Walker’s Recall Victory over Wisconsin Democrats: What the Hell Happened?

Activists will rightly be dismayed that Scott Walker defeated the union-backed grassroots campaign to recall him. The repercussions will be felt in states across the country as right-wing groups see it as  a vindication of their hostility to state workers’ unions. Let’s not forget, however, that Republicans lost control of the Wisconsin State Senate. There is a chance this could be reversed in November, but for now it will prevent them pushing through further right-wing legislation.

Interviewed on Democracy Now, John Nichols pointed out its immediate significance: “Governor Walker is an incredibly ambitious partisan. … He is particularly interested in taking apart many of the state’s environmental laws in order to allow for a particularly controversial form of mining in northern Wisconsin. That is likely to be blocked. Additionally, he’s been very, very aggressive on voting rights issues. He’s a big backer of voter ID laws, changes in registration laws, things of that nature. That would have been the sort of thing that you might have seen him initiate, and his allies initiate, if they had control of the State Senate.”

The narrative on the left is that big money unleashed by the “Citizens United” decision swung the election despite the massive effort behind the recall campaign. Nichols explains: “Over the period not just of this campaign but really of the better part of a year, he [Walker] used massive television advertising, as well as astounding amounts of mailings—more than $5 million worth of mailings—and huge amounts of internet and social media communication, to basically alter people’s impressions of him sufficiently to win a 53-46 victory.”

This has some validity, but it is not the whole story. Money gave Walker the advantage of being able to frame the issues before the Democrats had a chance to get started, but his Republican rhetoric would have had little impact if it didn’t resonate with popular prejudices. In the absence of any accountability for bankers and plutocratic privilege, state workers have become the scapegoats for the recession.

The most important statistic to come out of the exit polls, in my opinion, is that Walker won nearly half the vote from members of union households who were not themselves in a union. The Washington Post suggests that: “Democratic and labor efforts to turn out their supporters (which is labor’s calling card) were largely successful. The problem was that too many of those who came out sided with Walker… the backlash against him was limited to the Democratic base and those directly affected by his decision [to strip collective bargaining rights from public sector unions], while Walker was able to garner plenty of support from everybody else — including family of union members.”

Walker succeeded – and this has to be faced squarely – in leveraging the underlying and growing resentment on the part of Americans made vulnerable by the recession against those who are not yet playing by the new rules set by the plutocracy for the rest of us. The new normal is accepting day to day life as being economically contingent and disposable without protection against corporate abuse. Under the guise of self-sufficiency, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, and the characterization of organized labor as mobs, leeches, monsters, etc., plutocrats have adjusted the collective expectations of the middle class to essentially accept the same lot as the immigrant farmworkers they also vilify.

Walker managed to divide the electorate using the fear people clearly have against this new reality as a wedge. Wisconsin Democrats were unable to counter Walker’s narrative and get across the importance of collective bargaining for all workers, not just those in the public sector. John Nichols commented: “This battle over labor rights was where the fight in Wisconsin began, and yet it was Scott Walker who, for the last year, did a lot more of the messaging on the assault on collective bargaining rights that he launched back in February 2011. Similarly, I think that Democrats and labor needed to talk about the recall power and explain it in much more detail. Walker was very, very critical of the recall. And I think, again, he used a lot of money and messaging to win that debate.”

Many voters were opposed to recalls as a means of political protest, so they responded to this criticism. And Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett, a centrist Democrat who was not labor’s first choice, had little to offer his base. Gary Younge of the Guardian was not impressed: “In the five days I’ve been reporting from the state I have yet to meet a single person who voted for him as opposed to against Walker. In the end this was just not enough. His failure to give some vision for what Wisconsin under his stewardship would look like could not win over the coveted independents or sufficiently inspire his base. When it came down to it, the people of Wisconsin wanted more than the absence of Scott Walker. They wanted the presence of an alternative.”

