Not only has the stuff always been incredibly dangerous to unearth (both to humans and the surrounding environment), it's equally (if not more) dangerous to burn. Coal used to turn industrial cities gray and black and make their inhabitants ill. Today, coal combustion endangers human health and well-being via the production of vast quantities of greenhouse gas that promote global warming. It also injects immense amounts of toxins high up into the atmosphere that ultimately settle out into the air we breathe and the water and food we consume.

And that's not the end of it. Once you've burned the stuff (and hopefully used modern technology to "scrub" some of the exhaust flowing up the smokestack), you're still left with yet another mess: the byproduct of the combustion process. In the United States, coal combustion produces nearly 140 million tons of waste - "fly ash,", "scrubber sludge," and other combustion byproducts - each year. These byproducts remain near to or on the site of the coal fired power plant - sort of like an especially vile version of the leftovers in your fireplace.

If you're trying to visualize how much ash and sludge that is, think of it this way: A modern American aircraft carrier like the USS George H.W. Bush (length 1,092 feet) tips the scales at 100,000 tons. This means that the each year, U.S. coal-fired power plants produce 1,400 aircraft carriers worth of ash and sludge.

The current controversy

For a long time, the solution of what to do with fly ash and sludge has been twofold. Most of it was simply left in place or discarded. Some of it, however (as much as 40%) is actually "recycled" for other, seemingly beneficial purposes - like landscaping and in the production of wallboard (used in building construction) and concrete. In North Carolina, the state Department of Transportation has used fly ash in the concrete used for road construction since the mid-1980's.

Unfortunately, in keeping with the increasingly apparent truth that there's no free lunch when it comes to coal, a growing body of evidence shows that, like the substance from which it emanates, coal waste is nasty and dangerous stuff.

Fifteen months ago in Tennessee, there was a disastrous spill of coal byproducts when a dam that had been used to contain a fly ash "pond" collapsed, sending 1.1 billion gallons of slurry (an ash and water mixture) cascading into local rivers and onto local lands.

Even more important than the risks associated with being inundated with ash and sludge, however, is the issue of the toxicity of the stuff itself. Though they've long been treated by utilities as essentially harmless, it turns out that coal byproducts contain a host of incredibly noxious chemicals - arsenic, cadmium, lead, selenium and other toxics that cause cancer and brain damage in humans.

Even if you just leave the stuff in place and don't "recycle" it, these chemicals can easily leach out into the water supply and endanger surrounding communities. Tests conducted around utility disposal sites and in and around locations (like a Virginia golf course) where the stuff was used, demonstrate that ground water pollution is a serious hazard.

Just last month, a pair of national environmental groups (the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) and Earthjustice) released a new report about the dangers associated with coal waste entitled "Out of Control: Mounting Dangers From Coal Ash Waste Sites." The report brought to light the fact that 31 coal combustion waste sites are known to have contaminated groundwater, wetlands, creeks, or rivers in 14 states: Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.

For all of these reasons and others, the federal EPA has been moving to reclassify coal combustion waste as a hazardous chemical (it has long been classified as more benignly). This would place significant new requirements on utilities to store the stuff more safely and greatly limit (if not eliminate) its application toward products and other uses that risk human exposure. Advocates for the environment hope that EPA will act in just a matter of weeks.

The North Carolina debate

In many ways, North Carolina is ground zero for the coal waste debate. The state relies heavily on coal-fired electric plants and is home to 12 coal ash dams - the most in the country. Five of the 31 contaminating sites identified in the EIP/Earthjustice report are in North Carolina. These include sites in Arden (Buncombe County), Goldsboro, Moncure (Chatham County), Rocky Mount, Belews Creek (Stokes County), and Wilmington.

Last year, Governor Perdue weighed in on the side of improved waste site monitoring in the aftermath of the Tennessee disaster and trumpeted her decision to sign a bill that, among other things, enhanced coal dam regulation.

Unfortunately, on the question of regulating coal waste as a hazardous chemical, the Perdue administration has gone the opposite direction and is following the lead of industry - particularly the powerful electric generation companies - in putting on a full court press in opposition to strong EPA action. Late last summer, Perdue's Secretaries of Commerce and Transportation, along with the Executive Director of the Utilities Commission Public Staff, wrote to the EPA urging it not to take strong action. Their stated rationales were right out of the standard, big business playbook for defeating environmental protection efforts - namely that such regulation would cost money, raise utility rates and inconvenience business.

Of course, there's probably a kernel of truth in these gripes - just as there often is when it comes to environmental protection: Protecting humans from environmental poisons usually does cost money - sometimes a lot of it - and can cause inconveniences for businesses that were used to doing things a particular way. The same has been true hundreds of times before in the last 40-plus years as American regulators have struggled to limit the degradation of the natural environmental and human health. If we'd let that stop us in the past, though, we'd probably be mourning the final demise of the ozone layer, have tens of millions of Americans struggling with lead poisoning and might even be recovering from an American Chernobyl or two by now.

Ultimately, cost and inconvenience cannot be the deciding issues when human health on a large scale is truly at risk. And if coal waste is truly as toxic and dangerous as the reports of experts indicate (and one environmental expert recently described it as "the dirtiest waste that pollution control devices keep out of the atmosphere") then efforts to delay strong federal regulation are a terrible mistake and represent an extremely shortsighted step by the Perdue administration.

As with the infamous Corvair automobile from the early 1960's that consumer advocates properly branded as "unsafe at any speed," we're coming to see that large scale use of coal is unsafe in just about any form.

Let's hope that the Governor and her allies in the state's business elite come to understand this truth and rethink their position against strong regulation of coal waste before we all live to regret it.

It's easy to demand, for instance, that every undocumented immigrant be rounded up and summarily deported to his or her country of origin, but the reality, of course, is much more complicated. Unless Americans want to imitate the regimes and systems of government we profess to abhor by crudely lumping vast groups of people together because of their race or skin color or ethnic heritage and simply dumping them at the border, we must acknowledge the hard truth that every immigrant has an individual story.

Each individual person has a reason for being here, a story to tell about what drove them to come, family members and relatives who may or may not have legal status, and often, connections to an employer, a religious congregation and the community in which they live. Now add to this reality the fact that each such person ought to have at least some opportunity to make their case - to explain their individual story to a neutral truth finder - and you begin to grasp the facts that immigration law is complicated stuff.

• On what basis should a person be subject to arrest and imprisonment (what we so politely refer to as "detention")? Should people be rounded up in the middle of the night?

• Who should have the burden of proof? What kind of due process should the person receive?

• Should people from certain countries receive more generous treatment? How bad should the conditions be in their country of origin in order to cut them some slack? Must the person face certain death? A good chance of it? Is the likelihood of political persecution enough? How about a natural disaster or just plain old grinding poverty?

• What about their family? Should they have a right to know where their loved one has been taken to? To visit them? To procure a lawyer?

Now, attempt to apply these and dozens of other relevant questions to millions of individuals and, well, the scope of the problem quickly mushrooms to a gigantic scale.

