Watch: Voices for New Democracy Forum With The Poor People’s Campaign

In our latest monthly political forum, Roz Pelles and Lucy Lewis from The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival joined Voices for New Democracy to discuss the important work of the campaign and its strategy of weaving together diverse struggles that center impacted communities.

The Poor People’s Campaign draws on the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s organizing and the Civil Rights Movement to bring the fight against poverty back into the national conversation through grassroots organizing in communities across the country and nonviolent direct action with their diverse coalition.

In the forum, Roz Pelles discusses the outlook and strategies of the movement, highlighting the leadership by directly impacted individuals and the ongoing work of bringing together diverse social, political, economic, and environmental movements to build a unified voice demanding common goals. She also discusses the Campaign’s work of submitting a “moral budget” to Congress, highlighting priorities for investment in family care and community support, which may have influenced the recent Congressional infrastructure bills that would deliver historic investments in these areas.

Watch the full forum below.

“A Season of Action”: Women at Center of Fight to Protect Voting Rights Step Up to Save Democracy

| Roz Pelles & Dr. Liz Theoharis |

This article originally appeared in Ms. Magazine.

On Monday, July 19, nearly 100 women were arrested with the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C. while protesting the filibuster and demanding full voting rights and living wages. These women—a multiracial group of leaders from major labor unions, religious denominations, national organizations and grassroots communities that represent millions of people—demanded action from Congress and the president by August 6, the anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. 

The attack on democracy currently playing out in D.C. and in state legislatures like Texas is the worst we have seen since Reconstruction. Since January, there has been a wave of voter suppression laws across the country—while in the Senate, members of both parties continue to use the filibuster to block the political will of the majority of Americans. At the center of this crisis are poor women, especially poor women of color, who are facing increasingly unlivable conditions, none of which will change without a democracy that works for them.

History has circled back in the most wicked of ways, forcing a new generation of women to step into the breach to save this democracy. 173 years ago, on July 19, 1848, hundreds came together in Seneca Falls, New York, to denounce the outrage of second-class citizenship for women. Seneca Falls is often remembered for the issue of suffrage. At the time, though, it was too radical for some. But others including leading abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who attended the convention, urged the women to make voting rights a key priority, knowing that their struggle was connected to the fight for what W.E.B. Du Bois would later call “abolition democracy.” 

Indeed, the demands in Seneca Falls largely echoed the unheralded efforts of Black women stretching back decades, and their rising discontent under the leadership of women like Sojourner Truth. Three years after Seneca Falls, at a women’s convention in Akron, Ohio, Truth famously said:

“If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back and get it right side up again.”

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On Monday, we carried the spirit of all of these women into the streets of D.C. We reminded the nation that unshackling our democracy from voter suppression and procedural rules like the filibuster is inextricably linked to the work of building a nation where every person’s needs are met. At this critical crossroads, we cannot let up on the demand for racial and economic justice, including the raising of the minimum wage to at least $15 an hour, which would immediately lift the pay of 32 million people, disproportionately poor women of color. 

That is why on Monday we committed ourselves not just to one day, but a season of action. Next week we will bring the fight to state legislators, with actions in dozens of states, including a Selma-inspired three-day march to the Texas legislature in Austin.

The following Monday, on August 2, we will converge again en masse in D.C., fueled by a growing movement of women and others who are willing to move beyond calls for quiet conversation and compromise, and into bold action.

Is a Progressive Majority in Texas Possible?

| Matt Perrenod |

Democrats have been talking about flipping Texas for at least a decade.  It’s not hard to understand why.  Nearly 40% of Texas residents identify as Hispanic, according to the 2020 Census.  An additional 20% identify themselves as African-American, Asian-American and other non-whites, meaning that only slightly more than 40% of the state’s residents identify as non-Hispanic white, and that number is shrinking as a percentage of the whole.  

