Month: December 2011

A dime’s worth of difference

by digby

There are many reasons one might say that there’s not a dime’s worth of difference betweeen the parties, but this is one very clear cut case in which they couldn’t be more different. And depending on your perspective, it may be most the important reason of all:

As the nation gears up for the 2012 presidential election, Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008. Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots. “What has happened this year is the most significant setback to voting rights in this country in a century,” says Judith Browne-Dianis, who monitors barriers to voting as co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C.

I suppose if you’ve given up on democracy and are leaning toward revolution, then you might not care about this. But everyone else should. Particularly young people, who have been specifically targeted:

A New Hampshire measure that ultimately failed earlier this year stoked Democratic concerns about the law’s true intentions. The law would have ended same-day registration and prohibited most college students from voting from their school addresses.

New Hampshire House Speaker William O’Brien, a Republican, told a tea party group that allowing people to register and vote on Election Day led to “the kids coming out of the schools and basically doing what I did when I was a kid, which is voting as a liberal. That’s what kids do — they don’t have life experience, and they just vote their feelings.”

This long term Republican project is a slow, inexorable erosion of the voting franchise, making it as difficult as possible for people of color, the elderly and the young to vote.It is an assault on the democratic process itself, the fundamental method by which we choose our representatives. Now, it’s true that we often choose unwisely and that the people are often duped into thinking that their representatives are one thing when they are another. But it’s the only method we have for democratic government so if you want to change things, this is one function that must be protected.

Both parties are woefully corrupt and inept, but only one of them is engaged in systematic vote suppression. It doesn’t make the other side heroes, but it does show one important distinction between the two.

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Martha Coakley Sues the Big Banks for Fraud

by David Atkins

You won’t see much mention of it in the traditional media, but Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley is suing the big banks for foreclosure fraud. That’s a really big deal.

Coakley will likely be most remembered in history for losing Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat to truck-drivin’ fraud Scott Brown. Admittedly, Coakley isn’t the greatest campaigner. But that’s a shame, because she has been a real champion against the overreaches of the financial sector for years. She may not possess Elizabeth Warren’s down home charm and charisma, but she just as much in the way of real courageous action on behalf of the 99%. She’s a national treasure, and I hope she learns from her defeat in the Senate race to brush up on her campaign skills to move into higher elected office one day. America needs more like her, because of moves like this (via Dave Dayen, who was all over this story yesterday):

Simply put, Coakley seeks penalties for “unfair and deceptive practices” in violation of state consumer protection laws, in particular the Massachusetts Consumer Protection Act. The top list of complaints tells the story:

1. Engaging in unfair and deceptive foreclosure practices by conducting foreclosures when the defendants lacked the right to do so and misrepresenting to homeowners their roles as mortgagees or as the holders of the mortgages;

2. Engaging in false documentation practices to facilitate their foreclosure practices;

3. Deceiving homeowners in the course of servicing mortgage loans by misrepresenting to borrowers regarding its loan modification programs, acting deceptively in implementing loan modifications and deceiving borrowers regarding foreclosure proceedings; and

4. Failing to comply with Massachusetts’ registration statute.

That’s a pretty clear rendering of what went on. Notice that she tags robo-signing and document fraud (in #2) as a facilitator for the main crime, which is to foreclose on borrowers without the legal standing to do so. To prove this, Coakley cites the Ibanez decision, and the upholding of it recently in Belivacqua, which clearly states that, under Massachusetts law, “any effort to foreclose by a party lacking jurisdiction and authority to carry out a foreclosure under the relevant statutes is void.” The layman’s term for that is “stealing homes.” Coakley is accusing banks of stealing homes. They didn’t have the proper proof of ownership to take control of the homes in a foreclosure, and they did it anyway, by forging documents and committing fraud upon state courts.

If that sounds like explosive stuff, that’s because it is. It still probably won’t land these crooks behind bars, but it will certainly be leverage toward much, much stiffer penalties against the banks than the Obama Administration is hoping for with their papered-over settlement.