The lack of an effective counter-narrative left voters open to Walker’s claims that he was attempting to deal with the state’s fiscal problems. The fact that he balanced the budget with large cuts in further education and mortgage settlement money was drowned out. In These Times reports on a long discussion that John Dupies, a special education teacher in the Milwaukee schools, had with a voter when canvassing. “Dupies asked him, ‘In years, have you seen our state divided like it is now?’  The voter said he supported Walker: ‘I’ve got to pay for my own healthcare…everyone else should do it too.’ … After a friendly exchange about common acquaintances in the local schools, the voter said, ‘As a small business owner, I bust my ass, I pay my own bills, plus I’m paying for all of the illegals.’  Dupies asked whether he thought it was fair for big corporations to get away with not paying taxes.  He answered, ‘No, I don’t think it’s fair.  But there’s nothing I can do about it’.”

The battleground in Wisconsin sums up the dilemma of the left today. Since Obama has not jailed a single CEO or top banker for crashing the economy and plunging America into recession, it appears that there’s nothing that the people, through their government, can do about it. Matt Stoller writes in Naked Capitalism: “Up and down the ticket, Democrats are operating under the shadow of the President, associated with unpopular policies that make the lives of voters worse and show government to be an incompetent, corrupt handmaiden to big business. … Obama’s economic policies have made economic inequality sharper than it was under Bush, due to his bailout of banks and concurrent elimination of the main source of wealth of most Americans, home equity.  With these policy choices, Obama destroyed the Democratic Party and liberalism – under Obama’s first two years, the fastest growing demographic party label was ‘former Democrat.’ … Then, in Illinois and Maryland in April, liberal labor-backed candidates were absolutely wrecked in primaries. … In Wisconsin, the stage was much more high-profile, but the dynamics were the same.”

The national story is what frames the lives of Americans, whatever the local issues. In order to counter the Republican onslaught, the progressive wing of the Democratic party—reduced as it has been under the Obama administration—needs to regroup and reassert its presence. The Occupy movement has begun this conversation; the best hope for countering the plutocratic Republican brand of fear and envy is Occupy’s message of how we can recover our solidarity for a more just America. That my neighbor has healthcare and I don’t does not mean that he should lose it to make things fair; the fair thing, in this enormously wealthy country, is that we both have it.

Hey Honchos! Wake up and Smell the Wisconsin Recall: The Government Serves People, Not Corporations!

Whatever the final result of the recall election for the Wisconsin governor next Tuesday, the fact of the recalls themselves and the huge grassroots campaign to achieve them – in the face of the reluctance of the Obama administration and Democratic establishment to give support until the last minute – is a major victory. The first round of recalls last year reduced the Republican senate majority to one, and on Tuesday there are four more senate recalls together with the governor’s and lieutenant-governor’s.

Cap Times editor John Nichols points out that “this is the most sweeping set of recalls in American history. We’ve never had a situation where on a single day a state could change control of both its executive branch and the dominant house of the legislative branch. … if just one seat is picked up – the Democrats gain full control of the state senate. That in itself is a pretty big deal.”

If Walker were voted out of office, or even if the Democrats were to regain control of the senate, it would curb his attempts to sell the resources of the state to the super-rich – his slogan “Wisconsin is open for business” is code for “The public property of Wisconsin is up for grabs.” It doesn’t matter to him if the natural beauty and ecology of the state is destroyed by strip-mining, or that people sink deeper into debt. He just wants to keep his wealthy donors rewarded with whatever tax breaks or immunity from legal control they can profit from.

As Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne noted: “Wisconsin has become the most glaring example of a new and genuinely alarming approach to politics on the right. It seeks to use incumbency to alter the rules and tilt the legal and electoral playing field decisively toward the interests of those in power. … This recall should not have had to happen. But its root cause was not the orneriness of Walker’s opponents but a polarizing brand of conservative politics that most Americans, including many conservatives, have good reason to reject.”

Walker’s huge spending on attack ads is not aimed at changing the minds of independents – it’s to keep his base fired up. He needs to keep his potential voters motivated because otherwise some of the scandals surrounding his political career will cause them to doubt his suitability for any kind of government responsibility. The frenzied media blitz helps to keep partisan divisions at fever pitch.

