In 1964, Brown v. Board of Education (of Topeka) ruled that separate was not equal. The ruling allowed for the integration of students from all…

Four more contestants were eliminated on American Idol: Katelyn Epperly, Todrick Hall, Alex Lambert and Lilly Scott. So this is the Top 12, the performers…

At yesterday’s Progressive Media Summit with members of the Senate Democratic caucus, Chuck Schumer, Debbie Stabenow, Sherrod Brown, and Bernie Sanders fielded some tough questions and mutual frustration from said progressive media members over the reform process.

First, in answer to a somewhat convoluted question from Ed Schultz about why the House wasn’t just going to have to pass the bill, Schumer deflected back to the reality that the bill as it stands now–with the Nebraska deal et al.–won’t cut it, and gave a really decent asnwer on precisely why the House has good reason to be distrustful of the Senate. He talked about some of the very difficult votes that the House has had to take over the last year, only to watch in frustration as some really hard votes go to the Senate to die. His answer made it clear that leadership in the House, Senate, and White House are all on board with finding a mechanism that will lock 50 Senators in to supporting a reconciliation fix that will get 218 votes in the House.

More on the background of the process, Sanders gave a “lessons learned” sort of retrospective look at where we are, and who we got here, saying the “process of moving hcr has not been has efficient or effective as it might have been,” and then detailing the deficiencies. First, by not having single payer on the table, which sent a message to progressives that they weren’t going to be heard. He talked most forcefully about what he called the “major error” that existed, the “assumption that we had 59 or 60 votes…. We spent month after month after month negotiating with people who weren’t going to support the bill.” Sam Stein, who attended the event, has more.

Brown reiterated his support for the public option, and echoed one of the primary themes for the hcr discussion, that reconciliation is not an extraordinary process, and did some cheerleading to try to push progressive media through the rest of the process, saying that “all of us want more out of this healthcare bill,” and continuing “I know that a lot of you are discouraged about what has happened in the last year. Discouraged that the conservative, moderate wing of the Democratic Party too often seems to holds sway over both caucuses.”

I asked Stabenow whether the Senate progressives were involved in the strategy for dealing with Stupak, and she said that they were, and that there was no way that the Stupak language could pass in the Senate–hence the Nelson language. Given that Stupak says that he refuses to accept the Nelson language, the impasse continues.

By Michael J.W. StickingsJust one recommendation today, a piece from Monday that I’ve been meaning to highlight here.********** Slate: “Why Has a Divided America Taken Gay Rights Seriously?” by Dahlia Lithwick, reviewing University of Chicago philosoph…

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Facing potential bankruptcy, the board that governs the once flush-with-cash Kansas City school district is taking the unusual and contentious step of shuttering almost half its schools.

Administrators say the closure…

Shielding Americans from banksters and likeminded rip-off artists is only one small piece of needed financial reform. Out-of-control executive compensation, overly large financial institutions, insane derivatives trading, a Federal Reserve System apparently incapable of basic regulatory enforcement, and levying of a securities transaction tax all require attention. Political obstacles make all these difficult changes to make, but an independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency seemed likely, once upon a time, to be a provision of the Restoring American Financial Stability Act that all but the most bank-beholden Congresspersons could get behind. As it turns out, the eagerness to gut the CFPA has enough Senate knife-wielders to make the agency, in the word of Barney Frank, a joke.

No surprise. By November, more than 1500 lobbyists had registered on Capitol Hill to have their say on this legislation, from credit-card companies to car dealers, from hedge-fund operators to payday lenders, everybody who might have a consumer-scamming shell-and-pea game at risk got into the act.

That didn’t stop the House from including a watered-down but still independent consumer protection agency in its legislation. But Sen. Richard Shelby soon made it clear that a standalone agency like the House bill’s was out of the question. So lame-duck Sen. Christopher Dodd, chair of the Senate Banking Committee, has sought to find a compromise by putting some version of the CFPA under the Fed, the very entity that failed so miserably in its regulatory, disclosure and consumer-education efforts in the run-up to the financial crisis that gave birth to the Great Recession.

Quite a number of Senators, Sherrod Brown, Chuck Schumer, Jeff Merkley and Jack Reed, among others, rightly think a Fed-based consumer agency is ludicrous. Which leaves the nation where it is on a number of other important pieces of legislation, up the creek without enough paddles. That is, unless it gets some focused grassroots attention. Up until now, however, most of the attention has been directed at health insurance reform

On MSNBC Tuesday night, Chris Hayes of The Nation took a look at the issue through the eyes of Heather McGhee, Washington director of the public research and advocacy organization Demos.

An excerpt:

McGhee: We have to realize that Republicans and all people in Congress have more than one set of constituents. They have the voters who are paying attention sometimes, and the donors and the lobbyists who are paying attention all the time. And they’ve been swarming Congress for the past year, ever since the financial crisis trying to weaken and ultimately kill the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

Hayes: So those banks that have been trying to kill this thing, and they’ve been going at it with hatchets from the very begiininng, what is it they’re so afraid of? Why are they fighting so hard against it?

