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On Wednesday, many of the key GOP legislators who voted to end collective bargaining for public unions in Wisconsin planned on coming to DC for a March 16 fundraiser — essentially sneaking into DC to pick up their checks for their sneak vote against labor.  A lot of different groups — AFL-CIO, MoveOn, Public Campaign — started telling their supporters to show up at the site of the fundraiser: the BGR lobbying firm headquarters, at 601 13th St NW in Washington DC.

I was among those who joined the demonstration.  As ever, I brought along my camera and video camera.

At first we just walked up and down in front of the building, I’d guess maybe five or six hundred people all told.  Then all of a sudden a guy standing at the door starts waving people in, so everybody so inclined crowded inside, chanting, blowing whistles, etc.

What greeted us was an all but perfect stage setting for a confrontation with the ruling class, something out of Bertolt Brecht’s wildest dreams: a marble and glass indoor atrium, lined with palm trees below, stretching up for ten stories above, each floor with balconies at which startled denizens of the building gathered to view the impromptu occupation. A heroic statue* stood at the center of a stairway reaching up several stories; a “Respect Workers Rights” banner was quickly hung on the balustrade in front of it. It developed that three or four hundred people can really raise a pretty deafening ruckus if they are so inclined.

The organizers showed a deft touch with the whole thing in that they did *not* stay in any one place for long.  After a few remarks by an AFL-CIO organizers, a Wisconsin teacher, and a Sheet Metal Worker union official, the word was OK, we’re leaving now, clean up, leave it better than you found it.

At this point many hundred more had gathered outside, and the DC police decided to just cordon off the block and give it over to the protest.  So that’s what happened — but after a few minutes the crowd proceeded away from that as well, heading straight to the White House.  We got there in about ten minutes, stood there doing many of the same chants — “What’s disgusting? Union busting” etc. — and then left *again* along a diagonal path through Lafayette Park, away from the White House.  I had no idea where they were headed and tagged along.  But when they got to H Street they doubled back heading east — towards the US Chamber of Commerce.  And by golly if they didn’t head straight in there too!  So I did as well.

This time the place was smaller, a regular lobby maybe forty feet by forty feet, with several dozen of us inside, one guy banging a drum for all he was worth, everyone else chanting “hey hey ho ho” and “people united will never be defeated” and whatnot.

One security guy was apparently steamed about it all — and decided he’d pull a fast one on us and close and lock the doors with us still on the inside.  I started to leave, but he blocked me — and he was a *big* guy, bound and determined to keep me from leaving and on bottling up everyone else behind me.   At no time did I hear him or anyone else request that we leave, though I may have missed that part, I was maybe the 30th person to go in.

By the time he was trying to shut the doors, there were about three or four dozen of us inside.  One guy ducked under his arm, he tried to stop that (so he wasn’t just trying to block further entrants). A bunch of us started to press out, me in the lead (I didn’t want to get trapped in there).  A bit of a nonviolent scrum ensued, him and one or two security guards on the outside trying to close the doors on us, 4 or 5 of us pushing out, me getting pushed from both sides — kind of the cork in the bottle — thinking hmm, this is the proverbial tight squeeze.  But our push won, the door stayed open.  On the outside, people began chanting “let them out,” and as far as I know everyone did stream out — and dispersed, this time for good.

In just a few minutes my friend Tim and I had left as well.  We headed over to a bar, and celebrated the day with some beers and fish and chips.  I gave away my “We Are One” ATU sign — which someone else had given to me — to some tourists who asked me for it.

I’ll post some videos below.  The first two are fairly raw footage — i.e., sometimes I forgot the camcorder was on and you’ll see the bag or my feet or the world turned upside down.  But in a way, it was, and the topsy turvy videography almost gets across the spirit of the moment as well as anything else.  Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Other accounts of the protest:

• Wisconsin Republicans Get Special Welcome in Washington (Hall, AFL-CIO)
• Large, dynamic solidarity protest in DC outside Wisconsin GOP fundraiser (Chris Bowers, DailyKos)
• DC protesters help Wisconsin GOP feel at home by occupying atrium of the Homer Building (Dane101)
• Hundreds of Wisconsin Protesters Crash GOP Fundraiser (Loudis, Slatest)
• Union Protesters March Through DC Streets, Storm Wisconsin Republican Fundraiser (Cohan, FOX5)

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* The statue in the center really was magnificent, it seemed all but designed for the occasion. It turns out it’s called “Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves,” by Donald De Lue; perhaps sadly, the original is at the Normandy American military cemetery in France. I like to think this was its happiest day in many a year.