The Obama administration's year-one performance

Last week, experts at the Immigration Policy Center, a project of the Washington, DC-based nonprofit known as the American Immigration Council, released a detailed and thoughtful report on many of these difficult topics. The report - "DHS Progress Report: The Challenge of Reform" - assesses the performance of the Obama administration's Department of Homeland Security (DHS) during its first year of operation. What has the new DHS done? How has it improved the federal government's response to the myriad complexities of the immigration policy arena? Where has it fallen short?

Here are some of the chief findings:

As a general matter, the new DHS Secretary (and former Arizona Governor) Janet Napolitano, has made important progress in shifting what one might call the overall tone of the nation's approach to immigration policy and enforcement. For the most part, gone are the days of the Bush administration's macho posturing and reckless assaults on American norms of fairness. In particular, the report credits the new DHS for:

• A pragmatic and compassionate response to the earthquake in Haiti and the people it has affected;

• Modest headway toward assuring effective counsel for people in "removal hearings";

• Moving away from the practice of large-scale work site raids and instead targeting employers who hire unauthorized workers;

• Creating a path to asylum for women victimized by domestic violence;

• Making some modest improvements in the detention system that warehouses thousands of people as they await the deportation process; and

• Reaching out to stakeholders and providing funding of community-based immigrant services organization.

Unfortunately, when it comes to many of the day-to-day workings of the immigration enforcement machinery, little has changed. According to the report:

• Due process remains a huge problem. The immigration courts are hugely overburdened, access to counsel is limited, and the appeals process is inadequate to assure every person a fair shake.

• Despite a public commitment to move toward targeting employers and individuals with serious criminal convictions, data indicate that these groups still comprise a tiny percentage of those targeted by enforcement officials.

• DHS continues to expand programs (like the flawed 287(g) program) that empower local law enforcement officers to play immigration cop and round up large numbers of people that pose no threat to the community.

• DHS continues to move full steam ahead with its flawed "E-Verify" program (a program that continues to generate large numbers of false positives and negatives in assessing the immigrations status of workers) as well as its court-clogging "Operation Streamline" (a program that mandates criminal prosecution for non-violent border crossers).

Summing up and going forward

Though dispensing plenty of credit to the Napolitano DHS for its efforts to implement change, the report's bottom line assessment of where the immigration system is and where it needs to go is pretty blunt: Right now, America's immigration system remains broken and beyond repair - at least so long as those repairs are confined to tinkering and tweaking around the edges. It's like trying to fix a broken a broken umbrella with duct tape.

Here's how the authors of the Immigration Policy Center report put it:

"…no matter how earnest the reform effort, it is likely to be eclipsed by the crushing burden of the broken immigration system. Although this document points out many areas where the Administration-without any act of Congress-can have a positive impact, ultimately it will not be enough. Secretary Napolitano herself identified the problem during her major statement on immigration in November 2009-the more we reform, the more we know we have to change the system. The immigration agencies themselves cannot possibly hope to succeed as long as we rely on them to create reason out of chaos. To that end, the longer we delay comprehensive immigration reform, the greater the burden will be on DHS to carve rational policy out of irrational laws, and the more difficult that task will become."

In other words, as with so many other issues, President Obama's immigration policy team deserves praise for some important and worthwhile policy shifts in their first year of running the show. Unfortunately, as with health care and financial reform, climate change and fiscal policy, much more dramatic and comprehensive reform will ultimately be required.

In this regard, Americans are right to keep their eyes on the big picture - just so long that is, as they don't lose sight of the impact of the policies they adopt on the lives of millions of their fellow human beings. Next week, a group of activists will be traveling through North Carolina as part of a national "caravan" designed to deliver such a message. Let's hope people listen to what they're saying.

From: Your customers, stakeholders and constituents

Re: The demise of the community we all call home

Dear Friends:

There comes a time in the public life of a democracy when people who care about their community must stand up and be counted; a time in which remaining on the sidelines and merely pursuing one's own private interests (or contending that one's interests aren't at-stake) simply won't do. Such a time has arrived in North Carolina's bustling and fast-growing capital county. Right now, it's crunch time in Wake County, North Carolina.

Anyone who harbored any doubts about this reality and who was paying attention was disabused of them over the last few weeks as they watched the kangaroo sessions conducted by a group of extreme and buffoonish interlopers who have seized control of the single most important public body in a county of a million people.

It happened when people listened to the school board chair refer in public to those who would dare to question his plan to reverse decades of progress in public education by reassigning the county's students into segregated population zones as "animals out of their cages."

It happened when people looked on in stunned disbelief as that chair and his allies rammed through an unprecedented plan to make a far right propaganda shop and private foundation funded exclusively by one man - the rather bizarrely named "J.W. Pope Civitas Institute" - an official adjunct to the Board.

It happened when people saw the school system's veteran and respected superintendent resign in protest and when surveys showing widespread content with school assignment were ignored.

It happened when people heard the Board establish a subcommittee for the purpose of thoroughly researching the myriad issues related to the county's complex student assignment system and then, before any research could be conducted or reported, watched it go back on its word and move forward with a radical plan to dismantle the current system.

Friends, right now the Wake County public school system (and, thereby quite likely, the long-term health and wellbeing of the capital county of our state) is sitting on the point at the top of Raleigh's new RBC Tower. It's wobbling in the wind, waiting to crash to the street below.

And when it falls, it won't fall alone. Not only will it hit the pavement full of innocent kids and families, it will be followed in short order by a series of follow-up crashes - the health of the local business community, its attractiveness to potential newcomers, the drawing power of our colleges and universities, real property values, and ultimately, the county (and state's) overall health, wellbeing and reputation. It will begin what former school board chair John Gilbert is warning will be "the Detroitization of Raleigh."

We understand that this is an unusual request. For many of you, school board politics are usually at a level below your radars - the kind of micro-politics that motivates and involves PTA's but not CEO's. But the current situation is different.

This isn't a matter of degree in which a new group of elected officials is trying to take the helm and adjust course a few degrees right of center. This is, in effect, a dark of night coup d'état by ideologues with no real interest in governing. These people have capitalized on inevitable and understandable public discontent in pockets of the community in order to seize control of the ship of state, run it aground, and effect radical change.

Just look at one of the major forces behind this effort. This plan wasn't hatched and inspired by some concerned group of benevolent city fathers. Rather, much of it is the work of a team led by a national chain store magnate (well-known for his support of far-right causes) who owns hundreds of stores throughout eastern U.S. - catering, ironically enough, to people of low and modest income. Only three of these stores appear to be in Wake County. Heck, the main offices aren't even in the Triangle!

One of his chief cronies is, among other things, the head of a conservative and controversial private school with aspirations to establish a chain of such institutions that would supplant public schools.

These people are not racists, but their views on the key issues of the day are decidedly and hopelessly reactionary. Can you really stand by and let such people destroy one of the most important public structures in North Carolina's capital county - the home to the seat of government, a flagship university and many of the largest economic engines in the state?

Now, don't get us wrong, we know that the current school system is far from perfect. Though it is much better than most, years of record population growth, inadequate funding and a failure to stick to objectives around school diversity have caused some backsliding - especially for poor and minority children. This is an unacceptable situation. But this is not grounds for dismantling all that we have achieved.

