Puget Sound Liberals Weekly Newsletter #207
Enhancing Freedom, Opportunity and Cooperation in
Through informing and networking Liberals and Liberal Organizations.
Our vision is hundreds of thousands of well-informed
Our Website Our Editor To Unsubscribe Table of
Contents * Featured Articles Calendars of Events Communication with Our Members Opportunities Petitions Commentaries from Our Members John
Burbank: Want Jobs. Then Create Jobs Ray McBain: Andrew Sullivan Wrongly Accuses Obama of
Being Conservative Liberals and Democrats Links to the Beef Could President Obama Have Realized More Reforms?* Conservatives Continually Mischaracterize Liberals* Resolve to Increase Our Liberal Democratic Majority** State and Local Links
to the Beef Featured Advocacy Group: Reform Immigration for America 2010 Census May Give Washington another House Seat Washington State’s Dreary Politics Nation and World Links to the Beef Our Liberal Spirit Resolving to Change Is Not Enough Our
Political Priorities ·
Fair Clean
Elections and Open Government ·
Fair Taxes and
Competent Spending ·
Investment for
Productivity ·
Quality
Health, Education, Jobs, Income ·
Environmental
Protection and Energy Independence ·
Security and
Equal Rights ·
Justice and
Peace Everywhere ·
International
Cooperation and Leadership Conservatives oppose all of these Let’s
End Our National Nightmare
Let’s
Restore Our American Dream More on Conservative opposition to our
American Dream Washington State’s 5 Major Needs · Federal Funding for Health and Education · Substituting
a Progressive Income Tax · Replacing Conservative
Legislators Quote of the Week It is time for a new
generation of Leadership to cope with new problems and new opportunities
for there is a new world to be won. John F. Kennedy
John Burbank: Want Jobs. Then Create Jobs
Calendar of Events
Saturday, January 9th at 9:30 AM - 2:30 PM
at Seattle Pacific University, Gwinn Room (3310 Sixth
Avenue West, Seattle) - 2010
Environmental Priorities Coalition Legislative Workshop. Sponsored by Washington Environmental
Council, Washington Toxics Council and other environmental organizations. $10 + $10 for lunch. To
Register.
Monday, January 18 at 8:30 AM at The Capitol Theater (206 5th Ave SE, Olympia) - Peoples Summit and March on our Capitol. To Register.
Saturday, January 23 at 6:30 PM at Carrie
Bogner’s home (1120 24th Ave E, Seattle) - InspireSeattle Potluck Social, Presentation and Discussion of Seattle’s
Recycling Strategy.
Communication
with Our Members
What a Year
Barack Obama took office with more
support than any recent president. He
embarked on a low risk approach of different strategies to recover our
collapsed economy: an economic stimulus-recovery package, health care reform,
greenhouse gas reduction, regulation of financial and companies. He quickly obtained passage of an economic
stimulus-recovery package and will soon obtain health care reform. In both cases, they are less than may be
needed, due especially to Senate rules requiring 60 votes to stop a filibuster.
With adoption of health care reform, the
primary necessity for further reform is to increase the number of Liberal
Democratic congress members in 2010.
This will depend primarily upon lowering unemployment. It will depend secondly upon passage of
unionization, immigration, and GLBT legislation. Finally it will depend upon identifying
likely Democratic voters and stimulating them to vote.
By insisting on doing virtually nothing
beyond what produced our bubble and its collapse, the Republicans have set
themselves up as a ‘Do Nothing’ target in the fall 2010 elections. In addition, Tea Bag Conservatives may
compete with more versatile Republicans to produce Democratic victories. If Democrats (especially of consistently
Liberal) Democrats increase their majority, we can expect further health care
reforms, and greenhouse gas reduction and financial regulation reforms.
One of the major lost opportunities of
this last year was the placement of Organizing for America (consisting of
Barack Obama’s 2008 supporters) under the Democratic Party instead of retaining
it as a supporter of Barack Obama’s policies.
In support of our Democratic Party’s Old Politics instead of Barack Obama’s
call for a new politics, Organizing for America has played no role in pressing
inconsistently Liberal Democrats to support President Obama’s proposed
reforms.
