You know how big-company lobbyists get some states to pass laws that block cities and counties from doing something about problems like tobacco or guns? Well there is a “trade” treaty called the Trans-Pacific Partnership in the works that sets down international rules that would keep our Congress and our states from regulating the giant multinational corporations. If we can keep Congress from being stampeded into passing “Fast Track” maybe we can stop this corporate takover — or at least get the terms changed in our favor.

I hosted an FDL Book Salon yesterday, over at firedoglake (FDL), named FDL Book Salon Welcomes Lori Wallach, The Rise and Fall of Fast Track Trade Authority. In the setup for the conversation I wrote,

You think trade is complicated, technical, boring, so you tune out and don’t pay attention to the issue… And then BANG, you’re told they are moving the facility where you work out of the country and you are going to be laid off, but if you want your severance and the chance to collect unemployment you have to train your replacement. Not long after that, in other factories and offices everyone is told to accept wage and benefit cuts or they’ll move that facility out of the country, too.

… After a year you finally land a job! The job is you have to dress up like a duck and stand on a corner waving a sign. These are the things that all of this arguing about trade is about. Welcome to the new America.

Fast Track

Lori Wallach’s book talks about a process called “Fast Track” which means Congress agrees to drop that pesky “checks and balances” thing in our burdensome Constitution. They agree not to make any amendments to trade agreements, not to allow any filibusters, and agree to vote in a serious hurry once the agreement is ready. It also is the only time the executive branch writes laws instead of Congress, so we don’t have those pesky transparent hearings or those pesky citizens weighing in.

The short time before a vote enables giant corporations to do one of those multi-million-dollar “crisis” run-up campaigns they do to stampede Congress into something. While this is going on the lobbyists will argue that turning down the agreement will damage US credibility and foreign relations. They will argue that the agreement will “create jobs.” They will say and promise whatever they need to say and promise to get COngress to pass it.

Fast Track is part of how we ended up with our enormous trade deficit that is draining around $600 billion a year out of our economy. But here is the good news: Fast Track is not currently in place. It expired several years ago and Congress has not renewed it. But the new nominee for US Trade Representative said last week that he is going to push for Fast Track. (Please click through to see the charts.) So we have to keep this from happening.

If we can keep Congress from passing Fast Track then there is more time to build opposition to TPP as it look like now, and we can pressure Congress to either pass amendments that put protections for working people, consumers, the environment, smaller-than-giant businesses, human rights and other non-multinational-corporate interests into the agreement — or just block it if all else fails.

Trans-Pacific Partnership

The TPP is the big enchilada of trade agreements. It is an attempt by the billionaires and their giant multinationals to bypass the stirrings of democracy that have been taking place around the world. It is being negotiated of, by and for the giant multinationals with pver 600 corporate advisors involved — but not even our own Congress. In my CAF post, TPP: A Deregulation Treaty Not A Trade Treaty, I wrote about how the negotiating process itself is a setup,

“The upcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement is using a process that is rigged from the start. It is not being negotiated by governments for the benefit of their people, it is being negotiated by executives (or future executives/lobbyists currently in government) largely for the benefit of the giant corporations they serve. The process has these giant corporations “in the loop” but groups citizens, working people, consumers, the environment, human rights groups and especially democracy are not part of the process. That can only go one way: if you don’t have a seat at the table you are on the table — the meal.”

Got that? ONLY corporate representatives are party to the negotiations. Not even our Congress is a party to the negotiations, and the terms negotiated so far are being kept secret even from them!

Only a small part of this agreement is about trade. The rest is about things that are absolutely supposed to be done by our Congress – and only our Congress. “investor “rights — the rights of people with tons of money to get what they want — limits on regulations, things like that. Senator Elizabeth Warren has warned that it looks like Wall Street is trying to use TPP to make an “end-run” around American efforts to reign in the big banks.

This will limit by law what our democracy is allowed to decide! One example of the things these trade agreements do for the giant corporations that Lori pointed out in the FDL discussion was how a European firm is suing Egypt for increasing their minimum wage after Egypt’s revolution, because that costs that company money.

And the worst part is that it is being set up so that new trade agreements don’t even have to be negotiated,

What You Can Do

Forst and foremost, be aware of this upcoming TPP, and start learning more. Learn about Fast Track. Write and call and visit the office of your member of Congress and let them know of your concerns. (One of the problems is that many members of Congress are not well-informed about TPP and about the dangers of Fast Track.)

Ending the conversation, Lori wrote:

If you want to help stop Fast Track, please sign up for action alters on Fast Track and TPP at tradewatch.org At the bottom of the page you can sign up with your email.

You can also get regular news updates at our eyesontrade blog – follow the RSS feed! http://citizen.typepad.com/eyesontrade/

Also, check out http://www.ExposetheTPP.org it is a great action oriented site

So if you don’t want to end up having to dress up like a duck and stand on a corner waving a “car wash” sign just to get enough food to survive (but still sleeping in an old car) you need to pay attention to this. We have to stop TPP or get it changed to serve the people of the country, instead of the billionaires.

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On Monday afternoon 27 people were arrested in front of the Department of Justice and put behind bars. Their crime: Being sick and tired of Washington bailing out banks while there is no bailout for those among the other 99 percent of the country who are drowning in underwater mortgages.

Almost 500 activists from the faith, progressive and labor community traveled to Washington this week to protest the ongoing mortgage foreclosure crisis and our government’s failure to act. Several volunteered to be arrested (although they did not volunteer to have police use stun guns on them as they were being arrested) to make the point that the police have arrested the wrong people.

While these innocent citizens sit behind bars, those who robbed the middle class and committed the crime have yet to be brought to justice. “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out” and “arrest the bankers, not the people” were a few chants heard at Monday’s protest.

A news conference outside the Justice Department on Tuesday featured leaders of major organizations that supported the protest, including Larry Cohen of the Communications Workers of America and Laura MacCleery of National Nurses United. “The citizens that came to the Justice Department to ask for justice are now in jail” and the Justice Department “needs to remember what its name stands for,” said Robert Borosage of the Campaign for America’s Future. But he added that “it’s not too late for justice to be done.”

For one thing, the Justice Department could reverse its policy of asserting that the leaders of the banks responsible for the financial crisis are too big to jail and begin to aggressively prosecute instances of wrongdoing. The administration could require financial institutions to pay financial restitution commensurate with the cost of the damage of their reckless behavior. And it could push the banks to offer underwater homeowners – those who did all they could to save their homes but were thwarted by the banks themselves – real relief, mortgages reset based on current home values and opportunities to refinance at today’s below-3-percent interest rates.