As usual, Dave Dayen already has a better handle on this one than anyone in the mainstream press:

This is a big deal. In some cases there isn’t really a way to cure title: the true ownership of the property has become confused, or the statute of limitations on fixing the securitization has run out. The only way I can see where satisfaction could be reached is on a new mortgage, with the expectation of a mass principal write-down or some other accommodation, that cures title. In her press conference (which I wasn’t able to see), Coakley said that she was moving forward because the banks were proving unwilling to deliver any benefits to homeowners in the global settlement. They wanted too much liability release and wanted to deliver too little in return.

This is how you drive a bargain. If the other side refuses to go along with demands, you use the tools at your disposal. You do the investigation and you sue the pants of the offending party. You don’t go into an investigation by leaping right to the settlement. You carry out a credible threat. Maybe Coakley wasn’t a great Senate candidate. But she’s a damn sight better negotiator than anyone on the AG settlement. And that’s because she displays a responsibility to homeowners in her state and not bankers. The AG settlement is a sham, and if it wasn’t, every AG in the country would be doing this to secure the maximum benefit for homeowners as a result of their being abused in a criminal enterprise. This is a telling statement from a JP Morgan Chase spokesman:

“We are disappointed that Massachusetts would take this action now when negotiations are ongoing with the attorneys general and the federal government on a broader settlement that could bring immediate relief to Massachusetts borrowers rather than years of contested legal proceedings,” a spokesman from JP Morgan Chase tells CNBC.

Shorter version: “We really like how the AGs are trying to give us immunity. Coakley should try that.”

No doubt.

It’s important to remember the context for all this. While the Obama Administration won’t quite admit to it publicly, the policies they have pursued on this business are right in line with the Romney agenda to process foreclosures as soon as possible. The conspiracy-minded will immediately conclude that this is because of corruption, Wall Street payoffs, big bank influence, promised sinecures, lack of difference between the two parties, and all that jazz. What it really comes down to, though, is the commonly held neoliberal view that the economy cannot recover until housing and other assets do. Keep in mind that foreclosures are still at record highs. But the focus here is on overall assets, rather than the people affected.

Since conventional wisdom holds that those being foreclosed on will never be able to pay for their homes according to the original contract, that housing prices cannot continue to rise again until the foreclosures are processed, and that the economy cannot recover until housing prices do, then conventional wisdom also dictates that the banks should be allowed to push through the foreclosures as soon as possible for the good of the broader economy. That means evicting people ASAP, and letting the already teetering banks off with a slap on the wrist.

Except there are three big problems with that. The first is that housing is still overpriced in many areas, and unaffordable in others even where it may not still be technically overpriced. Attempting to reinflate that bubble is madness, a vain desire to return to an economy that cannot return, should not return, and will not return.

The second is that it’s not really the value of housing and other assets that is keeping the economy down, but wage depression and the erosion of the middle class. The housing bubble was a virulently harmful cover for what has otherwise been a sustained economic recession for the last decade in terms of middle class wage growth and standard of living. Those who weren’t buying houses and stocks during that period were actually losing ground even before Lehman’s collapse. The true health of an economy should be measured not in volatile asset growth, but in wage growth versus cost inflation, together with leisure time and other happiness index indicators. In that context, pushing millions of people out of their homes in order to boost housing prices is madness. What is really necessary is programs to keep people in their homes, with the ability to repay lenders what they can, thus keeping both the people themselves and the banks solvent and able to boost demand in the consumer economy.

But the third and most important problem is that the banks are guilty of massive systemic fraud. People are being illegally foreclosed on. Sometimes that illegality takes the form of banks that sold and resold these mortgage CDOs with so little documentation and cross-checking that no one really knows who holds the title anymore, if anyone. Sometimes it takes the form of banks sloppily foreclosing on people who were actually still paying their mortgages on time. Other times it involves fraud in the modification process.