“Astroturf Wars: How Corporate America is Faking a Grassroots Revolution” is an impressive documentary by Australian Taki Oldham; he’s distributing it for online viewing for $1.99, and the DVD can be purchased for $14.99. There’s a website, of course — and it’s worth a look, too.

I’m watching the movie, though I’ll have to quit halfway through and hopefully return to it tomorrow evening. Oldham traces corporate connections to the anti-healthcare movement, the climate change skeptic, pro-energy company movement, and the Tea Party movement.

The grass is real, the roots are real — but any
lawn you make this way isn’t exactly grassroots –
even if it isn’t astroturf either.

Oldham is well aware of the problem with the astroturf charge, one I’ve brought up before myself: that’s an awful lot of people with something bugging them, it can’t be completely artificial.  Thus one Louisville Tea Party speaker:

“The fact of the matter is, we ain’t no astroturf.  Nobody’s pre-printing signs for us.  Nobody’s telling us what to think or how to think it.  By God, they’re not gonna start now. So we thought how do we take these feral cats and kind of herd them all together?  And we thought, a rolling symbol across the country in towns small and big and in between…”.

He means the Tea Party Express — a bus beautifully custom-painted with images of the Constitution, currently on its 4th multi-state tour in less than a year.  Now if that’s grassroots I wish I was back in the business; in the 80s the Nuclear Freeze groups I was with ran out of grubby storefronts if they were lucky and from people’s living rooms if they weren’t.

Oldham’s point — and it seems to me a fair one — is that movements like these needn’t be completely artificial to still be deceptive, to still be “astroturf.” But the word is misleading, because astroturf is completely artificial.  Call them perhaps “grass sod organizations” and the distinction to a lawn or a meadow is clearer: not completely artificial — but not natural either: tour buses. Conventions. Ad campaigns. Cookie cutter “Americans for XYZ” groups and web sites.  It all costs a lot of money to “spring up overnight” and it costs more to stay there once you’ve sprung up.

With this new kind of phenomenon, the grass is real, the roots are real — but any lawn you make this way isn’t exactly grassroots. It’s been built and it’s being fertilized by other people, ones with plans of their own.

Click the image to send a petition
to your Congressmembers

Good point from CREDO:

There is very little that so clearly demonstrates the callous venality of some members of Congress than the simultaneous demand to give Paris Hilton a tax cut while pushing benefit cuts to Social Security.

They continue:

…President Obama has called for the Bush tax cuts that affect the richest 2% of Americans to expire. We need to have his back.

Tax cuts for economic elites aren’t free and they aren’t effective. The government still needs revenue and giving away money to millionaires (who on average would receive over $100,000 in tax cuts per year if all the Bush tax cuts are extended) takes away from the money we can spend to help the victims of this economic downturn.

It’s almost incredible all this needs to be said, but all too many Democrats, as usual, are running scared trying to avoid a fight they should win, and a fight they should be proud to win.

They should take on this fight because ending the Bush era tax cuts is one of the main ways to support a stable economy, infrastructure, and political system (and fix the deficit): the wealthiest among us pay progressively higher tax rates for a system within which they have flourished more than others. They’ll still be the wealthiest, and the system will function better for everyone. Including the wealthiest, unless they enjoy risking a declining nation and all that entails. (The other main way is reducing our military budget, ending our wars, and reducing our commitments/claims overseas.)

But if that doesn’t mean anything, wavering Dems might still consider it for simple reasons of self-preservation: less money for the superrich to play with may mean fewer, um, peculiar political candidates like Christine O’Donnell or Sharon Angle. (Notice how Rand Paul or Sarah Palin almost seem mainstream by comparison).

Now I can see why the Koch brothers, the O’Donnells, or the Angles of the world would like things to stay the way they’ve become. The Great Divergence — and its related developments: (a) the new “Citizens United“  rulebook allowing unlimited corporate spending on campaigns, (b) the great media noise machines like FOX, Rush, or Beck — is both cause and consequence of the super-rich getting super-richer, and their minions and allies getting attention and electoral successes they’d never achieve otherwise.

I just don’t see why the rest of us should welcome that. The super-rich are buying our country out from under us with campaign contributions, advertising, and astroturf movements (or heavily fertilized ones at any rate). They’re turning it into a country with a government ever more openly by, for, and of the wealthy few.

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NOTE: built from comments and links on Facebook.

Campaign web site here. We are the change we’ve been waiting for.

