When merging companies talk about “transaction-specific efficiencies” and cost savings through “synergy,” the workers involved know that pink slips are usually on the way. That’s what we can expect if Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski allows a proposed merger of T-Mobile and MetroPCS to go through without conditions to protect employment.

Without conditions, the prospects for T-Mobile workers look grim. T-Mobile and MetroPCS claim the merger will result in $1 billion in “cost reductions” in both customer support and back office operations (see p. 42-44 of their merger request to the FCC), euphemisms for job loss and outsourcing. Today, MetroPCS outsources its entire customer service staffing, with many of those jobs overseas in the Philippines and the Caribbean. It appears that T-Mobile is prepared to adopt this low-road path after the merger in order to realize $1 billion in “synergies” and “efficiencies.”

T-Mobile workers would not be facing this prospect but for the fact that the FCC rejected the proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile two years ago. During that merger review, AT&T committed to a no lay-off policy, to keep all call centers open, and to bring back 5,000 offshored call center jobs. In addition, AT&T, the only unionized wireless company, promised to respect workers’ rights at the newly acquired work locations, giving T-Mobile workers a real opportunity to select union representation. All of this I detailed at the time in this Economic Policy Institute report.

Instead of that scenario, soon after the FCC blocked the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, T-Mobile closed seven call centers and displaced 3,300 employees, sending the work to foreign countries. Then, T-Mobile searched for another merger partner, and last fall inked a deal with MetroPCS. Now the FCC is poised to approve that merger.   If the Commission is going to allow this T-Mobile/MetroPCS merger to go forward, they should at least try to undo some of the damage they inflicted on T-Mobile’s workforce by requiring the merged company to preserve existing jobs and repatriate jobs those companies have already outsourced overseas.

A broad coalition, ranging from the Communications Workers of America to the NAACP, the Sierra Club, the National Consumers League, SEIU, the AFL-CIO, and the Center for Community Change is working to secure such job commitments in any FCC decision. In a letter to the FCC, the coalition notes that the merger is a threat to T-Mobile employees’ job security, to the “economic health of the communities in which they live and work, and the consumers who rely on quality service provided by trained and experienced employees.”

In addition, 62 members of Congress have urged Chairman Genachowski “to seek enforceable commitments to protect and grow U.S. jobs” as he evaluates this transaction.” And state and local officials – including mayors from Florida, South Carolina, and Virginia – have written the FCC asking the Commission to protect jobs in the T-Mobile/MetroPCS merger.

With a slow recovery and high unemployment, this is a clear time for the FCC to exercise its power to secure job commitments as part of this merger approval.

Will Chairman Genachowski live up to his stated rhetoric and make jobs a top priority in this merger review? Or will he let thousands more T-Mobile jobs disappear?

One question is whether content providers on the Internet like Netflix, Google and Facebook, who profit tremendously from the existence of a fast Internet, should be taxed to support the physical infrastructure supporting broadband?

In Europe, at least, political leaders are increasingly arguing that the answer should be yes.  A report commissioned by French President Francois Hollande recently argued for an “Internet tax” on the financial value of the personal data collected by companies in providing online services. Advertising-supported firms make tremendous profits collecting user data and de facto reselling it through targeted ads, so returning some of that revenue to the users in each country through taxation would help sustain the physical networks that make those businesses possible. Similarly, the European Telecommunications Network Operators Association (ETNO) proposed last year revising international treaties on Internet governance to require high-volume content providers to pay a larger share of the infrastructure costs necessary to transmit their traffic to local customers.  Google is already paying the Orange wireless network in Africa to defray the costs of transmitting its data to users on that Continent.

A few voices in the U.S. have made similar proposals. The National Telecommunications Cooperative Association has argued in the past that content providers like Google should be taxed to help support the Universal Service Fund and more generally help local Internet providers support the use such Internet giants make of local infrastructure. “Search engines run bots that run through the Internet to take pictures of every Web page,” noted Dan Mitchell, vice president of legal and industry affairs for the NTCA, a few years ago. Netflix alone is estimated to use almost 10 percent of bandwidth at many internet service providers.

