First the banks were bailed out.  Then it was the insurance companies.  The auto industry will be next.

When will the those who really need it get their bailout?

There will be another economic stimulus package in the next few months.  President-elect Obama made it clear at his first press conference last week:  “If it does not get done in a lame-duck session, it will be the first thing I do as president of the United States.” A glance at headlines from the past few days drives the seriousness of the situation home:

L.A. Times:  Unemployment rate hits 6.5%, a 14-year high

Postal Service Looks To Cut 40,000 Jobs In First Layoff In History

Working Poor and Young Hit Hard in Downturn

McDonald’s same-store sales rise 8.2 percent

If the Coalition on Human Needs gets their way the answer to the question above will be sooner than you might think.  The Coalition’s new report, Towards Shared Recovery (pdf), makes the case for an economic stimulus package for boosting the economy by providing assistance to those who need it most.

Here are the specifics of what the report proposes:

The report:

presents Congress with key items that should be part of an effective stimulus package, including an increase in nutrition assistance, an expansion of unemployment insurance, investments in infrastructure and job creation, additional aid for states, help for victims of home foreclosure, and increased funding for Head Start, child care and child support programs.

Deborah Weinstein, Executive Director of CHN, explains: “Economists tell us that providing aid to low- and moderate-income people is the most effective way to boost the economy.”  The need for an additional economic stimulus package is well understood.  Others are calling for it from throughout the political spectrum…

Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke:

“with the economy likely to be weak for several quarters, and with some risk of a protracted slowdown, consideration of a fiscal package by the Congress at this juncture seems appropriate.”

Brian Bethune, chief U.S. financial economist for the research firm Global Insight:

“Effectively, the Fed chairman is giving Congress a green light to go ahead with an additional fiscal stimulus package”

Douglas W. Elmendorf, former Treasury and Federal Reserve Board economist and fellow at the Brookings Institution:

“We need fiscal stimulus. The outlook is much darker than it was even a few months ago.”

Plenty of great work is being done in the private sector, but it is not enough.

A foundation driven effort called Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity is pushing President-elect Obama to make poverty reduction a hallmark of his administration.  The Open Society Institute (Baltimore Chapter) has just awarded $450,000 in fellowships to eight creative individuals who are working to support underserved communities in Baltimore.  These types of programs are extremely valuable, and I applaud them.

But the fact remains that the private sector alone can not provide the types of supports and investments the American people right now.  Only a broad economic stimulus, targeted to help lower-income Americans, can get our country back on the right track.  Towards Shared Prosperity provides an excellent framework for such a stimulus program.  

There’s a lot of anger over Prop. 8, and the gay/lesbian community seems engaged and passionate in a way I don’t recall in recent years.  In my case, while I was out working for Obama and healthcare activism, I came back to California to find my marriage had been undermined and my children been attacked by a public campaign bankrolled by religious partisans.

The good news is an engaged and enraged California gay/lesbian community has significant political potential and resources that have never been fully realized, and that will make the fight to overturn Prop. 8 the fight of our lives.  This is going to be our generation’s Briggs/Milk moment, and we’ll never stop fighting till we win it.

I am wondering if there is a general sense of agreement over the following ideas:

1. The LGBT community should work as one to overturn Prop. 8 at the earliest possible moment (presumably June 2010).

2. We need to make one-on-one voter contact and field work the heart of our efforts.  There is a general sense that the No on 8 campaign abandoned field work; at the end of the day, though, the campaign’s poor decisions were amplified by a lack of commitment among the gay/lesbian community, which was pre-occupied by Obama and a false belief that the voices of angels would prevail for the No on 8 campaign.  The field work should be organized both online and off, and the campaign should be expected to translate incredible volunteer energy into cutting-edge work.  The messages should revolve around civil rights and protecting gay/lesbian families.

3.  The incredible story of how President Thomas B. Monson led the out-of-state, out-of-touch Mormon Church to try to impose their Utah values on California, ripping apart 20,000 California families should be a central part of our narrative.  It is an amazing national hate crime perpetuated by a Church hoping to impose it’s religious values as public policy.

4.  This will end up one of the dominant stories of 2009-10, the gay/lesbians will run an incredible campaign, and we will win a difficult and heart-rendering battle.

Is there general agreement on this approach?

And how can we run the quality of campaign we need to?