It is for all these reasons and more that we are calling on you today -

• You - Senator Hagan, Governor Perdue, the members of the Council of State, Senate President Pro Tem Basnight and House Speaker Hackney,

• You - Erskine Bowles and the chancellors and presidents of the various Triangle colleges and universities,

• You - Bill Johnson of Progress Energy, Jim Goodnight of SAS, Bill Atkinson of WakeMed and Harvey Schmitt of the Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce

to stand up and speak out.

A broad coalition of parents, students, clergy and grassroots activists (along with a few of your courageous peers) has been doing its best to resist the tide. But now we need your help.

In case you needed any other reminders of how vital this effort is, consider these words from the Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce about what we have and what's at risk:

"Whether you're looking for world-class educational opportunities for your children or yourself, we have it all.

The high quality of education found throughout Wake County is a primary reason that the Triangle area continues to be heralded as one of the best places to live in the country. (Emphasis supplied). And the relocation of people to Raleigh from other parts of the nation and around the world results in high expectations and even higher standards for school performance.

Our public schools earn high marks across the board, outperforming school districts across the state and nation in end-of-course and proficiency tests, SAT scores and other performance-measuring criteria. In fact, the Wake County Public School System is a national role model with its goal of having 95 percent of its students performing at or above grade level. With a reputation like that, it's no surprise that Expansion Management magazine gave the Wake County Public School System a gold medal rating as one of the best in the nation."

And finally, make no mistake: this is not a matter whose effects will only be felt in Wake County. People throughout the United States are watching. They’re looking to see whether Wake County will serve as a bulwark against reaction or a bellwether of bad things to come. And right now, they’re looking at headlines like the one that appeared this week in the respected Independent newspaper: “Wake County goes to hell.”

So, please stand up with us. Speak out. Get involved in the process. Better yet, come to a school board meeting. Let the world know that when the chips were down in this very important part of the world, the leaders and institutions with the greatest resources and political clout didn't sit passively by while amateurs and ideologues wrecked one of the community's last best hopes for progress and shared prosperity.

A measure of skeptical cynicism has almost always been a part of the armor worn by those who champion progressive policy reform. When you're a soldier in the fight to elevate and empower the underdogs and have nots of society, you're used to watching the rich and the powerful have their way. Allow that armor to crack or slip too much and one runs the risk of debilitating discouragement when, as frequently happens, one's idealistic visions are dashed on the rocks of political reality.

Still, as cynical and skeptical as almost all progressives try to be, for most there also remains a strong undercurrent of faith in the American system - a belief that, over time, justice and progress will generally prevail over greed and reaction.

It's like the American court system: While most of us understand that wealthy individuals and corporations will always be able to purchase a better chance at a favorable result, we also still believe that there remains an abiding commitment to truth-seeking in most instances. It doesn't always work - just ask Greg Taylor or Darryl Hunt or Bo Jones - but a lot of the time it does. And most of us still believe that we could get a fair shake if and when we face "our day in court."

And so it has long gone in the political sphere. Most of us complain about American democracy, but we still participate. We witness occasional instances in which the common good prevails and it's enough to keep us coming back. We haven't given up yet.

Treading on thin ice?

Still, one can't help feel that this spirit has been gravely wounded in recent weeks by the January ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Citizens United v. FEC. In that decision, of course, a narrow 5-4 conservative majority upended decades of precedent by holding that, in essence, corporations may spend whatever they want on campaigns to promote candidates for office.

The notion that America's enormous corporations - many of which have annual profits larger than the entire budget of the state of North Carolina - may now spend hundreds of millions - if not billions - of dollars each year to select our political leaders is a remarkable new fact. It's as if we had amended our judicial procedures to allow wealthy litigants to select their own rules of evidence. No longer would an impartial judge determine what is or is not admissible pursuant to a set of neutral rules. Rather, the decision as to what evidence a jury could or could not hear would be purely a matter of competing budgets. If Exxon wants to take the jury to the Bahamas for a few days of intensive briefings regarding its side of an oil spill dispute, no problem.

Next Tuesday, NC Policy Watch will host an important "Crucial Conversation" luncheon on the Citizens United decision to examine just how thin the ice under our American democracy has become. The event will be headlined by Brenda Wright. Wright is a veteran civil rights attorney and the Director of the Democracy Program at the national public policy research and advocacy organization, Demos. She has argued two voting rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and has extensive experience as a speaker and writer on voting rights, voter suppression, access to voter registration, campaign finance reform, redistricting, election protection, Department of Justice oversight, and other election reform and democracy issues.

The gory details

Wright will have plenty of important things to talk about. On the law side, of course, she will help the audience to decipher the Court's opinion. What does it really say? Who is affected and who isn't? What comes next? How far will the Court go in conferring "rights" upon corporations? What kinds of regulation of political spending, if any, are still permissible?

According to experts, Citizens United is already bolstering court challenges to other regulations on political spending. Earlier this month, the National Journal reported that judges on the powerful D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals had "sharply questioned existing limits on political action committees, citing Citizens United as an argument for deregulation." At issue in the case: Whether Federal Elections Commission regulations that cap contributions to political action committees at $5,000 per person and that require detailed disclosure requirements are constitutional.

It will also be interesting to hear Wright's take on the more immediate and practical implications of the decision. What kind of new behavior, for instance, can we expect during the 2010 election cycle? Based on early indications, this could be a sobering discussion.

Right now, all over the country, a new wave of blunt, hardball plotting is already underway. From the inner sanctums of corporate board rooms to K Street to Madison Avenue to state capitals across the country, lawyers, lobbyists and consultants are performing a hard sell on their corporate clients about the need to transform their political advocacy.

Consider the following excerpt from a recent newsletter of one Raleigh-based political consultant:

"The Highest Risk Option for Business in 2010 is Unilateral Political Disarmament

…Many businesses and their trade associations are weighing the risks of using corporate-funded independent political ads. This report offers suggestions from our speakers for low, medium and high risk options for your consideration. First, I would like to present the highest risk option: unilateral disarmament. This is what business has been doing. It's why we have so few allies.

Last Thursday, Chris Christie, newly elected GOP Governor of New Jersey, said to a Joint Session of the Legislature, ‘Today, we come to terms with the fact that we cannot spend money on everything we want. Today, the days of Alice in Wonderland budgeting in Trenton end.'

If you like Christie's statement, then work to elect lawmakers who think like that. Use all of the political tools at your disposal, including your PAC and the new right to corporate-funded independent expenditure ads. It's time to stop the high risk politics of unilateral disarmament….

With the Citizens United ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court has freed you to make independent expenditures from your general treasury on behalf of candidates for political office. The only thing that remains is your decision to use this new political tool."

Got that? According to this influential politico, Citizens United is a call for North Carolina's downtrodden, put-upon corporations to rise up and use every tool at their disposal to seize control of the policy-making apparatus. The newsletter goes on to offer a menu of specific tips and "how to" suggestions - from creating one's own faux nonprofit "social welfare" group to establishing and managing PAC's and "527's" to targeting drive time radio and airplane banners. One can only imagine what's being said behind closed doors at Exxon or Wal-Mart or Halliburton.