These demands were included in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder. “Americans lost 40 percent of their household wealth, while communities of color were hit even harder – Latinos losing 66 percent of their household wealth and African Americans 53 percent,” the letter said. “Over a quarter of homeowners with mortgages are underwater, owing more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. As a growing chorus of experts and leaders called for a widespread program to reduce mortgage principal, we became hopeful that this would happen. It hasn’t.”

When some banks, as part of a settlement with the Obama administration, received $300 checks that were intended to compensate homeowners for tens of thousands of dollars in lost equity in their homes, “our patience ran out. We’ve had enough.”

Five of the demonstrators who were arrested Monday chose to symbolize the people who actually should be jailed by identifying themselves as Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs; Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America; and John Stumpf, CEO of Wells Fargo.

Banks are neither too big to fail or too big to jail. The Justice Department needs to remember who it serves and prosecute those responsible instead of innocent homeowners.

Today, the Campaign for America’s Future is joining 100 other organizations in delivering a message to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his Republican counterpart, Mitch McConnell: Enough is enough. End the obstruction. Stop the constant abuse of the filibuster.

The group Fix the Senate Now is collecting signatures on a petition that it plans to take to Capitol Hill. (Sign here.) The petition declares that “the compromise on rules reform that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell agreed to at the start of this Congress is clearly not working. We still do not have a functioning Senate that passes legislation and confirms nominations in a timely manner.”

That compromise was an agreement with McConnell that was supposed to end filibusters against “motions to proceed,” or votes to proceed to debate legislation. It takes 60 votes to break a filibuster, and in the previous Congress Republicans forced the introduction of 115 motions to end filibusters; only 41 succeeded.

This time was supposed to be different, but so far it isn’t. We’re four months into the 113th Congress, and already there have been 10 motions to end filibusters, with only 5 succeeding. That’s more than motions than were needed to file in any of the entire two-year Senate sessions between 1917 and 1970.

The talking filibuster that we saw in March when Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., took to the floor to filibuster the nomination of John Brennan as CIA director remains the exception. More routine is the silent filibuster, when a member can block legislation and it just slips discreetly into limbo. Objecting members do not have to stand on the Senate floor and justify their objection.

The country saw once again how conservative obstruction has broken the Senate when the body could not even agree to debate the merits of gun control legislation. As Richard Eskow pointed out in a post earlier this week, the Senate did not technically vote against gun control legislation. A minority used its power to keep the Senate from even putting the legislation up for debate. So routine has this become that news stories often refer to a measure “not receiving the 60 votes needed for passage,” when every 6th-grade civics student learns that in a 100-member Senate, you only need 51 votes to pass a bill. But you need 60 votes in today’s Republican-obstructed Congress to agree that a bill gets a chance to be voted on.

The consequences are sweeping, as noted in an email message by the Fix the Senate Now group. “Our federal court system is in crisis because judges cannot be appointed. Agencies that safeguard workers rights, ensure the safety of our air and water and make sure that banks don’t mislead consumers cannot function effectively because key leaders can’t be confirmed.”

Also on the casualty list: Several measures designed to help stimulate the economy and create jobs. Today’s anemic economic growth and recession-level unemployment rates are in part due to Senate paralysis.

Reid needs to find a way to do what he could have done more easily at the beginning of the session: Insist on a talking filibuster in which members have to physically hold the floor in order to block a bill, and insist on strict time limits on debates of motions to proceed and executive and non-Supreme Court judicial nominations.

For years now, Senate right-wingers have turned a feature intended to protect minority rights into an instrument of minority tyranny. It is time to end the tyranny and fix the Senate. If you agree, support this petition.

By now, there have been plenty of negative reactions to last week’s defeat of sensible gun regulation in the U.S. Senate due to the power of the gun lobby to have more sway with senators than popular opinion has.

In his Rose Garden address, President Obama was incredulous that legislation favored by 90 percent of Americans couldn’t get 60 votes in the Senate.

News stories about the bill’s defeat invariably referenced the origin of the bill in the “tragedy” of the horrific shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

Even former U.S. House Representative Gabrielle Giffords – an ardent backer of the bill and a victim of gun violence herself – castigated the senators’ fear of the gun lobby as a shameful contrast to “the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended by a hail of bullets.”

The quick take on this might lead you to believe that the massacre of innocent school children in Newtown has had little to no effect on how Americans have dealt with school safety and gun proliferation.

You would be mistaken.

Legacy Of The Sandy Hook Shootings

Although connecting the Sandy Hook shootings to high-profile legislation in D.C. seemed to impart little power to passing the bill, the aura of that tragedy has quietly been at work producing all kinds of other actions around the country

While federal lawmakers hesitated and then faltered to take action on restricting gun commerce, policy makers elsewhere in America have had no problem using the Sandy Hook shootings to rationalize new ways to turn school buildings into harsher, more punitive environments for the students who populate them.

The result is likely to be more students – particularly students of color – having disciplinary issues that result in suspensions, expulsions, arrests, and referrals to the criminal justice system, and what has become known as America’s “school-to-prison pipeline” will quite probably grow ever larger unless this wave of nonsense stops.

More Guns And Guards In Schools

Following the Sandy Hook shootings, there were widespread reports of school districts adding more police presence, in the form of “campus resource officers,” to their campuses.

As this article in The Atlantic  reported, following the killings, there was “a spate of new bills proposed at the state level – including in Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Virginia – to either allow educators to carry weapons or to add armed guards to public schools.”

Altogether, The Sunlight Foundation, found that, post-Sandy Hook, 36 states were considering legislation related to guns on school grounds with “the vast majority of these bills” making it “easier for school personnel, guards, and volunteers to carry guns on campus.”

As the Politics K-12 blog at Education Week observed, the Obama administration helped move this effort along by providing “incentives for schools to hire resource officers . . . by giving priority to applicants who plan to use the U.S. Department of Justice’s COPs grants.”

The National Parent Teachers Association noted the White House’s move to encourage more guns and guards in schools and declared that action a “disappointment.”

What’s wrong with heightened “school security?”

What More Guns And Guards Do To Schools

As the above-mentioned article in The Atlantic noted, “about a third of states already allow school personnel to carry concealed weapons on campus,” so there is a long and well-researched track record for what happens when school and government officials respond to violent incidents by stocking schools with more guns and guards. That track record is not good.

As a recent op-ed in the Raleigh News and Observer noted, “on the heels of the Columbine High School massacre,” schools “rapidly increased deployment of law enforcement officers.” This resulted in “soaring rates of suspension, dropouts and school-based arrests and court referrals” that pushed students committing school infraction into the juvenile and criminal systems.

A recent article in The New York Times also looked at the track record for adding more guns and guards in schools and found “the most striking impact of school police officers so far, critics say, has been a surge in arrests or misdemeanor charges for essentially nonviolent behavior – including scuffles, truancy and cursing at teachers – that sends children into the criminal courts.”

