Change From The Bottom Up On Transit

The passage of the Nadler amendment restoring $3 billion in transit funds into the stimulus is a big deal, and not because of the amount. There are still more funds for corporate tax cuts in the bill than transit, which is pathetic. But in this case, the online community (led by Chris Bowers at Open Left and leaders on this issue in the Congress like Peter DeFazio used a public/private strategy to get this passed. In public DeFazio went on Rachel Maddow's show and others to decry the pittance given to transit in the bill. In private Congresscritters and constituents whipped members of the Rules Committee to get the amendment placed on the calendar for the full House. It was a true citizen lobbying effort, and it had nothing to do with "Obama's list" or any other such thing. It was engaged citizens, mature enough to navigate the corridors of power, identifying and working toward a progressive goal. We also see progressive House members willing to buck their leadership on battles they can win, and drive successful policy.

Thing is, spending on infrastructure like rail and transit cannot end with the stimulus package. Indeed, mass transit projects require long-term funding and not random moments like an economic crisis to get a quick infusion of funds. The latest report by the American Society of Civil Engineers is out, showing historic neglect to our nation's infrastructure, and massive funding needed to fix it:

Because decades of underfunding and inattention have endangered our nation's infrastructure, $2.2 trillion in repairs and upgrades is needed over the next five years to meet adequate conditions. That's the conclusion of ASCE's new 2009 Report Card for America's Infrastructure, released today, which assigns an overall grade of D to the nation as well as individual grades in 15 infrastructure categories. Since ASCE's last assessment in 2005, there has been little change in the condition of America's roads, bridges, drinking water systems, and other public works. With the nation's infrastructure receiving renewed attention from the White House, Congress, and the public as a vital part of an economic stimulus package, the Report Card offers informed guidance from professional engineers on where funds would best be spent.

I would modify that to say "decades of conservatives telling you that 'your money' shouldn't be spent on waste," not "decades of underfunding and inattention," but I like to be specific. The report card is here, and the assessment is stark.

If we're going to both provide a long-term boost to the economy and create a more sustainable and clean energy infrastructure, we're going to need more than $3 billion dollar amendments. We need to create a National Infrastructure Bank to ensure attention is paid to this crucial sector over time. And we need to use the transportation fund and rework the formula, so that more than 20 cents on the dollar from the fund goes to transit. There are a host of things we can do, and I think the progressive movement is learning how to do it.

Roads, Rails And Subways, Please

Rep. Peter DeFazio thinks that Barack Obama's getting some bad advice:

There’s a pretty good consensus among members of the House that it should be more. But the dictate from on high in the negotiations with Obama’s advisers — I don’t think the President is there — I think he’s ill-advised by Larry Summers. Larry Summers hates infrastructure, and some of these other economists — who were very much part of creating the problem. Now they’re gonna solve the problem. And they don’t like infrastructure.

They want to have a consumer-driven recovery. We need an investment- and productivity-driven recovery for this country, a long-term recovery.

It's kind of curious that Obama's public statements and YouTube addresses always speak very highly of infrastructure improvements, but there are substantially less funding toward that in the stimulus that you'd expect if you simply read the public PR instead of the actual bill. Although, there has been a general de-emphasis recently, as energy, health care and education spending take prominence.

The reason you want lots of infrastructure spending in the stimulus is because it can both be spent quickly and leave something behind afterwards. That's true of the health care and energy spending as well, but that's not what infrastructure spending appears to be competing with. It's competing with business tax breaks that do not provide nearly the kind of "bang for your buck" that can multiply the effect of fiscal spending. These Chamber-of-Commerce-friendly provisions being put in the Senate package, for example, are appalling.

The Senate bill includes a pro-business tax provision called bonus depreciation, which would allow companies accelerated write-offs of existing equipment and inventory if they make new purchases.

The Senate version also incorporates a complicated but important provision that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups are pushing. This measure, which isn't in the House bill, would allow some companies to reduce taxes if they buy down their debt between late 2008 and 2011. The idea is to encourage companies to lower their debts, a process called de-leveraging, and thus get in better shape for an eventual economic recovery.

"We're very encouraged," said Bruce Josten, the vice president of government affairs for the Chamber of Commerce. "The specific purpose . . . is to create an incentive on a very short-term basis to have an orderly process to de-leverage that debt and strengthen their balance sheets."