The fact that many of the largest online content providers are also engaged in some of the most notorious global tax avoidance schemes is helping drive the debate on having those companies pay their fair share of an infrastructure from which they benefit so dramatically. French political leadershave been explicit that they are proposing these new taxes to make up for the fact that these companies generate large revenues in France while paying relatively little in local taxes. A number of newspaper exposes in the U.S. have highlighted how Google and Facebook engage in massive tax evasion in the U.S. by shifting global profits and intellectual property assets to low-tax countries like Ireland, then claiming minimal taxable profits in the United States and many other countries. U.S. companies are sitting on $1.4 trillion in earnings from foreign subsidiaries from which they’ve paid no federal income tax. The trick of transferring key intellectual property ownership to foreign tax havens is a common part of the game by corporations to avoid paying taxes. These overseas tax games cost the U.S. government over $100 billion in revenue each year, according to this report by U.S. PIRG.

With political leaders talking about general tax reform in D.C., it’s also time to have a serious evaluation of how online content providers can help pay for the next generation of high-speed Internet and finally close the digital divide. Light taxation of online companies had a certain logic at the birth of the Internet age, but now those companies boast some of the fastest growing revenues and profits in our economy. Having benefitted so significantly from past public investments, reasonable tax reform should have them begin paying their fair share. And if that money is earmarked for expanding the number of high-speed online users, they would actually benefit in the long-run from a far larger customer base for their products.

A version of this appeared at SpeedMatters.org, the blog of the Communication Workers of America.

• * Taxes have been cut: the corporate rate is 22%, far lower than America’s.
• * [Sweden's]  budget deficit is 0.3% of GDP; America’s is 7%.
• * Denmark and Norway allow private firms to run public hospitals.
• * Sweden has a universal system of school vouchers, with private for-profit schools competing with public schools.

“All rights and obligations are stipulated in the semi-dispositive Employment Codetermination in the Workplace Act (MBL 1976:580). The purpose of the statute is to give employees and their representatives the right to participate in and negotiate with their employers. The law also ensures freedom of association, the right for employees to receive information from employers as well as the rights and obligations of collective bargaining, strikes, mediation etc. Although the act ensures all these basic rights and obligations, the Swedish system relies on partners to self-regulate via collective bargaining. The self-regulation is made possible because collective agreements have the status of civil law agreements. This means that issues such as equality between the genders, wages, work environment policies and other issues that are specific to the sectors are regulated in the sectoral collective agreements without intervention from the state.”

This is a case of a movie budget making poverty look nasty and heartbreaking, as nearly sainted characters join revolution in protest of its ills.   And in many ways, this 1832 occupation of the barricades of Paris is the early forefather of 2011’s Occupy protests across the country.

But the real measure of the radicalism of Les Miserables is not in the character of the heroes or the evils visited upon them, but in that of the movie’s villain, Inspector Javert.  Unlike so many political films whose villain may be a rogue corporation or a corrupt cabal of the government, Javert is rigidly honest and even fair in his own terms, since he believes his harsh standards of justice should apply to himself when he falls short.

As the movie sings, Javert is the law, embodied, a representative of the system not at its worst, but in many ways at its best.

And that economic and political system, even at its best, leaves mothers dying in the streets, children orphaned and good men losing decades of their life in prison for minor crimes committed to feed their families.  This is the rare movie with hard class politics that demands not opportunity for a few marginalized people but a change in the system itself.

It is not just because the hero Jean Valjean is a good man that he saves Javert’s life, but because Javert on his own terms is a good man as well—just dedicated to protecting a very bad system.  Instead of personalizing politics in a bad guy the hero can kill, this is a movie where a Javert defending the system is instead confronted with the system’s own failings—and can’t live with having dedicated his life to defending a lie..

While Javert dismisses many of those on the barricades as “school boys” playing at revolution, it is another child of the streets like himself who, when Javert attempts to spy on the barricades, is savvy enough to finger him and nearly gets him killed (before Jean Valjean saves Javert’s life).  That boy, Gavroche, is in many ways the representative of the workers of Paris and Europe, who generally will not rise in revolt in 1832, but, as Gavroche sings, they are underestimated and will soon “grow up”; in fact, sixteen years later the streets of Europe will be convulsed by workers’ revolutions as the Gavroches of Europe would come of age in the time Karl Marx would hail in his Manifesto.

Victor Hugo, however, was not Karl Marx, if only for the religiosity he mixes with his class radicalism.   Some might go further and argue that this is a story of love in conflict with the appeals of politics, but that tension—not conflict – is part of Hugo’s humanism.   As they approach the barricades, love-struck Marius and revolutionary leader Enjolras, sing out this tension in the song “The Red and the Black”, debating whether the Red of Love is more important than the Red of Revolution, but notably Marius ultimately opts to join in the revolutionary verse and the barricades themselves – as does almost every hero and every heroine of the film (if you count the final ending montage at the film).

