Campaign News

For some corporations and advocacy groups, Colorado's jam-packed ballot has meant opportunity.

And they don't just care about political candidates. In fact, issue committees — which stand on the front line of fights over proposed amendments and propositions — have raised more than 10 times the amount of money of Colorado Democrats and Republicans seeking state or local office. These committees have drawn in more than $86 million, a staggering difference when compared to the approximately $7.3 million raised by state and local Democrats and Republicans.

These statewide issue fights — this year races concerning ColoradoCare, the minimum wage and a so-called "right to die" proposition have dominated much of the conversation — can give out-of-state groups a chance to get more bang for their buck and jump into statewide elections, which might affect their bottom line more than federal races, Colorado State University political science professor Bob Duffy said. States like Colorado are less expensive to campaign in than, say, California, which makes it appealing for groups looking to affect legislation without breaking the bank, he said.

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"Typically those elections are cheaper and also low-information elections," he said, pointing out that sometimes people have less information about statewide ballot measures than more high-profile races. "So a little money can go a long way. A big fish can have a much bigger impact in a small pond than they can in a big pond."

In the fight over Amendment 72, for example, the parent company of tobacco giant Philip Morris has bankrolled No Blank Checks in the Constitution, a group fighting against the proposed hike in cigarette taxes. Philip Morris is one of the largest tobacco companies in the world, and is known for products including Marlboro cigarettes. It has so far spent more than $16 million on the campaign. That alone is more than Democrats and Republicans running for state and local offices have raised.

"Obviously cigarette sale declines puts a real crimp in their bottom line, and they have an opportunity (to fight it), and it's probably cheaper to do it here than in California, for example," Duffy said.

Oftentimes out-of-state groups will use statewide races as a test case to see how effectively they can influence it — and again, it makes most sense to do that in a less-expensive race than in a large state with lots of media markets — and sometimes it's meant as a warning shot to groups who might be considering similar legislation in other states, Duffy said.

Opponents of the "right to die" proposition have gotten much of their funding from Catholic groups. The Archdiocese of Denver, for example, has contributed more than $100,000 to the campaign fighting Proposition 106, which would allow physicians to prescribe lethal doses of medication to terminally ill patients who met certain criteria so they could end their own lives.

Colorado Families for a Fair Minimum Wage, a group advocating for Amendment 70, which would raise the state's minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020, has raised almost $5 million, including more than $1 million from the Center for Popular Democracy Action, a New York-based advocacy group which focuses on several social justice issues. Keep Colorado Working, a group opposing the hike, has raised about $1.7 million, and has also received out-of-state support, including $50,000 from Florida-based Darden, the company that owns Olive Garden and LongHorn Steakhouse, among other brands.

"Especially after 2010, some federal election rulings unleashed some money," Duffy said, referencing a few court decisions on campaign finance, included Citizens United. "The floodgate really opened up."

By Alicia Stice

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Several worker advocacy groups in swing states are showing senatorial candidates that according to polls, voters support raising the minimum wage and expanding eligibility for overtime pay.

The groups include the National Employment Law Project (NELP), the Center for Popular Democracy Action Fund and the Working Families Party. They report that when voters learn that GOP incumbent senators oppose raising the minimum wage and expanding overtime pay eligibility, they often switch their support to Democratic challengers.

This might greatly influence the outcome of close U.S. Senate races in Pennsylvania, Missouri, Ohio, New Hampshire and Arizona.

Forty four Senate Republicans have signed a resolution opposing the overtime pay expansion the U.S. Labor Department plans to implement December 1.

“Voters are fed up with lack of action in Washington on raising wages for working people, and what we’re seeing is that just letting voters know where the candidates stand on these issues can have a significant impact,” Dan Cantor, executive director of the Working Families Party, says.

He cited polls that found:

    ▪    Nationally, voters support expanding overtime pay eligibility by a three-to-one ratio. Just over half of voters say they would oppose a candidate who opposes the expansion.

    ▪    In Pennsylvania, three-fourths of voters say they support raising the minimum wage. Also, by an 81 to 15 percent margin, they say they approve of expanding eligibility for overtime pay. Fifty seven percent of voters say they will oppose candidates who do not support these goals. (Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Katie McGinty has made raising the minimum wage a key plank in her race against GOP Sen. Pat Toomey.)

    ▪    In Missouri, voters approve expanding overtime pay eligibility by a 76 to 16 percent margin. If a candidate opposes the idea, 53 percent of voters say it would lessen their support.

    ▪    In Ohio, voters approve expanding overtime pay eligibility by an 80 to14 percent margin. And if a candidate opposes the idea, 51 percent of voters say they would lessen their support.