The other issue here is that Americans interface with their infrastructure to a far greater degree than any other proposed spending (unless you sit on the Internets all day like me, in which case the broadband spending would apply). Therefore they know intuitively that it's crumbling, and they are desperate to see it fixed, and are even WILLING TO PAY FOR IT. Keep in mind that this passage was written by Frank Luntz.

Consider this: A near unanimous 94% of Americans are concerned about our nation's infrastructure. And this concern cuts across all regions of the country and across urban, suburban and rural communities.

Fully 84% of the public wants more money spent by the federal government -- and 83% wants more spent by state governments -- to improve America's infrastructure. And here's the kicker: 81% of Americans are personally prepared to pay 1% more in taxes for the cause. It's not uncommon for people to say they'd pay more to get more, but when you ask them to respond to a specific amount, support evaporates. (That 74% of normally stingy Republicans are on board for the tax increase is, to me, the most significant finding in the survey.)

This isn't "soft" support for infrastructure either. It stretches from Maine to Montana, from California to Connecticut. Democrats (87%) and Republicans (74%) are prepared to, in Barack Obama's words, put skin in the game, which tells you just how wide and deep the support is.

And Americans understand that infrastructure is not just roads, bridges and rails. In fact, they rated fixing energy facilities as their highest priority. Roads and highways scored second, and clean-water treatment facilities third.

You can see a road or a bridge or a new rail line or a better water treatment plant. You will use it every single day. And so the closest thing to a "bailout for Main Street," to employ that overused phrase, is an investment in immediate and long-term infrastructure spending. That can't all be accomplished by the stimulus, nor should it be - we should work for a long-term funding source through something like a National Infrastructure Bank, and we should try to alter the percentage of mass transit and rail spending in the transportation bill (right now it's 80-20 for roads). But clearly, with all the less targeted and less useful corporate tax breaks in there, infrastructure could be prioritized more.

In my mind, the two things progressives should be fighting for in the recovery bill is increased infrastructure spending at the expense of those corporate tax giveaways, particularly the benefit for lowering debt (which has no short-term benefit to the economy at all), and getting the mortgage cram-down provision into the bill, so bankruptcy judges can lower the amount that people upside down in their homes owe. Let's see how much leverage progressives have.

Major Internal White House Battle Over Iran

There are a host of conflicting signals coming out of the US on Iran, which suggests a war within the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House itself over whether or not to attack. It's very hard to decipher who is winning this debate. While Cheney usually has the upper hand in these fights (after all, it's his Administration), he's outnumbered these days, more so than when Rumsfeld was at his side. And it appears the commanders are very reluctant to go along with any attack plans for Iran as well.

Let's chart this battle on the flip.

We know that the US announced this week that it plans to engage in bilateral talks with Iran over the Iraq crisis and how it can be managed. But the Vice President was very quick to qualify that the two sides would only be talking with respect to Iraq. On other issues, such as the country's nuclear program, neoconservatives are continuing to press for attack. Take a look at what John Bolton said today:

A nuclear Iran would be as dangerous as “Hitler marching into the Rhineland” in 1936 and should be prevented by Western military strikes if necessary, according to a leading hawk who recently left the Bush administration.

John Bolton, who still has close links to the Bush administration, told The Daily Telegraph that the European Union had to "get more serious" about Iran and recognise that its diplomatic attempts to halt Iran's enrichment programme had failed.

Iran has "clearly mastered the enrichment technology now...they're not stopping, they're making progress and our time is limited", he said. Economic sanctions "with pain" had to be the next step, followed by attempting to overthrow the theocratic regime and, ultimately, military action to destroy nuclear sites.

Mr Bolton's stark warning appeared to be borne out yesterday by leaks about an inspection by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of Iran's main nuclear installation at Natanz on Sunday.

This is eerily similar to the Iraq debate, when neoconservative claims about the need to attack quickly were buttressed by leaked information coming out of the New York Times, possibly provided by the same group of people that are quoting it.

Inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency have concluded that Iran appears to have solved most of its technological problems and is now beginning to enrich uranium on a far larger scale than before, according to the agency’s top officials [...]

In a short-notice inspection of Iran’s operations in the main nuclear facility at Natanz on Sunday, conducted in advance of a report to the United Nations Security Council due early next week, the inspectors found that Iranian engineers were already using roughly 1,300 centrifuges and were producing fuel suitable for nuclear reactors, according to diplomats and nuclear experts here.