Going forward

Feeling cynical and skeptical yet? If so, then it's probably time to start getting up to speed on the brave new political world that Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Kennedy appear to be bent on establishing. While it remains to be seen just how far the Flat-earth Five (and the forces they have unleashed) are prepared to go, those who care about preserving the spirit of American democracy would do well to gird for battle.

On the one hand, he knows that continued economic recovery depends on a continued commitment to robust federal stimulus policies. Shut off the spigot too soon and the turnaround that last year's Recovery Act legislation helped to spur will surely wilt and wither. On the other hand, he also understands that current federal deficits are not sustainable - at least in the long run. Something more than just hunkering down and hoping for a miraculous recovery will need to be done before too long.

Yesterday, in yet another effort to find common ground with conservatives, the President appointed a former Republican senator from Wyoming, Alan Simpson, and every Republican's favorite Democrat (North Carolina's own Erskine Bowles) to head a new "National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform." The goal of this group appears to be to take yet another stab at brokering some kind of a debt reduction deal - that is, to somehow win some conservative support for a compromise solution that addresses the issue without sending the economy back into a tailspin of the kind it was experiencing at the end of the Bush presidency.

Achieving such a bipartisan deal will likely be a tough nut to crack. In the ever-more cynical, hardball world of modern Washington, conservative ideologues smell blood in the water with the debt issue and seem determined to do whatever they can to use it to their political advantage - regardless of the real world impact on the country.

Indeed, in many ways, the debt issue presents exactly the kind of opportunity for which extremist ideologues like Rush Limbaugh and Grover Norquist have long yearned - the opportunity to use obstructionist, "just say no to everything" politics in order to create chaos and help bring about grave crises in the health of essential public institutions. It's from the same playbook that conservative ideologues are using right now in Wake County as they do their best (worst?) to tear down the County's public school system in hopes of replacing it with quasi-private, fee-for-service model of education. Remember the Bush proposals to privatize Social Security?

A little perspective

Fortunately, despite the real world and political challenges posed by the debt problem, the truth of the matter is that it is not an immediate "crisis" of the proportions that some current media reports portray.

Yesterday, nationally acclaimed economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy Research released a special report on the debt issue entitled "The Budget Deficit Scare Story and the Great Recession." In it, Baker - one of the earliest identifiers of the "housing bubble" that precipitated the current crisis - expounds on the true size of the federal government's current deficits and the prospects for a return to relative solvency.

Here is his thumbnail summary:

"1) The extraordinary level of current deficits is overwhelmingly the result of the economic crisis. If any part of the system is ‘broken,' as claimed by some deficit hawks, it is the structure of economic policymaking that allowed for an $8 trillion housing bubble to grow unchecked. It was inevitable that this bubble would eventually burst, leading to the sort of economic crisis that the country is now experiencing. This crisis was both foreseeable and preventable. There is little reality to the claim that [the current] Congress is out of control in its tax and spending policies.

2) The budget deficit does not pose an economic problem at present. If the budget deficit were smaller, we would simply be seeing higher unemployment. There would be no short-term or long-term benefit from reducing the current deficit.

3) The size of the longer-term deficit problem has been both exaggerated and misrepresented. Projections show that debt-to-GDP ratios will be well within manageable levels at least a decade into the future, even if there are no major changes from baseline scenarios. As a long-term issue, the United States must fix its health care system. This, not demographics, is the real long-term deficit problem, as can be easily shown.

4) The wealth of near-retirees has been devastated by the collapse of the housing bubble and the plunge in the stock market. The economic prospects for these age cohorts look bleak even assuming currently scheduled benefits from Social Security and Medicare. Any substantial reduction in these benefits will likely leave large segments of middle-income workers with near-poverty level incomes in retirement.

5) Concerns about foreign ownership of the government debt are offensive jingoism. There is an issue about foreign indebtedness because this implies that an increased portion of future output will be paid out as interest and/or dividends to foreigners rather than being available for domestic consumption. However, this is driven by the trade deficit, not the budget deficit. The trade deficit, in turn, is attributable to the over-valuation of the dollar. The deficit hawks have rarely focused on the value of the dollar, preferring instead to hype misleading concerns about foreign (especially Chinese) ownership of government debt."

In other words…

While the deficit and debt problems are real and worth devoting significant attention to, they should not rise to the level to which some would elevate them. The issue is not something that's worth tearing down the federal government and/or ending aggressive recovery action over.

As Baker notes, the federal deficit is currently projected to run at a rate of less than 2.5% of Gross Domestic Product for the next decade - even if we do essentially nothing to address the issue. While significant and above desirable levels, this is well-below historic highs (such as at the close of World War II).

Moreover most of these deficits are attributable to the economic downturn - not to the spending hikes and tax cuts enacted as part of the Obama recovery package. If any spending growth is really to blame, it is the massive outlays for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If the lawmakers in Washington were to all of a sudden do an about face and reverse course on stimulus spending they would only make matters worse. This may be what Norquist and Limbaugh have in mind, but it would be terrible for the country.

"But what about those dire projections for the decades to follow?" you ask. "Mustn't we act now to avoid truly catastrophic deficits and debt in 2020 and beyond?"

To this Baker offers the following retort:

"Many analysts have highlighted the longer-term fiscal deficit picture, which is indeed bleak. However, these disastrous deficit projections are driven almost entirely by the assumption that per person costs of the U.S. health care system continue to get ever further out of line with costs in other wealthy countries….This suggests the urgency of fixing the U.S. health care system."

This view coincides with the recommendations of experts at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities who noted in a report last month that:

"Rising health care costs are the single largest cause of rapidly rising expenditures, and ongoing reform of the health care system is absolutely fundamental to any solution."

Going forward

Despite the carping of right-wing ideologues and political opportunists, President Obama deserves a good deal of credit for the consistent seriousness with which he has tackled the issues of recovery and federal debt. Let's hope that Erskine Bowles follows the advice of experts like Dean Baker and helps lead the new debt commission in a similar direction - that is, away from panicky and irresponsible cuts that would harm average Americans and toward common sense solutions like real, long-term health care reform that will serve the country well for the decades to come.

This coming Saturday morning, thousands of North Carolinians will gather in Raleigh for the fourth annual HK on J march and rally. Here's how the organizers describe what this event is all about:

"Three years ago this week, a diverse and extraordinary collection of thousands of North Carolinians gathered in Raleigh for what the group called a "People's Assembly." The Assembly took place on Jones Street, in front of the State Legislative Building, where our elected representatives craft state laws and choose how to spend our tax dollars.

The new movement that was launched that day ("HK on J" for "Historic Thousands on Jones Street") was and is the first modern coalition of its kind - a movement organized by the state's 100 NAACP Branches and featuring for the first time since the 1960's, a broad Black, White and Brown progressive agenda supported by over 88 state and local organizations, with more than one-million members.

Now, the HK on J People's Assembly gathers each February on the Saturday nearest the NAACP's anniversary and Abraham Lincoln's birthday to witness the miracle of God's diverse human race, to feel the warmth and strength of thousands of our friends and allies gathered together in a common purpose, and to push forward the People's Agenda for poor and working people across the State.

This year's event will be especially uplifting, with celebrations of important victories and the unveiling of new plans to bring home more progressive change this coming spring and summer - both through direct advocacy on Jones Street and the work of local People's Assemblies across the state."