Given the poverty of Fantime, which kills her chance to care for her child Cosette, and the oppression of Jean Valjean, which nearly kills all humanity in him before being saved by the kindness of one other man, Hugo’s whole story is that of how revolutionary change is needed to make the world safe for love and compassion in the world.  Yet his romanticism would argue that love is needed to make revolution safe for the world as well – something lost in the worst, dogmatically ideological revolutions we saw in the last century.

At their best, the Occupy Wall Street protests launched in 2011 sought to combine the best of  historic class radicalism and humanism in their demands for national and global equity for “the 99%.”   Many dismiss the Occupy protests as a historic blip, one dominated by the educated young, but it’s worth remembering that the events of 1832 in Les Miserables were similarly dismissed – yet were memorialized in arguably the greatest novel of one of the greatest writers of the 19^th century and is now, one hundred and eight years later, pulling the heartstrings of millions globally on the big screen.

We’ll see if Occupy finds the poets to similarly memorialize its moment but Les Miserables is a reminder of the enduring radical and humanistic sources of social revolution over the last few centuries.

Yes, a Constitution was written in 1789.  And it fell apart in 1861 under the weight of its uncertainty on whether the United States was a collection of sovereign states or one nation—and even more so based on its moral bankruptcy on the issue of slavery.

And so, beginning in 1865, a new Constitution was forged, both in the halls of Congress and, as importantly, on the battlefields of Antietam, Bull Run and Gettysburg.  The new movie Lincoln does the inestimable service of telling that tale of the Civil War, not as a tragedy, but as the founding of our country as one truly “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

For all that some conservative members of the Supreme Court talk about “original intent” in the words of the Constitution, remarkably little attention is paid to the intent of those who refounded this nation in the wake of the Civil War.  This is not a nation where the intent of slaveholders in 1789 is the only intent that matters in understanding constitutional law.  Instead, Lincoln reveals a far more diverse set of principal players in our constitutional drams—not just Lincoln himself, but House Speaker Schuyler Colfax, abolitionist firebrand Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, Secretary of State William Seward, Rep. James Ashley of Ohio and a wide range of others.

Some critics of the movie have wished for more focus on Lincoln’s personal existential journey to abolishing slavery (see a very good roundtable discussion here), but this is not a biopic of an individual but of a nation.  Lincoln is the key player – at least for this opening act of the constitutional drama – but the movie is masterful in showing that the real story the national will that he helped midwife among fractious factions to remake the Constitution.

And while Lincoln would exit the drama at the hands of an assassin, the rest of the players would continue the constitutional drama in coming years in enacting the 14^th and 15^th Amendments.  This new Constitution was clearly dedicated to ending the dogmas of “states rights” and giving Congress the power to enforce this new national consensus.

That “states rights” was the key issue in this Constitutional change is understood, if disputed by some, but the latter point of giving Congress, not the Supreme Court, the responsibility for enforcing equality is less recognized.   With the current Supreme Court reviewing whether Congress exceeded its powers under the 15^th Amendment in renewing the “preclearance provisions” of the 1965 Civil Rights Act, the film is a strong reminder that constitutional drafters like Thaddeus Stevens (played by Tommy Lee Jones in the movie) were determined to challenge the power of the Supreme Court, which had essentially launched the Civil War by overturning Congressional legislation in the Dred Scott decision.

All three post-Civil War amendments provided—crucially, in the minds of Stevens—that the “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”  Note that these were the first Amendments to the Constitution that specified not limits on Congressional power but instead its expansion—with not a word about a judicial role in limiting that power.   That’s not accidental for the Supreme Court was seen as the enemy of freedom in the nation at that point, having not only struck down Congressional limits on slavery in Dred Scott but had expanded the power of slave-owners to recapture runaway slaves in cases like Prigg v. Pennsylvania.

When I was counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice almost a decade ago, I cowrote a piece, A New Birth of Freedom: The Forgotten History of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, that detailed both the legal history that informed the drafting of those amendments, as well as the political and legal fallout.