The moral hazard the Rick Santellis of the world were screaming about in letting homeowners who bought too much house off the hook would be multiplied a hundredfold in letting the banks that were responsible for gigantic fraudulent schemes get away with it for pennies on the dollar. Letting financial institutions get away with essentially the greatest organized criminal heist of the 21st century isn’t just bad morals: it’s bad economics, too.

Thankfully, theere is a new crop of Democrats like Coakley, Schneiderman, Warren and many others out there who are ready and willing to do the right thing. They aren’t quite in positions of national leadership yet. But in time they will be.

For now, keep an eye on Massachusetts. What Martha Coakley is doing this week will end up as a bigger deal than anything in Scott Brown’s insignificant and soon-to-be-ended career.

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Radical Middle (class)

by digby

Greg Sargent reported earlier today that the latest polls show that the conservative attack on Elizabeth Warren isn’t taking hold:

The poll finds that Warren has edged ahead of Scott Brown among registered Massachusetts voters, 43-39, though that’s within the margin of error. What’s more interesting is what the internals tell us about whether each side’s message is resonating. For instance:

Warren’s candidacy appears to resonate strongly among lower and middle class voters. Respondents earning $40,000-$100,000 support Warren by 11 points (48 percent to 37 percent), while those making less than $40,000 support her by of 15 points (42 percent to 27 percent).

This, despite the fact that the primary target of efforts to link Warren to Occupy Wall Street are working class whites from places like south Boston who (the theory goes) should be culturally alienated by Warren’s embrace of the protests.

He points out that Independents aren’t rallying and that Warren is seen as less moderate that Scott Brown. But at this point in our history being perceived as “moderate” may not be the selling point people usually think it is.

Warren is the candidate most closely aligned with the Occupy Movement and has handled the attacks on her for it with spirit and intelligence. Perhaps the most important result of her successful counter attack is this:

Warren holds the edge on which candidate is trusted more on the economy (38-32) and even taxes (37-30).

Greg muses:

Perhaps Massachusetts voters don’t find the message expressed in that viral video — that it’s fair to ask the wealthy to pay a bit more in taxes to keep the society that helped them get rich functioning smoothly — to be so radical after all.

That would explain why Frank Luntz is “scared to death.”

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Is Luntz losing his touch, or are conservatives that desperate?

by David Atkins

It may be bad form to harp on the same item three posts in a row, but I can’t resist taking a few jabs at Frank Luntz based on his latest talking points for Republicans concerned about Occupy Wall Street and rising inequality. It’s important to talk about this because Luntz’ latest talking points represent a significant danger not to Democrats and progressives so much as to conservatives themselves.

The genius of Luntz has always been his ability to use the emotional power of language to bullshit the public at a slant, while maintaining a connection to reality and avoiding direct, outright lying. The “death tax” is a perfect example of this: it’s an emotionally gripping negative phrase that paints an incomplete but not entirely inaccurate picture of a tax on the estates of wealthy people after they die. “Estate tax” and “inheritance tax” are the most accurate descriptors, but do little to engage emotionally. “Paris Hilton tax” is a good progressive substitute, as it also has resonating emotional associations, while telling a progressive and positive story of the tax in just three words. It’s not the most accurate description perhaps, but neither is death tax.

But the key to making framing work is that any language you substitute has to have 1) a connection to reality; and 2) move the language more strongly in the direction of the story you want to tell in a way that can’t be co-opted by the other side. Most of Luntz’ language on inequality here fails on one or both of these fronts. Let’s peruse some examples:

1. Don’t say ‘capitalism.’

“I’m trying to get that word removed and we’re replacing it with either ‘economic freedom’ or ‘free market,’ ” Luntz said. “The public . . . still prefers capitalism to socialism, but they think capitalism is immoral. And if we’re seen as defenders of quote, Wall Street, end quote, we’ve got a problem.”