• What We Really See: GOP Senators Question Sotomayor (Oliver Willis)
  

  >> …Now, I’m a-looking here at your papers and such and I see where you sez, that you’re a wise latin-a.
  >> Well actually Senator, that pull quote misrepresents the full context of what I was saying…
  >> Well I gotta say ma’am, I’m mighty unnerved. Powerful unnerved by the sen-ti-ments you got here on this paper.
  

  While the script is great, it’s the “Dukes of Hazzard” stills captioned by each line that elevates this to high art.

• Similarly, What are we being asked during our confirmation hearings? (Brando, “Circle Jerk at the Square Dance”)
  

  12) Why do you hate white people?
  11) Let me elaborate: why do you hate white guys?
  10) Given that 106 white men have served on the Supreme Court, do you feel that you’re receiving preferential treatment?
  9) Related question: if Latinas are so wise, how come they have never served on the Supreme Court?
  [...]
  4) If you were a tree, would you be the kind of tree that would let a white family build a house out of her?
  3) If you had a cat trapped in a tree, would you let a white firefighter get the cat out of the tree? Follow up question: what color is your cat?
  2) We noticed that you’re wearing a white cast on your ankle. Do you find plaster racist? What about white bones?
  1) Why are you so obsessed with race?

• Caption contest:
  

  1) Oh the humanity
  2) Hit and bun
  3) I was dreaming that I was driving this big wienermobile into this little garage, and when I woke up I was.
  4) You should see the mayonnaise spill inside.

• Goldman Sachs in Talks to Acquire Treasury Department (Borowitz Report)
  

  The Goldman spokesman said that the merger would create efficiencies for both entities: “We already have so many employees and so much money flowing back and forth, this would just streamline things.”Mr. Hestron said the only challenge facing Goldman in completing the merger “is trying to figure out which parts of the Treasury Dept. we don’t already own.”

  Goldman recently celebrated record earnings by roasting a suckling pig over a bonfire of hundred-dollar bills.

• “We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission,” stated Harry Schoell, Cyclone’s CEO.
  Well, shoot, that woulda been cool.

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THE COMPLEAT “Good for a Grin” and “Heh !ndeed” posts
CREDITS where due: Brando, Wienermobile, and ‘hit and bun’ via Lori Learned Robinson, Goldman Sachs update via Steve Bremner, reassurance that futuristic military robots will not kill and eat me via Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

Quick followup on the tragicomic “pay to play” scandal at the Post mentioned below, via Marcy Wheeler (”emptywheel”) — this Paul Farhi item (”Internal Review Launched on Post Salon Proposal“) in the newspaper on Tuesday:

Weymouth yesterday appointed the newspaper’s general counsel, Eric Lieberman, to review the discussions that led to the controversy. The review, along with a parallel inquiry by Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli and Senior Editor Milton Coleman, is aimed at avoiding another episode that could damage the paper’s reputation.

“We think we know what happened, but we want to know if there were any details we missed or if there was something we overlooked,” Weymouth said in an interview. “If any of our business practices aren’t clear, we’ll amend them.”

Weymouth was allegedly on vacation when the flyer was released, but I should think “buy the boss a Blackberry and CC her when inviting guests to her home” was already S.O.P. Also, it’s becoming clear this wasn’t just the new guy’s (Charles Pelton, a Post marketing executive) fault:

But while Post executives immediately disowned the flier’s characterization, senior managers had already approved major details of the first dinner. They had agreed, for example, that the dinner would include the participation of Brauchli and some Post reporters; that the event would be off the record; that it would feature a wide-ranging guest list of people involved in reforming health care; and that it would have sponsorship. [...]

The only unresolved question was whether the first event would have multiple sponsors or a single one. Brauchli and Weymouth have said they preferred multiple sponsors, to dilute the influence of any particular sponsor. Yet when Weymouth’s office sent out e-mail invitations to the event early last week, only one sponsor, Kaiser Permanente, was listed. (Kaiser officials have said they had not decided whether to participate.)

Seems to me like they should just leave Farhi on the case. But you’ve got to love the approach — pioneered, perhaps, by Rumsfeld after the Abu Ghraib story broke — of siccing multiple investigations on an issue, the better to pretend those in charge are as shocked, shocked! as the rest of us. As Wheeler observes,

This all feels so DC.

Kathy — can I call you Kathy? great! — I’ve been a little upset about the story in Politico last week about how you and the Washington Post were going to hold pay for play issue “salons”, where companies could pay anywhere from $25,000 to $250,000 to have off the record discussions with top of the line, elite journalists and government policy makers.