Opportunities
Useful
Websites: contacts, maps, community organizing tools, and more.
Petitions
Tell
your house member to support House Resolution 274 to promote nuclear disarmament.
Commentaries
From Our Members
John Burbank: Want
Jobs. Then Create Jobs
We’ve got an
official unemployment rate of 9.3% here in Washington and the likelihood of
increased unemployment in the coming months. This understates the actual
unemployment and underemployment of workers in our state, and the decrease in
the employment to population ratio. The national underemployment rate
(the unemployed, those who have quit looking, and those working part-time who
want full-time work) is 17.5%. The private sector is sloughing off
jobs. As unemployment increases, consumption falls, generating further
cutbacks in economic activity and employment.
What can we
do? Create jobs. The federal government should enable the states to
immediately create public sector/service jobs. In Washington state, an
immediate jobs program with 12,000 jobs would make up ten percent of the
121,000 jobs lost since the beginning of the recession in December 2007.
Here’s how we
could create jobs – jobs that enhance public services, build public
infrastructure, and stimulate economic growth. The precedents are the Works
Progress Administration, the Public Works Administration, the Civilian
Conservation Corps, CETA, VISTA, and Americorps. Today, here in Washington
State, the Employment Security Department (ESD) would be the central
collector/distributor for public job creation. ESD knows who is unemployed,
where, and what occupations.
The Governor’s
office requests each state department to identify unfilled needs and attach a
job estimate to each need. The focus should be on labor-intensive
work. The Governor can send a similar request to cities, counties, and
other localities. Each department reports these needs and job estimates back to
ESD within five working days. After another five days, each department
must report how they would create the supervisory and management team to
allocate and administrate these jobs.
DES then
supplies the workers to the agencies, as requested. This will be a
voluntary request on the part of the worker. Each worker will receive the
equivalent of her/his unemployment compensation, or 133% of the minimum wage
($11.40/hour), as a paycheck, plus health coverage through the Basic Health
Plan. The total cost per worker for one full year of employment,
including health coverage, FICA taxes (employee and employer), and 15% for
administrative overhead and capital costs would be about $35,500. 12,000
jobs would cost $426 million dollars.
What kinds of
jobs are possible?
· Teacher aides, tutors, and
coaches in the public schools
· Teacher aides in public early
learning centers (to be combined with the ongoing career and wage ladder
· Trail development and maintenance
(Sound to Mountains Greenway, etc.)
· Housing energy retrofitting (to
be combined with an ongoing apprenticeship program
· Expansion of Community Jobs to
the unemployed workforce. (Community Jobs are jobs with community-based
non-profits for “hard-to-employ” welfare recipients)
· Community theater projects
through the community college network
· Parks maintenance and
stewardship, resulting in re-opening of parks
· Library workers, enabling longer
hours for public libraries
· AmeriCorps expansion
· Legal aid work
· Jobs identified by DNR,
Transportation, Department of Ecology, Parks, Community Development
This is just to
sketch out the possibilities. State and local agencies should be able to
identify immediate needs and practical development of jobs. The need is to:
· Get commitment of federal funding
($425 million, for 2011)
· Get agencies to act promptly
(jobs identified within two weeks)
· Disallow supplantation of current
jobs; negotiate with unions
· Get DES to match unemployed
workers with jobs
· Insure that appropriate
supervisory team is in place.
· Get people to work by January
2nd.
· Label the projects, so that the
general public begins to equate job creation with our government.
John Burbank, Executive Director, Economic Opportunity Institute
Ray McBain: Andrew Sullivan Wrongly Accuses Obama of
Being Conservative
I agree with your
position on Obama as more liberal than conservative. Andrew Sullivan is just plain wrong. His
viewpoint is valid only to him. Further, he uses the terms
"conservative" and "liberal" without any definition nor
even an association to indicate his use of these terms. Kudos to DT! (Dave Thomas). Ray
McBain
Liberals
and Democrats
Government Watch
Also go to Whitehouse.gov.
On Vacation
Immigration Policy
Obama Administration implements
more human immigration policies.