In other words, HK on J is North Carolina's most visible and important public event dedicated to progressive policy change - the place where the state's often fractious and too-frequently-divided progressive movement can come together to march under one common, reform banner.

And if this fact alone is not enough to assure your attendance this weekend, here are ten more reasons to devote a couple of hours to the cause this Saturday:

#10 - To respond to the assorted "Tea Party" nuts - We all know that this noisy and misguided group represents much of the worst in modern America and receives more coverage and attention than it deserves. What better way to demonstrate to the world what truly patriotic political activism looks like?

#9 - To connect to (and carry on) the 20th Century civil rights movement - This year's HK on J event will start at Shaw University on the south side of downtown Raleigh. The Shaw campus, of course, was the birthplace of one of the stalwart organizations of the American civil rights movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC. This connection is especially appropriate in 2010 because it marks the 50^th anniversary of both SNCC and the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins.

#8 - To stand up for health care reform - Despite the bizarre case of inside-the-beltway myopia that seems to have afflicted large segments of official Washington, one quirky special election in Massachusetts has not altered the underlying facts that a) Americans desperately want and need health care reform, and b) elected officials are in the position to deliver it. Come to Raleigh and help convey this message once and for all.

#7 - To show that most Americans are not anti-immigrant haters - The United States is a nation of immigrants. Immigration is in many ways the bedrock of our republic. Unfortunately, one need not look too far beneath the surface to see the kind of grip that fear, intolerance and even hate, have on those who want to halt progress in its tracks. Courageous people of all races and ethnicities owe to our future to speak up for comprehensive immigration reform.

#6 - To learn more in a few hours than you might normally absorb in as many weeks. Though HK on J is first and foremost about speaking out, it is also about education. For progressive North Carolinians looking for a "hands on" crash course in what's really at-issue in the 2010 policy debates, there is no better place to hear from a large collection of passionate and informed speakers or collect large quantities of insightful, to-the-point literature and talking points.

#5 - To feel like you're truly a part of something big and good - Face it, in our busy, computerized, cell "phone-ized" society, how many opportunities does the average North Carolinian really get to walk down the middle of the street, arm in arm, with an incredibly diverse crowd of thousands of people (rich and poor, young and old, Black, Brown and White) for the purpose of building a better world. There's almost guaranteed to be a moment that sends chills down your spine. Speaking of which…

#4 - To hear the President of the North Carolina NAACP, the Rev. William Barber II, speak - Right now, there simply is no other public figure in the state of North Carolina with the passion, presence or oratory skills of the NAACP's dynamic president. If you have a caring bone in your body, it's impossible to hear Barber address a crowd on the issues of the day in his inimitable style and not to feel inspired and more determined to keep fighting for what's right.

#3 - To demand better and fairer economic policies - Last year's federal recovery legislation has made an important impact in blunting the worst effects of the Great Recession. Unfortunately, the light at the end of the tunnel remains a long way off. North Carolina's unemployment and poverty rates remain at unacceptable levels even as bailouts and giveaways to large, profitable corporations continue unabated. Come and show your support for aggressive, intentional solutions that put the creation of jobs and the strengthening of the social safety net ahead of tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy.

#2 - To say "no" to the re-segregation of North Carolina's public schools - If there's a candidate for "most disturbing public policy trend in North Carolina" in recent years, it's been the steady, drip-by-drip abandonment of socioeconomic diversity in the state's public schools. Most recently, the battle over this issue has been joined in Wake County, where a small faction of reactionaries has captured control of the local school board and sought to undo several decades of progress. Participants in this year's HK on J event will be delivering a simple and straightforward message in response: "Well never go back!"

And #1 - To help celebrate past successes and to recommit oneself to a progressive agenda for change - Last year, despite a record $4.6 billion budget hole, state leaders made some progress on the H K on J 14-point agenda - including the passage of the Racial Justice Act, modest advances on compensation for forced sterilization victims, expansion of Children's Health Insurance, and real progress on a number of important housing and consumer protection laws. Most of the agenda, however, remains a work in progress.

Come to Raleigh this Saturday to help make sure that next year's march in February of 2011 has a shorter agenda to champion.

For more information about the event, including logistics, click here.

See ya' Saturday!

Of snow removal and other essential services

Much of North Carolina took it on the chin from Mother Nature this past weekend. Snow and ice piled up in several parts of the state and left things, much to the self-satisfied amusement of just about anyone who’s ever lived even a few miles north of North Carolina, generally paralyzed for the beginning of the work week.

From Cherokee County to Currituck, transplants and returning natives who have at some point lived north of the Mason-Dixon Line shook their heads disdainfully and remarked on our state’s generally woeful capacity for snow removal. You know how this went and may have even uttered it yourself:

“I can’t believe four or five inches of snow can shut down practically an entire state! When we lived in Pittsburgh (or Buffalo or Chicago or Omaha), they would have had all this stuff plowed before sunrise.”

There are at least two obvious rejoinders to such comments – one obvious and the other somewhat less so.

The first and most obvious response is that it simply doesn’t make sense for North Carolina to invest a lot of money in the kind of snow removal equipment they have in colder climes. With the relative infrequency of significant snows in most of the state, we would simply be wasting tax dollars to go down such a road. It would make no more sense than it would, say, for some burg on the prairie to invest the kind of resources Raleigh puts into leaf removal. One might call this the “shoulder shrug” response:

“What are you gonna’ do? This is just one of the things you have to put up with to live in this part of the country.”

On second thought

A second and less obvious response, however, might examine and consider this issue a little more thoroughly. Aside from the intensely practical questions regarding how much these every-so-often periods of gridlock are really costing our state and its economy in lives and money (and whether there might just be a way to modify some of our existing equipment and personnel to allow for quicker and more thorough responses than are possible now), there is a broader philosophical issue that’s worth exploring. One might call this the “light bulb” response:

“Hmmm, you may have got a point there. Just because North Carolina has always responded this way in the past, doesn’t mean we have to do so forever. As a matter of fact there are probably a whole slew of issues on which we might fare better if we put our heads together and adopted more of a ‘can do’ approach.”

The fact of the matter, of course, is that the main force behind North Carolina’s lack of snow removal capacity is one simple thing: money. For a host of reasons – many of them never closely examined – elected officials have simply never appropriated the kinds of funds that would be necessary to get the job done.

This is not the case in a limited number of private communities and shopping centers, where people and businesses have banded together to clear the roads and parking lots, but it is on a huge proportion of the public highways and city streets. There, on weeks such as this, thousands of comfortably well-off North Carolinians struggle mightily at the risk of their lives and their $30,000 cars to slog through a single lane of half-melted slush.

By all indications, this is not a philosophical decision driven by a conservative, anti-government bias. People overwhelmingly like and enjoy high quality public services when it comes to things they can’t easily provide for themselves like trash removal, good roads, water and sewer service and snow removal. They intuitively grasp the benefit of communities coming together in such instances. Life is easier and better. People have more time to devote to their families, their friends, their jobs, their communities and themselves. They have less to worry about. They have more freedom.

At what price services?

