Features > February 20, 2006

Forget D.C.—the Battle is in the States (cont’d)

But the real danger from ALEC and its associated organizations comes from conservatives’ aim to structurally undermine the very capacities of government that restrain corporate power and to fuel campaigns that fracture progressive alliances and political power.

Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform and arguably the premiere right-wing strategist, has famously described the conservative goal as cutting government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Key to that objective is cutting tax revenues and using constitutional limits on state taxing powers to make it politically impossible to fund social needs through government action. This strategy serves not just to limit progressive policy but, by creating a limited pool of funds, pits progressive groups against each other in a fight for resources.

Conservatives also aim to shut down the enforcement of business regulations across the states. The very success of state attorneys general in bringing tobacco and financial firms to heel has led to a backlash to limit the power of attorneys general. And where citizens have the ability to enforce regulations in the courts, the right has been gutting those citizens’ legal powers. For example, one of the first acts of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s administration was forcing through restrictions on the state labor code’s Private Attorney General Act, which had given advocates greater power to enforce the state’s labor laws.

In the last few years, no issue has consumed corporate America more than shutting the courtroom door to plaintiffs injured by corporate malfeasance under the campaign of “tort reform.” Damage awards have been limited and judges have increasingly been granted the right to exclude evidence of corporate wrongdoing by limiting plaintiff witnesses. This is done through the banning of so-called “junk science,” with an often-politically connected judge (rather than the jury) getting to decide which witnesses are credible. The end result of this campaign is to make it nearly impossible for poor plaintiffs to get a day in court or to prevent a judge from overturning any judgment in their favor.

Another key strategy for the corporate right is privatization, a strategy that both undermines labor standards for government services and opens the labor market to corporate profiteering. The conservative-induced budget crises in many states have served to help this process along. In 2002, ALEC co-wrote a report with the Manhattan Institute that made privatization a key solution for balancing state budgets. They proposed that Medicaid be replaced with private Medical Savings Accounts and public schools be funded with vouchers. Similarly, prison management would be privatized. Name an area of government and conservatives are seeking to hand its operations over to corporate allies who, in turn, can eliminate labor unions and use the profits to fund more campaign contributions to their political machine.

A special case of privatization has been the recent assault on state employee pension funds. In 2005, Alaska passed legislation ending guaranteed pensions for all newly hired state employees in favor of individual accounts, and legislators in California, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Virginia are heading in the same direction.

The most obvious goal is to cut benefits for union workers by ending guaranteed benefits—using exactly the same rhetoric of “choice” that President Bush employed to sell his Social Security privatization scheme at the federal level. But what really enrages conservatives are decisions by trustees of these pension funds to use their shareholder voting power to challenge corporate abuses, such as the pension funds in Ohio, New York and California that voted to divest in firms involved in privatization. And of course, there is the direct payoff to the financial services firms who will end up administering the millions of private accounts in a privatized state pension system and collecting the billions of dollars in fees.

Defunding the left

The shift in control of financial assets from public trustees to private corporations highlights the most pervasive and dangerous goal of the right’s campaign in the states: defunding progressive institutions and thereby leaving corporations—and a few religious conservative allies—as the only forces with significant resources in politics.

Take the 2003 legislation passed in Texas that reserved family planning dollars, including those from the federal government, exclusively for healthcare providers that do not offer abortion services or referrals. This kind of proposal, coupled with “gag rules” and “abstinence only” legislation, not only shifts abortion policy, but strips resources from the broader pro-choice community. Similarly, the push for “faith based initiatives” shifts resources from nonprofits embedded in social justice networks to conservative organizations engaged in active conservative politics.

State-based “Right to Work” campaigns were conservatives’ original weapons to cut off union dues, one of the primary sources of funding for political campaigns that oppose conservatives day-in and day-out. The present round of attacks is labeled “paycheck protection”—a nice-sounding term for crippling union workers’ ability to donate political contributions through workplace deductions.

The whole right-wing attack on the civil justice system also has the effect of cutting the fees for employment and other trial lawyers, who have been strong sources of political funding for progressive causes. Passing tort reforms nationally, Grover Norquist argued back in 1999, takes “a $5-10 billion a year bite out of trial lawyer fees” and shuts down the progressive “get-out-the-vote effort, funded with money from trial lawyers.”

By operating at the state level, Norquist et al have successfully avoided the glare of media attention and the full political focus of progressives. It’s as if the right is tunneling under the foundation of progressives; by the time the ground—and financial resources—give way, it’ll be too late to save the house.

How progressives fight back

So how should progressives respond to this coordinated assault on every level of progressive policy?

The key is to fight back, coordinate our own battles, think as strategically as ALEC and its allies and win back power at the state level. As People for the American Way said in a 2003 report about ALEC: “Progressives need a collaborative and equally coordinated effort to successfully counter ALEC’s influence, expose its corporate and right-wing ties, and defeat dangerous proposals launched by this ‘common enemy.’”

While many grassroots efforts have continued across the country since that report, progressives have not established the coordinated response that is needed to beat back the right. To do so, we must take three steps.