Unfortunately, the “New Birth” founders’ suspicions of the Supreme Court were well founded.  Even as Congress enacted laws to provide education and help for the freed slaves in the form of the Freedmen’s Bureau, cracked down on the Klan with voting rights laws, and – something few remember – banned segregation in most public accommodations, the Supreme Court would make a rearguard attack on the rights of the newly freed slaves. In the 1875 United States v. Cruikshank decision, the Supreme Court would free the ringleaders of a mob who murdered 100 blacks and allied whites who died defending their right to vote.  The Supreme Court ruled that, despite the 14^th and 15^th Amendments, Congress lacked the power to prevent private violence meant to undermine black civil rights.  This decision would only be the first in a series of decisions that would hand the former slave-owners the power to terrorize and oppress their black populations.

W.E.B. DuBois would later write that Reconstruction’s enemies “relied upon the court to do what Democratic members of Congress had failed to accomplish – and the Court through a process of reasoning very similar to that of Democratic legislators, deprived the enforcement legislation of nearly all its strength when it rendered its decisions…”

Here’s why this is all relevant today.  Cruishank is not dead law but was the basis of the decisions by the Rehnquist Court that revived “states rights” limits on Congressional power.  While Cruikshank itself was not cited directly by the either Chief Justice Roberts or the conservative dissenters in their discussions of limits on federal power in the Affordable Care Act decision earlier this year, they all cited to United States v. Morrison (where Congressional power to punish rape was limited in 2000), a decision which itself approvingly quoted Cruikshank for the proposition that the 14th Amendment “adds nothing to the rights of one citizen as against another” or the ability of Congress to take legislative action to protect those rights.

Which brings us to the upcoming decision on Congressional power to enforce the Voting Rights Act, the so called Shelby County cases, where the Supreme Court may sharply limit the provisions that require certain states to get “preclearance” before limiting voting rights of their citizens.

If that sounds like a replay of the 1870s, then that highlights the importance of Lincoln the movie in reminding Americans that we fought a Civil War to overturn anti-freedom decisions of a Supreme Court then dedicated to defending slavery.   Again, W.E.B. Dubois noted how history has either forgotten the statesmen who forged the post-Civil War Amendments or subjected them to “attack and libel” in the cause of vilifying the merits of Reconstruction.

We need more discussion about the real story of the Civil War, the shining period of Reconstruction – that brief period of 19^th century civil rights – and the long shadow of Jim Crow imposed by that era’s Supreme Court and the danger that this Supreme Court is poised to emulate that dark period.

No movie is perfect, but in a cinematic tradition where racist narratives like Gone with the Wind and Birth of the Nation have been the major blockbusters about the era, it’s a tremendous gain for the nation to have a Spielberg-style blockbuster highlighting the heroism and ideals of those who ended slavery and ushered in a new Constitutional era.

And the number one cause of greater poverty is medical expenses– driving nearly an additional 4% of the population into poverty compared to the original calculation. See the chart:

For the non-elderly, medical expenses force more people into poverty than the EITC helps life out of poverty and accounts for more poverty than food stamps, unemployment insurance and TANF welfare payments life out of poverty. (Not the pathetic impact of TANF).

The energy spent by Obama and progressive on health care reform are validated by these numbers.  Increasing access to health care insurance, particularly for the working poor who have often lacked access to Medicaid, will end up being the largest anti-poverty measure enacted since the Great Society.

But with Bill Kristol now calling for the GOP to abandon its protection of tax cuts for the wealthy, the Right is beginning to reach the stage of desperate bargaining with Thanatos for a few more years of life.  The bargain won’t be made and the conservative political majority that Bill Buckley and Barry Goldwater helped build, that George Wallace and Ronald Reagan brought into reality, and that Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush built two additional decades of government around — that majority is dead and buried.

Now, that should sound a bit wildly optimistic with 30 Republican Governors in office and the GOP controlling the House of Representatives.   However, those political results are built on the quicksand of vote suppression and gerrymandered districts across the country.   Those will continue to have political effects but it’s not majority politics but a rearguard defense of what is slipping away.

The GOP is caught in a demographic and political vise.  While not the only issue for latino and asian voters, the Republican rejection of immigration reform and its inherent racist appeals has steadily cost the conservative movement support.  It’s not just the 70% of latinos voting for Obama but the once-conservative leaning Asian vote shifting to the point of supporting Obama by 73% margins– what the American Conservative calls the GOP’s Asian-American Fiasco where obsessions with “birtherism and with the president’s alleged Muslim faith” just fed the sense of a party too xenophobic to support even by wealthier segments of the asian-American population that would have done so a generation ago.