The roadblock, of course, is that dreaded five-letter word that has been used to divide Americans for centuries: taxes. North Carolina’s elected leaders have made the calculation that their constituents would rather have the few pennies that each will retain as a result of not raising taxes to pay for snow removal than they would the snow removal itself.

This may, in fact be an accurate assessment, though it would be interesting to see what the public would say if it were ever actually asked. Notwithstanding the constant drumbeat of propaganda from the anti-government right, North Carolinians clearly like the idea of high quality public services and structures. As bond issue after bond issue attests, people are often willing to pay more in taxes when they can see a tangible community benefit.

And while officials are asking the public about what they might be willing to pay not to have worry about risking their lives driving to work or losing their children’s Spring breaks, it might also be very instructive to see what they’d say in response to some questions about some other essential services – health care for example.

Not that long ago, the right-wing Pope Civitas Institute conducted one of its typically stilted polls in an obvious effort to show that North Carolinians wanted no public involvement in health care. The results, however, were clearly not what they had anticipated. When asked if they would support a health care system run by the federal government and be willing to pay higher taxes to support it, a large majority of North Carolinians said “yes, as matter of fact we would.” Again, contrary to years of misinformation about the supposed inherent evils of taxes, most people showed that they’re actually willing to chip in a little bit more to enjoy a richer menu of essential services and structures.

In other words, people may wisely mistrust politicians and be wary of corruption in large institutions (both public and private) but they’re not stupid; they understand that they will be better off and live happier, healthier, freer lives if public structures and services can relieve them of worry and the need to fend for themselves in a dog-eat-dog existence.

As noted earlier, the only real question is how much would people be willing to pay? While there is clearly some point at which average North Carolinians would say “no mas,” it’s hard to imagine that most people wouldn’t be willing to pay substantially more to be relieved of the hassle, worry and threats to their physical and financial well-being that accompanies our current disaster of a health care system. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine that most North Carolinians wouldn’t also be willing to pay, say, 10% more per year to know that our education and mental health systems were truly of world class quality.

Who should pay?

Indeed, given North Carolina’s tax structure, the calculation may only need to apply to people’s attitudes toward the rich – since their state and local taxes are so much lower as a proportion of income than everyone else’s. If North Carolina only increased state and local taxes on the wealthy to the point at which they felt the same bite on their incomes as everyone else, the state would be well-positioned to plug many of its current holes and, indeed, dramatically improve and increase the services and structures it provides. One underreported story from last week was the passage of a ballot initiative in Oregon that bumped up taxes on the corporations and the rich by $727 million in order to assure that essential services would be preserved.

It would be fascinating to see what North Carolinians would do if they had the opportunity to express their opinions on such an idea. Would most North Carolinians be willing to tax the wealthy at the same overall, effective rates that most everyone else pays in order to assure that our schools and mental health systems (and snow removal crews) no longer had to do things on the cheap?

If we can ever figure out a way to have a fair debate on the matter that isn’t completely overrun by wads of corporate cash, don’t bet against it.

Here are two quotes that tell you everything you need to know about the so-called "moderate" U.S. Senate Democrats who are arguing for a piecemeal approach to health care reform now that Republicans have claimed what one insightful wag described as a "41-59 majority" - they come from Indiana Senator, Evan Bayh and Nebraska's Ben Nelson:

Quote #1: "Just ramming through a bill on a purely party-line vote on a strictly partisan basis will not do much to generate the kind of progress around here on other issues that we need," Bayh said of reconciliation. "We need to focus on things where we have a consensus."

Quote #2: "This is one where we need to make a pie a piece at a time, as opposed to a comprehensive approach," Nelson said. "We've tried a comprehensive approach and it's clear that won't be possible."

Got that? Americans elected a new president by a near landslide and put in place large majorities in both houses of Congress on a shared and specific platform of passing comprehensive health care reform and now, because of the fear of a few senators that they'll upset the sensibilities of some of their brethren in the House of Lords by passing a supplemental fix with less than 60 votes (they've already passed the main bill with 60 votes), everything must stop. How dare the majority rule?

A recipe for disaster

If this brand of "logic" weren't bad enough from a purely political, common sense perspective, there's also another small problem when it comes to the idea of baking the pie one slice at a time: it makes about as much sense in the health care arena as it does in the kitchen.

Here's the hard truth when it comes to health care reform: We'd all love it to be simple as, well, pie (and a piece of cake to understand and explain) but there's a reason that isn't possible - the only way to do it is to completely blow up the entire system and start from scratch with a straightforward, single payer, government-run system. And while one could make a good case that such an approach might actually make sense in a perfect world, it simply isn't going to happen in 2010 America.

So, given this fact and the fact that we simply must do something to: a) Bring tens of millions of uninsured people into the system, b) control explosive cost growth, c) abolish the twin obscenities of the "preexisting condition" and the hospital bill-induced bankruptcy, and d) generally prevent health insurance companies from becoming a metastasizing cancer on the American economy, the only realistic option is to pass something along the lines of what's been slowly developing in Washington over the last year.

Sure, it's complex and a challenge to follow and translate into winning sound bites, but that's what happens when you try to comprehensively reform a system that's already more complicated than War and Peace. What do people really think? That it would be possible to rein in one of the most complex and "lawyered-up" private bureaucracies in the history of humankind with a pithy little 20 page law? Heck, the budget bill for a modest-sized state like North Carolina is several hundred pages each year.

Capturing and controlling the current American health care system is like taming a giant and powerful river by constructing a giant flood control dam - it's not going to happen by adding a few concrete blocks to the river bed every now and then as Senator Nelson suggests. Too many parts of the system are dependent upon each other. The only possibility is to capture the whole thing all at once so that the new and improved system can be put in place in relatively short order. 

When American engineers and laborers built Boulder (now Hoover) Dam during the Great Depression, their only chance for controlling the Colorado was to dig enormous tunnels so that they could temporarily divert the river from its main bed. That's essentially, what the legislation under consideration now in Washington would do - it would give the American people a way to wrest control of our raging torrent of a system and bend it to our will for the service of all - rather than just those who are wealthy enough to hire the equivalent of a whitewater guide.

What's on the table

Generally, the House bill is stronger, but not in every case and with the adjustments to the Senate bill now under consideration (this is the issue that has Bayh and Nelson in a tizzy), the changes and improvements to our system will be quite significant and beneficial. Here is some of what the Senate bill will do:

Guarantees secure insurance coverage by:

• Preventing insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and by barring insurance companies from basing premiums on health conditions or gender, as many do now.
• Restricting insurers from raising rates when people get sick.
• Requiring insurers to devote at least 85 percent (80 percent in the individual and small market) of premiums to medical benefits. If insurance companies do not meet this threshold, they must provide rebates to consumers.

Creates affordable health care options for individuals and families by:

• Significantly expanding Medicaid, including to adults who are currently ineligible in most states. This will result in newly covering 15 million people.
• Providing subsidies to make health insurance more affordable for 20 million low- and moderate-income families.
• Requiring insurers to cap out-of-pocket costs for all families and by eliminating lifetime caps on benefits and medical services.
• Assisting small businesses in purchasing health benefits for employees.
• Extending funding for the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) until 2015

Allows individuals and families to make informed choices about health insurance by:

• Creating "Exchanges" - i.e. marketplaces to compare and purchase certified health plans. The Exchanges will make it easier for consumers to find the best plan that meets their needs.
• Funding the immediate startup of state-based consumer assistance offices dedicated to answering questions about insurance options, assisting with enrollment, and helping to navigate the health care system.