“Nationwide,” the report continued, “hundreds of thousands of students are arrested or given criminal citations at schools each year” with Texas setting the worst example, “where police officers based in schools write more than 100,000 misdemeanor tickets each year.”

“A large share are sent to court for relatively minor offenses, with black and Hispanic students and those with disabilities disproportionately affected,” the report found.

When a Washington, D.C.-based civil rights group studied the results of increased police presence in schools, their investigation found that officers were so rarely called upon to address real emergencies that they found “something else to do” and became “the de facto disciplinary arm of the school.”

As reported by USA Today’s Greg Toppo, increased police presence in schools resulted in a spike in students being arrested in school “for things like disorderly conduct” that previously would not involve the criminal justice system.

One of the researchers, testifying before Congress just three days before the Newtown shooting, explained that school discipline is “increasingly handled by law enforcement, and today, students are more likely to be arrested for minor in-school offenses.”

According to Toppo, her testimony included the statistic that harsher, more punitive security measures in schools have resulted in over 3 million students being suspended and over 100,000 students being expelled nationwide, each year.

There’s Money For Guns And Guards

At a time when most states are cutting education budgets, and depressed property taxes are reducing local revenues for schools, lawmakers are having no problem finding cash to spend on guns and guards in schools.

According to The Center for Public Integrity, post-Sandy Hook, a state legislative delegation in Florida approved a proposal to increase property taxes to pay for more school police, “at an annual cost of up to $130,000 per officer.”

A bill in Mississippi “set up a $7.5 million school-security fund.” Alabama legislators proposed “a lottery to pay for a $20 million plan to put police officers in every school.” And Indiana lawmakers weighed a measure to “set aside $10 million to offer grants to schools to hire local police to post in schools.”

Minority Students Hit Hardest

The increased rates of suspensions and expulsions that result from more police presence in schools are particularly devastating for students of color.

According to a report in The Christian Science Monitor, the number of school suspensions nationwide has grown dramatically in recent decades, from nearly 1.8 million students – 4 percent of all public-school students – in 1976, to, by 2006, 3.3 million – 7 percent of all students. “In addition to the suspensions, 102,000 students were expelled – removed from school for the remainder of the year or longer – in 2006.”

Suspensions and expulsions for certain groups – “particularly African-Americans, Hispanics, and those with disabilities” – are disproportionally high,” the report found, with African-Americans making up 18 percent of the students but “accounting for 46 percent of students suspended more than once, 39 percent of students expelled, and 36 percent of students arrested on campus.”

An even more recent report, this one from The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the University of California, Los Angeles Civil Rights Project, found “an increasing gap between suspension rates of black and white students,” with “24 percent of black students” getting the brunt of harsh discipline measures while only “7.1 percent of white students” experienced the same treatment.

According to a write-up of the report in The Huffington Post, “Most of the suspensions came not in response to violent behavior, but for minor infractions such as dress code violations or lateness. The research also found that suspensions increase the likelihood kids will drop out of school and commit crimes.”

Some Say “Enough!”

The strong correlation of guns and guards in schools to increasing rates of school suspensions, expulsions, and arrests has not gone unnoticed, and a growing number of educators and lawmakers have expressed concern that society will pay down the road for more jobless and incarcerated young people.

In fact, a different article about the study from the UCLA Project, quoted one of the report’s authors who noted, “The likelihood of dropping out from school can rise to 32 percent for a ninth-grader who’s been suspended just once.”

The civil rights coalition that produced the research from The Advancement Project, cited above, took action to preempt more guns and guards in schools with a “Gun Free Way to School Safety” recommending schools “focus on prevention of crisis situations through creation of a positive school culture,” enact “appropriate security measures” that don’t involve law enforcement personnel, and develop a “school crisis plan.”

Recently, the National School Boards Association released a report declaring that the use of out-of-school suspensions had reached a “crisis” level. The report, released in conjunction with the National Opportunity to Learn campaign (a funder of the Education Opportunity Network), included new policy guidelines for “discipline policies aimed at ending excessive and discriminatory out-of-school suspensions.”

Education Week reported that NSBA declared “School board members should lead the charge to reduce, if not eliminate, the practice of out-of-school suspensions and instead push comprehensive strategies for preventing the removal of students from school for disciplinary reasons.”

Students have spoken out as well, organizing in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and elsewhere in separate yet connected efforts to promote a process called “restorative justice.”

These and other recent actions got the attention of the editorial board of The New York Times, who last week expressed concern about “a larger police presence in schools” that can “create a repressive environment in which children are arrested or issued summonses for minor misdeeds — like cutting class or talking back — that once would have been dealt with by the principal.”

The editors called for “greater transparency in the reporting process to make the police even more forthcoming” and more efforts “to dismantle . . . the school-to-prison pipeline.”

Their recommendation: “Districts that have gotten along without police officers should think twice before deploying them in school buildings.”

Truly, isn’t this the least we can do?

If the horrendous crime that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary can’t provide the impetus for positive action on gun control, let’s make sure it doesn’t provide the rationale for turning schools into extensions of a brutal, uncaring culture we want our children to abhor.

Have we failed our children, and subsequently the future of our country? UNICEF says yes.

According to a report released earlier this month — “Child Well-Being in Rich Countries”— the U.S. came in 26th place out of 29 wealthy countries in its care for children. Though it is the wealthiest country in the world, the U.S. barely managed to beat out the poorest ones on the list: Lithuania, Latvia and Romania.

The report shows we have the second highest share of children living in poverty, and the second largest child poverty gap. That’s a byproduct of our stark income inequality continues to widen, as the top 1 percent capture 112 percent of all income growth. Shame on us.

In the academic race to the top, we have a long way to go. The U.S. was ranked 25th in the percent of people from 15 to 19 years old who are enrolled in schools and colleges and 23rd for those not participating in either an education, workforce or training program.

Our children may be some of the most likely to exercise, but they are still the most overweight. Also, we continue to have one of the highest infant mortality rates. To put this in perspective, an infant born in Botswana would have a better chance of surviving than an African-American infant born in some communities here. And American children are also among the most likely to fall victim to homicide: close to three times more likely than Canadian children, almost four times more likely than children in Greece or Poland, about five times more likely than children in the Czech Republic.

Additionally, the report found that the emotional well-being of American children is on par with their physical health. For their own level of “life satisfaction,” American children ranked in the bottom third and were ranked 28th for the quality of their relationships.

There were some positive rankings in the report: U.S. children are exposed to some of the lowest levels of air pollution, rank in the middle in terms of overall educational achievement, and have some of the lowest rates of tobacco and alcohol usage. All of these rankings have one thing in common: they are related to somewhat effective government regulations.