The Empty Conservative Economic Policy Locker: The problem is that the GOP’s political “success” in liquidating the middle class has destroyed the base of “Reagan Democratic” voters who were once attracted to Reagan’s more optimistic program of a bit more take-home cash with tax cuts, a defense department jobs program and a bit of overseas imperialism to keep oil prices down.   Now, with tax rates lowered and tax credits increased for low- and moderate-income working families and many families pushed into those lower-income ranks, we have the stark result that, as Romney  infelicitously put into words, 47% of the population is now immune to the politics of income tax cut promises.  And the debacles of the Gulf War means that cheap oil via overseas wars doesn’t seem so cheap with lives lost and treasure spent. (Note that Ronald Reagan always had the good sense to talk tough but hightailed out of Lebanon at the first sign of trouble for U.S. soliders.)  That plus the debt taken on for Bush’s wars means that defense-driven spending is also now a dead-end for job creation promises.

So that has left the GOP with almost no positive economic program to appeal to their working class base of voters, which has meant the xenophobic elements have had to be even more prominent.  Yes, Reagan used racial code words regularly, but that was not the only appeal he made to his white Reagan Democrats.   But the lack of any articulated economic program by Romney was not an accident; there is none left that appeals to working families so the only way to hold that base is through xenophobic racial and cultural  appeals.

That leaves the conservative movement in a zero-minus vice.  Any move they make to soften those racial or cultural appeals means they likely lose as many votes as they gain.   And demographics means that, to be blunt, their core voters are dying and more black, latino, asian and culturally liberal young white voters appear in each election.  And some form of legalization of the undocumented population is inevitable with these trends, so that demographic rising tide will become a tsunami of changing demographics in coming years.

How Obamacare Will Kill Off the Conservative Coalition: Worse for the conservative movement is the policy terrain is about to be profoundly reshaped by Obamacare.   They have depended on a last ditch effort to kill it by demonization of the bill in the abstract, yet their problem is that while the bill overall is not strongly popular, polls show that most of the elements of the law — the individual mandate aside — are extremely popular.   So when those provisions come into force, many GOP voters (and some marginal Dem voters) will wake up to a reality of a law that they quite like.  As I wrote in a 2009 piece, Why the Health Care Bill Will Destroy the Conservative Movement, once government subsidies for middle class families’ health care kicks in, there is no turning back to the anti-government politics of Reaganism.   With tens of millions of additional voters receiving a check from the government to pay for their health care, “the 47%” is going to become the vast majority of the American electorate having a stake in strong welfare state.

That Bill Kristol sees the writing on the wall to jettison tax cuts for the rich follows the analysis he made twenty years ago that successful health care reform meant the death of the Reagan coalition. Back then, writing about the Clinton health plan, Kristol wrote about the effects of its passage (and by implication the effects of implementing Obamacare):

It will relegitimize middle-class dependence for “security” on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.

Even with some states potentially opting out of expanded Medicaid coverage initially, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the law will add 10 million people to Medicaid by 2016 and an additional 23 million people will be receiving direct health care subsidies in the exchanges– with each of those  receiving an average of $5490 per year in health care support.   Those folks, many of them in the working class base of the GOP, will then hear “restraining government” as an imminent threat to the health care of their families.

So What Should the Left Do?  Now, the death of the increasingly insane Right coalition doesn’t mean the triumph of the left.  The Republican Party will ideally reconfigure itself more on the lines of a European conservative party, accepting the reasonable parts of the welfare state (as the GOP in practice has had to so with social security and Medicare) and figuring out the strategic appeals to build a majority that don’t involve pure xenophobia and paranoia.  Whether that will happen by 2016 is an open question but I look forward to the day people like Andrew Sullivan can reembrace the GOP as a reasonable Tory alternative.

The Democrats will ideally shed their neoliberal wing, which will find a more congenial home in a reconfigured GOP.  That will create a greater opening for those who identify with a transformative version of left politics — call it socialist, radical democrat, green or whatever — to argue for a more fundamental program of change by candidates it supports.  In the short-term, that will mean mobilizing to block Obama from signing onto any retrograde “grand bargains” that hamstring progressives in the long-term while pushing to extract the strongest progressive outcomes overall from a second Obama term.

