As featured on p. 218 of "Bloggers on the Bus," under the name "a MyDD blogger."
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
IL-05 Results
The results of the IL-05 election to replace Rahm Emanuel are trickling in, and well, Tom Geoghegan's currently in 7th place out of 12. 71% of the vote is in. The turnout is awful, but the unknown candidates aren't benefiting. Although, it looks like Mike Quigley will end up the eventual winner, despite SEIU spending something like $250,000 on ads for Sara Feigenholtz (she's in 3rd right now). Quigley's the only politician I remember from when I lived in this district a decade ago, and I remember him being fairly decent, though others would know better. He got the newspaper endorsements and has a really good record on environmental issues.
It's something of a shame that Geoghegan couldn't use all the netroots energy and cash to forge something that would have been really special. But these races are notoriously difficult. Anyway, we fight on.
Next Tuesday voters in Illinois will vote to fill the vacant seat of Rahm Emanuel in a special election, with 23 candidates on the ballot. With the, er, spotlight on Illinois politics recently, and the fact that this is Rod Blagojevich's old seat, the Democratic establishment and Chicago political leaders have largely stayed out of the race. With no front-runner, there is a real opportunity for progressive leader Tom Geoghegan to win. Harold Meyerson writes a great profile:
Little about Tom Geoghegan resembles Ronald Reagan, but his hard-to-decipher last name rhymes with the former president's. A wry, heterodox liberal intellectual with a lifelong passion for American workers, Geoghegan first burst on to the literary and political scene with a great, slightly crazed ode to Chicago -- in the best tradition of Hecht, Algren and Bellow -- that ran in the New Republic in the 1980s and then with his 1991 book "Which Side Are You On? Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back," which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has since written four other books, some on the shambles that is the American legal system. He's became the go-to lawyer for Chicagoans who've lost their jobs through discrimination or who've been denied the pay they've earned. And now, he's the congressional candidate who supports single-payer health care, expanding Social Security to compensate for the decimation of private pensions, and government investment to rebuild our offshored manufacturing sector.
I confess that I'm both a friend of Tom's and a Geogheganologist -- a distinction I attained when, for a year, I edited the back-page columns he was then writing for the American Prospect. A typical Geoghegan column combined the sense of outrage that all columnists need with broad historical knowledge and a particularly Chicagoan feel for life as it is actually, grubbily, lived. One column on mass transit cut from scenes of Geoghegan stuck in traffic on the way to O'Hare to Henry Clay's case for internal improvements (roads and canals) to a discussion of how much easier it is to get from Dublin to Madrid than it is to get from Chicago to Detroit. In another column he wrote before Wall Street's collapse, Geoghegan lamented the high percentage of elite college graduates who funneled themselves into finance, and he characterized the bank bailout policy of the Bush administration as "the new social contract: In Tribeca, at least, no kid will ever lose his (or her) first (or second) condo." Another time, he wondered "why, in the party of William Jennings Bryan, is there no one demanding an interest cap on our Visa cards and our MasterCards," also noting that in Chicago, "payday lenders charge more than the Mob wants for juice loans." In the collected works of Tom Geoghegan, the value of social and economic ideas and practices is set by the way they play out on the streets [...] while the nation is going through its first real systemic economic crisis since the Depression, a guy who can knowledgeably compare public works programs clear back to the Jefferson administration and who can sniff out a bankers' relief program a mile away seems to me exactly what Congress needs.
Meyerson follows endorsements in the last couple of days by three of Chicago's legendary progressive reformer elders, Abner Mikva, Dr. Quentin Young, and Leon Despres, and from one of Tom's former opponents, Marty Oberman. Many in the Inside the Beltway Establishment have other favorite candidates. Predictably Emily's List endorsed a woman, basically their only criteria for endorsement these days. And some of the labor unions we've grown to trust came out for those who have scratched their backs in the grubby world of backroom politics. DFA, The Nation, Progressive Democrats of America, the American Nurses Association, the Greater Chicago Caucus, the Teamsters and Steelworkers unions and a long list of progressive writers from Katha Pollitt and David Sirota to Thomas Frank. Garry Wills, Don Rose and James Fallows have come out for Tom.
Geoghegan is the real deal and he can win. You can help.
