Month: June 2015

SCOTUS, Interrupted: Wolf PAC Takes Citizens United Repeal To The States (January 28, 2015)

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not_for_sale

Close your eyes and imagine America circumventing a do-nothing Congress, and a blatantly partisan Supreme Court of the United States, to effect necessary democratic change. Daydream for a moment about empowered citizens successfully lobbying State governments to create a mechanism for reversing the corrosive influence of private money into local, regional and national elections.

Now open your eyes. Because the fantasy is rapidly becoming reality.

According to Kira Elliot, an Illinois volunteer for Wolf PAC, “The sad fact is that most of us have no idea about the power offered by Article V of the Constitution.” It is with regret I report that until earlier this week, this columnist was of that number.

Slightly excerpted, Article V reads as follows:

“The Congress…on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress.”

Enter Wolf PAC. A grassroots effort spawned by the enormously popular Young Turk Network, Wolf’s mission is boldly simple. Per the group’s website, “We must reverse Citizens United, Restore our Democracy, and Save the Republic. Join the Fight for Free and Fair Elections in America!” But the message is more than mere rhetoric. Using the basis of Article V, Wolf PAC has a plan – and it’s working.

Elliott says, “We need 34 states to pass a resolution calling for the aforementioned convention of States. Once convened, if 75 percent of those States vote to remove all private money from politics – individual, corporate and labor union – the vote will be on its way to becoming the 28th amendment to the Constitution.”

She admits that some States will be a tougher sell than others. The group began its work seeking sign-on from the largest and most liberal in the Union. After initial success with Vermont and California, the Wolf PAC enjoyed perhaps its most unlikely victory on December 3, 2014. That is the day when SJR 42 was adopted by both houses of the Illinois Congress.

When asked how the Wolf PAC managed to pull this off in a State so notorious for corruption and machine politics that two of the last three Governors have gone on to serve time in Federal prison, Elliot says that is precisely the point. She observes, “The reason Illinois was able to get it done, and so quickly, is BECAUSE we are infamously corrupt. When Wolf PAC started getting its campaign together in the State, we found plenty of people willing to get involved.”

So passionate are the Wolf Packers about removing outside financial influence from our elections, State volunteers often stay on to lobby the next legislature on the list. The committed members of the group understand that this must be more than a cause of the moment. It took us decades to get to this place of moneyed electoral exploitation. To that end, according to Elliott, “We’re now calling citizens of other States and asking them to contact their legislators. We provide them with a list of names. New Jersey is looking ever more realistic. The resolution just needs to get past the House.”

She offers one other reason for the political action committee’s growing success – a sense of shared responsibility and community. Quite apart from the cynical, shortsighted and selfish halls of Capitol Hill, or the disingenuously impartial pretensions of the SCOTUS, Wolf Packers understand the power of relationship building and sustained teamwork. Elliott offers, “Anyone can join the Wolf PAC and there are meetups all over the country. I believe that’s where camaraderie spawns and the activism gels. We are just as dedicated to each other as we are the cause!”

For more information on Wolf PAC, and to learn how you can start taking action right now, click here.

It’s easy to forget who we are sometimes, lost in the daily shuffle of life and the dysfunctional workings of our political system as we become. But we are a nation of self-starters and entrepreneurs. Armed with the right information and energy, we can work together to fix some of our biggest problems – including the financial takeover of our democracy. The Koch Brothers are on notice.

Partisan IRS Budget Cuts Create Pointless Tax Season Headaches (January 21, 2015)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

IRS Budget Cuts

If there’s one bargaining tactic Congressional Republican lawmakers have perfected since President Obama took the oath of office in January 2009, it’s trying to cut off America’s nose to spite its face. When the GOP doesn’t get its way, every feasible effort is made to scorch the earth, even when that includes the ground under lawmakers’ collective feet.

We’ve seen this play out over and over again. Every manufactured debt ceiling and budget showdown has featured some version of the “hold your breath until we all turn blue” scenario. The most notable of these was, of course, the government shutdown of November 2013. This ill-advised Obamacare implementation temper tantrum led writer Sylvia Mathews Burwell to observe on the Office of Management and Budget blog:

“The shutdown had significant negative effects on the economy. The Council of Economic Advisers has estimated that the combination of the shutdown and debt limit brinksmanship resulted in 120,000 fewer private sector jobs created during the first two weeks of October [2013]. And multiple surveys have shown that consumer and business confidence was badly damaged.”