McGhee: What we’ve seen is over the past 30 years there’s really been a really radical experiment in financial deregulation across the board. But at the consumer level there’s just a new Wild West situation out there where the banks, the payday lenders, the rent-to-own stores, the used auto dealers have just basically had very little oversight. And they’ve profited from that regime.  

Hayes: Right …

McGhee: The financial crisis has absolutely shown that that was not only bad for consumers, it was bad for Wall Street, it was bad for the entire country. And they know that the jig is up unless they can beat down a consumer protection agency. …

And so we’ve got backroom deals right now. We’ve really got … Senator Dodd really wants to make a deal and he’s going to give away, I think, a real opportunity to make a very clear contrast and say “Hey! This is what the Democratic Party stands for, and it’s you and your family, your retirement savings and your home.”  Republicans are trying to gut investor protections, consumer protections. they’re trying to stand up for the subprime lenders and the payday lenders. I mean, this should be a very easy political fight. So, I think if we can make that political fight more visible to the American people, and it’s really just starting to heat up, then I think we’re going to have a stronger hand to get this consumer agency passed.

Three years ago, Elizabeth Warren wrote:

To be sure, creating safer marketplaces is not about protecting consumers from all possible bad decisions. Instead, it is about making certain that the products themselves don’t become the source of the trouble. This means that terms hidden in the fine print or obscured with incomprehensible language, unexpected terms, reservation of all power to the seller with nothing left for the buyer, and similar tricks and traps have no place in a well-functioning market.

How did financial products get so dangerous? Part of the problem is that disclosure has become a way to obfuscate rather than to inform. …

In a recent memo aimed at bank executives, the vice president of the business consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton observed that most bank products are “too complex for the average consumer to understand.”

Rahm Emanuel famously said that crises shouldn’t be wasted. Indeed, they are and should be the cradle for making big and long-needed changes in the way our political and economic system operates because nothing gets reformed in less anxious times. However, wasting the financial crisis seems to be exactly the outcome of efforts to give hoi polloi a smidgen of leverage against hoi oligoi in the next decade or so of the 21st Century.

None of what’s been proposed is radical or anything like the supposed “socialism” that Republicans and their media mannequins keep caterwauling about. Too bad it’s not. But just getting our leaders to enact even an ultra-modest reform ending the most egregious financial deceptions and rip-offs would appear to be a tough enough task.

Are your Senators on board? You might give them a call to find out.

Speaking at a Progressive Media Summit held by the Senate Democratic caucus today, Harry Reid said that the Senate is “likely going to have to make changes to the filibuster” in the next Congress. Analogizing the filibuster to the spit ball and the four-corner offense in basketball–which were both outlawed by their sports, Reid said it was a tactic that has been now so abused that it’ll have to be changed. But next year, when it can be done through the organizing process of the new Senate when new rules can be drafted. Changing the rules now would require a two-thirds majority vote.

Senators Stabenow and Schumer both reinforced the message, with Schumer telling HuffPo after his presentation that he was going to start having hearings in his Rules Committee to investigate how it can be done in two or three weeks.

In other Senate organizing news, Sherrod Brown said that chairmanships will be up for review at the beginning of the next Congress, and while it wouldn’t name names, said that that reorganizing “would send a message.”

By Michael J.W. StickingsFirst, just a couple of weeks ago, it was for voting with the Democrats to move a jobs bill forward, now it’s for announcing he’ll vote to end a Republican filibuster on an unemployment benefits and tax credits bill. It’s for c…

Barbara Mikulski.

“I was raised in a country where I thought the majority ruled. This is what I hear from my constituents in Maryland. Every single thing we want to do to help people is stopped by the filibuster. Job reform is stopped by the filibuster. Health reform is stopped by the filibuster.

“But when all is said is done, more gets said than gets done. The filibuster means that in order to get something done you need 60 votes. It protects the rights of the minority.

“But it is not being used as intended. It’s a dated rule from another century. I’m done with it.”

I’m certainly done with it. And as Open Left’s filibuster reform whip count shows, there is growing and trans-ideological support for bringing democracy to the Senate.

Filibuster Reform Whip Count
50 Senators who are currently safe bets for being in Senate in 2011

Favor 51-vote Senate (11): Begich (AK); Bingaman (NM); Brown (OH); Durbin (IL); Harkin (IA); Johnson (SD); Kerry (MA); Lautenberg (NJ); Lieberman (CT); Shaheen (NH); Udall (NM)

Favor / considering some sort of reform (7): Biden (VP); Blumenthal (CT, incoming); Casey (PA); Conrad (ND); Leahy (VT); Levin (MI); Sanders (VT)

Potential Senators in 2011

Favor 51-vote Senate (1): Fisher (OH)

Favor / considering some sort of reform (3): Bennet (CO); Feingold (WI); plus both leading Democratic challengers in North Carolina

Mikulski is now the 12th name in the “favor 51-vote Senate” category. And remember, while the rules can’t realistically be changed now (GOP would block), all you need in 2011 is 50 votes plus Vice President Joe Biden to change the rules at the outset of the new Senate, when committee ratios are allocated and the Senate leader is chosen.