Now obviously this was mishandled from the start; these “salons” — heck, let’s just call a spade a spade and call ‘em policy brothels — are a great idea, but the product rollout was terrible.  Like you told your loyal servant Howie Kurtz the day the story broke, “This should never have happened. The fliers got out and weren’t vetted. They didn’t represent at all what we were attempting to do.”

But I still accept your abject weekend apology in the Washington Post.  Like you wrote, this was a venture that just “went off track,” – kind of like a dog that slipped its leash; I mean, who’s really to blame for that?

After all, how could you be blamed for some business plan by some guy you employ to hold a policy brothel in your home? Sure, the Washington Post business vice president guy — Charles Pelton — said that “newsroom leaders, including Brauchli, had been involved in discussions about the salons and other events,” but seriously: who’s going to believe a guy who can screw up a nice racket like this one?

For my part, I can’t wait for whatever it was you were attempting to do.  Like the flyer said — “Spirited? Yes. Confrontational? No.” I’m sure I speak for most captains of industry when I say now that’s the way I like my journalists, all shy and respectful, in the “intimate and exclusive” privacy of your own home.  I don’t know which of the talent in your stable you were “inviting” to these “salons,” Kathy, but I tell you what: you take a fresh young fella like Ezra Klein, why, it’d be a crying shame not to try to make a little money off him.  You brought him in off the mean streets of the blogosphere, you gave him a nice home — you have an investment to recoup! I’m sure there’s many an “underwriter” who’d gladly pay for even just a kind word from him.

For his part, Ezra still seems to hope that “salons could be profitable after all”; as long as everything’s on the record the way you (now) agree it should be.  So he’s not against the “pay to play” part — tough as that might be on little papers that can’t attract the high rollers, or the little nonprofit citizens groups who either can’t afford to get past the doorman, or won’t suck up to the “underwriters.”  Not his problem — and not ours either, Kathy!

Kathy, like you, I think there’s got to be some “legitimate way to hold such events” — there’s too much money at stake for there not to be!  However the events eventually do work, you’re right to want to“review the guidelines for them with The Post’s top editors and make sure those guidelines are strictly followed.” As long as those “guidelines” have 3 or 4 zeroes at the end of ‘em, I’m sure old Fred Hiatt will play ball — heck, just a couple of zeroes would probably get you some of the, you know, less discriminating boys.  Am I right or am I right, Jackson?

I’ve been saying for a long time that the way the Post and the Times do journalism only makes sense if you figure they’re doing it for the influence, not for the readers.  Thanks for proving me right, Kathy — it might have been better if you’d piled up some board memberships instead, but now that it’s out in the open, go make it profitable!

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EDIT, 7/7: D’oh. Weymouth, not Graham.
UPDATE, 7/20: prompted by Nell, I lay a figurative flower wreath at the Internet Archive link to Media Whores Online, 2000-2004.
UPDATE, 7/26: In an e-mail, eRobin went “policy brothels” one better with “message parlors.”  Also, on his July 10 “Journal,” Bill Moyers delivered a homily for the ages on the subject. Among the many good parts:

Remember, the invitation promises this private, intimate, and off-the-record dinner is an extension “of THE WASHINGTON POST brand of journalistic inquiry into the issues, a unique opportunity for stakeholders to hear and be heard.” Let that sink in. The “stakeholders” in health care reform in this case do not include the rabble — the folks across the country who actually need quality health care but can’t afford it. If any of them showed up at the kitchen door on the night of this little soiree, a bouncer would drop kick them beyond the beltway.

Josh Marshall relays Charlie Cook’s report about the reaction of Republican staffers to the news of Senator Ted Stevens’ (R-AK) conviction:

Only the most partisan of Democrats or cold-hearted of people would fail to have some compassion or sympathy towards a party for which virtually everything has gone wrong. Someone recently likened it to watching a wounded dog kicked.

Stevens is one of the nine “Nazgul” (Republicans all, natch) who even voted against the torture amendment — McCain’s last decent act before he, too, joined the torturers with the Military Commissions Act. Today’s Republican Party deserves no sympathy — just a good old-fashioned “Raiders of the Lost Ark” mountaintop meltdown.

So here’s one cold-hearted partisan saying OK, maybe this Republican Party’s like a poor old wounded dog — but the thing’s rabid, too.  Put it out of its misery.