John Nichols in the interview cited above explains that “aides for the governor, and perhaps the governor himself – that remains to be seen – set up a secret campaign operation in the [Milwaukee] County Executive’s Office where people were paid out of the Treasury for pretty much just full-time campaign work for Scott Walker and his favorite candidates. It was effectively a recreation of an old-style political machine without any rules. It appears to have been illegal. That’s why his deputy chief of staff, his scheduler, his former deputy chief of staff have all been charged. … It’s also why the governor is now represented by four separate law firms, including two of the top criminal defense law firms. … The guy is looking at major state and potentially federal investigations into his activities.”

What Walker’s regime means for ordinary people is made clearer by another series of scandals surrounding the state environmental agency, the Department of Natural Resources (DNR).  According to an investigation in the Wisconsin State Journal, a former Republican state legislator, Scott Gunderson, who was appointed as executive assistant to DNR Secretary Cathy Stepp by the Walker administration, “chose not to send a complaint against an Oconomowoc waste hauler to the Department of Justice for prosecution despite findings by agency staff that the company was treating fields with so much human waste from septic tanks it risked poisoning nearby wells … Instead, Gunderson decided to ask district attorneys in Waukesha and Jefferson counties to issue five citations against Herr Environmental and fine the company $4,338 — the minimum forfeiture for the permit violations, which the lead DNR investigator called ‘among the worst’ he’d seen.”

Also implicated is the local state representative, Joel Kleefisch, who is the husband of Lt. Governor Rebecca Kleefish who is facing recall on Tuesday. According to a DNR investigator who spoke to the State Journal, he argued that five citations were too many and should be reduced by two or three “as a show of good faith.” At a public meeting, concerned homeowners in the area were told that neither the DNR nor the hauler would pay for tests on the water quality of their wells and they should do it themselves.

The Center for Media and Democracy’s PR Watch explained that the story was “the second part of a two-part series by the State Journal, the first part having revealed that the DNR’s environmental activity has dropped dramatically in the past two years under the Walker administration and that the number of permit violation notices from the department hit a 12-year low last year. The DNR’s Secretary Cathy Stepp, appointed by Walker, is a former Republican state senator who ran her family’s construction business after leaving public office. Before her appointment, Stepp was an outspoken critic of the DNR, calling its employees ‘anti-development, anti-transportation, and pro-garter snakes, karner blue butterflies, etc.’ Walker said that his controversial decision to appoint Stepp was because he was looking for a DNR chief with a ‘chamber-of-commerce mentality’.”

At the same time, the landscape in northern Wisconsin is being devastated to feed the growing appetite of the natural gas fracking industry for high-grade sand. Rolling hills containing the sand are being leveled and the valleys filled with dumped industrial waste water. The DNR has done nothing to monitor how much crystalline silica – a carcinogen like asbestos – is released into the air by sand mining, and it recently denied a petition by people living in the region that it control the amount being dispersed by mining operations.

Given the appointment of Cathy Stepp as DNR Secretary, one of the petition’s signatories, Ron Koshoshek, wasn’t surprised. “For 16 years he was a member of, and for nine years chaired, Wisconsin’s Public Intervenor Citizens Advisory Committee.  Created in 1967, its role was to intercede on behalf of the environment, should tensions grow between the DNR’s two roles: environmental protector and corporate licensor. ‘The DNR,’ he says, ‘is now a permitting agency for development and exploitation of resources’.” Instead of being able to protect the public good, state environmental professionals are being overruled by Walker’s political appointees.

All this could be overturned in Tuesday’s election. As John Nichols put it: “… this mass mobilization, which the unions have put a lot of their resources and energy into, has the potential to produce a sufficient number of new voters. The traditionally unpolled voters such as young people, people of color, and rural people can make this a close and potentially very winnable race not just for Tom Barrett but for the incredible movement that developed last year.”

Wisconsin Democrats hamstrung by national leadership: grassroots doing the fighting

If Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett beats Walker in the recall elections, it will be no thanks to the national Democratic leadership and entirely due to the tenacity of Wisconsin Democrats channeling a grassroots movement to defend the social contract. Indications are there will be a high turnout: early voting is at or near record levels in key municipalities like Milwaukee and Madison, and also the conservative stronghold of Waukesha.