The retreat from capitalism is astonishing, if not altogether surprising. The Occupy movement can’t really take credit for this, as the polling on capitalism versus socialism has been been weak for years now since the economic crash. Still, there’s no question that with income inequality having been successfully vaulted to the forefront of the national discourse by the Occupiers, the perception of capitalism as a system has taken a hit. But to retreat from capitalism as an idea isn’t just a big loss for the right wing alone: the problem is that “economic freedom” can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. Single-payer healthcare and free public education means economic freedom. Forgiveness of student loan debt means economic freedom. George Lakoff wrote a great book Whose Freedom? on the way the Right and Left perceive that all-encompassing word. “Freedom” has always been a weak frame for the Right, because it’s so easily muddled and put in more progressive terms. Shifting from “capitalism” to “freedom” and calling that a positive message development for the Right is like calling a “retreat” an “advance in the opposite direction.” Moving on:

2. Don’t say that the government ‘taxes the rich.’ Instead, tell them that the government ‘takes from the rich.’

“If you talk about raising taxes on the rich,” the public responds favorably, Luntz cautioned. But “if you talk about government taking the money from hardworking Americans, the public says no. Taxing, the public will say yes.”

3. Republicans should forget about winning the battle over the ‘middle class.’ Call them ‘hardworking taxpayers.’

“They cannot win if the fight is on hardworking taxpayers. We can say we defend the ‘middle class’ and the public will say, I’m not sure about that. But defending ‘hardworking taxpayers’ and Republicans have the advantage.”

The problems with this approach for conservatives are numerous. First off, it’s a retreat from the issue of taxes–an acknowledgment that a word they used to spin as entirely evil (“taxes”) no longer carries such a negative punch. Instead, they are recommended to use more violent imagery of theft. The only problem with that is that everyone pays taxes: most people who aren’t libertarian anarcho-capitalists get that taxes aren’t exactly armed robbery. Besides, Robin Hood has always been and continues to be a pretty popular legend. I recently did a series of focus groups on progresssive framing with mostly political moderates, and many respondents in almost all the groups advocated forceful approaches to redistributing the wealth stolen by Wall Street. Many advocated more than just violence against their pocketbooks. So if Luntz is hoping that the rich will get sympathy by using the language of violence, he’s mistaken on two counts.

The other failure here is the sleight-of-hand equation of the super-wealthy with “hardworking taxpayers.” This won’t work, either, in large part due to right-wing message machine itself. “Hardworking Americans” has long been code in Republican and conservative Democratic circles for (mostly blue collar) white America. When we hear the phrase “hard-working American”, most of us are instantly primed to think of a Republican-voting white male construction crew foreman in a hard hat driving a Ford F-150. Those with more progressive leanings will see this phrase more inclusively. But no one sees a fat cat in a $3,000 Armani suit when you say that phrase. Using it to defend investment bankers comes off poorly and won’t really work.

4. Don’t talk about ‘jobs.’ Talk about ‘careers.’

“Everyone in this room talks about ‘jobs,'” Luntz said. “Watch this.”

He then asked everyone to raise their hand if they want a “job.” Few hands went up. Then he asked who wants a “career.” Almost every hand was raised.

“So why are we talking about jobs?”

This one really makes me laugh. It’s perhaps Luntz’ most creative approach, but it’s also the one that best shows off his glass jaw. Again, two big problems here for Republicans. First, almost no one actually believes that politicians on either side of the aisle will help them find a stable career; insofar as they do, careers come from a personal and public investment in education, which is squarely in the Dem/progressive wheelhouse.

But more importantly, it has been the conservative and neoliberal approach for many years now to move workers away from stable decades-long jobs, and into movable jobs in which they switch careers and locations several times in their life. Remember that freedom is supposed to be part of the economic conservative appeal: that means in theory that no one owes you a business model (though in practice, of course, conservatives are quite guilty of crony capitalism as even Sarah Palin pointed out), that when technology or global arbitrage kill entire industries, people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and find a different line of work, and that the free flow of capital is more important than protecting any particular career tracks. Stable careers, dependable jobs in the same field, defined pensions from those careers, all of these things that cater more to human dignity than to flow of capital are part of the progressive worldview, not the conservative one.