As it concerns the reports of Harman possibly being nominated to a post in the intelligence apparatus, it’s very important for everyone to remember how complicit Jane Harman has been in illegal acts by the Bush administration in allowing detainee torture to take place and in trampling on our rights as American citizens.  Because of her history, there’s no way she should get any of these jobs. (follow below)

From Glenn Greenwald’s post from July:

In December of last year, The Washington Post revealed:

Four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

The article noted that other Democratic members who received briefings on the CIA’s interrogation program included Jay Rockefeller and Jane Harman. While Harman sent a letter to the CIA asking questions about the legality of the program, none ever took any steps to stop or even restrict the interrogation program in any way.

Identically, numerous key Democrats in Congress — including Rockefeller and Harman — were told that Bush had ordered the NSA to spy on American without warrants and outside of FISA. None of them did anything to stop it. In fact, while Rockefeller wrote a sad, hostage-like, handwritten letter to Dick Cheney in 2003 (which he sent to nobody else) — assuring Cheney that he would keep the letter locked away “to ensure that I have a record of this communication” — Harman was a vocal supporter of the illegal NSA program. Here’s what she told Time in January, 2006 in the wake of the NYT article revealing the NSA program:

Some key Democrats even defend it. Says California’s Jane Harman, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee: “I believe the program is essential to U.S. national security and that its disclosure has damaged critical intelligence capabilities.”

Harman then went on Fox News and pronounced that the NSA program was “legal and necessary” and proudly said: “I support the program.” Even worse, in February, 2006, Harman went on “Meet the Press” and strongly suggested that the New York Times should be criminally prosecuted for having reported on the illegal program. And indeed, in 2004, Harman demanded that the NYT’s Eric Lichtblau not write about the NSA program. As Lichtblau wrote in his recent book about a 2004 conversation with Harman:

“You should not be talking about that here,” she scolded me in a whisper. “They don’t even know about that,” she said, gesturing to her aides, who were now looking on at the conversation with obvious befuddlement. “The Times did the right thing by not publishing that story,” she continued. I wanted to understand her position. What intelligence capabilities would be lost by informing the public about something the terrorists already knew — namely, that the government was listening to them? I asked her. Harman wouldn’t bite. “This is a valuable program, and it would be compromised,’ she said. I tried to get into some of the details of the program and get a better understanding of why the administration asserted that it couldn’t be operated within the confines of the courts. Harman wouldn’t go there either. “This is a valuable program,” she repeated.

In light of this sordid history of active complicity, is it really any wonder that these leading Democrats are desperate to quash any investigations or judicial adjudications of Bush administration actions that they knew about and did nothing to stop, in some cases even actively supporting?

While I’d love to have the chance to replace Harman with a progressive Democrat in my solid blue 36th Congressional District here in California, I would gladly keep her as my congressional representative if that kept her from being in any of those positions of power over intelligence matters.  I think the most important thing first is to prevent her from getting named as DNI or CIA Director or DHS Chief.  That’s essential.  

Don’t get me wrong, these comments are the right ones that should be made by the Governor of California:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger today expressed hope that the California Supreme Court would overturn Proposition 8, the ballot initiative that outlawed same-sex marriage. He also predicted that the 18,000 gay and lesbian couples who have already married would not be affected by the initiative.

“It’s unfortunate, obviously, but it’s not the end,” Schwarzenegger said in an interview on CNN this morning. “I think that we will again maybe undo that, if the court is willing to do that, and then move forward from there and again lead in that area.”…

Today, Schwarzenegger urged backers of gay marriage to follow the lesson he learned as a bodybuilder trying to lift weights that were too heavy for him at first. “I learned that you should never ever give up…. They should never give up. They should be on it and on it until they get it done.“

This is precisely the message that needs to be delivered to California. Prop 8 was unfortunate, and it must be reversed, and we will not give up until it is.

If the repeal vote comes up in 2010, while Arnold is still governor, then he ought to repeat these comments and speak out for equal rights. Of course…he should have done that this year.

These comments do beg the question of where Arnold was these last few months on Prop 8. Even if the No on 8 campaign did not solicit him to cut an ad (and I don’t know if they did nor not) Arnold ought to have spoken up himself and explained why it would be “unfortunate” to take away marriage rights. Arnold still has a lot of pull and credibility with swing voters in California, and in parts of red California. He should have spoken up sooner.

Still, this is the right framing, and helps build the narrative that Prop 8’s passage is a Bad Thing for California and something that needs to be reversed.