Despite conservative myths, that fact is that government can play an important role in improving the health and wealth of our country. Lifting our children out of poverty is not only a moral imperative but also an economical one. Policies that would improve the environment our children grow up in are supported by the majority of Americans: raising the minimum wage, protecting financial support programs, investing in education and infrastructure, protecting the environment and supporting job creation. Still, deficit hawks continue to use our children as their reason for slashing spending on education and entitlements.

Both political parties are to blame for our shame. Just last week, a Democratic-controlled Senate failed to protect innocent lives by deciding not to extend background checks on guns, and the president’s recent budget proposal would cut Social Security benefits. His proposal would also be the smallest U.S. investment budget in our recorded history.

For too long our national dialogue been focused on what we’re leaving behind for future generations while disregarding how we are failing them today. If our current political climate doesn’t change, our children will continue to suffer, and so will our stature in the eyes of the world.

Earlier this week I wrote about Executive PayWatch from the AFL-CIO. This site tracks the huge wage gap between CEO pay and the average employee. Something many people don’t know is that the Wall Street reform law was supposed to do this, but years later the regulations still have not been written! The SEC delays and delays, and then the head of the SEC leaves to take a high-paying job with a “bank consulting” firm.

The Law

Section 953(b) of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act requires public companies to disclose the median annual total compensation of all employees, the total annual compensation of the chief executive officer, and the ratio of the median employee pay to the CEO’s pay. But years later the regulations still are not written so the disclosure still does not happen.

Wall Street’s strategy is to capture regulators, delay, delay, fund Republicans, fund Republicans, and maybe it will never happen. So far this is the case.

Why The Law Is Needed

Bob Borosage explained the need for this law to take effect in March, in Mary Jo White at SEC: Watchdog or Lap Dog? The CEO Pay Test,

Needless to say, a horde of bank and corporate lobbyists mobilized to overturn the provision, and failing that, to muck up the SEC rule-making, including the big guns of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The regulations, promised over a year ago, are still buried in the bowels of the SEC.

This is a big deal, as testified by the millions spent on lobbying against it. CEO pay surged after 1980 when Business Week estimated it was 42 times that of the pay of factory workers. By 2010, CEOs at big companies were pocketing 343 times that of the typical worker, according to the AFL-CIO. Corporate profits are at record levels; worker pay at record lows as a percentage of the economy. The top 1 percent – made up significantly of top corporate and bank executives – captured 121 percent of the nation’s income growth in the first two years coming out of the recession. The remaining 99 percent lost ground on average.

… the information is of deep concern to investors and to customers. Legendary management guru Peter Drucker promulgated the “Drucker principle” that CEO compensation should not exceed worker pay by more than 20 to 1. If it went beyond that, Drucker argued, it destroyed morale and team spirit, particularly among middle management – with deleterious consequences for the company.

Worse, current CEO compensation packages … feature stock options and bonuses that give CEOs multimillion-dollar personal incentives to focus on short-term returns rather than the long-term growth of the company. They gut needed investments and pursue strategies to meet short-term profit expectations – shipping jobs abroad, taking on debt, selling off and plundering their own companies. They pocket their bonuses and are gone in a few years.

… investors have a deep stake and interest in this. And increasingly such companies as Whole Foods are discovering that a sensible CEO-to-worker pay package, like a commitment to the environment, helps attract customers.

The Regulatory Delay

July 2010, President Obama signs the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

March 2012, “two more months”: SEC finalizing Dodd-Frank CEO pay ratio rule within two months,

Under pressure from restless lawmakers awaiting action, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairwoman Mary Schapiro said her agency will implement the federally mandated CEO-to-employee pay ratio disclosure requirement “in the next couple of months.”

Today — still nothing.

Revolving Door And Captured Regulators

After delaying and delaying the regulations, the head of the SEC left to take a high-paying job with a “bank consulting” firm.

Marketwatch, April 2, SEC ex-chief Schapiro lands consulting-firm job

Less than four months after stepping down as the top U.S. securities regulator, Mary Schapiro is joining a consulting firm that has built a reputation as a shadow regulator by hiring scores of former government officials.

Promontory Financial Group LLC is expected to announce Tuesday that it has hired Ms. Schapiro, who was chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission for nearly four years.

Promontory Financial?

Wait … where have we heard of Promontory Financial before?

Bloomberg, March, Costly Consultant Work on Foreclosures Prompts Congress Scrutiny,

U.S. lawmakers plan to summon regulators and outside consulting firms to explain shortcomings in a multi-billion dollar settlement over botched mortgage foreclosures, according to two people briefed on the plan.

Fortune, Former SEC chair Mary Schapiro’s mysterious new gig, (emphasis added, for emphasis)

On Tuesday, the bank consulting firm Promontory Financial Group announced that it had hired Mary Schapiro, who stepped down as the head of the head of SEC four months ago.
Schapiro is a particularly high-profile hire for the firm, but she’s among many there who are former Washington officials. In fact, Promontory already had a former SEC chair on its roster — Arthur Levitt is on the firm’s advisory board.

Also associated with the firm are Laura Unger from the SEC; Alan Blinder, who was a vice chairman at the Federal Reserve; Frank Zarb, who headed the Nasdaq Stock Exchange in the 1990s; and Paul Tagliabue, the former commissioner of the NFL. In all, the firm has about 400 employees, about a quarter of which are former regulators.

… Promontory came under criticism late last year for leading a review of foreclosure practices at a number of the big banks. The reviews were supposed to be independent. But reports revealed that Promontory and others allowed the banks to control the process more than they should have. Ultimately, regulators determined the reviews were flawed and shut them down earlier than expected, but not before Promontory and other consultants collected $2 billion in fees.

… Adding to the problem is the fact that it’s not exactly clear what Promontory does. Generally, it is one of the many firms that are helping banks navigate new Dodd-Frank regulations, though the firm has been around a lot longer than the law.

USA Today, Foreclosure review debacle lines consultants’ pockets,

The IFR debacle has thrown a spotlight on one consulting firm in particular, the Promontory Financial Group, which could serve as a poster child for the revolving door in financial regulation in Washington.

The group, which collected some $1 billion for its work in the failed IFR, was founded by Eugene Ludwig, who headed the OCC during the Clinton administration. Since it first opened its doors in 2001, it has grown to 400 employees, many of them former staffers at the regulatory agencies.

In his post, Borosage wrote about how the incoming head of the SEC is another product of the revolving door,

After serving as a public prosecutor, White made millions defending top Wall Street banks and major companies at Debevoise and Plimpton. Recent clients included JPMorgan Chase on cases arising form the financial crisis, News Corporation over its phone hacking, former Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis on the shady parts of the bank’s takeover of Merrill Lynch. Not surprisingly, Jamie Dimon, the head of JP Morgan Chase, has hailed her as the “perfect choice” to head the SEC. Exactly the kind of endorsement that should rouse the hackles of the citizens and senators alike.