Could President Obama Have Realized More Reforms?
Liberals have
wanted more reforms than President Obama has achieved. Many have criticized him for not acting more
forcibly. But given the congressional
rules and the numbers of Democratic congress members, can anyone show how more could have been achieved? Could a larger stimulus-recovery package have
been passed? Could a health care reform
bill have been passed which offered more competition to private insurers or
dispensed with them entirely? I don’t
believe any of President Obama’s critics have shown how President Obama could
have achieved more.
I believe it
was the congressional rules, the ‘Do Nothing’ Republicans, and several
Democrats that made it impossible to achieve more reforms, no matter what
President Obama did. Notice that if the
Democrats had elected one less Senator or a few less Democratic house members
in 2008, it is likely that we would not have had any reforms. We can be thankful that some combination of
Barack Obama’s coattails, Howard Dean’s 50 state strategy and Rahm Emanuel’s
recruitment of winning house candidates produced our 2008 victories.
I
doubt that our Senate will pass any robust cap and trade legislation. So
the EPA will have to take the lead by banning various global warming
activities. Cities and states are also acting. But none of this
necessarily leads to binding international treaties. It may be we just
keep the pressure on governments to take needed steps even in the absence of a
binding treaty.
I do
believe that both the Senate and House will pass some fairly robust financial
system reforms, due to Main Street’s strong negative reaction to the Wall
Street bailouts. I also believe that
with Obama Administration leadership both the Senate and House will pass unionization,
GLBT and immigration reforms. If
employment increases and these pass, our 2010 elections should increase the
number of Democratic congress members, hopefully consistently Liberal
ones. Dave
Thomas
Conservatives Continually Mischaracterize Liberals
Conservatives
trust free enterprise and distrust government.
Socialists trust government and distrust free enterprise. Liberals recognize that both free enterprise
and government offer benefits and may be abusive. So unlike Conservatives and Socialists,
Liberals seek mixtures of free enterprise and government that are appropriate
to various situations. Conservatives
continually accuse Liberals of being Socialists.
Conservatives
also continually accuse Liberals of being unconcerned with competence such that
people, government and private organizations should do the best they can to
avoid being a burden on others. And they
criticize Liberal compassion for those who have fewer freedoms and
opportunities than the rest of us. Their
view is that through compassion, Liberals encourage incompetence. Yet it is Conservatives who typically
participate in crony capitalism, in which they reward incompetent enterprises
that reward them with campaign contributions.
Both the Clinton Administration and the Obama Administration have been
much more competent than the Bush Administration.
Conservatives
also hypocritically accuse Liberals of using various political strategies that they
used when they controlled our government, including earmarks, threatened
filibusters, borrowing to pay for their proposals instead of paying for them
with reduced expenditures elsewhere or increased taxes.
Conservatives
also falsely assume that high income people use their income to create jobs,
when high income people instead divert money from creating jobs to speculation,
which in the long run destroys jobs.
Conservatives favor tax cuts for high income people and criticize
Liberals for increasing taxes on them, although our economy has always done
better when high income people pay their fair share of taxes and worse when
high income people don’t pay their fair share.
When taxes for low income people are reduced, jobs are created to
provide goods and services to them.
Resolve to Increase Our Liberal Democratic
Majority in 2010
To increase our freedoms and
opportunities, we
need to produce a Liberal Democratic majority in our house and senate which can
defeat any attempts to filibuster against needed reforms. We
can run against the ‘Do Nothing’ Republican congress members. We need to stimulate the young people,
Hispanics and others who voted for Barack Obama to vote. We can also hope that the Tea Bag
Conservatives will run against any Republicans who might attract votes from
Independents.
Unfortunately, most of our
Democratic Legislative District Organizations are more concerned with
exchanging insider political gossip than with grassroots organizing to get out
the vote for Democratic candidates. However,
anyone can
do grassroots organizing.
Select about 200 homes near
your own. These will typically contain
about 350 voters, of whom half, more or less, are likely to vote for Democrats
if they vote. Canvass
these homes between now and next fall to identify whether their voters are
likely to vote for Democrats. It will
take 40 hours at about 5 homes per hour.
