Baltimore

I would think our conservative friends who often try to claim they are big defenders of the U.S. Constitution, would be twisting in front of their computer screens a bit on this situation.  The bar on “bills of attainder” in the Constitution is clear that any single entity or organization could not be politically singled out and punished without rhyme or reason without investigation or trial or particulars, but just in the herd reaction of a crowd in a theater hearing the shout, “fire!”  This is an obvious and critical protection of the rights of speech and association in the Constitution where the bright line tests and protections against political whim and vengeance are as fundamental as one can imagine.  Yet, to their shame we saw scores of Democrats and Republicans lined up to tar and feather ACORN without trial or charge or usually a clue.  It is hard to forget that in pure political expediency the President, a former constitutional law teacher for crying out loud, joined the lynching mob in giving cover to these scurrilous attacks, which continue even as the Justice Department tries – unsuccessfully – to overturn Judge Gerson’s ruling.

The AP summary might be easier to handle than the actual decision:

The judge…wrote that it was “unmistakable that Congress determined ACORN’s guilt before defunding it.” She said Congress is entitled to investigate ACORN but cannot “rely on the negative results of a congressional or executive report as a rationale to impose a broad, punitive funding ban on a specific, named organization.”

She said the Code of Federal Regulations establishes a formal process for deciding when federal contractors can be suspended or debarred. She added that “the existence of these regulations militates against the need for draconian, emergency action by Congress.”

What a tragedy!  But I doubt that members of Congress or the Administration will lose too much sleep over any of this.  They need to worry about saving earmarks and a couple of perks for businesses in their district, right?  Who really cares about the fate of an organization of lower income people and the impact of its eradication on the ongoing struggle for equity and justice?

The poor  will always be with us right?  And, we will always have people in power who will guarantee just that Biblical promise and do so, as it turns out, without a second thought.

Washington

But…increasingly there seems to be blood in the water as the Administration becomes the gang that can’t shot straight.  Evidence is piling up:

◦     Weatherization strategy for creating jobs and helping working families seems to be nowhere after more than a year.  Energy Secretary frustrated, but how hard could this have been?

◦     Teachers all fired in Rhode Island to take the blame for god knows what, probably just to take the blame and the President of the United States weighs in with a gut punch.  Why in the world is Obama in this picture?

◦     Big talk about increasing school hours to better education the kids, but school districts strapped for money are cutting down to 4 days per week.  Mr. President?

◦    A year after a new administration, don’t ask me about post-Katrina recovery.

Why pile on?  The list could go on and on.  Maybe if people get their legs moving and voices louder it won’t breakthrough the Congressional logjam, but at least people will start remembering that we only win, when we fight.

New Orleans

This was a bet, like so many at the time, that prices would just keep going up, up, and up, and in this case the bet was on rising gas prices.  People got paid on the bet.  The fork tongued CEO of TXU, C. John Wilder, who played most for the fool, claiming he was going to build a pile of coal fired plants when he could hardly finance lunch, and negotiated with the equity folks out of the other side of his mouth to sell out, managed to clear over $200 million as we walked away.  The equity folks paid themselves more than $300+ million for doing the deal.  Huh?  And, in the meantime the Great Recession has strained a lot of their big buddy investors including Warren Buffet, the so-called Oracle of Omaha, a job which seems to define, not much competition.

Now they are asking such bondholders to allow them to write new paper (and they’ll probably try and charge for that too, but that’s the big whoops own problem) which would discount the value by 25-50% according to the story, without the private equity partners taking such a discount.  The big bills come due in 2014, and by the looks of it, there’s virtually no way they make the bucks they had counted on scoring.

I would like to meet the Texan alive who doesn’t think that they aren’t still going to be asked to help pay for this mess before it’s all said and done with some more rate hikes.  This is all a perfect example of why we call these “public” utilities, and why we should actually be going the other way and taking them fully public, since if “investor owned” means more mess like what KKR, TPG, Goldman, and the big banks like Chase, have brought us, this cannot be the right way to go.

Told you so then and I’m telling you so now.

New Orleans

Several conservative bloggers sent me the link to give me a heads up yesterday.  From the executive summary (which is as far as I’ve gotten) it appears that Issa has two issues:

• ACORN and its family of organizations involved way too many corporations to make Issa’s staff happy.  I’m not sure exactly what the issue there is or what might have been wrong with having a lot of different corporate entities to handle different kinds of business?  It’s actually pretty common practice with most large outfits to keep property holdings in separate corporations and to limit liabilities within various corporate missions.  I guess being in government and all, the Congressman and his staff find it unsettling, but…yawn…so what?
• The other issue he seems to have is that ACORN’s low and moderate income families wanted to use the organization to build power.  ACORN was a straight non-profit with no special tax status or privileges (the first Issa staff report got that wrong, so maybe they’ve learned something here).  ACORN was always very transparent about the fact that its members wanted to organize together to build enough power to actually solve some issues and make a difference in their communities, cities, states, and country.  Nothing to apologize for there as far as I can see, and with freedom of speech and freedom of association in the USA, I’m not sure what the beef might be?