If she recuses herself from any matter concerning her former clients, what is left? As a defense attorney for the big banks, she knows where the bodies are buried. Is she able and willing to use that information? Her husband has been lobbying against the Dodd-Frank regulations. Is she willing to spurn his arguments? Or is her nomination a most perverse expression of the “regulatory capture” that has rendered the SEC and other financial regulatory agencies toothless?

Answer to that last question: yes, regulatory capture that has rendered the SEC and other financial regulatory agencies toothless.

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MORNING MESSAGE: The Upside of Taxes

OurFuture.org’s Richard Eskow: “Today’s new corporate-sponsored cost-cutting craze is merely the latest policy designed to enrich a powerful few at the expense of the many, and today’s anti-tax agenda is being used to make sure it succeeds. Taxes provide us with many important services, often far more cheaply and efficiently than the private sector. It wouldn’t be painful to pay taxes in a well-managed economy where everyone prospered. The thriving America of the 1950s and 1960s had top tax rates as high as 91 percent, and those taxes helped create the prosperity that’s so sorely lacking today.”

More Work Needed For Progressive Tax Code

Corporations should pay higher taxes, argues James Livingston in NYT oped: “For most of the 1950s, corporate income at large companies was taxed at 52 percent … by slashing corporate income taxes and forcing a new reliance on payroll taxes to finance government spending, we have redistributed income to the already wealthy … since when have tax cuts on corporate profits led to increased investment, faster job creation and higher per capita consumption out of rising real wages?”

The current tax system isn’t fair, says Joseph Stiglitz in NYT oped: “… as the top 1 percent has grown extremely rich, the effective tax rates they pay have markedly decreased. Our tax system is much less progressive than it was for much of the 20th century. … We could have a tax system that encourages good things like hard work and thrift and discourages bad things, like rent-seeking, gambling, financial speculation and pollution. Such a tax system could raise far more money than the current one — we wouldn’t have to go through all the wrangling we’ve been going through with sequestration, fiscal cliffs and threats to end Medicare and Social Security as we know it.”

Immigration Reform Roadblocks Ahead

Business groups gear up lobbying efforts to alter, or sink, bipartisan deal. Politico: “Several tech lobbyists said they think the Senate Gang of Eight’s plan won’t increase the number of H-1B [foreign worker] visas by nearly enough … The Senate package is expected to contain a provision that will not allow companies to displace an American worker in the same region and occupation unless the entire number of American workers in that occupation has remained the same or increased. That provision could have a big impact on large companies like IBM, Deloitte and Accenture.”

House may not fast-track Senate immigration and gun bills to floor, threatening final passage. Bloomberg: “For all the momentum that the Senate is showing on guns and immigration this week, [GOP strategist Ron] Bonjean notes that Boehner is going to allow ‘the legislative process to work its will in the House, meaning that these bills would go through the committees. That would likely slow down the momentum.’”

Dems Divided On Social Security Strategy

Dems split on whether Obama saving Social Security or killing it. Politico: “Many liberals believe that this stance represents a surrender, in politics and substance alike, in what is their side’s most potent class-conflict weapon. But to Obama loyalists, Democrats must act now to preserve their hallowed New Deal and Great Society accomplishments so they’re not emasculated later under a Republican president … Other Democrats fret that Republicans outfoxed Obama on entitlements. ‘He wants to look like a centrist and all he did was let them make him own it,’ said Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), co-chairman of the House Progressive Caucus. ‘It’s terrible politics.’”

Robert Kuttner argues Obama’s premises have been “proven wrong”: “The Republicans haven’t given an inch, the $270 billion in cuts undertaken so far this year under the January budget deal and the March sequester have cut the growth rate in half, and he is alienating core Democratic constituencies.”

Breakfast Sides

“GOP Fights to Rebrand the Party of No” reports Time: “Republican leaders left a party confab in Los Angeles last week in agreement that they can no longer be ‘the party of no.’ But they were less clear on what to say ‘yes’ to … While GOP officials at the party’s spring meeting in Hollywood had plenty of ideas for changing their public rhetoric, however, positive new policy ideas were in shorter supply.”

New investigation into suspect bank rate. Bloomberg: “ISDAfix rates at the center of a U.S. price-manipulation probe, while often relegated to the fine print of regulatory filings, help determine everything from borrowing costs on bonds that finance skyscrapers to interest on annuities … ‘Let’s treat this as seriously as we treated the Libor scandal,’ said Robert Emerson, head of interest-rate derivatives at SuperDerivatives Inc….”

Everyone at all familiar with the Judgment of Solomon has to be aghast as political leaders reverse that Biblical wisdom and proceed to “split the difference” over who gets whose way on matters affecting children.

Instead of putting the interests of children first, there’s a prevailing wisdom among political centrists inside the Beltway that “compromising” with radical conservatives is the only serious approach to governance and policy-making. So when “hard fought” compromises are reached in the back corridors of the nation’s capital, centrists hold self-congratulatory press conferences, but the lives of children are cleaved in two. We see this in deals made over sequestration, in the new budget being proposed by the Obama administration, and regarding school security measures.

The Centrist Rejection Of Solomon’s Wisdom

Recall that when King Solomon was confronted by two interested parties vying over the well-being of a child, he threatened to serve both parties involved by hacking the kid in two.

This caused one party to stubbornly press its case and say, “Go ahead,” while the other party abandoned its own personal interests for what was in the best interest of the child in the long term. Solomon – understanding the long-term best interests of the child, and not the needs of the vying parties, was central to the matter – was able to rule justly and correctly. That’s called wisdom.

But in today’s political climate, the “centrist Solomons” in charge begin with the belief that compromise must rule the day and let the sword fly. This is called realistic.

Solomon Says: “Sequestration”

If you question at all how political centrism has damaged the lives of children, consider the recently enacted financial sequester. This sterling example of bipartisan legislation is now rolling out its appalling effects on the most vulnerable children.

As Sam Stein and Amanda Terkel report at Huffington Post, among the first and most affected by sequestration are “hundreds of lower-income parents forced to game out major life adjustments to accommodate cuts to Head Start” – the federal preschool program delivering educational, health and nutritional services to disadvantaged young children age 3 to 5.

“Across the country,” they report, “drastic measures to meet the 5-percent cut, as mandated under the sequester,” are resulting in reduced access to programs, early closures, and curtailed services. “In Wisconsin, 700 families could end up losing Head Start access. In Cincinnati, nearly 200 children are at risk. In Oklahoma City, that number is 100.”

A report by the National Education Association found two Head Start programs in Indiana that “removed three dozen students by random drawing in order to offset the coming budget slashing.”

Beyond the negative impact to Head Start, the sequester also harms children attending schools in rural and military and Native American communities.