“Working women and men should be paid for the time they work, period. The Obama administration’s decision to increase the overtime threshold is an enormous, in many cases life-changing, win for working people, from fast-food, retail and healthcare managers to post-doctoral associates and counselors,” Service Employees President Mary Kay Henry has said.

She continued: “This action will put more money in people’s pockets and boost the economy. It will boost women, African Americans, Latinos, people who are early in their careers and people who have modest education levels – the very people hardest hit by the 40-year assault on working people built on phony trickle-down economics.”

“Raising wages includes lifting national wages, but it’s far broader than that,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has said. “We want earned sick leave and paid family leave. We want full employment, fair overtime rules and fair scheduling so people won’t have to guess whether they’ll get enough hours to pay the rent.”

The Working Families Party, the NELP Action Fund and their allies are working to inform workers about where candidates for office from president down to city councilperson stand on raising wages,” said NELP fund spokesman Paul Sonn.

By Mark Gruenberg 

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The three council members also want the corporation to divest from private prisons and immigration detention centers.

Read the full article here.

There might be no issue that splits so neatly along party lines as climate change. While Democrats have all but consensed on the existence of man-made global warming, Republicans have staked out their place as the party of denial. But with climate-fueled chaos on the horizon, trumping Trump’s climate plan may not be enough to stave off the end of the world as we know it—and progressive activists are looking for more ambition on their side of the aisle. 

First, the bad. At this year’s Republican National Convention, the GOP’s drive to drill baby drill toward an “all of the above” energy policy yielded chilling results.

Take the GOP’s climate and energy platform, an extremist document—even for them—that calls for more pipelines, a cancellation of the Clean Power Plan, the United States’ total withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement and the end of the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon dioxide and just about anything else, morphing it into “an independent [and toothless] bipartisan commission.”

Others fused energy policy with Trumpian law-and-order nationalism: “Every onerous regulation puts American lives at risk,” Harold Hamm, a fracking mogul and Trump’s pick for energy secretary, said Wednesday. “Developing America’s own oil supply is a matter of national security.”

And official RNC proceedings were dotted with panels on energy sponsored by the likes of the American Petroleum Institute, a lobbying outfit for the fossil fuel industry. At one such event, Congressman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) voiced a myth popular among her colleagues: “The earth is no longer warming, and has not for the about past 13 years, in fact it has begun to cool.”

Squared with any climate science worth its peer review, the GOP’s plan is a recipe for literal disaster. This year will likely be the hottest on record, and recent research shows that thanks to ramped-up melting, Greenland lost a trillion tons of ice from 2011 to 2014.

Rising temperatures could cost the global economy some $2 trillion by 2030, around the time when coastal cities might become virtually uninhabitable. By stripping the government of its ability to scale back the emissions fueling these trends, the Republican platform might well kill us all—or at least force us inland.

But is the Democrats’ plan much better? When it comes to climate change, there’s precious little time for lesser evils; the physics—as scientists are quick to tell us—has put humanity on a deadline. Next week, thousands will converge on the Democratic National Convention to enforce it.

Articulating climate change as “an urgent threat and a defining challenge of our time,” the Democratic platform sets out a series of ambitious goals on climate for the next half-century: a full transition to clean energy by 2050, creating millions of well-paying green jobs, fulfilling the Paris Agreement for a 1.5 degree Celsius global cap on warming, pricing both carbon and methane, and abandoning the “all of the above” stance Democrats wrote into their platform in 2012.

The issue, climate organizers say, is that the plan says next to nothing about how to get there. Though the platform benefitted from input of climate hawks like Bill McKibben, Keith Ellison and Cornel West, many of the strongest environmental protections brought up in the drafting process were struck down. Food and Water Watch National Organizing Director Mark Schlosberg noted that, among other shortcomings, the document failed to ban fracking, reject the Trans-Pacific Partnership or commit to keeping fossil fuels buried.

Not only that, but Clinton’s staffers have made pains to distinguish the party’s plans from her own, which are focused largely on market-based clean energy incentives and a handful of regulations. If the Democrats’ own nominee won’t champion her party’s policy slate, pushing beyond it will be no easy task.

Despite its flaws, the Democrats’ platform remains the most ambitious the party has produced to date. But meeting its relatively lofty benchmarks would require rapid cuts to current fossil fuel use, and a virtual moratorium on new pipelines, drilling projects, coal-fired power plants and fuel export terminals—none of which are included to sufficient degree in either the document or Clinton’s own agenda. Even if every national commitment outlined in the Paris Agreement is met, the world is still on track for around 3 degrees of warming. A recent report from Nature, moreover, finds that “the window for limiting warming to below 1.5 C … seems to have closed.” Meeting that now, researchers say, would require the use of some magically efficient (and currently non-existent) technology to suck carbon out of the atmosphere.