• First, we need to develop a deep national network of progressive legislators supported by grassroots organizations. We have to establish partnerships between national organizations, grassroots activists and state legislators in each state to find state-specific ideas that represent home-grown progressivism. Not only will these networks help bring progressive-minded people together, but they also will serve as a hotbed of information exchange so progressive legislators can equip themselves with all of the information they need to promote progressive bills.
• Second, we need to promote a set of popular issues that define the progressive state agenda in the minds of voters. This could include raising the minimum wage, expanding health care, promoting family issues like paid family leave and pre-K education for all children, protecting free speech in the workplace as well as the political realm, and developing an energy independence policy that creates jobs in each state.
• Third, we must develop a set of policies that beat back the right-wing attack and turn the tables on conservatives. We should use legislation strategically to highlight the hypocrisy of groups like ALEC and put conservative legislators in the uncomfortable public position of voting either the interests of their corporate patrons or the desires of their constituents.

For instance, recent legislative initiatives in states ranging from Virginia to Michigan to preserve public lands and stop sprawl divide sprawl developers from a broader population that wants both livable communities and green areas for recreation. Similarly, targeting taxpayer subsidies specifically to entrepreneurial businesses that provide a living wage, as progressives have done in a number of cities, challenges conservatives to justify their fealty to low-wage companies. Supporting paid family leave and expanded child care for working parents forces legislators to confront empty “families values” rhetoric.

Ultimately, each strategic issue will reinforce the others, undercutting opposition coalitions while adding new allies to the progressive side, exposing the hypocrisy of the conservative agenda while clarifying the progressive program, and, step-by-step, entrenching progressive power in ways that the right wing will find harder and harder to dislodge.

Progressives need to use every tool of grassroots mobilization to build unity among our side’s state legislators and deploy both strong policies and innovative strategies to beat the conservatives at their own game. Our overarching strategy: find the best public policies and champion them with effective and cohesive messaging. That is what the new Progressive Legislative Action Network (PLAN) is all about. It’s time to finally end conservatives’ dominance of state policy. It is time for progressives to govern from the states.

This article is being published by In These Times in conjunction with the release of PLAN’s report, “Governing the Nation from the Statehouses.”

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• Reader Comments

  Testeng.

  Posted by scorp on Feb 28, 2006 at 5:24 AM

  The rational majority in the USA does not share you leftist’s fascination with progressive policies. 

  The ultimate manifestation of progressive policy and action was the Soviet Union and international communism, which resulted in about 100 million innocent dead, and which itself died of corruption and inefficiency.

  Socialist Old Europe is not doing much better.  When progressives are not outright killing their own people, as in the SU, they are lacking in human passion and failing to reproduce, as in Europe today.  Europe’s passion for disastrous socialist policies, as opposed to their passion for each other, results in such progressive policies as multiculturism and rampant bureaucracy.  But the Muslim immigrants to Europe do have a passion for each other, and if something radical does not happen soon, Europe will soon be a Muslim monoculture, with essentially no economy, huge pension obligations for old native Europeans, and no means of satisfying its obligations; you think a bunch of uneducated, unemployed Muslim youth are going to pay pension benefits for a bunch of old white Europeans?  Probably not.

  At the time of the death of the Soviet Union, progressive influence in Latin America was at a nadir, but has since made a remarkable recovery following Gramscian socialist policies.  Not to worry; the LA economy with the greatest access to resources is Venezuela, with its oil.  Senor Chavez is rapidly wrecking the Venezuelan economy, and utterly wasting his countries valuable assets on socialist schemes worthy of Stalin himself.  Poor Venezuela, but there will be a reaction.  I hope the reaction comes before the price of oil drops, and the Venezuelans have income to begin to recover from the Chavez disaster.  But don’t count on it.

  This quote from the article above illustrates nicely the folly of progressive policies:

  The shift in control of financial assets from public trustees to private corporations highlights the most pervasive and dangerous goal of the right’s campaign in the states: defunding progressive institutions and thereby leaving corporations—and a few religious conservative allies—as the only forces with significant resources in politics.

  There is an inherent assumption in the statement above that private institutions are corrupt and state institutions are not corrupt.  That is false, of course.  There were a number of high-profile scandals (Enron, WorldCom, Tyco) that developed during the Bubba Bubble and are being prosecuted by the Bush Administration.  But these cases, big as they were, are a small percentage of the American economy, and the perps are in jail or on their way to jail.

  Continued ...

  Posted by scorp on Feb 28, 2006 at 5:33 AM

  The biggest case of corruption in world history, bigger by far than the UN’s Oil-for-Food scandal, was President Johnson’s Great Society programs.  Welfare alone cost over $6 trillion, and the only practical effect was to destroy black families in America.  Using tax money to fund welfare necessarily meant that this money was not available for investment and job creation, and in fact there was a period of over a decade when the American economy did not grow. 

  During the Carter Catastrophe, the economy was stagnant, interest rates and inflation were sky-high, and employment was down.  Carter and his economists concluded that the American economy was in terminal decline, like the Soviet Union.  All because of the abuse of the American economy dating from the Great Society.  President Reagan corrected that in a hurry, and the American economy went into the greatest period of growth in history, briefly interrupted by the Clinton tax increases and the Bubba Bubble.

  In a free society, such as ours, progressive foolishness is recognized as such by the majority of citizens, who vote for free-market capitalist democracy, the proven system that generates wealth rather than destroys it, as progressive policies do.  But good rational people stare in wonder at the dishonesty, hypocrisy, and utter useless destruction generated by progressives.  Such as described in this article.

  Posted by scorp on Feb 28, 2006 at 5:33 AM

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Also by Nathan Newman and David Sirota

• Forget D.C.--the Battle is in the States