Republicans didn’t fare very well in the court of public opinion either. Just as it was during Newt Gingrich’s big shutdown adventure of 1994, an October 9, 2013 Associated Press pollfound that a majority of Americans (62 percent) blamed the GOP for the completely avoidable farce. It’s possible (possible) that the right has finally learned an obvious lesson. The people may not all agree on what the size and scope of government should be, but at the end of the day, they want it open and functioning to some degree.

So in advance of this tax season, Republican lawmakers tried something new(ish). Without a hint of irony, the group voted to extend more than 50 temporary tax breaks that had expired, depriving the Treasury of badly needed revenue. And we know that it’s needed because at the same time, per another December 18, 2014 report from the AP, “Congress cut the IRS budget by $346 million for the budget year that ends in September 2015. The $10.9 billion budget is $1.2 billion less than the agency received in 2010.”

To understand what the GOP is about here, it’s important to remember, “The cuts come as the IRS is starting to play a bigger role in implementing President Barack Obama’s health care law. For the first time, taxpayers will have to report on their tax returns whether they have health insurance.”

Bingo. Of course.

The House has unsuccessfully passed more than 50 bills designed to dismantle Obamacare. Total failure to achieve anything but wasted time and paper.

Cynical charlatan and Texas Tea Party Senator Ted Cruz played pied piper to House lemmings who jumped off the 2013 shutdown cliff. Obamacare’s rollout remained impervious to all but website malfunctions.

And now we have this. Starve the beast. Is there any reason to believe that Republican efforts will succeed at doing anything more than creating a bureaucratic backlog that delays refunds to hardworking American families? Not if you ask IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. Per the AP report, “He said the IRS is required to enforce the law, so other areas will have to be cut, including taxpayer services and enforcement. Koskinen said the IRS is imposing a hiring freeze, except for emergencies, and is eliminating almost all overtime.”

In short, exhausted government workers and stressful uncertainty for taxpayers, so that the GOP can log another Obamacare torpedo miss. Totally worth it.

“‘Everybody’s return will get processed,’ Koskinen told reporters. ‘But people have gotten very used to being able to file their return and quickly getting a refund. This year we may not have the resources, the people to provide refunds as quickly as we have in the past.’”

Republicans they got us this time. Unlike the open warfare of a shutdown or a debt ceiling “crisis,” attempts to injure the administrative functions of the IRS through line item budget cuts is an exercise in (more) subtle obfuscation. But not subtle enough folks.

Two Year-Old Walmart Shooter A Year-End Scream for Gun Law Reform (December 31, 2014)

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It’s the end of an eventful year and the beginning of a new one. I had visions of a fresh start as I sat down to write my final political words of 2014. I’ve had a lot to say about American gun culture over the past 12 months and figured it might be refreshing to explore a different issue. But as I perused The New York Times and came across the headline, Woman at Walmart Is Accidentally Shot Dead by 2-Year-Old Son, I was reminded that it’s nearly impossible to forget about guns in this country for any length of time.

Early this week in a Hayden, Idaho Walmart store, a toddler pulled a concealed weapon from his mother’s purse and fatally wounded her at close range. Almost everyone in the nation can agree that this is a terrible, terrible tragedy. It seems likely a similar number of us would concur that avoidable mistakes were made. Why then can we not come together to change the omnipresence of guns in American culture?

Every moment, in a home, public space, school or office, lies an avoidable accident waiting to happen. Lieutenant Stu Miller, a spokesman for the Kootenai County, Idaho sheriff’s office was interviewed for the Times story. Writers Bill Morlin and Kirk Johnson quote the officer: “‘This situation is such a tragedy, particularly happening so close to the holidays,’ Lieutenant Miller said. Asked why the woman might have felt the need to go armed to the Walmart, he said that carrying a weapon was not particularly remarkable or unusual. ‘It’s pretty common around here — a lot of people carry loaded guns.’”

There are too many guns, and they are too commonly toted around like a charming accessory. That is exactly the problem.