Improves quality of care by:

• Promoting access to primary and preventive care; strengthening infrastructure by rewarding care coordination, innovation and efficiency within the delivery system.
• Shifting the health care system toward more patient- and family-centered care.
• Developing pathways to test and evaluate payment and delivery system reforms to improve quality and lower long-term costs.
• Including consumer representation in many of the key quality efforts.
• Establishing a national strategy to improve delivery of care, patient outcomes and population health, including reduction of racial and ethnic disparities.
• Expanding funds for prevention initiatives and targeting racial and ethnic disparities.

Strengthens Medicare by:

• Limiting cost-sharing for seniors enrolled in Medicare Advantage and by creating a new office dedicated to improving policies for some of the frailest and sickest elderly. It also promotes integrated care for beneficiaries who are dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid
• Beginning to close the Medicare Part D "doughnut hole," or coverage gap. The bill increases the threshold at which Medicare Part D beneficiaries enter the coverage gap by $500, and it provides a 50 percent discount on the prices of drugs in the doughnut hole   

Going forward

Is the Senate plan perfect? Of course not. The insurance and drug industries and many others have thrown enormous wads of cash at the issue and have weakened it in numerous ways. But, especially in light of last week's U.S. Supreme Court decision completely unleashing corproate politcal spending, there isn't much chance that this problem is going to be abated any time soon. And, for all its flaws, the Senate bill remains a more or less comprehensive solution.

In short, it may not divert the entire river all at once, but it will cut the torrent down to size and give the foundation of a new system some chance to become established. Let's hope our leaders act before the health care flood gets completely beyond our control. 

In 1988, one of the nation's great political cartoonists, Mark Alan Stamaty, created a side-splitting parody of the 1988 Bush-Dukakis election is his comic strip, "Washingtoon." The message Stamaty delivered in the cartoon still resonates 22 years later.

As those old enough to remember that dreary election may recall, Dukakis received major downgrades from the national press corps at the time for his response to a question posed by CNN news anchor Bernard Shaw during one of his debates with then-Vice President Bush.

Shaw asked Dukakis, an opponent of the death penalty, how he would feel about the issue if his wife, Kitty, were raped and murdered. For the mainstream pundits, Dukakis's failure to perform a credible Dirty Harry impersonation during the response was sufficient evidence that the Governor lacked the requisite "toughness" to be president. This, along with his failure to cut a sufficiently macho figure in a photo op in which he rode in an army tank and Bush's down-in-the-gutter TV ads about Willie Horton, helped seal Dukakis's fate.   

The "Washingtoon" parody went something like this:

Bush: "If elected, I promise to do three things - salute the flag, play with my grandchildren and appoint judges who will overturn Roe v. Wade."

Dukakis: "What about me? I won't appoint right-wing judges."  

Shaw: "You can't be president until you tell us how you'd really feel if your wife were raped and murdered."

Narrator: "One thing logically follows another. We have to have a reactionary Supreme Court because Mike Dukakis doesn't like to talk about his emotions in public."

The more things change…

And so it goes today. Recently, we've witnessed two new examples in which harmful and backward-looking public policy choices of enormous and lasting importance may be inflicted upon large numbers of people because voters (and elected officials) lost interest or allowed themselves to be distracted by side issues and conflict craving pundits with the attention span of three year-old.

Consider this week's election results from Massachusetts where an obscure Republican state senator captured Senator Edward Kennedy's vacated U.S. Senate seat in a special election. In it, the winner, Scott Brown, won 51.9% of the roughly 2.2 million people who voted or about 1.16 million people.

Though portrayed almost universally by pundits as "heavy" turnout, the 2.2 million figure actually represents only about half of the state's registered voters and a third of its total population. It's about two-thirds of the number who voted in 2008 - an election in which Barack Obama and Joe Biden received about as many votes by themselves as the total number voting this Tuesday. Brown received almost the exact same actual vote total as John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Nonetheless, the Massachusetts results are being touted as an earth-shattering, "game-changing" development that has gravely wounded the movement for health care reform because Senate Democrats now hold "only" a 59-41 edge.

As a new "Washingtoon" strip might put it:

"One thing logically follows another. Three-hundred million Americans must now be denied health care reform because of an off-year election driven by an array of issues in one mid-sized state that could have gone the opposite way if 49,000 people (seven-tenths of one percent of the state's population) had voted differently or if an extra 1.5% of the population had bothered to vote."

To see an equally egregious example closer to home, consider once more last fall's school board elections in Wake County.  In that case, of course, the gap between what voters actually did (and did not do) and the "mandate" that the election victors claimed is perhaps even more startling.

In Wake County, there are around 900,000 people and more than 572,000 registered voters spread across the county's nine geographic school board districts. Last fall's election however, involved just four of the nine school board seats. Moreover, turnout was abysmal. In the main (October) vote, a total of 31,170 people voted. This represents about 11.5% of eligible voters in the four districts, 5.4% of total county voters, and about 3.4% of the total county population.

Together, the four victorious candidates received just over 18,000 votes or about 3% of the county's registered voters or about 2% of the county's total population. That's one person in fifty.

The combined margins of victory in the four districts were even more microscopic. Together, the October results produced a total victory margin for the four candidates over their nearest competitors of 7,153. That's 2.6% of eligible voters in the four districts, 1.25% of total county voters, and about 0.8% of the total county population.

Put another way, had an extra one in a hundred Wake County residents shown up or changed his or her mind in the October election - an election that received scant attention and in which the key issues were, to say the least, poorly understood - things today would be completely different. In other words:

"One thing logically follows another. The large and mostly successful school system in one the country's fastest growing and most desirable communities must be torn down and radically overhauled by conservative ideologues because of an off-year election driven by an array of confusing and poorly covered issues that could have easily gone the opposite way if one extra person in one-hundred had changed his or her mind or bothered to vote."              

Making sense of it all

The point of all this is not to denigrate the democratic process or to challenge the fundamental legitimacy of these elections. Scott Brown in Massachusetts and Chris Malone, John Tedesco, Deborah Prickett, and Debra Goldman in Wake County were all legitimately elected as far as anyone can tell.

The point is to highlight two critical and badly underreported facts:

#1 - Despite the breathless and overheated conclusions of the main stream media and a large number of wimpy, self-interested politicians, neither of these elections should be interpreted as powerful new mandates to kill national health care reform or to end integration of the Wake County schools. Instead, they should be reported for what they were: typical results for poorly publicized, poorly covered and poorly understood off-year elections involving small fragments of the populace during hard economic times.

#2 - The overall popular support for progressive policy solutions has not changed. The vast majority of Americans still want dramatic health care reform and the vast majority of Wake County residents still want an integrated, world class public school system. But a lot of people are unhappy with the current hard economic times and the seemingly slow pace of change. Add to this the often tin-eared and tepid approaches of the nominally progressive officials in power and you've got a recipe for thoughtful voters to stay home in droves and for protest votes to carry the day. For better or worse, American elections are not multi-party affairs in which people can more clearly elevate different points of view. Here, if you're frustrated with the people in power, you often don't have a good alternative choice.