People aren’t about to believe that government offers them a career. They certainly don’t believe that conservative politicians want them to have a stable career. And even if they did believe that, it wouldn’t exactly help the conservative cause in the long run, but would hurt it by diluting and contradicting the conservative economic message.

6. Don’t ever say you’re willing to ‘compromise.’

“If you talk about ‘compromise,’ they’ll say you’re selling out. Your side doesn’t want you to ‘compromise.’ What you use in that to replace it with is ‘cooperation.’ It means the same thing. But cooperation means you stick to your principles but still get the job done. Compromise says that you’re selling out those principles.”

Once again, this is one-step-forward-for-two-steps-back advice from Luntz. Yes, what he is saying is true and is a great set of talking points…for liberal politicians. Polls show that liberals have a much higher respect for the notion of “compromise” than do conservatives, which is why Luntz is making this case.

But Luntz’ problem here is that his alternative is “cooperation.” Again, that’s smack in the middle of the progressive wheelhouse. Conservatives may not like compromise, but everything about the word “cooperation” brings forward imagery and associations that help the Left, not the Right. The Right is predicated on individual self-reliance, which is part of why sticking to one’s principles is most important to them. Think John Wayne. The Left is predicated on collective action and cooperation between rival groups to solve big problems against overwhelming odds. Think Avatar. “Cooperation” also assumes something less than Manichean political divides, which runs directly contrary to the Fox News mindset. Switching from “compromise” to “cooperation” for conservatives is jumping out of the frying pan into a doubly hot fire.

After some fairly boilerplate stuff (say “waste” instead of “government spending,” since Luntz has advocated for years not to attack “government” as an entity but instead attack “Washington”; indicate an understanding of the voters’ concerns; use “job creators” instead of “entrepreneurs,” which is legitimately good advice for them and the most dangerous framing challenge facing the Left at the moment), Luntz again astonishes with #9:

9. Don’t ever ask anyone to ‘sacrifice.’

“There isn’t an American today in November of 2011 who doesn’t think they’ve already sacrificed. If you tell them you want them to ‘sacrifice,’ they’re going to be be pretty angry at you. You talk about how ‘we’re all in this together.’ We either succeed together or we fail together.

For a conservative, this is utterly incompetent. One can understand what Luntz is trying to do here: paint everyone from Wall St. to the middle class as being in the same boat, and asking everyone to take a haircut in the form of entitlement cuts. But again two big problems here: first, the language of collective destiny is decidedly far Left. Second, it’s been fairly obvious to almost everyone for quite some time now that we’re not all succeeding together. A few people are succeeding fabulously, while almost everyone else is getting left in the dust. If we’re really all in this together, then it should be incumbent on those who are doing very well in this economic to make provision for those who are not, and do something to rectify the imbalance. That’s why this imagery is part of the Left’s rhetorical construct in the first place.

This is just terrible, terrible advice for conservatives. I hope they take it.

And finally, the last bits:

10. Always blame Washington.

Tell them, “You shouldn’t be occupying Wall Street, you should be occupying Washington. You should occupy the White House because it’s the policies over the past few years that have created this problem.”

BONUS:

Don’t say ‘bonus!’

Luntz advised that if they give their employees an income boost during the holiday season, they should never refer to it as a “bonus.”

“If you give out a bonus at a time of financial hardship, you’re going to make people angry. It’s ‘pay for performance.'”

Yes, Luntz is again advocating “blaming Washington.” He goes on at length about this in his book Words that Work: Washington is a cold, distant, corrupt and unfeeling place for most voters, and it’s associated with intrusive big government, which paints the Left in a negative light. Fine insofar as that goes. But the problem for Luntz here is that every poll up to this point makes clear that most voters blame the Bush Administration and Wall Street for the economic crisis. Only in the fetid fever swamps of the Fox News demographic are Barney Frank and Chris Dodd to blame. Now, many progressives see catering to Wall Street’s interests as a bipartisan affair. But telling angry voters to “Occupy the White House” instead of Wall Street is going to fall on deaf ears. Even if they are inclined to believe that the current occupant of the White House isn’t doing much to solve the problem, the only people who believe the current occupant is the cause of the problems are people already firmed entrenched in the conservative camp.