As we await the carnage that the Axis of Nelson-Collins brought to the recovery bill, my thoughts turn to what could happen if some real progressives were in positions of power in Washington. We have an opportunity in Rahm Emanuel's old seat, IL-05, where I lived for a while a decade ago (and I believe my Congressman was one Rod Blagojevich).
Earlier this week I was able to attend an event with Thomas Geoghegan, a labor lawyer who has dedicated his life to helping working people, running for Congress as a first-time politician. He has a completely different conception of what's needed right now, a three-point plan that you'll almost never hear from anyone in the political arena. He describes it in this video:
1) Increase Social Security benefits so we have a livable public pension system comparable to the rest of the developed world. Businesses have all but eliminated their pensions, and Social Security is not enough to survive.
2) Single-payer national health care now. It is crucial we take over the non-wage labor costs from the private sector so they can increase their global competitiveness and stay in business. Insurance company overhead is a waste of money and single payer is the way to fund health care and hold down costs.
3) Reduce the interest rates on what the financial sector can take out of the economy, and in exchange for bailing out the banks (and taking them over temporarily), cancel consumer debt just like we're canceling the debt from toxic securities.
Geoghegan's overall goal is to increase the economic security of working people while making US businesses more competitive globally. The key point he said is that "people have no sense that they get anything back on their taxes" and that we'll never win the long-standing tax battle if we don't offer something tangible. In European nations the tax base is higher, but people are happy to pay it because they see a return. His smaller point was that the banks have become the real economy instead of the industrial sector, and this has taken all the creative energy of the economy away from entrepreneurship and into the financial sector.
This is a radical departure from how most politicians talk about the economy. Instead of placating an interest group or tailoring a message to the people who can fund a campaign, Geoghegan is really talking about the return of the social contract, where work is rewarded and government is on the side of the people. We're so unused to hearing these ideas, so ready to dismiss them as unworkable, that these avenues get permanently closed off. It's time to shift the debate.
In many ways, the stimulus package debate has been overshadowed somewhat by the request for the second half of the bailout money, orchestrated by both the current and the next President. I think the reason for this is that we're starting to hear a steady drumbeat from banks that need more cash infusions to survive in this economic climate. The first tranche of money hasn't fixed the balance sheets of these companies, and it indeed might have encouraged them to take larger write-downs because they could absorb them. Bank of America is asking for billions in US aid because they claim not to have known the extent of the rot inside Merrill Lynch when they bought it. Citi is about to fall over if they don't get more funds. And that's just the beginning.
On Tuesday, Mr. Bernanke publicly made the case that one of the most unpopular and most scorned programs in Washington — the $700 billion bailout program — needs to pour hundreds of billions more into the very banks and financial institutions that already received federal money and caused much of the credit crisis in the first place [...]
Since last September, no major banks have failed and the credit markets have thawed somewhat.
But analysts said the problems are still acute, if less apparent on the surface. Banks have received $200 billion in fresh capital from the Treasury since last fall and have borrowed hundreds of billions of dollars more from the Fed. But in the meantime, the economy fell into a severe downturn last fall that is likely to continue until at least this summer.
Industry analysts estimate rising unemployment and business failures will lead to another $500 billion to $750 billion of losses in coming months. That could bring total losses from the credit crisis to $1.5 trillion to $1.8 trillion, twice as high as earlier estimates.
Bernanke expanded upon this at a speech this week, saying that the recovery package would be "doomed" if the financial and credit markets weren't fixed. And we're starting to see the same kind of wrangling for more bailout money from the financial sector and their establishment cheerleaders, warning that even more than the $700 billion allocated must be put into the banks.
I agree with Atrios - the time has come to talk about nationalization. There is no oversight over this huge amount of money lent by both the TARP program and the Fed, which is only now coming under scrutiny. It's been a slush fund of close to $2 trillion dollars, without a sense of who got that money or where all of it is going.
Indeed, Treasury is already promising more money to the banks before they are even authorized by the Congress to do so. Sadly, the way it has been structured, it will be very unlikely for Congress to stop the delivery of the other $350 million. They have to vote affirmatively to keep it away from the President, which the Senate will do today, but the President can veto, and then override would require a 2/3 vote. I don't think you'll see that kind of support for holding back the money in Congress.