The biggest obstacle Meg Whitman faces in her run for the governorship of California is not Jerry Brown. Her hurdle is the urban state press and the gray-beards among the political pundocracy who have set their minds against her.

The women took to the stage and after a very strong Crystal Bowersox, so many of the women crashed and burned that the not-bad women…

Delaware’s Ted Kaufman s the 34th Senator to voice support for passing the public option through reconciliation (see the entire list of supporters).

“I’m for a public option, if there’s some way that it can get done,” he said. “If it qualified under reconciliation, then I would,” he said, when asked if he’d vote for it on the floor.

Kaufman is the 34th Senator to commit to supporting the public option through reconciliation. Two others — Sens. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) — are public option supporters but have not committed to passing it through reconciliation.

With their support, public option backers would be 14 votes short of victory; White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said recently he doesn’t think there is enough “political support” for the public option in the Senate. Reconciliation allows the majority to pass budget-related legislation with 50 votes plus a tie-breaker from Vice President Joe Biden.

Additionally, Sherrod Brown says he’ll push for a separate public option amendment, if it’s not included in the reconcilaition package.

Brown, a liberal Democrat, told reporters that he hopes that Democratic leaders include a public plan in the current package but said that he would “absolutely” try to cobble together a different proposal if it is not.

“If we don’t get it on this. I still hope we get it on this. If we don’t get it on this, we can give it a try,” he said. Asked if that meant passing separate legislation, he answered “Absolutely, absolutely, oh yeah.”

We have heard months’ worth of assurances from Brown that the public option would be in Senate bill and/or included in the final bill after conference. There is no reason not to have this vote, however, now that a large majority of the Democratic Senate caucus (and 120 House members) have said they want it.

At the very least, this enduringly popular piece of the reform package should get an up or down vote.

“Insider’s knowledge with an outsider’s mind” is what we need, says this former California governor, former Mayor of Oakland, and current Secretary of State. The race will be him vs. the odious Meg Whitman who thinks starting eBay somehow qualifies her to be governor even though she has no political experience at all.
Brown is [...]

A month ago, Sen. Jim Webb and Sen. Barbara Boxer introduced the Taxpayer Fairness Act, S 2994. The legislation would levy a one-time 50% tax on bonuses over $400,000 paid to executives of financial institutions that received $5 billion or more of taxpayer support under the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). The legislation would affect an unknown number of executives at 13 financial institutions and raise up to $10 billion that would be applied against the federal deficit.

“It’s outrageous that many of these companies are doling out millions of dollars in bonuses while the rest of America feels the pain of reckless decisions,” said Boxer on Feb. 4.

Webb wanted to add the tax proposal to the jobs bill last week, but no amendments were permitted. So now he hopes to attach it to the “tax extenders bill,” H.R. 4213, which has now been resolved after getting the haggle treatment by Sen. Jim Bunning and the Democratic Senate leadership.

Unsurprisingly, numerous critics have whined about the Webb-Boxer proposal, even though it focuses only on those few banks that received monster taxpayer bailouts and is far less onerous than a House bill passed a year ago that would have imposed a 90% retroactive tax on bonuses of $250,000 or more. The House legislation never made it to the Senate. Webb-Boxer also doesn’t go as far as a 50% tax on banker bonuses over $40,700 levied in Britain late last year. Nor as far as Sen. Sherrod Brown’s proposal that would impose a 50% tax on bonuses of over $25,000 for executives working at any TARP recipients, not just the biggest 13.

Webb called the tax “a matter of basic fairness to the American taxpayers who enabled these financial institutions to again become profitable.” And they became profitable without doing much of what the bail-out was meant to do, accelerate lending to small businesses and homeowners. “This money went other places,” Webb said. “So if they want to take this money and put it into fairly extravagant bonuses, then they ought to pay some back so we can reward the taxpayer. In other words, if you are going to get that kind of bonus, you can share it 50-50 with the people who helped bail you out. We believe it is fair and reasonable.”

Brown made similar comments last month about his proposal: “”Most of these banks are healthy again, but the rest of the economy’s not. These banks are healthy because the taxpayers stepped up and assisted them. … This country has made Wall Street rich. Wall Street has not, in the last decade, returned the favor, frankly, and this bill will help them do that.”

You can taste the acid when foes of such modest payback proposals pronounce them the unfair products of populist outrage or that all-purpose put-down of “class warfare.” They conveniently paper over the fact that it isn’t middle-class and working-class initiatives that have suppressed wages and transferred wealth upward over the past three decades. But, in their view, it’s only class warfare when we resist.

Given the record of previous efforts to rein in outrageous bonuses at companies that might not even exist without taxpayer handouts, the chances that Webb-Boxer’s or Brown’s proposals will pass are about as good as the chances that we’ll see a decent bank regulatory bill reach the President’s desk. But it’s always worth calling your Senators to nudge them.