Although Republican governors are coming out in force to support Walker, not one nationally-known Democrat has campaigned with Barrett. And in an interview on Friday, DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz said: “there aren’t going to be any repercussions” nationally if Wisconsin voters re-elect Walker.

This is a serious underestimation of the national significance of the recalls. When Walker was elected he immediately legislated a prefabricated right-wing agenda, part of a strategy devised by Republican groups like ALEC to force change in America from the state level. Their aim is to destroy Democratic support by crushing unions, restricting the franchise, and redistricting to achieve a permanent Republican majority.

At a national level, the Democratic leadership focuses heavily on Obama’s re-election calculations and carefully avoids the populist message that successfully fired up the recall signature-gathering campaign in Wisconsin. They appear to have left Wisconsin Democrats to fight Walker on their own.

This is certainly how it appears to people at the base. In comments on a blog post about the fact that Obama has avoided taking a public stand on the recall, “PJ” says: “I think it’s pretty clear that the DNC has decided that voters’ minds are set at this point. If that is so, then the Democratic establishment bears the brunt of the responsibility for not offering an early, frequent, clear, and genuine alternative to the conservative agenda. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – the protests and ensuing recall effort were an historic, game-changing moment that Democrats squandered.”

The fight in Wisconsin is important because it mirrors a national struggle against the Republican narrative that, when states are faced with fiscal shortfalls, budgets need to be balanced by spending cuts targeted at state workers and programs for the poor. They manufacture support for this program with a consistent message that public sector employees are allegedly protected from the recession while others are suffering – in Walker’s words, “divide and conquer.”

As the recall approaches, this message is accompanied by vicious demonizing and witch-hunting of unionized state workers. In Janesville, southern Wisconsin, a pro-Walker group distributed anti-teacher fliers listing teachers’ salaries “and urging parents to request their child be assigned to a ‘non-radical teacher’ next year. The fliers, which included the names, titles and salaries of the 321 highest-paid Janesville teachers, also urged readers to go to iverifytherecall.com to determine if the teachers signed the petition to recall Gov. Scott Walker.”

The legislative onslaught on state workers’ unions was set up to conceal Walker’s primary agenda of enormous tax breaks and concessions to the rich. A “domestic production” tax credit was slipped into his 2011-13 budget which could reduce state income tax for the richest Wisconsinites from 7.75 percent to zero, or even end up as a credit, according to The Cap Times. It noted: “The production tax credit was just one of the ‘gifts’ in the budget approved by Walker and the Republican-controlled Legislature last June. Most, if not all, are targeted at corporations, investors, upper-income residents and campaign contributors. Combined, they will reduce state revenues significantly. Making up the difference, opponents argue, will be average Wisconsin families.”

How did Walker get away with this? An insightful commentary by Paul Fanlund in The Cap Times draws attention to a series of interviews with regular people across Wisconsin carried out between 2007-10 by a UW-Madison professor. Fanlund writes: “… what she found in her chats in gas stations and restaurants was an almost seething resentment toward public employees, who in the interviewees’ estimation had not suffered like they had in the economic downtown and were less likely to be ‘working hard.’ There was no similar, visceral blame for their economic suffering directed towards the private sector, even after the Wall Street crisis and even as the income gap has grown exponentially in recent years and the comparative tax burden on the wealthiest has shrunk. …

“Katherine Cramer Walsh is the UW-Madison professor I referenced above who interviewed many Wisconsin citizens. ‘In all my conversations about causes of the great recession, maybe a handful of times’ was any blame directed at the private sector even after the Wall Street crisis, she says. ’The most striking thing to me is how much those attitudes were in place when Walker tapped into them,’ she says.”

A comment from a Wisconsin resident on a New York Times magazine article about how divided the state has become, expresses the political consequences succinctly: “Wisconsin, hit as hard as any state by the economic collapse that originated on Wall Street and in Washington, was a pile of dry tinder. Walker was a flaming match. Legislation enacted rapidly after his inauguration was the equivalent of gasoline.”