What ought to be done is that Congress should establish some oversight, and the TARP funds should be committed in a radically different way. On the first point, Barney Frank has worked to draft a bill putting restrictions on the bailout money, which include limiting executive compensation and demanding information on where the money is going. But top Democrats feel that the bill doesn't need to become law and that it should be seen more as a guideline, and Obama ought to be trusted to do the right thing. This isn't about taking someone at his word, this is about Congress fulfilling its oversight duties. So that should clearly be passed as a statute with the force of law instead of wishful thinking.
1. Do not use any of the money to buy stock in -- that is, to "recapitalize" -- the banks. This is a sinkhole of cosmic proportion. Citigroup, to take but one example, has so far received $45 billion of taxpayer cash since early October (along with some $250 billion in taxpayer-supported guarantees from the Fed for junky assets on Citi's balance sheets), and is in far worse financial shape than it was three months ago. Perhaps, someday over the rainbow, these shares in Citi along with Citi's lousy assets will be worth more than taxpayers paid for them. But we're not in Wonderland yet and probably never will be. Giving Citi or any other big bank more taxpayer money is analogous to giving it to Bernard Madoff. It's a giant Ponzi scheme. The money will disappear.
2. Do not use the money to buy the banks' "troubled" assets. This might have made sense a year ago when the proportion of such assets -- which include mortage-backed securities as well as loans to private-equity partnerships that pissed them away -- was relatively small. But these days a huge and growing proportion of bank assets are "troubled." (It's also a huge waste of taxpayer dollars for the Fed to exchange them for Treasury bills.)
3. Prohibit any bank that gets TARP II funds from issuing dividends, purchasing other companies, or paying off creditors.
4. Bar any bank that gets TARP II funds from paying its executives, traders, or directors more than 10 percent of what they received in 2007.
5. Require that any bank getting TARP II funds be reimbursed by its executives, traders, and directors 50 percent of whatever amounts they were compensated in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008. This compensation was, after all, based on false premises and fraudulant assertions, and on balance sheets that hid the true extent of these banks' risks and liabilities.
6. Insist that at least 90 percent of the TARP II money be used for new bank loans. If the banks cannot find suitable lenders, they should return the money.
Absolutely. Obama says that the second tranche will be used to limit foreclosures. That's simply a wiser use of the money rather than throwing it into the sinkhole provided by the banks. It would provide a bottom-up stimulus and generate actual economic activity. Reich has an excellent suggestion for how this could be done.
Meanwhile, Congress should attach to TARP II -- or to the upcoming stimulus bill -- a small change in the bankruptcy law allowing homeowners to renegotiate their mortgages on their primary residences (as owners of second homes and commercial real estate can already do). The practical effect will be to give homeowners more bargaining leverage with their mortgage banks, and save at least 800,000 homes from foreclosure. Yes, in theory, holders of mortgage-backed securities will take a hit but as a practical matter they've already taken a hit because the securities (and the securities in which they're wrapped) are already deemed to be junk. At the least, this change will put a bit of a damper on the rising number of foreclosures. A home that's occupied by a family paying something on their mortgage is far better than a home that's empty, on which no one is paying anything.
And the money from TARP could be used to sweeten the pot for lenders to get moving on these workouts, though ultimately they're going to have to take a haircut.
This ought to be a bright line for progressives. Bankruptcy and foreclosure reform ought to be a part of this bill - and we should be willing to fight for it. Thomas Geoghegan, the progressive candidate running to replace Rahm Emanuel in IL-05, has a petition calling for no more blank check bailouts.
We call on Congress to reject President Bush’s request for another $350 billion blank check bailout. The Congress must follow their constitutional role and provide guidelines and restrictions on any money given to banks and Wall Street. These include:
Give priority – directly if possible – to help people keep their homes. Get public interest representatives or directors on bank boards in all of the banks receiving money. Penalize any bank that has been hoarding money from the first bailout In a time of economic hardship, with people losing their jobs, health care, pensions, and homes, Americans need economic security. We need a raise in social security, less debt, and single payer universal health care reform.
Where Progressive Leadership and D-Day Obsessions Collide
Thomas Geoghegan, who is running for Congress to replace Rahm Emanuel, already had me excited about the potential for new progressive leadership. When he wrote the definitive brief against the absurd Senate appointment process today, that just made it all the sweeter.
IN 2009 four new senators will slip into office — all in violation of the Constitution, which requires a special election to fill a Senate vacancy. Colorado, Delaware, hapless Illinois and star-struck New York will have senators “elected” by a single voter, the governors who appoint them.