The longer-term policy program of that post-Obama Left will no doubt have a range of elements adding to the mix coming from both traditional strands of labor, feminist and racial justice activists mixing with new Occupy and other grassroots activists seeing openings for new policy directions.  Without arguing for an endpoint vision for where that politics should go, here are four pillars a left program in the new political environment:

• Single Payer Health Care:  That Obamacare will not solve the failings of the U.S. health care system is admitted by everyone, but that just creates an opening for arguing for building on the bill to create a single payer health care system.  Which is actually how most of Europe reached universal health care, building on partial fragmented commitments to health coverage to create their universal systems.  Luckily, the health care law in a provision sometimes overlooked by its left critics contains an explicit route to single payer care: beginning in 2017, states have the option to pool all Medicaid, individual exchange and employer subsidies flowing into their states via Obamacare into an alternative health care delivery system, which states like Vermont are already planning to be a single payer one.  With Californians elected a two-thirds majority for Democrats in both houses there, there is greater likelihood that a single payer bill there could become law.
• Expanded Labor Rights:  Ideally, a second Obama term will see some federal labor law reform, more likely via National Labor Relations Board appointments and new rules to speed union elections and restrain employers breaking the law.  But labor law reform doesn’t have to be confined to the federal level– states can expand labor rights at the state and local level through a range of policies .
• A New Civil Rights Agenda:  Racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination are still pervasive in the workplace and society– as multiple studies continue to show.  One key target will be reversing the Supreme Court’s limits on class action lawsuits and the rise of “mandatory arbitration” which forces those alleging discrimination into employer-controlled private courts.  More broadly, we need to reconfigure work to be more family-friendly and to ensure that job creation is directed to every community.
• A Job Creation Program to Stop Climate Change:  Since the cleanup after Hurricane Sandy shows that a hell of lot of jobs will have to be created to clean up after the escalating damage of climate change in coming years, the left should be in the forefront of arguing for the investments to avoid that damage in the first place — and employ the millions of the unemployed across the country.   We need a multi-trillion dollar program in the coming decades to build smart grids that reduce energy use, reconfigure transportation systems to increase mass transit, and build new high-density housing at transit hubs to further reduce the per capita energy footprint of each American.  The great thing is that such investments pay for themselves over the long-term in lower energy costs, lower bills from disaster spending and higher productivity due to a more reliable power grid– so it will actually fit in any long-term discussions of smart budgetting.

Beyond Elections:  Still, this is an ambitious but ultimately basic policy program and the progressive left will be faced with even broader organizing challenges that will transcend national politics.  At its core, we face a problem of growing economic inequality that adjustments to tax and budget policies will only partially address.  As long as corporate raiders like Bain Capital can stripmine firms and outsource jobs at will, employees will have little power to hold on to a decent standard of living.   Strengthening labor laws can help give workers more power to stand their ground and progressives need to better support those organizing struggles.

But that broad challenge is part of a global fight for justice and empowerment.  Looking back, Bush v. Gore didn’t just short-circuit the rise of progressive domestic politics; combined with post-911 hysteria, it helped short-circuit the then rising global justice movement that from the Seattle trade protests in 1999 had been linking activists around the world in building a joint movement for greater global equity.  The recent Occupy movement has echoes of that movement but a deeper institutional linking of global movements will have to go hand-in-hand with domestic politics to ultimately take on the challenge of reversing trends of greater and greater corporate enrichment at the expense of both people and the planet.

On the plus side, the very diversity of the United States population — pulling people and community linkages to countries around the world — gives hope that a new progressive politics in the United States can help build a model of politics that reflects these global needs for justice as well.

But what this means is that the death of the Rightwing Coalition in U.S. domestic politics is not the end of the struggle, but merely the chance to engage the real challenge of taking on global corporate power — and racing the clock in this century against the economic and environmental self-destruction we face if we fail that challenge.

Networking the Green Economy 2011: How Broadband & Related Technologies Can Build a Green Economic Future.  (June 2011 )    Updated report sponsored by the Sierra Club, Blue-Green Alliance, Natural Resources Defense Council and the Communications Workers of America.

How To Raise The Phone Bill Of The Average New Jersey Family: What S 2664 Will Do To NJ Consumers. (March 2011) Demos and New Jersey Policy Perspective.

Economic Policy Institute Form:  The future of wireless networks: AT&T’s proposed acquisition of T-Mobile

A Progressive Case for States’ Rights? (GritTV)

Not Too Late to Stimulate Economy Equitably (GritTV)

Why Not Tax the Rich? (GritTV)

Dems Hit The Trifecta: Progressive States Network (GritTV)

Progressive Movement and the Internet (C-SPAN at the first YearlyKos Convention)

At Congressional Briefing on Networking the Green Economy

At PSN’s annual gala

• C-SPAN- National Budget Simulation demonstration with Brian Lamb (go to video at 1:55)