Progressive Groups form an alliance

Progressives hope 'One Nation' coalition can recapture grass-roots fervor

By Krissah Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 12, 2010; A03

 If imitation is the highest form of flattery, the "tea party" movement must be honored.

In an effort to replicate the tea party's success, 170 liberal and civil rights groups are forming a coalition that they hope will match the movement's political energy and influence. They promise to "counter the tea party narrative" and help the progressive movement find its voice again after 18 months of foundering.

The large-scale attempt at liberal unity, dubbed "One Nation," will try to revive themes that energized the progressive grass roots two years ago. In a repurposing of Barack Obama's former campaign slogan, organizers are demanding "all the change" they voted for -- a poke at the White House.

But the liberal groups have long had a kind of sibling rivalry, jostling over competing agendas and seeking to influence some of the same lawmakers. In forming the coalition, the groups struggled to settle on a name. Even now, two of the major players disagree about who came up with the idea of holding a march this fall.

The National Standards Scam

The National Standards Scam

Panel Proposes Single Standard for All Schools

By SAM DILLON, NY Times. March 10,2010.

“A panel of educators convened by the nation’s governors and state school superintendents proposed a uniform set of academic standards on Wednesday, laying out their vision for what all the nation’s public school children should learn in math and English, year by year, from kindergarten to high school graduation.

The new proposals could transform American education, replacing the patchwork of standards ranging from mediocre to world-class that have been written by local educators in every state.”

 So, the professional edu wonks ( not teachers) have again found the solution.  How nice. The effort will have little effect in California.  California has some of the nation’s highest standards, and lowest test scores in reading and math ( about 47 out of the 50 states depending upon the  year).

This is the politicians ( and their consultants) approach to school improvement and it will not teach a single child in California  to read or do math.

Nationalize the Banks: don't protect the bankers

The Nationalization Option
By Harold Meyerson
Washington Post
Wednesday, March 18, 2009; A13

You might think that having anted up $173 billion of our own money, we taxpayers would have some leverage at AIG, now that we own 80 percent of the shares. You might think that when chief executive Edward Liddy, a holdover appointee of Hank Paulson's, told Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner that he had just mailed $165 million of our money as bonuses to the geniuses at the firm's financial products unit -- who probably did more on a per-banker basis to destroy global capitalism than any other kindred group -- that Geithner, upon hearing this news, would have responded, "Liddy, you're fired."

But Geithner's indulgence of bankers' indulgences is fast becoming the Obama administration's Achilles' heel. The AIG debacle is the latest in a series of bewildering Geithner decisions that threaten to undermine the administration's efforts to restart the economy. So long as it's Be Kind to Bankers Week at Treasury -- and we've had eight straight such weeks since the president was inaugurated -- American banking, and the economy it is supposed to serve, will remain paralyzed. The Geithner plan to restart the banks provides huge taxpayer subsidies to hedge funds, investment banks and private equity companies to buy the banks' toxic assets without really having to assume the risk. That's right -- the same Wall Street wizards who got us into this mess, using the same securitization techniques that built mountains of debt within a shadow financial system that remains unregulated, are the saviors whom Geithner has anointed to extricate us -- with our capital, not theirs -- from the mess that they created.

A more plausible solution would be for the government to assume control of those banks that are insolvent, as it routinely does when banks go under. It could then install new management, wipe out the shareholders, take the devalued assets off the banks' books, restart lending and restore the banks to private control at a modest profit for the taxpayers. There may be reasons that Geithner's plan makes more sense than this one, but if they exist, Geithner has failed to explain them.

It's certainly not because Americans are dead set against bank nationalization: A Newsweek poll this month found that 56 percent of respondents supported it. Hell, Alan Greenspan supports it. But Geithner seems unable to imagine a banking system not run by its current leaders or owned by its current shareholders or engaged in the same arcane securitization practices that led to its collapse. An administration that is busily creating alternatives to our health-care system and our energy policies is being dragged down by a Treasury secretary who cannot conceive of an alternative to our catastrophic system of banking.