Once voter preferences have been identified, avoid those who would vote
for Republicans, hoping they will not vote.
Get several of the more enthusiastic Democratic voters to help you
stimulate the less enthusiastic Democratic voters to vote.
You may hold house parties to
discuss both neighborhood and national issues.
You can also start an email list, to send (mini-newsletter type)
messages to identified likely Democratic voters. Voting for Democrats will bring needed
national changes. Getting to know your neighbors
is also locally helpful for crime protection, checking on people during an
emergency, and to protect and support our neighboring children.
Before the election, share
your information about likely Democratic voters with your Democratic candidates,
so they and you can stimulate them to vote.
If you succeed in stimulating 20 or more likely Democratic voters to
vote who otherwise wouldn’t, you will have done more to elect Democratic
candidates than most Democrats, including legislative district members and
bloggers.
For the longer run,
enthusiastic Democratic voters should be encouraged to position themselves to
run for office. They can begin by
serving as volunteers with advocacy organizations, and by being appointed to
various planning and other commissions.
Later these farm team candidates can run for municipal, state and
federal offices. Dave Thomas
Here’s the Beef
What to do about
curbing global warming is unclear: EPA action or various forms of Cap and
Trade?
Our
climate control strategy should include converting methane to useful energy.
Will
climate change make organic farming necessary?
State
and Local
Primary Care Experiments
Group
Health Cooperative experiments with medical home model. Qliance has opened three
clinics in Seattle, Kent and Mercer Island with 9 doctors, which provide
medical homes for 3,000 patients. Swedish
Medical Center’s Ballard campus has opened a medical home
clinic that currently bills 900 patients or their insurers $45 per month,
instead of billing them for treatments.
Each of these experiments rewards providers for effective preventive and
medical care instead of for treatments.
If
widely adopted, these medical home clinics could dramatically reduce the
expense of unnecessary treatments and increase close monitoring of health
conditions to implement measures to prevent deterioration of health.
Featured Advocacy Group
----------------------- Reform Immigration for America
----------------------------
The
Campaign to Reform
Immigration for America is a united national effort that brings together
individuals and grassroots organizations with the mission to build support for
workable comprehensive immigration reform. The Campaign to Reform Immigration
for America is, in part, a project of the Tides Advocacy Fund.
The
campaign connects people from communities across the country who are ready to
work together towards achieving the 279 votes needed to win just and humane
comprehensive immigration reform legislation: 218 votes in the House of
Representatives, 60 votes in the Senate, and one signature from the President. We will be working especially hard with
advocates and leaders from faith communities, small business owners, unions and
labor advocates; and community-based civil rights, human rights, and
immigrant-serving groups.
Our
vision of reform includes immigrants and native-born U.S. citizens working
shoulder to shoulder to achieve better wages, working conditions, and labor
protections—making sure everyone is playing by the same set of rules so that it
is harder for unscrupulous employers to cheat immigrants and therefore harder
for everyone to be cheated. We need to build faith in our immigration system so
that people respect the process and so that the process respects them. That’s
our vision for a stronger America.
Plain
and simple, the U.S. immigration system – as it currently exists and operates –
no longer works. Fixing it presents a daunting challenge, but action must be
taken sooner rather than later. The time is now to do the right thing and fight
for practical solutions that benefit all of us and are rooted in the
restoration of the rule of law, earned citizenship, united families, and fair
treatment of workers.
Untargeted
raids in workplaces and neighborhoods and rogue enforcement agents at all
levels are terrorizing immigrant workers and dividing families without making
us any safer and without fixing the real problems with our immigration system.
Our out-of-date laws force many American families to remain separated for years
– and in some cases, decades – because of backlogs and barriers to family
unification in our immigration system.
American-born
workers suffer if there is a vast pool of undocumented workers who are easily
exploited by employers who seek unfair advantage. All of us are stronger if all
of us have rights.
Finally,
our outdated laws are practically unenforceable, driving too much immigration
into the black market and not enough immigration through legal and orderly
channels for immigrants who want to work in this country. The result is hundreds of thousands of
immigrants being detained each year, hundreds of thousands deported, people
forced to take life-threatening risks because they cannot enter legally, people
dying in the desert, and people dying in detention due to awful conditions and
official neglect. We can and must do better.
