order to make collaboration possible… To be able to organize successfully, low-income and working-class activists need more of the resources they are short on: money, decision-making power, skills, and information. Middle-class and owning-class activists need to share their resources and learn to follow the leadership of those without class privilege. And we need to realize that our motivation to be allies is not some kind of nice political correctness, but rather to increase the size and effectiveness of the movements we care about.” (Class Matters, p. 23).

The Future

“Single-issue politics in the Achilles’ heel of progressive Democrats. Conservatives understand that individual issues need to be linked to an overall moral and ethical perspective…. Battles on hundreds of fronts, competing for attention and funding, will not bring us political power. Too many voices often cancel each other out, and the confusing cacophony can send people away. We have to rethink change and appreciate that by gaining political clout our issues have a better chance of winning…. We must communicate a positive vision of the future.“ Don Hazen “A 12-Step Plan for Regime Change, Alternet.org, May 30, 2003.

In order to build a multi-issue, multi-class, multi-race movement for social change in Tennessee, we must be willing to get outside our comfort zones and build a network that includes people from different classes and different races. If we are serious about transforming Tennessee, we must set aside traditional turf issues, stop arguing about who is “right” and who is “wrong” and embrace new ways of doing things. We must respect the organizational cultures of our allies if we truly want to build alliances. We must take a “fearless moral inventory” of ourselves and be willing to look at our strengths and weaknesses openly and non-judgmentally. We must come together around a shared analysis and strategy and then move forward with energy, compassion and clarity. We must articulate a value-based vision of hope for the future that will excite people. If we can clearly and honestly articulate our vision, we will attract people of good will from all walks of life who are moved by the belief that there are better days ahead.

New Battles for States’ Rights by David Sirota

March 22, 2006

David Sirota is the author of the upcomingbook HostileTakeover (Crown Publishers, May 2006) which explores how corporate interests have corrupted public policy. He is the co-chair of the Progressive Legislative Action Network, a research and advocacy organization that supports state lawmakers .

When Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign in Mississippi by declaring support for “states’ rights,” many felt uncomfortable. The term had become a codeword for bigotry when racist politicians demanded the federal government allow states to preserve segregation.

Thankfully, the federal government, through the Civil Rights Act, responded by waging a successful war on states’ supposed “rights” to these racist policies. But now, 40 years later, the federal government is waging a new and very different war on states’ rights‹one motivated not by altruism and equality, but by greed and corruption. This war is being waged not to protect millions of disenfranchised minorities from racism, but instead to protect the wealthiest corporations in America from statutes that defend ordinary citizens’ economic interests.

This war was on full display this month when the House of Representatives passed legislation to prohibit states from having food-contamination standards and warning labels that are stricter than federal requirements. The bill, backed by the supposedly pro-states’ rights Republican Party, is the product of almost $40 million in campaign contributions from the food industry. And its effects would be devastating. As just one example, it would likely invalidate California’s 20-year-old Proposition 65 which requires warning labels about chemicals causing ³cancer, birth defects or other reproductive harm.²

This is no anomaly. Over the last five years, political power has been usurped from state and local governments in a way not seen before in American history. That may seem like just a concern for academic types, but it should worry every American, as the power grab increasingly creeps into almost every aspect of citizens’ economic life. This is not by accident, and the motives are obvious: the more political power is concentrated at the top echelons of government, the more removed that power is from ordinary citizens and the more easily Big Money interests can use their influence to corrupt public policy.

The evidence is most pronounced in the financial sector‹not surprisingly, one of the Republican Party’s biggest backers. In 2003, both parties in Congress joined hands to pass legislation barring states from having stricter financial privacy laws than new federal standards, which were far looser than states like California already had on the books. The financial services industry, which has made almost $1 billion in donations to both parties since 2000, salivated.

In 2004, the Bush Treasury Department issued an edict invalidating state laws that were cracking down on some of the most abusive credit card practices. The credit card industry, having invested $18 million in the GOP since 2000, was thrilled.

In 2005, they sued New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer in an effort to force him to halt an investigation into banks that may have violated state civil rights laws. The banking industry, handing over $53 million to Republicans since 2000, was let off the hook.

And this year, Rep. Bob Ney‹the same congressman connected to the Abramoff investigation‹is pushing legislation to prohibit states from regulating predatory lending in the mortgage industry‹an industry which has given the GOP $17 million since 2000.

These were only the most high-profile examples‹there are many others, in the seemingly strangest of places, using the most creative tactics.

Buried in the recent Central American Free Trade Agreement, for example, are provisions preventing states from giving preferences to local companies, or to businesses that are socially or environmentally responsible. The archconservative Eagle Forum, headed by Bay Buchanan, issued an alert noting that “Under CAFTA, state legislatures would relinquish their right to regulate utilities, land use, and taxpayer-funded contracts.” But after a massive lobbying campaign by Big Business, the pact was pushed through by Republicans and signed into law.

In 2003, Bush appointees at the National Labor Relations Board backed a Chamber of Commerce lawsuit against a California law prohibiting companies that do business with the state from using revenues from state contracts to fund union-busting campaigns.

And then in 2005, there was the class action “reform” bill‹a more covert attack on state power, but no less insidious. The bill moved multi-state cases into federal courts, which often don’t recognize or enforce state laws. The bill was so extreme, it was even opposed by the organization representing the federal judges whose power it was designed to increase. Yet, at the behest of companies that don’t like being sued for abuse, Republicans pushed the bill into law.

At the local level, various southern and western states passed “wage repeal acts ” banning local governments from enforcing local minimum wages higher than the federal minimum wage level. The moves, backed by business interests, were in response to cities passing popular living wage ordinances.

Not surprisingly, the desire to concentrate power is palpable in the Bush White House. Just a few weeks ago, President Bush demanded Congress give him “line-item” veto power, allowing him to circumvent constitutional checks and balances and edit already-passed bills. He is also pushing to stop congressional “earmarks.” Undoubtedly, earmarking abuses need to be curbed through much stricter disclosure rules. But wholly eliminating the ability of lawmakers to direct spending would simply move the power of the purse out of Congress and into the White House. Meanwhile, the administration has tamped down on approval of Freedom of Information Act requests, in order to prevent the public from even knowing how this newly-concentrated power is being wielded.

At the start of the “Republican Revolution” in 1995, Newt Gingrich said, “We are committed to getting power back to the states.” It was a promise that conservatives would be ideologically committed to more democratic control o fgovernment. But what we see now is that their ideology has nothing to do with democracy, nothing to do with states’ rights, and everything to do with serving the Big Money interests who really run the show.