The Washington Examiner tried to help me by laying out Issa’s real interest:

“The ranking Republican on the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, who speaks at CPAC today, asserts that a judicial decision blocking Congress’s efforts to stop funding ACORN amounts to a new bailout, because ACORN is currently on the precipice financially. Meanwhile, even as it continues to draw down the taxpayer’s hard-earned dollar, ACORN’s affairs remain a shadowy mess of mixed private, non-profit and government money characterized by collusion between various organizations.”

For the life of me, I’ve read those sentences a couple of times, and I’m still not sure that I get it.  But, I’m guessing that Issa is arguing that because a federal judge ruled that the defunding of ACORN was illegal (thwarting the will of Congress for trying an illegal bill of attainder), he’s upset because some of his buddies and informants (the Louisiana Attorney General’s office seems to have a lot of loose lips) have told him that they think ACORN is on the edge of insolvency, and despite having been jammed up by a federal judge for illegal activity, Issa is disappointed because he may have been so close to his goal of putting ACORN out of business that now he’s upset that he may not have succeeded.  Is that the drift?

So while he waits to see if he and others have succeeded in the original smear and subterfuge, he thought he would go down to the CPAC meeting with the rest of the heavy breathing haters and throw out some more innuendos, allegations, unfounded asserts, mud and general garbage.  All in a day’s work for an esteemed member of Congress, eh?  And, they wonder why the public has nothing but contempt for Congress in every poll taken these days?

Dallas

Media Matters, which has been a truth squad on many of these vicious attacks handles it best in a column by Eric Boehlert.

Breitbart tries, and fails, to explain away the ACORN pimp myth

February 17, 2010 11:16 am ET by Eric Boehlert

As I note in my column this week, both Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe (with some help from Fox News, of course) did their best last year to mislead the public and the press into believing that as part of his ACORN sting, O’Keefe wore his outlandish pimp costume right into the offices, and that clueless ACORN workers didn’t blink an eye.

But it’s not true. Based on all available evidence, O’Keefe never wore his pimp costume inside ACORN offices. (Raise your hand if you got duped.)

Turns out last night Breitbart, doing lots of yellling and name-calling (surprise!), appeared on a conservative radio show with blogger Brad Friedman who pressed him on the myth of the ACORN pimp. At first, Breirtbart denied any wrong doing:

“I didn’t lie about James O’Keefe. When did I lie about James O’Keefe? “

When Friedman then read out loud from an erroneous Washington Times column by Breitbart in which he claimed O’Keefe was “dressed as a pimp” while receiving advice from ACORN workers, the furious (and confused) spin began.

Go here to listen. (The fun begins at the 36 minute mark.)

UPDATED: Breitbart insisted last night he had nothing to correct in his Times column, even though he falsely reported O’Keefe was “dressed as a pimp” while receiving ACORN advice.

New Orleans

The easy ask from Catholics United, and it seems so lame, I hate to put it out there, is that you sign a petition in support of CCHD by hitting this link.   Do it now and I’ll explain more in a minute:

http://www.catholics-united.org/cchd-petition

I’ve known Bishop Roger Morin for more than 30 years from his time as diocesan director for the Archdiocese of New Orleans.  Sometimes I raised some money from him, and sometimes I did not.  He was a smooth operator in southern Louisiana where being Catholic still means something as if we were a Latin American country.  It’s why we have a Mardi Gras, remember?  Morin has been promoted several times in the last couple of years and now has his own operation in Mobile, Alabama and because of his record in New Orleans quickly became the point man for the rest of the bishops’ conference at CCHD.  I am not a fan of how Roger has handled the ACORN funding controversy, because I think he should have stood taller and that might have stopped some of the conservative rearguard attacks they are taking now, but, hey, he did what he thought he needed to do to “protect the Church,” and that is hardwired into their training and DNA, so what can I say.

Bottom line:  the enemy of our enemies is our friend, and CCHD invested millions in my 38 years there in helping support ACORN and its operations in communities all over the country, so I have no trouble standing with them and asking others to do the same.

The best “inside” view of the war within the church I picked up from the “On Faith” blog in the Washington Post written by Anthony Stevens-Arroyo, which makes the case in beautiful fashion.  I pasted some of his points below, and I think you’ll agree:

Some bishops have broken troth with their brother bishops by refusing to take up the annual collection. The bishops are Bishop John O. Barres of Allentown, Pennsylvania; Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Nebraska; Bishop Robert C. Morlino of Madison, Wisconsin; and Bishop Robert J. Baker of Birmingham, Alabama. According to the USCCB’s John Carr, who is specifically accused of wrong-doing, the accusations and cut-off in funding came without the decency of a direct communication with him. “Neither the American Life League nor the Bellarmine Institute contacted me, CCHD or the bishops’ conference before making these accusations.”