Further, the state is large, with a population and electoral strength nearly equal to Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona combined.  If Texas were to become electorally competitive statewide, it would completely change the electoral calculus in the U.S. as a whole.  And both Dems and progressives have noticed, giving the state increasing attention over the last few years.  They have, nevertheless, been disappointed: the GOP continues to hold every statewide office, including both U.S. Senators, and dominate both the Congressional delegation and both houses of the state legislature, with no erosion in 2020.  Biden did narrow Trump’s margin in the Presidential race, but still lost by nearly 6%.

With this in mind, I spoke with Mike Siegel, who ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Congress from Texas’ 10^th Congressional district in both 2018 and 2020. Mike is an attorney and longtime progressive activist in the Austin area.  Mike’s campaigns were strongly progressive in content and tone, and he surprised many when in 2018 he came within 4% of beating a well-financed GOP incumbent in 2018 in a Republican-leaning district stretching from east Austin to the western fringes of Houston.

With more support and considerably stronger fundraising in 2020, he actually fared slightly less well in 2020, reflecting a statewide pattern.  “We raised a lot more money in 2020, and probably 80% of that went to polling and media,” he says.  “I think we need to get a chunk of that fundraising into grassroots organizing.”

In 2021, Mike and Julie Oliver, another progressive Congressional candidate who outperformed expectations in 2018 and 2020, have created a new organization called Ground Game Texas, with an aim “to organize and mobilize voters community-by-community, collaborating with partners on the ground to meet voters at their doors, hear their concerns, and highlight popular issues that are on the ballot.”

“Obviously I think they’re important, but electoral candidacies are a limited form,” Siegel says.  “They’re about a specific candidate, in a specific race, and specific location.  And to the extent ordinary people have bandwidth for politics, they may be thinking more about Joe Biden versus Donald Trump than about the local race… If we’re going to make real progress, we need a long-term horizon.”

Ground Game Texas is meant to address that, drawing on the lessons in places like Arizona and Georgia, and applying them to the Texas context.

“The folks who successfully fought to roll back SB 1070 (the Arizona anti-immigration laws enacted in 2010) kept working,” Siegel says.  “Now Arizona has two Democratic Senators.”  The New Georgia Project went door to door for ACA (Obamacare).  Organizing for health care led to voter registration, which led to fighting for voter rights, which led finally to some big wins.  If the goal is to build a progressive Texas, we can’t rely on shortcuts.  But Texas may be even tougher: “We need twenty Stacey Abrams.  We’re big, and we’re diverse.”

Siegel believes strongly that a sustained conversation around key issues is central to this long-term thinking.  To this end, Ground Game Texas will put money and organization behind a set of issues they characterize as “Workers, Wages & Weed.”

“These are wedge issues that work in our favor,” Siegel says.  “And in Texas, a key tactic is to put these issues on city ballots throughout the state, to excite progressive voters and stimulate political conversation, and address the disconnect between Democratic policies (which are often popular), and the Democratic brand (often seen as disconnected from popular concerns).”

Ground Game Texas hopes to promote progressive causes and candidacies throughout several electoral cycles by providing campaign expertise and funding to a combination of candidacies and ballot issues, sustaining an ongoing conversation among voters that will gradually swell to a progressive majority that matches Texas’ perceived potential.

One issue is how to constantly be advancing electoral work that galvanizes voter interest and turnout. “Safe seats are a problem,” Siegel says.  “Turnout is reduced, even in strongly progressive communities, when there’s not a closely-contested race.  So we’re looking to ballot issues as a key tactic.”

Citizen-initiated ballot issues are not allowed statewide in Texas, nor at the county level.  Citizens can petition for ballot measures at the municipal level, and Ground Game Texas hopes to promote these all over the state.

“You could put an initiative on the ballot to require a living wage in city contracts, for example,” Siegel says.  “Or you could limit enforcement of marijuana laws for possession of small amounts.  These are progressive ideas that majorities support.” 