And as far as “pay for performance” goes instead of “bonuses,” that’s so far from reality that most voters will simply laugh. There’s scarcely a voter alive who doesn’t know stories of executives being grossly overcompensated even as they run their companies into the ground. In theory this is good framing for Republicans; in practice it’s so divorced from reality that it will just come off as tone-deaf.

One could argue here that Luntz is losing his magic touch here. But one could also say that conservatives are in enough of a message bind right now that this is all Luntz has to work with on the subjects of Wall St. and inequality. I tend to lean toward to the latter view.

This is a big glass jaw for the conservative movement, one they can only protect by attempting to steer the conversation to something, anything else. Dems and progressives need not to get distracted. They need to punch and punch hard.

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“It denigrates the very foundations of this country.”

by digby

Spencer Ackerman on the Senate’s latest atrocity:

Here’s the best thing that can be said about the new detention powers the Senate has tucked into next year’s defense bill: they don’t force the military to detain American citizens indefinitely without a trial. They just let the military do that. And even though the leaders of the military and the spy community have said they want no such power, the Senate is posed to pass its bill as early as tonight.

There are still changes swirling around the Senate, but this looks like the basic shape of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. Someone the government says is “a member of, or part of, al-Qaida or an associated force” can be held in military custody “without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force.” Those hostilities are currently scheduled to end the Wednesday after never. The move would shut down criminal trials for terror suspects.

But far more dramatically, the detention mandate to use indefinite military detention in terrorism cases isn’t limited to foreigners. It’s confusing, because two different sections of the bill seem to contradict each other, but in the judgment of the University of Texas’ Robert Chesney — a nonpartisan authority on military detention — “U.S. citizens are included in the grant of detention authority.”

An amendment that would limit military detentions to people captured overseas failed on Thursday afternoon. The Senate soundly defeated a measure to strip out all the detention provisions on Tuesday.

So despite the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a right to trial, the Senate bill would let the government lock up any citizen it swears is a terrorist, without the burden of proving its case to an independent judge, and for the lifespan of an amorphous war that conceivably will never end. And because the Senate is using the bill that authorizes funding for the military as its vehicle for this dramatic constitutional claim, it’s pretty likely to pass.

This is such a good idea I don’t see why we can’t apply this to criminal law as well. After all, if the government just “knows” who’s guilty and who isn’t we it could save scads of money on trials. It’s really very inefficient and shows such a lack of trust in our government to always do the right thing to force them to prove such things.

And anyway, they know exactly who the American terrorists are so there’s no need to worry that they might make an error or overreact to domestic dissent. It’s not like they’ve ever done that before or anything.

Let’s just let them do their job, shall we? If you’re innocent you have absolutely nothing to worry about. After all, except for that little issue with the WMD in Iraq, the government’s hardly made any mistakes at all lately.

Update: Emptywheel has more

Ebenezer Newt

by digby

He really wants to make poor kids replace janitors in their own schools for half the money. There’s just no other way to see it.

Yes, he says he wants to do this in order that they learn “how to work” because they never see people working.

Therefore, one must assume that the janitors, office workers and teachers in their school are not really working — which raises the question as to why having the kids take over these “non-jobs” would serve any purpose other than cheap labor. But then, that would be the point, wouldn’t it?

Newtie knows that he must attempt to articulate his fundamental loathing for the poor in a way that sounds as if he’s actually helping those he wishes to exploit. He’s been doing it for 30 years. The problem for him is that there’s just something so unctuous and insincere in his delivery that he can never sell it very well.

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Hey Luntz. I gotcher job creators for ya right here

by digby

Earlier, I published a post about Frank Luntz’s rebranding of capitalism and one of his big points was to replace the word “entrepreneur” with “job creator.”

Here’s another view:

I’m a very rich person. As an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, I’ve started or helped get off the ground dozens of companies in industries including manufacturing, retail, medical services, the Internet and software. I founded the Internet media company aQuantive Inc., which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) in 2007 for $6.4 billion. I was also the first non-family investor in Amazon.com Inc.