According to a blog post in Education Week, provisions of the sequester are forcing “rural communities nationwide must repay $17.9 million” in funds used primarily for education services.

CBS News recently told about the sequester’s effects on Impact Aid that provides “$1.2 billion annually to 1,400 school districts nationwide near military bases and Indian reservations.”

The sequester cuts $60 million of that funding. The report quoted a school administrator whose district is affected by the cuts, “You should have excellent schools for our military that has done so much for us, and to cut them is just callous.”

A Budget Compromise On Kids

In striving for a Grand Bargain in his new budget, President Obama also mostly abandons the interests of children for the sake of a compromised deal.

In what The Washington Post describes as a “break with the president’s tradition of providing a sweeping vision of his ideal spending priorities, untethered from political realities,” the budget deal, according to a Bloomberg report, doesn’t include any stimulus spending related to the interests of children.

Although, according to Education Week’s Politics K-12 blog, money in the budget is allocated to a new effort to expand access to pre-K education, those funds are provided by a back door method – “raising federal taxes on cigarettes and other tobacco products” – rather than a straightforward new revenue stream investing in the nation’s children.

Like the proposed cuts to Medicare and Social Security that are built into the president’s budget, according to The New York Times, the Obama administration’s shortcoming on child-centered spending is due to “his willingness to compromise with Republicans.”

If budgets are supposed to reflect values, then what we are seeing again is the interests of Beltway bipartisanship winning out instead of the interests of children.

Where Spending Continues Unabated

While centrist Solomons search for the place where they’ll cut the kids, at least one party to the deal is continuing to pursue its own self-interests unabated.

While cuts roll out of D.C., conservative Republicans across the country are demanding that state and local lawmakers go on a spending spree on arming schools with more guards, guns, and security paraphernalia.

Accompanying the National Rifle Association’s push to get more guns in schools, lawmakers in 36 states have introduced legislation to put more guns in schools, according to a report by the Sunlight Foundation.

“The vast majority of these bills would make it easier for school personnel, guards, and volunteers to carry guns on campus.”

The report notes that the NRA and its backers have, “played tough on this issue,” taking every opportunity – even after the horrendous killing of school children in Newtown, Conn. – to press its case, not compromise.

The negative effects on children of ratcheting up these security measures on schools are multifaceted. Studies conducted where there already is widespread presence of armed guards and strict security in schools have generally found that these measures tend to lead to more students being pushed out of school and into the criminal justice system.

Writing at The Huffington Post, the president of the Children’s Defense Fund, Marian Wright Edelman, recently wrote

There is no evidence that armed guards or police officers in schools make children safer. An armed guard at Columbine High School in 1999 and a full campus police force at Virginia Tech in 2007 were unable to stop the massacres that occurred at both schools. A 2010 review of existing research found no evidence that the use of police to handle school disorders reduces the occurrence of problem behavior in schools but there is evidence that over-policing leads to a new set of problems. (emphasis original)

Instead of arming schools, Edelman recommends “better ways for providing an effective model school safety plan, that an include an emphasis on relationship building . . . consistent reinforcement of positive norms . . . and individualized approaches to student discipline and intervention that seek to address root causes of misbehavior rather than to punish indiscriminately.”

Effort to put more weaponry in schools are not only damaging to children, they are expensive.

As the recent post at the blog for the National School Board Association noted, “Public schools spend billions each year on school resource officers, according to a report on NPR’s Marketplace Morning Report. One officer could cost between $50,000 and $80,000 per year, depending on the district.”

A recent report in the local newspaper in Charlotte, N.C. found that that the school district was struggling to come up with “an added $800,000 required by a change in the city formula for paying school resource officers.”

So while political leaders in D.C. make the federal deficit the defining interest of the nation, elsewhere, conservatives are promoting huge new expenditures for their constituents, and the interests of children get completely lost in the deal-making.

That any Democratic administration would find the interests of the National Rifle Association as a place to compromise on the well-being of children is appalling.

“Splitting The Baby” Not An Option

The way that the Wisdom of Solomon has been interpreted by America’s leaders today resembles the cruder version, reflected, according in the Wikipedia article cited above, in the legal profession, where attorneys propose a simple compromise they call “splitting the baby.”

But that’s not how Solomon’s judgement became “an example of profound wisdom” and not what we need for the well-being of our youngest citizens.

This article originally appeared on the Education Opportunity Network, a project of the Institute for America’s Future and the Opportunity to Learn. Visit the home page to subscribe to a weekly email of education news and views.

Have the Wall Street Democrats of “Third Way” or their predecessors in the Clintonite “Democratic Leadership Council” ever been right about an important economic issue?

That’s not meant as a thoughtless insult or flippant one-liner.  We consider it a legitimate line of inquiry, especially at a time when their pronouncements are being used as ammunition for an aggressive campaign against Social Security, Medicare, and other vital government programs.

We can omit topics of limited economic importance from our investigation.  The “centrist” Democrats often adopt the ‘liberal’ line on social issues like gun control or gay marriage – which, coincidentally or not, are also issues which have little or no financial impact on their corporate and high-net-worth individual sponsors.

But what’s the verdict on the core economic issues of our time?

Civil Society

Prof. William K. Black Jr. was understandably displeased by the New York Times’ description of the Third Way think tank as “center/left.” Prof. Black writes that “Some lies will not die … Third Way is Wall Street on the Potomac.  It is funded secretly by Wall Street (it refuses to reveal its donors), it is openly run by Wall Street, and it lobbies endlessly for Wall Street.”

Black adds that “Third Way, like every Pete Peterson front group, is dedicated to shredding the safety net as its highest priority and throwing the Nation back into a gratuitous recession through self-destructive austerity.”

The description of Third Way as a “Pete Peterson front group” might seem to contradict the “Wall Street” label. It doesn’t. Peterson’s a hedge fund billionaire who has devoted decades of his life, as well as an enormous sum (he spent nearly a half-billion dollars in one five-year period alone) to slashing Social Security and lowering taxes for himself, his ultra-wealthy peers, and large corporations.

Black’s words are likely to be deemed uncivil in most Washington circles, where it’s considered impolite to mention a gentleman’s or lady’s wealthy (and potentially corrupting) funding sources in polite company. Besides, who wants to find themselves thinking negative thoughts about lobbying when you may want to pursue it yourself someday? 

This “civil” attitude toward an uncivic activity proved very useful in the 1990s, as corporate Democrats joined with Republicans in the extremely civil exercise of deregulating Wall Street on behalf of their common paymasters.

Wild in the Streets

In those days Third Way President Jonathan Cowan was predicting – or attempting to instigate – a generational war over Social Security and Medicare benefits. In 1994 Cowan and Rob Nelson co-authored a book called Revolution X, which argued that greedy baby boomers were going to ruin the economy with their rapacious appetites for things like medical care and financial security when they grew old.