At the bottom of all this, I fear, is a form of McCarthyism — “guilt by association.” Bishop Morlino specifically mentioned links between CCHD and ACORN, giving echo to the meandering complaints of Fox News talking head Glenn Beck. Mr. Beck, it will be remembered, gave great importance to “gotcha’ video” of some ACORN employees taken by Republican-trained operatives. However, once the smoke cleared, the operatives — not part of ACORN — now face jail-time if found guilty in court for their illegal shenanigans.

In my experience, Catholic America uses common sense when confronted by competing sets of facts. Judging the source of the statements is a good place to start. On the one hand, we have the USCCB itself. On the other are the members of a newly formed coalition of critics. One, the American Life League, is reported to support the extremism of Operation Rescue and the violence espoused by its director, Randall Terry. The ALF Web site sells a prayer card for the conversion of Barack Obama (for only $7). Father Euteneuer, head of the Human Life International, is on YouTube saying he would deny communion to Sean Hannity for not being a conservative enough Catholic. The Catholic Advocate is headed by Dr. Deal W. Hudson, a former Karl Rove operative who has had his own problems.. The Bellarmine Institute does not permit Catholic cooperation based on shared interests, and demands a conscience check on non-Catholics to “make sure that those we cooperate with do not have an all-together different set of values.” But don’t the bishops determine those values, rather than the Bellarminites?

I have no doubt that the American bishops should be criticized at times: this is not one of them.

New Orleans

A conservative blogger asked me my opinion of why the Tea Party was getting traction, and the Minutemen were not?  My answer was simple:  guns.  You cannot build a mass movement in America to create political power with guns.  Period!  End of sentence.  The majority of Americans understand guns, and many of them own guns and are comfortable with them, especially in the West and South, as opposed to the East, but nobody, absolutely nobody in their right mind believes that guns should be anywhere around politics.  This is a bright line dividing principle of contemporary American politics and separates the citizen activists from the right wing nut.

Despite the success in Massachusetts and lively pressure being applied by Tea people in a number of states with the Republicans trying to hijack the movement in every way possible, Barstow and the Times had no problem putting their story in the wild, wooly, West and bringing it to Idaho.  Except the rich and Sun Valley, the rest of coastal America is scared of Idaho.  This is big mountain, Mormon country in their view.  It is also the home of one violent, fringe nutcase group after another (and the Unabomber?), and it was easy for the Times to bring them into the story as fellow travelers here.

But, as I say, they didn’t need to work hard.  A Republican candidate for the Senate in Indiana (Bayh was too selfish to stand in front of these kinds of folks?) was quoted as saying he was getting his guns ready – just like his audience – if they didn’t like the results in upcoming elections.  And, there were other stupid comments from Tea people putting guns in the mix.

Barstow could sneak around on this story because he could slip in a paragraph that reflected real understanding like:  “They are frequently led by political neophytes who prize independence and tell strikingly familiar stories of having been awakened by the recession.  Their families upended by lost jobs, foreclosed homes and depleted retirement funds, they said they wanted to know why it happened and whom to blame.”  Those are fair questions begging for answers, but most buried in the blunt blows of this story.

ACORN gets its mention as a scourge of the right with the fabrication that it is “stealing elections” in the same slap as Obama “trying to control the Internet and restrict gun ownership.”  (Does anyone but the Times capitalize “internet” anymore?)  I hate to see it when we are on the brunt end of this slick sell, and it’s painful to read even if the Tea people deserve it and brought it on themselves.

The real questions will still remain about why people are being moved like this and where they are going and what can be done to meet their anger and needs.  The Republicans trying to seize control and leadership will be brought down by the fringers – and the guns – if they are not very, very careful, and thus far they have been sloppy and stupid as well.  Meanwhile the Democrats will tut-tut about it all and still not move forward in the way that makes sense, but instead too often desert the battlefield with the Bayh kinds of politicians.

What a mess and now there are guns firing in the background!

New Orleans

While the Senate was voting on the question of closure for Becker’s nomination before the city snowed under (52-39 falling short of the 60 needed to block more mess), I was inundated by some of the conservative bloggers asking me if Becker was bending the facts in response to a query from Senator McCain about whether or not Becker had ever worked for ACORN.  Some Republican Senators are still dancing around this totally discredited storyline.

Craig Becker answered – truthfully! – “no,” he had not worked for ACORN.  Ever!