At the end of a column I wrote in late November, Why Ferguson Is Also, And Again, About Guns, a conservative commenter misappropriated a famous quote from Samuel Adams. The insinuation that I prefer “the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom” was leveraged as a suggestion to take my citizenship elsewhere. This predictable right wing retort speaks volumes about the tired, repetitive state of our national public safety conversation. It’s a dangerous bullying tactic designed to scare dissenters into stony silence, as though the only choice we have is between suppression of Second Amendment rights and the unchecked proliferation of weapons. If you’re not for the latter, you must advocate the former. Ergo, you’re a traitor invited to self-deport.

We should be able to soberly discuss whether we collectively want to continue policies that render a family trip to the grocery store a potentially lethal outing. Does one’s Constitutional right to bear arms (as least as some individuals interpret it) really trump another’s right to life? Isn’t that’s somewhere in the Bill too? Where is the balance and how do we locate it together? Because Dear God, we’re not even close.

The events in Hayden also beg questions about timing. Morlin and Johnson interviewed Stefan T. Chatwin, the city administrator, for the Times piece and quote him as saying “that guns are a part of the culture here. The city amended its gun laws just last week, he said, to conform with state laws and make it clear that a gun owner is justified in firing a weapon in defense of persons or property.”

How many more residents are walking or driving around packing heat, ironically fearing the unknown assailant more than thereality that “for every time a gun is used in self-defense in the home, there are 7 assaults or murders, 11 suicide attempts, and 4 accidents involving guns in or around a home?” How long until the Gem State has its own Trayvon Martin case? Idaho’s six percent ethnic minority population better leave the hooded sweatshirts in the closet.

We’re going in the wrong direction in an effort to find a sensible balance between freedom, individualism and community. The choice between self-interest and neighborly responsibility is not either/or. I am tired of reading stories like Hayden’s. I don’t want to hear anymore – but not because I’ll stick my fingers in my ear and deny there’s a problem. Let’s demand our lawmakers do something. Because right now in Idaho there’s a two year-old child without a mother who hasn’t lived long enough to grasp that he was the agent of her demise. His concealed carry suffering has just begun.

Republican Warhawks And Arms Lobby Unite To Undermine US On World Stage (December 24, 2014)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

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President Obama has taken bold actions in the fourth quarter of 2014, including a shift in Cuban policy and a public condemnation of Sony Pictures Entertainment’s decision to pull controversial film The Interview. It’s been several weeks of determined administrative change and strong messaging after a disappointing midterm election, starting with a resolution to alter the country’s broken immigration laws within the limits of Executive power.

Despite the incoming threat of a 114th Congress that promises to be even less agreeable than its predecessor, it finally feels like a winning time to be a liberal. Standing on the right side of history with a leader who has nothing left to personally gain or lose lives up in some small way to the ideals of candidate Obama. By and large, it’s a happy holiday week for those of us who are tired of receiving kicked cans from the nation’s capital.

But there is much work to be done, at home and abroad, before we put real distance between ourselves and the stagnant at best, harmful at worst policies that have characterized most of this century to date. For every Dreamer who now has a legal shot at a future in America, there is climate change denial. With satisfaction over the dismissal of an outdated, counterproductive approach to Cuban relations, we must still endure an economic model built to reward the one percent at the expense of almost everyone else. And then there’s the issue that often feels most hopeless of all – guns and weapons.

President Obama has been clear in his advocacy of sensible gun reform at home, as well as balanced global demilitarization. After the heartbreaking events at Sandy Hook Elementary School two years ago, the POTUS said:

“These tragedies must end, and to end them, we must change. We will be told that the causes of such violence are complex, and it is true. No single law, no set of laws can eliminate evil from the world or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society. But that can’t be an excuse for inaction. Surely we can do better than this.”

And in a June 2013 effort to reduce nuclear arms in partnership with Russia, Obama observed: “I’ve determined that we can ensure the security of America and our allies, and maintain a strong and credible strategic deterrent, while reducing our deployed strategic nuclear weapons by up to one-third.”

Shamefully, the President has been totally lacking in Congressional partners who want to make the world’s streets safer with him. A late 2012 report from the Sunlight Foundationhighlighted the problem: “Just over half (51 percent) of the members of the new Congress…have received funding from the National Rifle Association’s political action committee at some point in their political careers..And 47 percent received money from the NRA in the most recent race in which they ran.”

There’s a lot that the leader of the free world can do without Capitol Hill, but he can’t ratify treaties designed to make the present and future of our planet a little more secure. Thus the BBC’s innocuous headline this week, Global Arms Trade Deal Takes Effect, masks an important detail. Around130 countries have signed the pact, but fewer than half of them have ratified it. The latter number includes the United States, which also happens to be the world’s top arms exporter.