Even so, I’ve never been a “job creator.” I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.

That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be.

Read the whole piece. The funny thing is that it used to be conventional wisdom.

This is a person who really doesn’t want to kill the golden goose of capitalism but would like to save it. It doesn’t speak well for the future of capitalism that there are so few entrepreneurs like him.

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Losing their religion

by digby

So chief Republican propagandist (and deeply spiritual) Frank Luntz says that he’s “frightened to death” of Occupy Wall Street because it is affecting the way people think about capitalism. But he’s got some new language to brainwash the people into embracing it again without know what they’re embracing.

I didn’t know that the word “capitalism” is now a dirty word so they’re changing it to mean something it doesn’t mean at all: economic freedom.”Tax the rich” is quite popular so they have to change it to “take from the rich”, (which strikes me as pathetically lame). They can’t say they support the “middle class” obviously, so they are going to change the term to “hardworking taxpayers.”

He replaced entrepreneurs with “job creators”, says they should use “waste” instead of “spending” and tells them to “always blame Washington” for everything. (You wouldn’t want to blame our hard working job creators.) He says they need to say to OWS protesters that they “get it.” and suggests they replace the word “compromise” with “cooperate” and they should never use the word “sacrifice” because it makes people really angry. (He’s right about that one.) Oh and the word “bonus” should be replaced with “pay for performance,” which is so hilarious that it proves Luntz is losing his touch.

Lessons from Egypt: Occupy the Democratic Party

by David Atkins

The election results in Egypt are in. As expected, the Islamists have taken a commanding lead:

Islamists claimed a decisive victory on Wednesday as early election results put them on track to win a dominant majority in Egypt’s first Parliament since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, the most significant step yet in the religious movement’s rise since the start of the Arab Spring.

The party formed by the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s mainstream Islamist group, appeared to have taken about 40 percent of the vote, as expected. But a big surprise was the strong showing of ultraconservative Islamists, called Salafis, many of whom see most popular entertainment as sinful and reject women’s participation in voting or public life.

Analysts in the state-run news media said early returns indicated that Salafi groups could take as much as a quarter of the vote, giving the two groups of Islamists combined control of nearly 65 percent of the parliamentary seats.

Most media sources are concentrating on the further rise of conservative religious power in the Middle East after the election. But that perspective obscures a greater lesson: in electoral democracy, those who are best organized are the ones who usually win, no matter how inspiring the revolutionary movement may be.

Consider Egypt: in the months and days leading up to the vote, there were multiple calls to delay the election. Why? Because in the divide between secular and religious revolutionaries in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis were much better organized than the more liberal opposition.

More secular and liberal Egyptians wanted more time to organize their political parties; the Brotherhood wanted to hold elections as quickly as possible. The Brotherhood got its wish, and the result is that the better organized Islamists won the day handily, in spite of the fact that it was the secular and liberal Egyptians who helped propel the anit-Mubarak regime forward.

That victory came at the expense of the liberal parties and youth activists who set off the revolution, affirming their fears that they would be unable to compete with Islamists who emerged from the Mubarak years organized and with an established following. Poorly organized and internally divided, the liberal parties could not compete with Islamists disciplined by decades as the sole opposition to Mr. Mubarak. “We were washed out,” said Shady el-Ghazaly Harb, one of the most politically active of the group.

Although this week’s voting took place in only a third of Egypt’s provinces, they included some of the nation’s most liberal precincts — like Cairo, Port Said and the Red Sea coast — suggesting that the Islamist wave is likely to grow stronger as the voting moves into more conservative rural areas in the coming months. (Alexandria, a conservative stronghold, also has voted.)

The preliminary results extend the rising influence of Islamists across a region where they were once outlawed and oppressed by autocrats aligned with the West. Islamists have formed governments in Tunisia and Morocco. They are positioned for a major role in post-Qaddafi Libya as well. But it is the victory in Egypt — the largest and once the most influential Arab state, an American ally considered a linchpin of regional stability — that has the potential to upend the established order across the Middle East.