Siegel hopes to take the fundraising capacity demonstrated in progressive candidacies and direct that toward grassroots organizing.  He notes that there is already strong grassroots organization in some parts of the state, citing as an example the Texas Organizing Project, which is active in Houston, Dallas and San Antonio.  In those cases, he says, Ground Game Texas can provide tactical support, including funding and legal help.  Progressives are less well organized in many other parts of the state, however.

“For example, there is Grand Prairie, outside of Dallas,” he says.  “It has over 100,000 people, and is majority Hispanic, but lacks political organization.”  He described how a city that leans Democratic continued to be dominated by white conservative Republicans.  “We were able to help two progressive people of color win city council elections for the first time.  And you’ve got places like Grand Prairie all over the state.”  

Again, Siegel emphasizes a prolonged effort.  “It would have been nice if one exciting candidacy could flip the state,” he says, referring to Beto O’Rourke’s unexpectedly strong showing against GOP Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018.  “But that’s not how it’s going to happen.  To be real, we need to be thinking about 2028.”

Ground Game Texas starts with $1 million, and a goal of raising another $2 million this year, and funding organizers to knock on a million doors throughout the state. You can find them at www.groundgametexas.org.

Political Possibilites in the South & Sun Belt

| Matt Perrenod |

In the wake of the 2020 election cycle, there has been renewed attention among progressive electoral activists to Sun Belt states where people of color are a large part of the electorate in a region that for several decades has been dominated by conservative whites.  The Biden electoral victory resulted not just from his winning three northern states Trump won in 2016 (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin), but also from victories in Georgia and Arizona, where Democratic candidates were unsuccessful for decades.  Similarly, the narrow Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate arguably rests on Georgia and Arizona, where Dems flipped four seats in 2018 and 2020.  There has also been significant attention given to North Carolina and Florida, where the GOP eked out a series of narrow victories in the 2018/20 electoral cycles, and Dems won the NC governor’s race.  Dems now control the state government in Virginia, as well as a majority of that state’s Congressional delegation.  A coalition of Hispanic, Native American and progressive white voters have delivered Dem majorities in New Mexico for several cycles.

Through much of the South and Southwest, however, the GOP retains an electoral majority, and progressives have been working on how to extend the successful experience in states like Georgia and Arizona to other areas.  Major states like Texas have drawn the attention of progressives for several cycles, but remain locked in the hands of the GOP. Stronger candidates have come forward in places like Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina and Alabama, but all of these states continue to be dominated by the right, despite large African-American populations.  With few exceptions, Republicans dominate the border states of Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia as well.

The South and Southwest have become centers of demographic diversification in the U.S.  Much of the growth in Latinx voters has been in the region, and AAPI communities have become a major component of urban centers like Houston and Atlanta.  The region remains the largest concentration of African-Americans in the country.  Given this, we ought to continue to look closely at the opportunities for progressive political power in this region, while acknowledging that demographics doesn’t automatically confer success.  Rather, we should be asking, and acting upon what it will take. I believe the successes in Georgia and Arizona point to the importance of prolonged grassroots organizing to breaking the conservative white lock on the Sun Belt.  For this reason, I hope to post occasionally on the intersection of grassroots and electoral organizing in my native region, and highlight emerging examples of how these movements are striving for political power.  I will look to both electoral contests as well as community campaigns, help amplify regional voices, and try to identify the lessons as they’re being tested and learned.  And I would like to hear from others living and working in the region, and your perspectives on the current situation.  Please comment on my posts, and feel free to email me directly at mperrenod@gmail.com.

Steve Clark Responds to “The Dollar as the World’s Reserve Currency”

| Steve Clark |

In this piece, Steve Clark responds to Dennis Torigoe’s recent article, “The Dollar as the World’s Reserve Currency.”

Thanks to Signe for raising a stimulating comment on Dennis’ piece in regard to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). I appreciate what Tom had to say and wanted to comment further.