The Democrats have struggled to create a coherent response to this rapid polarization of the state, and have missed chances to broaden their support, opting instead for a return to consensus politics. As commentator John Nichols points out: “Soft messaging by Democrats on labor issues has done them serious harm with voters in their potential base. And a failure to educate the broad mass of voters on the importance of collective bargaining to protecting middle-class wages and benefits has been equally damaging. Republicans do not make this sort of mistake. … Walker knows that a recall election in a closely divided state is about maximizing appeal to the base, not softening messages and avoiding issues.”

Paul Fanlund, in the article quoted above, also cites another UW-Madison professor, Barry Burden, who said: “What the [Wisconsin Democratic Party] has not done a good job of is saying ‘look at all the things that public spending actually does for you, like providing roads, or fire protection, or education for your children in the UW System or on public schools.’ ”

This cannot be blamed on the Wisconsin Democrats alone. They are hamstrung by the national leadership, which should be fighting to uphold the essential things that the government does on behalf of the community – education, emergency services, medical care, social security for the elderly, housing, and more. They need to sustain the idea that the community should take responsibility for the young, the sick and the weak. But most legislators, including the great deceiver Obama himself, accept the neoliberal ideology that banks must be supported at all costs.

Instead of taking up the critique of the Occupy movement, the national Democrats have helped foster the belief that the crimes of the rich operate at an incomprehensible economic level and to be “part of the way business works”; this impression is reinforced by the fact that no high-flying executives have yet been jailed.

They are accomplices in the Obama administration’s purging of whistleblowers and the federal use of agents provocateurs against Occupy protests across the country. But they will be unable to control the growing movement of political defiance: like the grassroots movement to recall Walker, which was initially opposed by Democratic political operatives, it will break through the party straitjacket and create new and more effective forms of resistance.

Recall Walker vote sabotaged by Democratic National Committee

On June 5 Wisconsinites go to the polls to vote in recall elections. Even though extreme right-wing governor Scott Walker has presided over a disastrous jobs record, has been linked to corruption and crony capitalism, and taken away collective bargaining rights for state workers, it’s not going to be easy for Democrats to win this election.

Wisconsin’s voters are already highly polarized for or against Walker on party lines. The results will be a test of whether the Democrats can attract enough new voters to overcome the strength of Walker’s highly-motivated Republican base. In a virtually uncontested primary, he got over 600,000 votes, close to the total for all the candidates in the Democratic primaries combined.

Yet the Democratic National Committee – the body responsible for political activity in support of Democratic Party candidates – has refused a request from Wisconsin’s Democrats for a major investment in their campaign, in sharp contrast to Tea Party Republicans who are pouring resources into the election and view it as a national referendum on their right-wing policies.

The national Democratic leadership has no stomach for a fight that came up from the grassroots in defense of the social contract. They are themselves tied to corporate interests and the financial industry, and don’t want to get involved in a movement to remove elected officials when Democratic governors are also cutting state workers’ jobs and benefits to fix budget shortfalls. They want Democratic voters to stay passive, and they avoid contact with a mass movement intent on fighting for change. Obama has effectively neutralized the left within the party, regularly exploiting people’s desire to believe in him by making rhetorical but vague promises for reform while in practice ensuring nothing changes – even after the $2 billion loss by JP Morgan Chase, Obama still praises Jamie Dimon as “one of the smartest bankers we got.”

The popular protest movement that led to a three-week occupation of the Wisconsin Capitol and over 100,000 to demonstrate outside became harnessed to a campaign to get signatures for recalls.  In the second round, over a million signatures – twice the number needed to force Walker into an election – were gathered. But the union leadership made a strategic mistake in not building a movement that took up issues such as unemployment, homelessness and bank evictions in order to broaden their support, as critics of the protests noted at the time.

That’s not to say that the recall campaign has been ineffective: the first round last summer reduced Walker’s senate majority to one, and resulted in a shutdown of his more blatantly partisan legislation. It was a significant victory against Republicans who had been elected against the Democratic trend in 2008. But the restricted electoral focus of the Walker recall meant that Democratic primary voters understandably made a pragmatic choice for their candidate, picking Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett rather than Kathleen Falk, who had aligned herself closely with the recall campaign from the beginning and had pledged to veto the state budget if it did not restore collective bargaining rights.