An American News Project report via Real News Network

The sums involved may seem paltry — but maybe that just proves how cheap a Congresscritter vote can be: “94 House Democrats who reversed their earlier position and voted in favor of immunity got an average of $8,359 from telecom PACs since 2005.” On the other hand, Senator Jay Rockefeller — who you’d think would be rich enough not to need it — got $51,500 this year alone. Guess it’s true — you don’t get rich by spending money. (Pretty wicked reporting of this in the video, watch for it around 1:40.)

There’s a storm brewing out in Nevada that ought to be much bigger than the one surrounding Eliot Spitzer: people’s health and lives are at risk because of shoddy medical practices — and neglectful oversight.

As the Wall Street Journal’s Scott Hensley explains, a Las Vegas endoscopy clinic has been reusing syringes; everyone subsequently tested with reused syringes is potentially exposed to infected equipment (see here for a graphic). Six cases of acute hepatitis C have been traced to the clinic, and as many as 40,000 people are at risk for hepatitis B, hepatitis C, and HIV according to the Las Vegas Sun.

My Vegas friend Paul is blogging about it:

With more and more revelations regarding Dr. Dipak Desai’s criminal malfeasance coming to light, many people are asking why his clinics were able to operate as long as they did without any sort of oversight by the relevant State inspection boards. It turns out that the Nevada State Health Division’s Licensure and Certification Bureau has not inspected the clinics since at least 2004, and even then they were not fully inspected. The last complete inspection of the clinics was performed in 2001.

The Division has not been able to hold clinics accountable and ensure public health and safety because Gov. Jim Gibbons cut 10 surveyor positions from the budget and refused to sign any bill raising taxes or fees on medical clinics to pay for the needed health surveyors. It should come as no surprise that Gov. Jim Gibbons is a Republican.

There’s more; the doctor involved is close enough with Governor Gibbons to have been on his health care working group transition team — and was the head of the state board of medical examiners until 2003.

As predictable as the fact that a GOP governor is in the middle of the mess is said governor’s reaction to the mess. Via the San Jose Mercury News, AP’s Brendan Riley reports:

[Gibbons] … said more staffing is akin to more Highway Patrol troopers to nab reckless drivers, adding, “You do not have enough patrolmen to stop everybody who makes a mistake. We could inspect (surgical centers) annually and then pretty soon, have we done overkill?” [...]

While the Gibbons administration has been criticized for the level of its monitoring, the governor said the issue isn’t a new one and the focus now should be “not on assessing blame or pointing fingers.”

Don’t worry, I’m done with you for now, Governor Overkill.

We’ve seen this before, of course: a pattern of deliberate neglect of safety, levees, infrastructure, or anything else that might be worthwhile government functions by ideologues more interested in cutting government than in protecting the public welfare. Rick Perlstein has been writing about what he calls “E. coli conservatism” ever since the incidents of tainted spinach and other produce of last year.* The pattern is similar: in the name of “small government,” abuse-detecting (and -deterring) inspections were getting short shrift:

The Associated Press studied the records and found that between 2003 and 2006 the Food and Drug Administration conducted 47 percent fewer safety inspections. FDA field offices have 12 percent fewer employees. Safety tests for food produced in the United States have gone down by three quarters—have almost ground to a halt—in the previous year alone. [...]

Paul Krugman summed it up last May — and found an interesting intellectual ancestor for Governor Gibbons:

The economic case for having the government enforce rules on food safety seems overwhelming. Consumers have no way of knowing whether the food they eat is contaminated, and in this case what you don’t know can hurt or even kill you. But there are some people who refuse to accept that case, because it’s ideologically inconvenient.

That’s why I blame the food safety crisis on Milton Friedman, who called for the abolition of both the food and the drug sides of the F.D.A. What would protect the public from dangerous or ineffective drugs? “It’s in the self-interest of pharmaceutical companies not to have these bad things,” he insisted in a 1999 interview. He would presumably have applied the same logic to food safety (as he did to airline safety): regardless of circumstances, you can always trust the private sector to police itself.

Gratuitous (well, not entirely gratuitous) Friedman-bashing aside, I hope Governor Jim “Overkill” Gibbons supplants Governor Spitzer on the “Above the Fold of Shame” soon — or even just joins him there. But I’m not holding my breath.

And if he doesn’t, we’ll deserve the kind of country we’re getting: better at monitoring our bank statements and phone calls to catch a philandering governor (and headlining the results) than at monitoring our food and medical systems to keep thousands healthy. You might say E. coli conservatism just went viral.

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* Here’s a list, via the Campaign for America’s Future search engine.
CROSSPOSTED TO “American Street“