A bifurcated agenda (MMT at home and financial imperialism abroad) would be inconsistent and morally reprehensible for any progressive, and I don’t think anyone in or around MMT takes such a position. Rather, at worst — and like Dennis (and most of us) — MMT advocates don’t have a clearly articulated plan for remaking the international financial order. They know how it works, but they don’t know how to assert popular control at that scale (currently, their focus is on gaining effective influence in sovereign states and, someday, “going global” from such new-found power bases). Rather than criticize MMT for the same shortcoming that we all share, we need to put our MMT thinking caps on, figure out the necessary “next steps,” and advocate for consistent financial restructuring across our both domestic and global economies.  This might require a think tank and a legal corps, but that could set us in the right direction.

It seems to me that when our nation’s progressive wing overcomes dual power (defeats neoliberalism) in the US (that is, for now, in the Biden Administration and the Congress), all nations and people stand to benefit because the world does, in fact, have an integrated, global, financial system (and I think Dennis would agree) in which the US dollar and the US central bank (the Fed) dominate decision-making and financial power (at the IMF/BIS/SWIFT/IIF etc.). 

Given this institutional domination, if/when American progressives gain the power necessary to implement a true, worker-oriented, social investment agenda in the US, we also will gain (or will be on the verge of gaining) the power to pursue a similar agenda at global scale (via the IMF, where we progressives will have just acquired dominant power, or via some new authority that we and the world create to replace the IMF).

Further, given the scale and breadth of today’s crisis, when American progressives finally break the power of finance capital in the US (winning majority control of our government), the rest of the world’s progressives (in countries everywhere) will demand we immediately break that same financial power globally as well. Having gained control of the US votes at the IMF, we will have no choice but to comply (twist my arm!). 

Few American progressives have given much thought to how this “next system” of finance must operate to meet the needs of the whole world, including its impoverished nations. Obviously, “trickle down” from the US to the world doesn’t work, but, for sure, there’s no way some kind of global planned economy will be imposed. Rather, the next system — which has to carry civilization through the era of climate change impact and mitigation ahead — will be some kind of global mixed economy in which private entities and markets operate alongside public investment entities and non-market allocations, both within the world’s many nations and in transnational forms as well (corporations, global NGOs, UN-determined public investments(?), etc.).  

However this next system shapes up, the world is never going back to the gold standard. It will remain on fiat currencies because that is the actual and only way, now, that nation-states and their markets can operate (if anyone can see beyond the era of fiat currencies, please let us know what that might look like!). When US progressives quash dual power and take general control of our government (sometime over the next few election cycles), the dollar will become our currency (the public’s currency!), and we can directly and forthrightly engage China, Europe, Japan, Britain — the other four IMF-approved-for-trade currencies — the Global South, and all other sovereign nations on the matter of how best to reconstruct and democratize global finance for the challenging crisis-mitigation era ahead (including, possibly, setting a new Special Drawing Rights (SDR) currency to replace the dollar as the global reserve… MMT suggests how that might be done).  

I think that forging a new system of global finance is a necessary piece of this era’s struggle, an issue to be resolved sooner rather than later. MMT is empowering because it explains not only how the system works (and, as a corollary, how finance capital exploits the system for its own ends) but, also, how our nation’s democratic majority can impose its will on the system, reprioritize its investment agenda, move on to global financial reform, and, thereby, tackle all the vital problems of our time.

To me, a crucial task, now, is raising the financial consciousness of voters so elected politicians fight for popular oversight of finance in the public interest. That’s how we overcome dual power (defeat neoliberalism) and win progressive legislative majorities over the next few election cycles. Right now, the MMT folks are leading this project, but they need allies as well as broadened popular grounding and intersectional collaboration. I hope we Leftists will walk towards them, learn from them and help them see and link more effectively, beyond the financial realm.

Tom Clark Responds to “The Dollar as the World’s Reserve Currency”

| Tom Clark |

In this piece, Tom Clark responds to Dennis Torigoe’s recent article, “The Dollar as the World’s Reserve Currency.”