The Democrats’ platform, Schlosberg explains, “Contains some good language [on climate change] … and calls for a World War II-scale mobilization to address it. But the rest of the platform doesn’t live up to what is necessary to implement that. …

“We need to put forward an affirmative vision of what [a low-carbon world] should look like,” he adds, “not just what we can bargain for.”

Party platforms, at day’s end, are symbolic documents—more of a temperature gauge on the party’s mainstream than a commitment that it will do what it says. Even the “strongest climate change platform ever,” as the Guardian called the Democrats’ plan, leaves a dangerous gap between science and policy.

That’s part of the reason why—on Sunday—Food and Water Watch, with the support of some 900 sponsoring organizations, is hosting a March for a Clean Energy Revolution through downtown Philadelphia, just hours before the convention is set to begin. Joined by the Center for Popular Democracy, National Nurses United, the Labor Network for Sustainability and others, the march will invite thousands to call for everything from a ban on fracking to keeping fossil fuels underground.

Also on the ground next week will be Nay’Chelle Harris, a member of Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE) and something called the It Takes Root People’s Caravan. A redux, of sorts, of a delegation of organizers who attended the Paris climate talks back in December, the caravan has been bringing together “grassroots Indigenous, Latin@, Black, Asian, Muslim and working class white organizers from around the country” to plan and support actions in Cleveland, Philadelphia and points in between.

This week they joined the immigrant rights’ group Mijente outside the RNC to “wall off Trump,” and in Philly will participate in actions to shut down an immigration detention center and stop the expansion of a South Philadelphia oil refinery. Like Harris, many “caravanistas” work at the intersections of racial, immigration and climate justice. They kicked off their trip with a Pledge of Resistance “to stand against the racism, misogyny and hateful and xenophobic policies being put forth at the Republican National Convention.” Climate justice, they say, won’t come without victory on other fronts as well.

Having first gotten involved in MORE’s campaign against coal company Peabody Energy as a student at Washington University in St. Louis, Harris started devoting more time to the group after Michael Brown’s killing in nearby Ferguson in the summer of 2014. MORE provided jail support to protesters arrested in Ferguson that summer, and since then has worked on a project mapping out the connections between St. Louis power brokers—including Peabody Energy, headquartered there—and the city’s police department. “Power Behind the Police,” as the project is known, looks to target the “St. Louis 1%” while building out a people’s agenda for a just transition away from fossil fuels and police violence alike.

“We need to confront the GOP, and confront Trump and his rhetoric,” Harris told me by phone from Cleveland. “But we also need to confront the DNC—they have been pushing militarism, they have been pushing market-based, false solutions to climate change. They haven’t shown real dedication to ending violence against black people.” Carbon taxes and trading schemes have been a favorite not just of progressives but also free market ideologues, whose proposed version of the carbon tax would swap corporate regulations for a price on oil and coal. (Former Bush economist N. Gregory Mankiw is a fan of the idea, along with ExxonMobil.) Many in the caravan, on the other hand, see such elite-driven, market-based proposals as a cynical way to stave off the kinds of strong regulations that might actually put a dent in the fossil fuel industry’s business model, and protect communities on extraction’s frontlines.

Schlosberg and Harris each said that taking on such false solutions, and securing a better climate plan, would take more coordination among movements across issues. Harris joins many millennials, too, in her frustration with politics as usual as a path toward that, saying she “doesn’t feel beholden to the Democratic Party.” But she is also part of a tide of grassroots organizers who see electoral fights as a field of struggle in pushing movements’ demands, along with mobilizations and other forms of pressure from outside of formal politics—like demonstrations happening in Philadelphia next week.

“We can’t depend on the political system,” Harris told In These Times. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use every avenue for change we have at our disposal.” She referenced two local St. Louis politicians—Democrats Megan Green and Rasheen Aldridge—as examples of what it looks like for officials to run on platforms and govern on platforms that are accountable to activists. Green, an alderwoman, and Aldridge—now running for Democratic Committeeman in the city’s fifth ward—have each used their campaigns to push for demands brought forth by the movement for black lives and Fight for $15.

“I don’t think anyone should consider a party to be their savior,” Harris added, whether it’s the Democrats or the Green Party. “What matters now is people power.”

By KATE ARONOFF 

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