The problem for Democratic voters is that Barrett’s strategy is for a return to rule by consensus at a time when Republican voters have steadily moved rightwards. In 2010 Walker was silent about eliminating collective bargaining, but voiced generic Tea Party slogans such as cutting taxes and balancing the budget. This got him decisive numerical support from the very conservative population of Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee counties, large suburban areas that ring Milwaukee – described as “the pulsing heart of the GOP electorate” in Wisconsin .

The large blue circles show Democratic voters concentrated in Madison and Milwaukee. The red circles around Milwaukee represent the concentrations of suburban Republican voters.

The demographic of these counties fits exactly the profile of Tea Party Republican supporters described by author Anthony DiMaggio: “white, over 40-50, middle to upper income Americans who have generally done pretty well for themselves over the years, but are being pressured by the neoliberal attack on working Americans.  They’re rightly angry at being excluded from the tremendous economic prosperity that has taken place over the last three decades.”

Political science professor Barry Burden points out that none of the primary groups affected by current high unemployment rates — African American and Latino workers, those without college degrees, and manufacturing-based workers — are represented in the area. “If voters in Waukesha County don’t perceive widespread societal problems, they see problems as rooted in individual choices, he says. Therefore, he adds, ‘They don’t accept government as the solution to an individual problem’.”

Waukesha grew as a bedroom community for Milwaukee during the prosperity years of the 1960s, when a strong manufacturing base gave blue and white-collar workers well-paid jobs that enabled them to buy houses out of the city and to commute to work. A post in a 2004 Democratic Underground discussion board described the migration more bluntly as white flight: “Waukesha County used to be ‘Good Ol Rural America’ up until around twenty years ago. The county itself wasn’t made more prosperous overall since then, the rich from Milwaukee just migrated for better schools, less crime, and frankly less of/distance from blacks. Busing had a *huge* amount to do with the development of Waukesha county. It’s like why Detroit and Chicago have a bunch of rich suburbs. Milwaukee just basically all went in one direction because there is nothing in Racine and Kenosha worth looking at.”

A similar self-segregation of major cities can be found in most U.S. states. Lawrence Davison of West Chester University gave this analysis of Pennsylvania, which could apply equally well to Wisconsin: “…the people in the relatively rural center of the state as well as those in the urban suburbs, not only care little for those living in cities such as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, they actively dislike them. They don’t feel like they live in the same society. And they certainly don’t want to be taxed to help an urban population with a lot of poor folks. In others words, whatever sense of social solidarity rural and suburban Pennsylvanians feel, it does not go much beyond their own local community.”

Whatever happens in Wisconsin’s elections, in the longer term a wider, inclusive and pluralist community has to be rebuilt in America. To date, only the Occupy movement has made this a central issue and worked on ways of creating a new society which values members of the 99 percent: as they stubbornly assert, another world is  possible.

American Politics as Strip-Tease for Plutocrats: Exploiting White Resentment on the Right while Obama Stamps out Fourth Amendment

Even though Mitt Romney is the clear Republican presidential nominee, both Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich vow to pursue the nomination until the party’s national convention. The question that baffles most people is: why is the Republican party continuing to drag out a divisive nomination process which is alienating large sections of the electorate?

There are two factors at work here: the rightward drift of the party base, encouraged by the Tea Party campaign; and the consequences of the Supreme Court’s Super PAC decision. Santorum and Gingrich are acting as surrogates for plutocrats who fund them to get a national platform for extremist conservative views. Las Vegas casino tycoon and supporter of right-wing Israeli groups Sheldon Adelson, for example, has given more than $16 million to the Gingrich Super PAC “Winning Our Future.”