It may have been a while since many of us read the 17th Amendment, which was ratified in 1913. Its first paragraph replaced the indirect election of senators by state legislatures with “direct” popular election by the voters. The second paragraph, which you may have skipped in school, deals with vacancies. It states that when seats open up unexpectedly, governors “shall issue writs of elections to fill such vacancies.” The plain enough meaning is that the governor will issue an order for a special election. But for decades now governors have opted not to issue writs directing new or special elections. Why are they ignoring the Constitution? To increase their own power, of course.
I have been saying this at least since the Blagojevich thing sparked up. The 17th Amendment allows for an appointment if the legislatures so choose, but it does NOT cancel out the plain statement that governors must issue orders for special elections. Governors have chosen to move these special elections until the next general election, but that does not make it legal.
The Senate appointment process invites corruption, as any action that puts power in the hands of the few does. It ought to be abolished so the people can choose their own representatives. Geoghegan argues that the Supreme Court could easily fix this by reinterpreting the law. If they choose not to, I'm sure someone would be willing to push for clarity in Congress. Someone like Tom Geoghegan.
Thomas Geoghegan announced his campaign on Daily Kos today. You're going to like his platform.
We’re deep in an economic crisis unlike any other we’ve known. It may last years. We need new and creative ways to protect working Americans, especially our older working people who have no real pensions to live on.
For years we’ve heard the doomsayers: "We can’t afford Social Security." "We can’t afford ‘single-payer’ national health." One thing we all learned from the $700 billion bail out: We’ve got the money to do all of this and more.
At the moment, the Federal Reserve is literally printing money, to give not billions but trillions to banks and financial firms. To the people of this District, the banks and others have gotten their money. Now it’s your turn. Here’s the bailout I will go to Congress to get:
First, I want to expand Social Security, our public pension system, to replace - not overnight but in stages - the private pension system which has collapsed. Social Security now pays about 38 to 39 percent of your working income. In other developed countries, it averages 65 percent. That’s where our fiscal stimulus should be: a commitment to reach this goal, a public pension that ordinary working people can live on.
Second, we have to move to single payer health care program, at least in phases: we might begin with extending Medicare to children, but the government should ultimately be the single payer for all. That’s not because single payer is the only ethical and efficient way to protect us all. No, it’s also because it is crucial to making us competitive globally. Through single payer and expanded Social Security, the goal is to pick up the "non-wage" labor costs that employers now have to pay. That’s already how other countries out-compete us: they have the government and not the private employer pick up these non-wage health and pension costs.
Unless we have government pick up the costs of pensions and health care, our companies can’t compete, and we’ll go on piling up huge trade deficits. We’ll have debacles like GM, which has collapsed in part because of the health and pension costs that the federal government should have been paying all along.
For years, the conservatives have said: "We can’t do this. The money isn’t there." Well, the money is there. It was there for the Iraq war, a colossal waste of money - and for the bailout, the first half of which has been a colossal waste as well. And if we now have the government pick up non-wage labor costs with the use of general revenues, we will in fact make it cheaper and easier for our companies to hire. This is in fact the best and most realistic approach for a long term recovery.
This is a serious leader, committed to improving the lives of working people through policy. It's the epitome of what you would want in a public servant. Plus, he'd drive conservatives crazy.
Tom's website is here. You can donate through ActBlue here. I'll be doing so today. Join me, won't you?
One thing that progressives are going to have to show in the coming months is that their electoral resurgence isn't just a function of President Bush's disaster or Barack Obama's charisma - it's that people are thirsting for progressive ideas on a macro level, and if the current crop of Democratic leaders aren't willing to go there, then these same people are willing to find someone who is. There are going to be a crop of new organizations designed to hold Democrats accountable and elect more bold progressives, but the first chance is going to come fairly quickly, on March 3. Rahm Emanuel's seat in Congress will be up for a special election then, and labor lawyer and writer Thomas Geoghegan is among a crowded field running for the seat. This being Illinois politics, you would expect a machine candidate to be a lock. But it's a crowded field, and with the Blagojevich mess swirling everyone's a little gun-shy to try and influence the race. Not to mention that Emanuel and Blagojevich, the last two holders of this seat, are on tape at least discussing the seat in part.