Cowan, who was born in 1965, was young enough back then to have employed a slogan like “Don’t respect the Social Security Trust Fund of anyone over thirty.”

The book predicted cataclysmic events in 2011 when, said the authors, rapacious Boomers “will stop working, many will stop paying taxes, and all will start gobbling up pensions and health care benefits.”   (Note the use of the word “gobbling”: it’s a classic Peterson-ism.)

The result, predicted Revolution X, would be a “shock wave” that would “blast people from their homes, rapidly plummet millions into poverty, and threaten the economic security and financial stability of our entire nation.” 

Cowan and Nelson were so eager to stir up an anti-elderly frenzy that they actually actually conducted a demonstration outside the headquarters of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP). That was done while they were leading a Peterson-funded group called “Lead or Leave,” and it was as unsuccessful in provoking intergenerational warfare as their subsequent efforts have been.

Their failure did not, however, prevent them from continuing to “gobble up” Peterson funds.

It’s the nineties now. The time’s ripe for a generational uprising which calls for lower government spending, right? Wrong.

Fresh Princes of Wall Street

A decade and a half later something did “blast people from their homes, rapidly plummet millions into poverty, and threaten the economic security and financial stability of our entire nation.” In fact, the entire world was wounded.

But “greedy geezers” didn’t cause that cataclysm: Third Way’s Wall Street sponsors did. They trashed the global economy like a Baby Boom rock star trashes a hotel room. We didn’t hear much about that from Cowan and Company.

Given their close relationship with Wall Street, one might hope that Third Way and its peers could offer some useful thoughts on ways to improve regulation and oversight. One would be wrong.

That’s not to say that Third Way has been completely silent on the banking issue. In one notable example, it put forward a proposal that would preempt state law in order to protect bankers who illegally foreclose on homeowners.  They don’t put it that way, of course, but that would be the end result. (Yves Smith and Bob Borosage have more.)

Third Way’s board members include a number of prominent financial types who benefited mightily from bank deregulation, including some (like William M. Daley) who lobbied and fought for deregulation.

Funny. The Third Way crowd keeps saying they’re bringing “fresh” and “new” perspectives to the debate, but all they do is keep rehashing twenty-year-old talking points. They don’t seem to have learned from the economic shocks – and financial revelations – of the 21st Century. The world has learned some hard lessons, but they still want to party like it’s 1999.

Hey, bankers deserve a break. Right? Wrong.

Classic Rock

Cowan’s still try to fan the flames of intergenerational fear and loathing, most recently as part of an absurdly inept Pete Peterson publicity gambit called The Can Kicks Back. (Cowan’s role is documented by Eric Laursen.) His war on Boomers is entering its twentieth year, and the youth of America still aren’t interested.  

Cowan will be fifty in a couple of years. But he’s still playing the oldies, like a classic rock act working half-empty arenas. As Spinal Tap would say:  Hello, Cleveland! 

“The Can Kick Back”: It can’t miss. This time the kids’ll turn on the old folks, right? Wrong.

(Deficit) Apocalypse Now

Cowan and Nelson suggested in 1994 that the nation’s most urgent crisis was the allegedly intractable Federal deficit – a deficit which disappeared altogether several years later.

Cowan’s still prone to statements like this one: “The fiscal cliff provides Congress with a now or never moment to solve our most pressing long term problem – the nation’s deep and chronic deficits.”

We’re currently experiencing crisis-level unemployment, record-high poverty (than includes one American child in six), wage stagnation, and a decline in social mobility. Citizens struggling with these problems will be surprised to learn that deficits are a more “pressing long-term problem” than their future, or that of their children.

Deficit spending re-emerged during the Bush years as the result of tax cuts (especially for the ultra-wealthy and corporations) and two wars “paid for on a credit card.” And it escalated significantly when Third Way’s Wall Street patrons crashed the economy in 2008.

Current debt levels would be far more sustainable after a short-term stimulus program restarted the economy. The Congressional Progressive Caucus budget reduces the deficit far more aggressively than any Third Way-backed plan, but it also might discommode Third Way’s wealthy backers.

Federal deficits are our most pressing problem? Wrong. (They don’t know how to fix them, either.)

Less Is More Less

As part of the Pete Peterson family of companies lobbying groups, Third Way routinely lobbies for lower taxes — which, of course, increases those deficits.

Their latest initiative is an attempt to cut corporate taxes – which, despite the propaganda, are actually lower in the United States than in most other developed countries. (You have to look at the rates corporations actually pay, not the nominal rates that are on the books – but which they all use loopholes to evade.)

Third Way argues that their patrons’ preferred system of (lower) taxes would increase employment in the United States. The response to that is simple: We’ve had more than a decade of low taxes for wealthy individuals and corporations. How’s that working out for you?

But lower taxes lead to economic growth, don’t they? Look around you: Wrong.

Power to the (Right) People

When Occupy Wall Street first hit the scene, demonstrating the potential to transform political landscape, Third Way sent its best person out to craft a response.  That turned out to be Bill Schneider, the former CNN political analyst who is now a Third Way “Distinguished Senior Fellow & Resident Scholar.”

Schneider was born in 1944, and is therefore too old to be a Baby Boomer. That might explain why he’s socially acceptable to the generationally-obsessed and Boomer-loathing Third Way crowd. Scheider’s piece dismisses Occupy Wall Street as a group which would inevitably alienate the majority of Americans.

Perhaps predictably, the opposite happened. The Occupy movement became enormously popular, and remained that way until unsympathetic media coverage, relentless police harassment, and internal friction turned the public against it.

Like-minded political pollster Douglas Schoen, another faux “centrist,” promptly produced an unscientific and unprofessional poll for the Wall Street Journal which purported to show that Occupy’s agenda was wildly unpopular with Americans. As we discussed then, the opposite is true: That agenda was, and is, extremely popular with the electorate.

Schoen began his Journal piece by red-baiting Occupy, writing of the movement’s “intense opposition to free-market capitalism and support for radical redistribution of wealth, intense regulation of the private sector, and protectionist policies.” With the unerringly inaccurate political instincts of the “centrist” operative, Schoen then advised the Democrats thusly:

“President Obama and the Democratic leadership are making a critical error in embracing the Occupy Wall Street movement–and it may cost them the 2012 election.”

We now know that President Obama and the Democrats continue to emphasize Occupy themes throughout the campaign – job creation, restraining Wall Street, protecting Medicare and Social Security – which was critical to their 2012 victories for the Presidency and Senate. (They won the House, too, by a million votes – but only in the popular vote.)

Populism will never sell. What the public really wants is corporate-friendly policies like ours. Wrong.