We
are a united voice for just and humane immigration reform. Our campaign
supports the following principles:
·
Immigration reform must promote
economic opportunity. We must
renew our commitment to helping all low-income Americans improve their job
prospects and move up the economic ladder towards the American Dream.
·
Immigration reform must be comprehensive. Unless we tackle the broken immigration system as a
whole, we will fail to solve the problem at hand.
·
Long-term reform requires long
term solutions. The factors
shaping immigration are not just domestic; the issue transcends our borders. As
such, how we as a country approach our relationships with other nations
matters. We must deal with the domestic aspect of this issue and work in
partnership with other countries over time to develop long-term strategies.
A
reform package that works for all communities and families in America should
include the following:
·
A rational and humane approach
to the undocumented population. We
must address the more than twelve million undocumented immigrants living in
this country by creating a rigorous registration process that leads to lawful
permanent resident status and eventual citizenship.
·
Protect U.S. and immigrant
workers. Immigration reform is a
component of building real economic security, contributing to a shared
prosperity agenda that maintains and improves wages and working conditions in
the United States and in other countries. We must protect all workers’ rights,
regardless of whether they were born in the United States or abroad, and any
employment verification system should determine employment authorization
accurately and efficiently while protecting workers and good-faith employers.
·
Allocate sufficient visas to
close unlawful migration channels.
One of the great failures of our current system is that the level of legal
immigration is set arbitrarily by Congress—as a product of political
compromise. The allocation of employment visas to workers should be
depoliticized and placed in the hands of an independent commission that can
assess labor shortages and determine the number and characteristics of foreign
workers to be admitted, with Congress’s approval.
·
Enhance our nation’s security
and safety. A sensible
enforcement strategy will keep America safe, protect due process and human
rights, make the most effective use of the tools and policies already available
in a fair and reasonable manner, and be fiscally responsible. Such a strategy
would prioritize enforcement actions to target genuine threats, violent
individuals, unscrupulous employers; traffickers and drug smugglers, and those
that might exploit the immigration system to do the country harm.
·
Establish a strategic border
enforcement policy that reflects American values. A border strategy that prioritizes the safety and
security of border communities and consults with these communities in the
process is the best way to ensure that our border policies protect our national
security, while balancing enforcement with economic development and human and
civil rights.
·
Keep American families
together. Our outdated family
immigration channels, which keep close family members separated for decades,
must be reformed to restore our commitment to promoting family unity.
·
Promote immigrant integration.
The federal government must help new immigrants learn our language and laws,
ensure equal opportunity for immigrants to participate in programs and
services, and support state and local governments’ efforts to help integrate
these new Americans.
·
Protect fundamental rights for
all. Congress must restore basic
civil liberties and reaffirm Constitutional protections for all individuals in
this country and renew our commitment to core American values of fairness and
justice.
The
document with the complete Principles of Immigration Reform adopted by the
campaign is available here.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2010 Census May Give
Washington another House Seat
In
spite of our economic slowdown and job losses, Washington’s
population growth is likely to give us another house seat. If so, a 5 member bipartisan commission will
redraw our congressional district maps, which then must be approved by our
legislature. Since more of our growth is
occurring in Liberal areas of the state, we can expect that a Democrat can win
the new seat. Depending upon how the
existing congressional seats are rearranged, we might find it easier for a
Democrat to win the 8th Congressional seat. So we might end up with 7 or 8 of 10
congressional seats occupied by Democrats.
Washington State’s Dreary Politics
Senators
Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell were very slow to indicate their support for
health care reform, but are now strongly supporting it. They also have supported wasteful pork barrow
projects wanted by their campaign contributors.
Except for Congressman Jim McDermott, our Democratic congressmen have
been slow to indicate their support for health care reform, and Congressman
Brian Baird voted against it. Our
Democratic congressmen have also supported wasteful pork barrow projects wanted
by their campaign contributors.