The basic background on Tom Geoghegan is here, written by his Chicago friend Rick Perlstein. Having been a friend of Geoghegan's for most of my life, I couldn't be more enthusiastic about his deciding to run.
To the extent Tom is known publicly, it's mainly because of his books, like Which Side Are You On?, The Secret Lives of Citizens, and In America's Courts. These really are masterful and original pieces of thinking and writing, which most writers would be content with as their entire contribution to the human endeavor during the period Tom has turned them out. Which Side, which was published in 1991, begins this way:
'Organized labor.' Say those words, and your heart sinks. I am a labor lawyer, and my heart sinks. Dumb, stupid organized labor: this is my cause.
The remarkable thing is that in Geoghegan's case writing has been a sideline. Day by day for several decades he has been a lawyer in a small Chicago law firm representing steel workers, truckers, nurses, and other employees whose travails are the reality covered by abstractions like "the polarization of America" and "the disappearing middle class." Geoghegan's skills as a writer and an intellectual are assets but in themselves might not recommend him for a Congressional job. His consistent and canny record of organizing, representing, and defending people who are the natural Democratic (and American) base is the relevant point.
A labor liberal in Congress? Pinch me.
The fact that so many candidates are vying for the seat may actually work to Geoghegan's benefit. I think progressives should get on board with him. There's a Facebook group here (no website yet, but ActBlue is taking donations).
I agree with the consensus that the Blagojevich/Obama "scandal" was basically manufactured, and the media ran with it because scandalmongering is really all they know, but I find it hard to continue with the story without acknowledging that Rahm Emanuel is implicated, though on a level wholly separate from Obama's Senate seat. Indeed it is becoming more and more clear that Emanuel wanted help from Blagojevich in making sure Rahm's House seat would be available to him after he finished his stint as White House Chief of Staff.
In addition to talking with Gov. Blagojevich about who would fill President-elect Barack Obama's Senate seat, Obama's newly minted chief of staff had something else on his mind: his own congressional seat.
Just after accepting the top post with Obama, Rahm Emanuel discussed with Blagojevich the possibility of keeping his congressional seat "warm" for him for a couple of years, the Sun-Times has learned.
Emanuel expressed interest in returning one day to his elected position because he was on track to become U.S. House speaker, the Sun-Times previously reported [...]
Days after Emanuel and Blagojevich spoke about Emanuel's seat, the governor is overheard telling aides on secret wiretaps he wanted Emanuel "to get the word today," about raising money for the governor and that when "[Emanuel] asks me for the Fifth CD thing, I want it to be in his head." The "Fifth CD" was a reference to Emanuel's 5th Congressional District seat.
Blagojevich couldn't appoint a successor to Emanuel. But he held the seat before Rahm did, and between the two of them, there is plenty of local power that could be leveraged.
This business with IL-05 wasn't included in the Obama transition report about contacts between their office and Blagojevich's. Marcy Wheeler thinks that was a real mistake because it's bound to come up more and more as this scandal drags on. In fact, Blagojevich's lawyers want Emanuel to testify in the impeachment hearings, where that contact could certainly re-emerge:
In a dramatic development in the ongoing impeachment proceedings, lawyers for Gov. Rod Blagojevich want two key aides to President-elect Barack Obama and U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. to testify before the House impeachment committee.
Sources tell CBS 2 that a letter sent by Blagojevich's lawyers to committee chairman, State Rep. Barbara Currie, asks that the committee subpoena Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, senior adviser Valerie Jarrett and Jackson.
Blagojevich is merely riding the scandal wave by pushing focus onto the more enticing aspects of the probe, like Emanuel and Jackson, rather than the repeated and numerous proposed pay-for-play schemes with local hospitals, the Chicago Tribune, etc.
The press clearly wants to extend this story and now they have a vehicle - focusing on Emanuel's conduct and trying to get that to rub off on Obama. I really hope that it was worth it to Emanuel to potentially damage an incoming President just because he was more interested in his personal aggrandizement and hopes for becoming House Speaker.
Fortunately, there's another committed progressive looking at the IL-05 seat, one who would be the polar opposite of Rahm Emanuel if he wins. Labor lawyer and author Thomas Geoghegan is exploring a run, and he has a long record of fighting for working people and exposing Republican hypocrisy. His single piece of proposed legislation, to allow workers to sue management in court for union-busting activities, is enough on which to hang a whole campaign, if you ask me.
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