Fortunately, Geithner is not the only public servant grappling with banking's daily outrages. In the Senate, Vermont's Bernie Sanders, joined by Illinois' Dick Durbin, has introduced a bill to cap the interest rates on credit cards. Even as banks are borrowing funds from the Fed interest-free and are counting on taxpayer largess to keep them from going bust, they are still charging usurious rates of interest. In 2007, the Demos Foundation found that one-third of credit card holders were paying rates in excess of 20 percent, in some cases as high as 41 percent, and the rates have not dropped notably since then.

Once, states were able to regulate their banks' rates, but in 1978 the Supreme Court ruled that banks operating nationwide could charge whatever they wished if they moved their operations to states that had no usury laws, such as South Dakota. Shortly thereafter, Citigroup moved its credit card headquarters to South Dakota, and, as we know, Americans began funneling more and more of their money to the banks. Sanders's bill would cap interest rates at 15 percent, which is the same rate cap that Congress set 30 years ago for federal credit unions.

In 1991, New York Republican Alphonse D'Amato authored a bill to cap credit card rates at 14 percent. It passed the Senate 74 to 19, but died in the House. Today, as populist rage at the banks rises, Congress and the administration should be racing to pass the Sanders bill.

Sanders and Durbin have two things that Tim Geithner sorely lacks: a capacity to envision a less predatory, more salutary form of banking and a determination to enact such reforms. No one expects Tim Geithner to become a born-again populist, but is it asking too much of him that he come up with a plan that doesn't throw our money at the same bankers engaged in the same old practices that brought us to this pass? Is it too much to ask that he nationalize the insolvent banks and stop shoring up a bankrupt system?

Harold Meyerson, Washington Post
meyersonh@washpost.com

Nationalize the Banks : Baker

Published on Sunday, February 8, 2009 by Beat The Press
Dealing With Bankrupt Banks: Nationalization or Welfare

by Dean Baker

The media continue to do more to misinform the public than to inform
them when it comes to plans for fixing the financial system. Following
the absolute worst in journalistic practices, a front page Washington
Post article explains the Obama administration's policy by telling
readers that the "approach reflects Treasury Secretary Timothy F.
Geithner's philosophy of how governments should respond to financial
crises."

Trees had to die for this garbage? The reality is that the reporters
have no clue as to what Timothy F. Geithner's philosophy of how
governments should respond to financial crises. The reporter knows
what Timothy F. Geithner told them, so why don't they just stick to
passing this information along to readers instead of speculating about
his innermost thoughts?

The excursion into philosophy deflects readers from the real issue.
Mr. Geithner wants to use taxpayer dollars to keep bankrupt banks in
business. In effect, he wants to tax teachers, fire fighters, and Joe
the Plumber to protect the wealth of the banks' shareholders and to
pay high salaries to their top executives. No readers of this piece
would understand that this is the process being described.

The Post editorial page carried on with this deception. An editorial
on saving the banks dismissed nationalization because it would involve
the government in running the banks. Then it discusses the idea of
buying bad assets and warns, "but there is a huge risk that the
government would badly overpay in the first place."

Actually, this is not a risk, this is the point. If the government
paid the market price for these assets the banks would be bankrupt and
we would be back to step 1, nationalization. The point of buying the
bad assets is to pay too much, so that the banks can get enough money
to stay solvent. (It is worth noting that deciding how much the
government will overpay, and to whom, also involves the government in
running the banks in a really big way.)

It would be nice if the Post and the rest of the media would report
honestly on the bank bailout and stop trying to conceal plans for a
massive redistribution of wealth to the bank shareholders and their
top executives.

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy
Research (CEPR). He is the author of The Conservative Nanny State: How
the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer (
www.conservativenannystate.org) and the more recently published
Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of The Bubble Economy. He also
has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage
of economic issues. You can find it at the American Prospect's web
site.