The neo-McCarthyites were not able to use my blog on this, so they pulled something out of a 2006 ACORN Year End /Year Begin book of reports claiming they had “proof” that Becker was “lying” because the reports were from an annual staff meeting attended by many ACORN staff.  Despite the plain and simple fact that reports were in the book and clearly identified as from SEIU Local 880 and SEIU Local 100, the dogs wanted to bark about the fact that somehow that made these SEIU locals the same as an ACORN citywide chapter.  Poppycock on top of balderdash, as I’ve been quoted before!

The sentence referenced from the SEIU Local 880’s written report threw props out to a number of lawyers including labor lawyer, Art Martin, our old friend from St. Louis, and Craig Becker among others, for the help the local had received during the year in organizing.  What’s the big deal?  Becker was associate general counsel for SEIU and for years had provided SEIU 880 with advice on its ground breaking organizing of home health care workers.  Did that make him an ACORN lawyer somehow, much less a liar?  Of course not, except to the dogs trying to spread the fleas.  This is how McCarthyism works, because the standard of “proof” is simply guilt by random association.  The fact that SEIU Local 880 had had long ties to ACORN, and of course that I was Chief Organizer of SEIU Local 100 as well as having founded and served as Chief Organizer for ACORN for 38 years was all they needed.

One Senator commented that despite seeing Becker as “highly qualified,” that he was still “troubled” by the ACORN “association.”  Wow!  Exactly what “association” is that, honorable Senator from wherever?  Did he ever go to an ACORN meeting?  No.  Draw a check from ACORN?  No.  Represent ACORN in court?  No.  What is the concern really?  That he may have seen an ACORN banner somewhere at the same address in Chicago when he was meeting with the staff and board of SEIU 880?

It is no comfort that in most of the articles in the Times and the Wall Street Journal the excuses for going limp around workers’ rights were fears that he would use his position with the NLRB to “sneak” employee free choice and card check into effect through his decisions rather than in the meat grinder of Congress.  Becker is good, but no one has explained how he would be able to manage that as only one of five votes!  Probably the very fact that they were then “associating” with him would hypnotize them into voting for such a thing under his magical spell?

One of my blogs some weeks ago had also predicted the fact that Senator Blanche Lincoln would go south on labor votes after her health care commitment.  She ran from this one with her tail between her legs for sure!

Whoops!  Now that I think about it, she’s probably toast now, too.  You know she’s the Senator from Arkansas, and Arkansas was where ACORN was founded almost 40 years ago, and all of us lived there at one time or another way back when, and it’s not a big state, so…

We were probably rolling together like dogs and couldn’t keep from scratching at the fleas.

New Orleans

O’Keefe’s employer, Andrew Brietbart and www.biggoverment.com had one of their fair haired boys, Kyle Olson, write a piece whose headline was “Sorry Wade, James O’Keefe’s Actions Don’t Excuse ACORN.”  Olson probably feels he has the right to do a “Wade” shout out, because he and I are old comrades.  He had been on Glenn Beck helping promote my book, Citizen Wealth, claiming he had an exclusive “interview” with me at the Octavia Book Store book signing.  Dressed in short pants, he and a buddy claimed that they were health care bloggers from Michigan, and wanted to get some video from me for their blog about health care reform.  The highlights of the “interview,” which consisted of Fox viewers watching me talk while signing Citizen Wealth last summer were there question about whether SEIU was working for healthcare reform and my “admission” that yes, by gum, they were (no, duh?!?) and them asking about ACORN and Health Care for America Now (HCAN), where I said I didn’t work for ACORN and asked Marie Hurt, the Louisiana director their question, and she answered in the background.  Olson and O’Keefe come from the same “school” of “journalism,” Olson is just better looking.  The rest of his piece was a rehash of whatever few remaining charges are still outstanding against ACORN back to the 2008 election and the highly documented partisan charges by the Republicans against the organization at that time.

On the other hand I got an email yesterday from Michael Gaynor, a conservative blogger often all over ACORN as the devil incarnate, who took me to task for being too soft on O’Keefe.  Gaynor is a lawyer, so he may take these lawbreaking high jinks more seriously as a member of the bar, but he thought my description of O’Keefe’s lame quasi-apology as “weak tea” was WAY TOO KIND.  A call from the Michael Volpe, who writes the Provocateur blog, wondered why I even cared about O’Keefe, and wondered if I was losing my focus.  I was able to reassure him that I was mainly exercised over bad, pretend “organizing” which was nothing more than a mask for self-promotion no matter the costs and consequences.

I’m not even mentioning the folks who have written about O’Keefe and his bungling buddies who are not conservatives.  Whoa!  Some of the suggestions about what is likely for this callow youth in our nation’s prisons were way too gross for me.   I’m sure that if O’Keefe ends up in the calaboose that he’ll figure out how to implant a camera somewhere and make prison reform his very personal issue sometime in the future.  We’ll welcome his help on that often overlooked issue where most firsthand reports are not filmed and not heard.