I’m a big Dennis Torigoe fan.  As I told him at the 40th Anniversary event, having never met him before, I miss his writings from the Worker’s Viewpoint days and am very glad to see him still at it after all these years.  His response about Walden Bello last winter was very useful and enlightening.  And, as I commented on the Voices for New Democracy site, I do appreciate Dennis’ timely information about SWIFT, one of the ways the US exercises its hegemony, and INTREX, a potential remedy. He is still an authority in my view.  I’ve thought that we should invite him to present to our Finance Group on how he thinks about financial and economic issues and what his suggestions are for how we should think about them.

So it is with all due respect that I say that I found Dennis’ explanation of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) to be vague and unsubstantial, and his conclusion about reserve currencies misplaced.  

In his article, he mentions the name Wynne Godley. What he didn’t mention, and might have, is the substance of what that economist’s work is about.  As laid out in Chapter 2 of The Deficit Myth, Godley demonstrated the principle of ‘sectoral balances.’  Simply put, as author Kelton does, the government’s red ink (the deficit) is the non-government’s black ink (a surplus).  Or, more precisely, there is a ‘penny-to-penny’ relationship between the amount of the government’s ‘debt,’ as we so misleadingly call it, and the amount of the surplus held by the non-government sector (what you, me, the business community, the Chinese etc., hold onto in our wallets, bank accounts, 401(k)s etc.) as assets, and didn’t pay in taxes.  As Godley showed, this accounting is a fact, not a theory, and decisively exposes the myth that the national debt is somehow a burden to our descendants, any more than the massive deficits from WWII were a burden to us.

In fact, there was a recent Twitter exchange where someone asked about exactly what [Signe Waller Foxworth] wrote here and what was in Dennis’ article:  Doesn’t MMT get used to maintain US hegemony over the world financial system?  The answer is that framing it that way is backwards:  The dollar acts as the world’s reserve currency because the US is an imperialist power and has the military and political clout to enforce its culture onto other players.  In other words, the dollar’s status as reserve currency is a result, not a cause, of US imperialism.  Of course they use monetary operations (the accurate description of which is the basis for MMT) to further their domination; it’s what we used to call ‘cultural hegemony,’ and part of the ‘code of capital,’ as we have called it more recently.  But the work of Fahdel Kaboub, Lua Kamal Yuille, Ndongo Samba Sylla and many others demonstrate how the MMT lens and the concept of monetary sovereignty can be used by progressive/revolutionary movements to improve the lives of their constituents as well as further expose the aggressive, oppressive roles played by the US and their neoliberal allies. 

To say one more thing, since you mention military spending.  As we all know the US military budget is nearly 3 quarters of a trillion dollars per year.  But notice that the Dems infrastructure and rescue proposals are for $6T total over 10 years, in other words about $.6T/year, comparable to the military expense.  What the MMT folk say is that we have enough room to do both, at least for a while. The MMT proposition is that there is no need to ‘pay for’ the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, education, childcare, reparations etc. by cutting the military budget or anything else.  Of course doing both seems wasteful and leaves in place an aggressive, damaging institution that we all hate.  (I say we can work on that problem as we go.)  But isn’t it worth it to get the good stuff that we really have to have and to highlight that possibility to those we work with?  I think so.

The point is that believing that we must first cut things like military spending to ‘pay for’ the social programs we know are so acutely necessary, is to swallow the ‘Deficit Myth,’ to accept that the US government has to ‘find’ the money it spends just like households, businesses and local governments must.  It’s just not so.
So the question is larger than, ‘how do we stop so much military spending?’  It’s ‘how do we get people the things they need?’ The MMT lens says we do that by writing and passing budgets that fund the programs we want, at least initially no matter what happens with the military budget.  Let’s do that and then the democratic will of the people we have established by working with everyone who will — what I think Steve means by ‘dual power’ — can decide later what best to fund for the long term, guns or butter, to use the old phrase.  The issue is getting our (small-d) democratic foot further in the door of this appropriations/spending process, using what ‘dual-power’ we can muster, not slaying old dragons no matter how righteous and right we are about how monstrous they are.   

Agree or disagree, I hope this is useful. Again, thanks for your response to my vids about the ongoing mainstreaming of MMT.