Our
state legislators have generally been unwilling to address the issues which
reduce our state’s revenue and ability to fund needed infrastructure and safety
net measures to serve our people. In the
absence of tax reform, our education is not receiving the support which our constitution
requires. They have not supported public
campaign financing which would save our state much money by reducing special
interest tax exemptions wanted by private campaign contributors. Many have supported the BIAW, even though the
BIAW is using a variety of strategies to reduce our state revenue and
regulation of abusive corporations.
By
siding with businesses instead of labor, many of our Democratic legislators are
also reducing the number of well paying jobs, such that people are borrowing, which
stimulates our bubble economy and its collapse.
To
improve our state government’s ability to serve our people, we need more
Liberal legislators, even if getting them reduces the number of Democratic
legislators. If a legislator is
Conservative, it doesn’t matter very much whether he or she is Republican or
Democratic.
Here’s the Beef
Nation
and World
Here’s the Beef
Our
U.S. doesn’t have too few people. We
have too many people.
Our Liberal Spirit
Resolving to Change Is Not Enough
New
Year’s resolutions are customary. But as
most of us have experienced, making resolutions is not sufficient to change
one’s behavior and the mental state that supports it. One also needs a plan and determination. For example, suppose one resolves to lose
weight.
One
needs to understand ones present habits relevant to weight: eating (what, when,
how much, urges, triggers), exercise.
One needs to research what recommended strategies:
·
When should we
eat and not eat?
·
What should be
eaten and avoided?
·
How much of
various foods should we eat?
·
What temptations
should be avoided?
·
What responses
should be made to temptations and urges?
·
How should one
react to a failure to follow a strategy?
·
How should we
enlist others to not tempt us and to support our diets?
·
How should we
monitor our weight?
·
How should one
react to failure to lose weight, staying stable or gaining weight?
·
How should we
reward or punish ourselves for succeeding or failing?
·
What exercises
should we do?
·
What other
strategies can we find?
Creating an experimental plan with many strategic
elements is crucial. We also need the
determination to keep experimenting when we are not succeeding until we find what
works. If we are tempted to stop trying
to lose weight, we should seriously consider whether our desire for less weight
is worth continuing to look for what works.
Once
we learn how to develop determination and an experimental plan to successfully
change a behavior and mindset, we may find that we can follow the same approach
to modify other behaviors. Such
modification presents us with new freedoms and opportunities. Dave Thomas
Recommended Books – See our list of books for liberals
Ravi Batra, 2005, Greenspan’s
Fraud. How Two Decades of His Policies
Have Undermined the Global Economy.
Since the collapse of our housing and credit bubble, various
commentators have blamed Alan Greenspan for stimulating the bubble. Writing before the housing and credit bubble
collapse, Ravi Batra predicted the collapse.
More than other commentators, Batra attempts to understand Greenspan’s
motivation for his various actions.
Alan Greenspan is a Libertarian Conservative who believes that
businesses should be mostly free from government regulation and taxation. He has encouraged income tax reduction for
high income people and businesses, while encouraging FICA tax increases for low
and moderate income people and the reduction of Social Security and Medicare
benefits. He sought a balanced
budget. He also opposes a high minimum
wage, unionization and restrictions on global trade. He didn’t worry about our loss of
manufacturing jobs. Thus he naturally
sides with Wall Street lobbyists.
Through these measures, a bubble economy occurs and crashes,
resulting in high unemployment.
Manufacturing jobs decline, our federal deficits and foreign trade
deficits both increase.
Alan Greenspan also wants to keep the power he has by being
Federal Reserve Chairman. As Federal
Reserve Chairman, his reappointment depends upon the president, who depends
partly upon Main Street Voters to be reelected.
So Alan Greenspan encouraged the placement of adjustable rate mortgages,
which allow more people to buy and furnish houses. He has similarly encouraged low interest
rates which stimulate the economy through allowing borrowers to buy more
stuff. Both of these measures caused
very imbalanced budgets. He also began
to worry about the loss of manufacturing jobs.
These measures further stimulated the bubble economy, delaying its
immediate crash, but leading to its ultimately much larger crash. Most damaging has been our increasing
financial inequality.