However, scrolling down the article, we see that the IAEA qualifies their finding:

It is unclear whether Iran can sustain its recent progress. Major setbacks are common in uranium enrichment, and experts say it is entirely possible that miscalculation, equipment failures or sabotage — something the United States is believed to have attempted in the past — could prevent the Iranian government from reaching its goal of producing fuel on what President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran boasts is “an industrial scale.”

The material produced so far would have to undergo further enrichment before it could be transformed into bomb-grade material. To accomplish that, Iran would likely first have to evict the I.A.E.A. inspectors, as North Korea did four years ago.

Even then, it is unclear whether the Iranians have the technology to produce a weapon small enough to fit atop their missiles, a significant engineering challenge.

The fact that we are then far away from the point at which Iran can successfully enrich enough uranium for a warhead is pushed to the side and obscured, and the information which can be twisted into a campaign of fear and warmongering but right at the top.

But despite this, not everyone within the Administration is on board for this new marketing campaign, as made most clear by Admiral William Fallon, the new chief of CENTCOM, who not only denied the release of a third carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf, but also said this:

Fallon's refusal to support a further naval buildup in the Gulf reflected his firm opposition to an attack on Iran and an apparent readiness to put his career on the line to prevent it. A source who met privately with Fallon around the time of his confirmation hearing and who insists on anonymity quoted Fallon as saying that an attack on Iran "will not happen on my watch".

Asked how he could be sure, the source says, Fallon replied, "You know what choices I have. I'm a professional." Fallon said that he was not alone, according to the source, adding, "There are several of us trying to put the crazies back in the box."

Yet while one side is trying to put the crazies back into the box, the other side is inviting the crazies over for meetings, and looking to them to incite grassroots support for an attack on Iran:

President George W. Bush met privately with Focus on the Family Founder and Chairman James Dobson and approximately a dozen Christian right leaders last week to rally support for his policies on Iraq, Iran and the so-called "war on terror."

“I was invited to go to Washington DC to meet with President Bush in the White House along with 12 or 13 other leaders of the pro-family movement," Dobson disclosed on his radio program Monday. “And the topic of the discussion that day was Iraq, Iran and international terrorism. And we were together for 90 minutes and it was very enlightening and in some ways disturbing too." [...]

Dobson went on to enumerate a series of meetings convened by Christian right leaders in Washington to discuss the supposedly existential threat to the United States from a nuclear Iran.

“I heard about this danger [from Iran] not only at the White House but from other pro-family leaders that I met during that week in Washington," he said. “Many people in a position to know are talking about the possibility of losing a city to nuclear or biological or chemical attack. And if we can lose one we can lose ten.

"If we can lose ten we can lose a hundred," he added, “especially if North Korea and Russia and China pile on.”

Since the Administration is getting such internal resistance to their saber-rattling on Iran, they're taking the case directly to the base through the conduit of the theocratic right. This also has a parallel to Iraq, as one of the last people Bush met with before the invasion was Pat Robertson.

So clearly, there's a lot of argument and arm-twisting back and forth. Into this breach step the Democrats. And they are gradually becoming more united on this issue, and more importantly appear to be taking it seriously.

House Democrats, who have been divided on whether the president needs authorization from Congress to attack Iran, suggested yesterday that they are more united on the controversial issue.

But with Iran measures possibly headed to the House floor as early as today, it is unclear if Democrats have the votes to pass legislation calling for the president to seek authorization from Congress for a preemptive strike on Iran [...]

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) promised several members, including Reps. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), and Maurice Hinchey (D-N.Y.), that she would allow for an up-or-down vote on an Iran amendment, though it is unclear which amendment or amendments will be voted on.

In the 109th Congress, Iran amendments offered by DeFazio and Hinchey were easily defeated.

But a new amendment by Rep. Robert Andrews (D-N.J.) could attract the most votes. His measure would prevent funds authorized in the bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from being obligated or expended to plan a contingency operation in Iran.

Andrews said in an interview that he has spoken to House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-Mo.) about his amendment to the pending defense authorization legislation.

The DeFazio Amendment is likely to come up for a vote today, and it's vital that you call your Representative and ask that they support it. It's going to come down to the wire to see if they can get this into the Defense Authorization Bill. With all of the turmoil surrounding where the White House is at on Iran, it's important that the Democrats are clear and direct: no funds for any activities regarding Iran without explicit authorization from the Congress.

I don't know if anyone can figure out where this will lead. What's clear is that there are still a significant number of those in power, including the Vice President and possibly the President, agitating for war with Iran. This is insanity, and those inside the Administration doing the yeoman work of trying to stop it need to be supported by the Democrats.