There is a lesson here. No matter how well-intentioned the revolutionaries and no matter how successful the revolution, at the end of the day organizational power will step in to win the day. It always does. That organizational power can be a force for good or for ill. But especially in democratic societies, the ability to leverage organized support toward specific ends will always trump anarchic mass sentiment. There’s a reason that feel-good stories like the original Star Wars trilogy end with the death of the Emperor and the destruction of the Imperial regime; good storytellers spare us the ugly aftermath of the fractious rebuilding process because the results are rarely pretty.

It’s easy to understand the sentiments of those who seek anti-organizational and apolitical solutions to America’s problems, and who see the system as so hopelessly corrupted that it’s barely worth voting much less becoming organizationally involved. But unfortunately, those who either refuse to or fall behind in participation in the process, like the liberals and secularists in Egypt, will find themselves at the mercy of those who do.

Insofar as the Tea Party was ever anything but a Koch-funded and Fox-News-promoted astroturf vehicle on the Right (and there is much evidence that it was never anything but a Republican rebranding campaign), it was co-opted and subsumed within the conservative organizational framework. Any anti-Wall Street sentiment that ever existed within the Tea Party has been crushed between Republican organizational dynamics. To its credit, the Tea Party did attempt to organize within and against the GOP insofar as it could in order to change the GOP to suit its more libertarian viewpoints. That has resulted in a shift of the Republican Party distinctly to the Right, partly as a result of rabid engagement against against mainstream Republican candidates. Remember that the Tea Party actually spent most of its time engaged in primary wars within the GOP, demanding allegiance to its goals from would-be politicians. But most of the energy behind that movement has largely dissipated, as the GOP now faces an all-too-establishment choice between Romney and Gingrich.

Similar lessons will apply for the Occupy movement. No matter how successful the movement may become in terms of shaking the foundations of the financial elite, power will ultimately be leveraged at the ballot box or not at all. As in Egypt, those who ignore or are unable to leverage the power of organization will be condemned to be subject to those who do have that power.

As we approach 2012, Occupiers will face of a myriad of choices regarding how and to what extent to engage in electoral politics. If they choose not to engage at all, the movement will ultimately fizzle and/or be co-opted. If they choose to engage simply on behalf of (mostly Democratic) candidates who support justice for the 99% against the 1%, all that will be accomplished is opening up the gap for Democratic victories in the endless electoral pendulum, without extracting necessary concessions from Democratic politicians in terms of governance on behalf of the 99%. If they choose to engage on behalf of some third party, they will ultimately be ground into the dust like every other third party movement in recent history.

My advice: Occupy the Democratic Party. If Occupiers want to make a real difference over the long-term, they will do what the secularists in Egypt would have had to do from nearly the beginning: organize, organize, organize. In the American two-party system, that means taking the Democratic Party over from the inside just as movement conservatives took the GOP over starting in the 1960s and 1970s, when the hippie revolution gave way to Richard Nixon, then Jimmy Carter, then Ronald Reagan.

If Occupiers can bend the Democratic Party to their will now and over the long haul, they will have made a lasting accomplishment that cannot be co-opted. If they eschew organizational power and electoral processes as unclean and beneath their lofty goals, they will suffer the same fate as young liberal Egyptians have at the hands of the conservative religious parties.

Update: Turns out George Lakoff said pretty much the same thing a few days ago. And no, I swear I hadn’t seen that when I wrote this. It’s the next logical step.

To clarify, occupying the Democratic Party doesn’t necessarily mean getting involved within the Party–though it certainly can mean that, and that’s the route I’ve chosen to take. But it can also mean doing something similar to what Grover Norquist has done: separate organizations that are designed to instill fear of the base and of primary challenges in Party politicians. For those who follow Southern California politics, Marcy Winograd may not have defeated Jane Harman, but the threat made Harman vote much more progressively in Congress.

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