Going forward

So what does this mean for progressive change and those who believe in it?

The first and most obvious lesson is that folks ought not to get too discouraged. Yes, for now, progress may be derailed, but that cannot last. The long-term, political, ideological and demographic trends continue to break progressives' way. That conservative protesters won such miniscule victories during such hard and restive times is actually pretty amazing.  

The second and more practical lesson is the need for a renewed commitment to "trench work." It ought to have been obvious, but progressives need to remember that it takes more than one presidential election victory to secure lasting policy change. If there's a central lesson to be learned from the Massachusetts and Wake County election results, it's that sustained efforts to combat apathy, sloth and distractions amongst the public and elected officials - even on a very small scale - can make an enormous difference. The stakes are high and the margins of victory and defeat are often very, very small.

Let's get back to work.      

For decades, one of the most persistent stereotypes in American policy and politics has involved the depiction of conservatives as hard-headed realists and progressives as hopeless dreamers. Think about it: we can all easily conjure up such images. Many progressives have helped promote the myth themselves.  

Often, however, the opposite is actually the case. For a good example, take a look at the current debate over national immigration policy.

On one side is the anti-immigrant right. Led by a passionate group of overwhelmingly white, European-Americans, this side seeks to hold back the latest tide of newcomers – mostly from Latin America and other points south. Though often couched in terms of law and order, the actual, overarching goal of this group is clear (just as they have been for virtually every other anti-immigrant movement around the world since the beginning of time): to keep out “the other.”

These activists have an idealized vision of America – often derived from a rose tinted view of their childhoods – in which friends and neighborhoods were static and familiar, diversity was limited, and English was the only language ever heard. This group sees large infusions of darker-skinned people speaking different languages as a threat to this vision. They fear dramatic change and look desperately for ways to stave it off – whether it’s through building big fences, denying health care and education to children, passing “English only” laws, empowering midnight raids that sweep up whole neighborhoods, or creating a domestic gulag to hold those detained.   

Now, contrast this with the progressive take on immigration. Sure, some pro-immigration advocates can get a little mushy when talking about human cooperation and harmony between different races and ethnicities, but, for the most part, the overarching motivations for the progressive take on immigration are tough-minded and pragmatic.

Pragmatic progressives

Progressives don’t favor comprehensive immigration reform that would dramatically increase the number of legal immigrants because they’re under any illusion that it will create some kind of multihued utopia. Some may imagine such a world and work toward it, but for the most part, progressives favor real reform because:

1. They know that we have no choice. Whether anyone likes it or not, there are enormous global forces at work – economic, demographic, and environmental – that make significant immigration to the United States inevitable, unavoidable and irreversible.
2. They know the United States economy needs immigrants. As the U.S. population rapidly ages, immigration provides an essential source of new, younger workers that can prevent a demographic crisis. Who do you think is going to pay for Social Security for retiring Generation X’ers?
3. Progressives fear for their own freedom and civil liberties. They know that the only plausible way to halt and reverse immigration (i.e. to martial the forces necessary to arrest and deport millions of people and/or make their lives so miserable that they’ll voluntarily self-deport) would involve the construction of a police/apartheid state of such massive proportions that everyone’s civil rights and liberties will endangered.

In other words, progressives favor comprehensive reform that would dramatically expand legal immigration because they see the reality of the world that confronts their country. They recognize that the nation cannot thrive in the interconnected economy of the 21^st Century by closing its doors and putting its head in the sand. They may wish that things were easier or that such hard realities could be avoided, but they understand the difference between wishing and thinking.

They understand that if the Unites States is to continue to thrive as a healthy and free country that preserves and promotes its historical commitment to democratic government and individual freedom, it must get about the business of intentionally turning the immigration issue to the advantage of its people. It must welcome immigrants and devote significant resources to integrating them into American society as rapidly and thoroughly as possible. It must, in short, re-imagine and reenergize its longstanding claim to be the world’s great melting pot.

National recovery

In the long run, such a renewed commitment to liberalized and regularized immigration policies offers enormous advantages to the U.S. – both economically and in the moral authority it will lend to the country’s foreign policy. As the country continues the work of repairing its fiscal and economic standing and international reputation in the aftermath of the disastrous Bush-Cheney years, few steps could send a stronger signal to the rest of the world that the nation had turned an important page.  

This Thursday morning, January 14, at 10:00 a.m., advocates for such a rational policy shift will gather near the state Capitol Building in downtown Raleigh for a rally and press conference. The event is part of a new, national movement known as the Campaign to Reform Immigration for America. In keeping with the themes of pragmatism and national recovery and renewal, the group is emphasizing four common sense arguments. Here are some highlights:

1. For America’s Families - The family is the basic unit of our society, and immigrants who have the support of strong families are more likely to contribute to society, pay taxes, and start businesses that create jobs….It doesn’t make sense to spend billions of dollars rounding people up, breaking up families, shutting down businesses, and deporting people who are working, learning English, and putting down roots here. For immigrants who don’t have legal status, we should require them to come out of the shadows and register, pay taxes, and start working toward becoming Americans, while keeping their families together.
2. For America’s Workers - Reforming immigration will help protect all workers from exploitation and unfair competition….When [undocumented workers] are on equal footing with other workers, unscrupulous employers will not easily be able to pit one group of workers against another, driving down wages for all Americans….Reforming immigration is an important part of fixing the ailing economy. The federal government has an obligation to reform immigration for all American workers.
3. For America’s Economy - Today, almost every American company needs smart planning, to navigate through hard times and be ready for growth when the economy recovers. Unfortunately, for too many American businesses, the unreliable and obsolete immigration system makes planning for the future more difficult….One of the challenges American businesses face today is the aging American workforce, the rapid retirement of the large Baby Boomer generation. To maintain a balanced and a stable workforce, American businesses must find younger workers, especially in manual labor jobs. With more and more US citizen youth earning high school and college degrees, the trend is making the prospects of adequately filling jobs in certain sectors extremely difficult, even in this tough economy.
4. For America’s Security - The immigration system we have today makes little sense in terms of America’s security. With few legal options to come in through the system, many seek ways to go around it. The broken system has spawned a thriving market for smugglers and has generated chaos on the border. A seemingly random enforcement regime targets ordinary immigrant workers and families, diverting resources away from protecting against genuine threats. Millions of immigrants are unknown to the government. Unscrupulous employers have little fear of punishment for recruiting and exploiting undocumented workers and undermining their honest competitors.

Immigration reform will allow more immigrants to come with a visa, not with a smuggler. It will require undocumented immigrants to get right with the law, register with the government, and go through government background security checks. This screening process will separate ordinary immigrants who have come seeking opportunities to better their lives from those who may be exploiting opportunities a broken system provides to those who may be coming to do us harm.”

Let’s hope that the group, its event and its arguments have the desired effect on North Carolina’s political leadership. They just might if those leaders considering the matter with their heads and hearts.  

For more information on the event, you can contact event organizers at either of the following email addresses:

ggillis@reformimmigrationforamerica.org or igodinez@reformimmigrationforamerica.org.