Gawker notes that Gingrich and his supporters are well aware that he has no chance of becoming presidential candidate, but he continues to campaign. “Perhaps most strangely, his events are still well attended. The Newt fans who come to see him aren’t hoping for a miraculous victory, but they do like hearing what he has to say.” Gingrich himself told the Washington Post that his aim was “to make sure Mitt Romney runs as a conservative in the general election, as he has promised, rather than tacking back to the center, as his campaign has suggested he might.”

Right-wing Republicans have built a movement that exploits the resentment of the white middle class at their declining status amidst the redistribution of wealth to the top. The Post described Santorum’s supporters as “traditionalist Americans. They yearn for an age when America was run by white Christian men, when husbands went to work and wives stayed home and raised as many children as they could handle.” When Santorum refers to “the integrity of family,” he is evoking an era “when abortion was illegal and gay marriage was a schoolyard joke.”

People may laugh at some of his remarks, but they contain messages for a specific audience, albeit a narrow segment of American society, which is increasingly agitated by the Great Recession. Sara Robinson writes in Alternet that while political commentators have derided Santorum for getting his facts wrong – for example, when he attacked California state universities for not teaching American history, when in fact 10 out of 11 universities in the system do – they miss the point.

She explains: “Even though right-wing narratives are often factually wrong, they are absolutely never content-free. Stories like this are always about something. … Santorum’s brief comment, incoherent as it seemed, communicated a great deal to his audience by artfully triggering a vast universe of essential right-wing memes. … The University of California may have 11 campuses, but in the right-wing mind, ‘UC’ is code for just one of them – UC Berkeley, the first and still-flagship campus, which holds a mythic position as Ground Zero for all of Dirty Hippiedom in the conservative imagination. …  Oblique as this already is, invoking UC and Berkeley also calls forth the ghost of Ronald Reagan [who abolished] UC’s free tuition – which is still remembered by the faithful as the first historic salvo in the long war to defund all public services.”

While at first sight it seems that by targeting the Californian university system Santorum was simply appealing to the prejudices of his base, he is also laying the ideological groundwork for cuts and privatization. It’s an extreme vision but one which elaborates the funding cuts for state higher education that have been made in most states, including Democratic strongholds like Massachusetts.

Despite this rightward trend in political rhetoric, there is a rising tide of opposition growing within American society. In the movement for justice for Trayvon Martin, initiated by the steadfastness of his parents, we can see a drive for popular sovereignty which has succeeded in ousting Sanford police chief Bill Lee, instigating a grand jury investigation of the shooting and a federal investigation of the entire police department. It has also energized important segments of American youth to demand equal justice under the law.

Tampa Bay 10 News reports that: “College students from across Florida are marching to Sanford this weekend as part of a movement titled the ‘The Dream Defenders.’ They started marching on Friday from Daytona. They plan to arrive in Sanford this Easter Sunday to protest the handling of the Trayvon Martin case. The Dream Defenders are calling for the immediate arrest of  Zimmerman and they want Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee and Sanford City Manager Norton Bonaparte Jr. permanently removed from office.” Their network started out as a conference call organized by former student leaders of Florida state universities with the idea that students and young people must come together to defend the dream set out by Dr. Martin Luther King.

In a video interview, Florida A&M University alumnus Phillip Agnew explained why he was marching: “What baffles me is that America is the biggest police force on earth. We chastise other countries for human rights violations, we sanction countries that don’t treat their people fairly, we rush in and rescue people and set up a democracy, but here in our country our people are killed, incarcerated at record rates and nothing happens. … some young people care about what goes on with their brothers and sisters, their black and brown brothers and sisters, and some white people are here with us today showing solidarity, and that’s the most important thing; the next generation of people are going to change the world.”

Universities are still a catalyst for protest against injustice. That’s why Santorum singles them out in his remarks and why they have become the target of cuts by both Democratic and Republican-run states. As the Occupy movement highlighted, both major parties limit access to political power on behalf of the plutocratic one percent, and so are truly bipartisan in their opposition to dissent.