But wait. There’s more …

Third Way on health care? Wrong.  (And wrong in a way that will drive up health care costs, which should be a deficit hawk’s biggest concern.)

Third Way on voter opinion in battleground states? Wrong.

Third Way on progressive opinion about Social Security? Wrong.

Third Way on public opinion about Social Security? Wrong.

Third Way on the corporate-driven rules of the new economy? Wrong.

Have they been right about any economic issue of import? We haven’t found any evidence for that. But we promise to keep on looking.  

Up next: Third Way finds a new issue — with predictable results.

As the US kicked off the Iraq War on the evening of March 19, 2003, with the infamous “shock and awe” bombardment of Baghdad, I huddled into a small high school classroom for an antiwar gathering organized by several faculty members. Little did I know at the time that, ten years later, the Iraq War would prove a defining moment in the development of my worldview.

Iraq War, 10 Years Later

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

I spoke about my experience on Take Action News with David Shuster last Saturday. Subscribe to YouTube.com/takeactionnewstv for free clips in your inbox.

I was a sophomore at The Ramaz School in Manhattan. Lo and behold, enough students were either against the war or sufficiently curious that the classroom where the teach-in had been scheduled was way too small for the turnout. It was packed to the point where people could barely get in the door. Kids were sitting on desks, standing, sliding in wherever they could. A large white sheet with a crudely painted black peace sign was draped over the blackboard. Faculty members made varying arguments against the war and answered students’ questions.

My history teacher, Dr. Jon Jucovy, made the strongest case against Iraq that I’d heard so far. He identified each of the claims being made about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction–nuclear weapons; chemical and biological weapons; and ties to Al Qaeda–and shot them down. One claim that stood out because of how quickly it had been debunked, but continued to be used by the Bush Administration, was that Iraq had purchased large amounts of “yellow cake” Uranium from Niger with which to make nuclear weapons. It had been clear since March 2002 that those purchases hadn’t taken place, Jucovy explained. In fact, the State Department and the International Atomic Energy Agency had flagged the document that was purported to record the sale as a forgery in early January 2003.

It didn’t take long to find out that Jucovy–like so many other skeptics–was right. There were no weapons of mass destruction.

Given the tragic consequences of the Iraq War, ten years later, however, there is no satisfaction in the knowledge that we were right before some other people. As Jucovy told us on the eve of the war, “I hope I’m wrong. I really hope they find weapons of mass destruction there.”

My personal experience and that of many of my peers, though, may offer lessons for avoiding other destructive policies that enjoy similarly unquestioned reverence among the political and media elite.

The Iraq War marked the end of our political innocence. It was our generation’s Watergate scandal. It instilled in us distrust in all institutions, but especially the government and the media. It taught us to question conventional wisdom even when it means enduring ridicule; to appreciate the overriding tendency of powerful people to abuse their power; and to accept that our institutions often reward failure and malice, while punishing excellence and goodness.

Questioning consensus. Conventional wisdom develops very easily, especially when people are afraid that questioning it will make them seem unpatriotic. Despite my doubts, I initially felt very uncomfortable opposing the war because everybody seemed to think it was such a good idea. My parents, many friends, and several liberals who I admired at the time, like Tom Friedman and Tony Blair, supported it.

Being marginalized taught us how to build our own communities. Experiences of solidarity with fellow dissenters like the teach-in I attended provided me and other opponents of the war with a very powerful countervailing force. So did alternative sources of information and a handful of personal mentors. Many of the tools we used to unite against the Iraq War–blogs, social media–and groups we became active in, such as MoveOn.org, continue to be important vehicles for political awareness and activism on a broad array of progressive issues where our positions may contradict conventional wisdom.

There is no greater validator though than the passing of time. If we felt nervous and alone in our opposition to the war in 2003, by the following year, we had learned the value of sticking to our guns. Not every issue pans out so quickly or clearly. And of course we are not always right. But the collective experience of liberals on the eve of the Iraq War should at least give us the confidence we need not to discard our ideas merely because they are unpopular in a given moment.

Appreciating the full potential for abuse of power. For some time, I had trouble believing there wasn’t at least some significant national security justification for–or benefit from–the war. I couldn’t believe they would send people to their deaths based on complete fabrications.

Discovering how absurd the WMD claims shattered those doubts. If Bush and his surrogates could baldly lie about something like the much-vaunted “yellow cake,” and out a CIA agent whose husband discredited their claims, then, I thought, perhaps our leaders really were capable of the worst. (We later found out that the outed CIA agent, Valerie Plame Wilson, was involved in tracking the “proliferation of nuclear weapons materials into Iran,” which meant that when her cover was blown, it hindered our ability to keep track of Iran’s nuclear plans.) I began to accept the possibility that the entire case for war could be not only dubious, but a deliberately perpetrated sham.

Getting over the initial shock of the Iraq War lies empowered us to acknowledge equally outrageous violations of public trust that we might otherwise not have seen, as well as more mundane deceptions that allow politicians to escape accountability.

Accepting that bad guys and good guys often don’t get what they deserve. The aftermath of the Iraq War has undermined our confidence in our system’s ability to reward excellence and punish failure. Many of the war’s most right-wing proponents continue to enjoy power and credibility–eg, Bill Kristol, Lindsay Graham and John McCain.

John Kerry, who is now Secretary of State, did not apologize for voting for the war when he was the Democratic nominee for President in 2004. Instead, Kerry offered the disingenuous excuse that his vote was based on assurances from President Bush that Bush was going to exhaust diplomatic channels before invading, but then Bush “went back on his word” to Kerry. That Kerry’s binding vote to authorize force was based on a verbal assurance from President Bush was apparently supposed to bolster Kerry’s credibility.

Worse still, we fall for new idiotic dogmas peddled by the same discredited warmongers. When liberal war cheerleaders like Tom Friedman insist that cutting Social Security and Medicare is as urgent as they once thought invading Iraq was, Beltway elites still take them seriously.

Even the adjectives Friedman uses in describing the indispensability of the Grand Bargain tracks directly with his language advocating the Iraq War. Friedman in the New York Times, September 2011 (emphasis mine):

I’ve been arguing that the only antidote to this debilitating situation is a Grand Bargain between the two parties — one that cuts long-term entitlement spending and raises additional tax revenues…

Friedman on Charlie Rose, May 2003 (emphasis mine):

And there was only one way to do it…What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying, ‘Which part of this sentence don’t you understand…Well, suck on this.’

The common denominator in both situations is that Friedman’s preferred idea is the only effective option.

And all of this has happened while the memory of the Iraq War is still fresh. Our memories will get worse as time passes, and then perhaps our pre-war naïveté will creep back in. After all, three decades after our parents’ generation lived through the Vietnam War, they fell for the lies that sent us to war with Iraq.