This one ought to be a no-brainer. The treaty was written to limit the transfer of weapons to “warlords, human rights abusers, terrorists and criminal organizations.” Yet the BBC observes, “Washington signed the agreement in 2013, but now it requires approval by the Senate, where opposition is believed to be strong.” The same Senate of course, that will be controlled by the NRA-owned GOP come January.

In his new strategy of basically going it alone to give the people what they need, the President has been admirably steady. There’s reason to hope for more delayed common sense action in 2015. Public and civic agitation regarding the nation’s cynical and deadly deference to the gun lobby, and its money, ought to be high on the priority list.

Porcelain

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(Source:http://prologuetheatreco.org/)

Mid-1980s London: the height of the global AIDS crisis when celebrity role models such as Rock Hudson, Freddie Mercury and gender-bending performer Boy George created space for homosexual young men to consider taking a few tentative steps out of the closet. At the same time, socioeconomic, cultural and familial acceptance were nascent enough concepts to render the struggle for physical and emotional safety a threat to personal freedom. And in a Western Hemisphere just waking up to the LGBT community hiding in plain sight, how much more complicated the issues for immigrants, already branded as “other?”

Into this knotty blend of history, sociology and human rights wades Prologue Theatre Company’s 2014-2015 season-ending production of “Porcelain,” directed by Matthew Ozawa. On a small stage, boasting a minimalist cast of five, Chay Yew’s 1992 work comes to colorful, violent, visceral life through the 21st Century prism of expanding marriage equality and a deep vein of xenophobia and nativism that runs through “enlightened” Western cultures.

Press materials accurately distill the plot as such: “Triply scorned — as an Asian, a homosexual, and now a murderer — 19 year-old John Lee [Scott Shimizu] has confessed to shooting his lover in a public lavatory.” The material knowingly leverages limited incidental suspense to examine a much larger mystery.

Yes, the audience is aware that John is guilty. But how does his particular brew of racial, sexual and personal isolation lead to a powerlessness that can only be defeated (in his mind) through a shocking act of human destruction?

Shimizu commands the stage as John, a lonely student who goes “cottaging (defined as anonymous sex in public bathrooms)” to assuage an unsatisfied need for physical and emotional connection. As the play makes clear, well before he became a murderous media sensation, John faced rejection from the Chinese immigrant community, gay society and even himself.

More than once as John shares his story with a prison psychiatrist, he uses the word “hate” to describe his tortured feelings about his appearance and the lifelong odyssey to find a place where he belongs. Shimizu’s performance is at once utterly sympathetic, unhinged and desperate. Exactly right.

A talented supporting cast uniformly gifted with the ability to slip quickly and seamlessly into the skins of representative London (TV presenters, old women, Chinese laborers and more) makes Shimuzu’s headlining work all the more successful. Cory Hardin, Scott Olson, Graham Emmons and Colin Sphar are a barbershop quartet of onomatopoeia, paparazzi flash, ethnic and social judgment rolled up into the screaming soundtrack of John’s consciousness. Without their strong, emotional work, John’s descent into identity hysteria would lack the necessary urgency.

The color red, origami and an ancient Chinese parable about a misfit crow follow John through the beginning, middle and end of his stage journey — storytelling devices that are both symbolic and literal. Red, representing both luck and death: origami an emblem of creativity and ruminating madness; the crow equally foreign at home and abroad.

These elements are woven into a beautiful but inevitably painful tapestry that unravels in tandem with John’s opportunity to assimilate. Even in prison, he is segregated via solitary confinement. And yet the murder, an act that permanently severs John from community of any type, may be the only powerful and deliberate choice of his life. It’s a willfully uncomfortable idea that both the material and Shimuzu’s performance force audiences to consider.

Running roughly 90 minutes with no intermission, Prologue Theatre’s “Porcelain” has a lot to say with no wasted words or fillers. Due to adult content including a rather graphic sexual assault, the production is decidedly adults only. It’s a chilling, thought-provoking piece worth placing on your early summer calendar.

“Porcelain” runs through July 15 at Greenhouse Theatre, 2257 N. Lincoln Avenue, Chicago, IL. For information or tickets, call 773-404-7336 or visit the Greenhouse Theatre website.