When the Supreme Court recently judged that prison officials may carry out strip-searches for anyone arrested even for the most minor offense, their decision was encouraged by Obama’s Department of Justice. Glenn Greenwald points out in Salon: “the Obama DOJ formally urged the Court to reach the conclusion it reached. While the Obama administration and court conservatives have been at odds in a handful of high-profile cases (most notably Citizens United and the health care law), this is yet another case, in a long line, where the Obama administration was able to have its preferred policies judicially endorsed by getting right-wing judges to embrace them.”

Greenwald quoted civil rights lawyer Stephen Bergstein, who said: “At oral argument, a lawyer for the Obama Justice Department told the Supreme Court that ‘[p]rotesters…who decide deliberately to get arrested… might be stopped by the police, they see the squad car behind them. They might have a gun or contraband in their car and think hey, I’m going to put that on my person, I just need to get it somewhere that is not going to be found during a patdown search, and then potentially they have the contraband with them’.”

It’s the Obama administration itself which wants to give prison officials the power to humiliate and intimidate protesters arrested on the flimsiest of charges: so much for Obama’s adoption of populist rhetoric for the sake of his re-election. In this assault on the rights of protest, his administration has taken a position indistinguishable from the Republicans.

Did the Occupy Movement Poop the Tea Party in Iowa?

The narrow victory of Mitt Romney in the Iowa Republican caucus has prompted some interesting commentaries on the political makeup of the Republican party. What should be remembered, however, is that the rigid Tea Party ideology of congressional Republicans is increasingly divorced from the general public, among whom its support has plummeted. Moreover, the Occupy movement has changed the political landscape in America, creating an imaginary where banks and market coercion can be resisted.

Juan Cole characterizes the ideological strains within the Republicans like this: “The Republican Party is a coalition of numerous groups, but the big three as things now stand are the wealthy 1%, the religious absolutists, and the suburban and prairie libertarians. The Iowa caucus split between candidates representing each of the three. Romney is the darling of Wall Street among the colorful Republican field. Rick Santorum has emerged as the voice of religious absolutists, mostly evangelical Protestants but including Ultramontane Catholics like himself. (He beat out Michelle Bachmann for this honor in part because religious absolutists are patriarchal and wouldn’t want to be led by a woman.) And Ron Paul is the standard bearer of the libertarians.”

What stands out is that the overwhelmingly white and older Iowa Republicans who in 2010 would have been the Tea Party’s natural constituency chose the candidate it least liked, and the candidates most closely aligned with Tea Party views – Bachmann, Perry, and Gingrich – were rejected. Ultra-conservatives like Santorum are traditionally favored by small businesspeople over Romney’s Wall Street orientation.

E.J. Dionne paid close attention to the voting. He agrees with Cole that the different constituencies within the party are personified by the three main candidates: “the split in the Republican Party is no longer between conservatives and moderates, but between members of the party who are very conservative and those who are only somewhat conservative. The days of Rockefeller Republicans are long gone. … Romney’s constituency is Republican Classic. He was the candidate of the ‘somewhat conservatives’ and did well with the moderates, particularly moderate Republicans. … Romney trailed badly with very conservative voters, running well behind Santorum in that group.  …  Ron Paul’s vote was something altogether different. He won overwhelmingly among the young, and brought young voters into the caucuses. … His vast improvement over his 2008 showing — he appears to have doubled his vote — was built in large part on the votes of non-Republicans, or at least of voters who hadn’t thought of themselves as Republicans before.”

Ron Paul’s vote is interesting because his idiosyncratic libertarianism makes him the only candidate for either party to oppose U.S. wars internationally and the extension of police state and executive powers domestically. Alexander Cockburn speculates that part of his vote “was undoubtedly leftists who, under Iowa’s rules, could cross over and vote in the Republican caucus.” However, it could also reflect public resentment of plutocratic control of political life in the U.S.

New Year’s resolution: Occupy without fear

The 2012 election campaign season has started with Mitt Romney (at the time of writing the probable Republican presidential candidate) attacking Obama for undermining “the soul of the country.” This vague expression, evoking a mythical past of individual prosperity, is intended to tap into voters’ anxieties about their future and channel their fear against immigrants, the poor, and Obama’s administration.

It would be a mistake to underestimate the irrationality of Republican voters, but E.J. Dionne pretty much summed it up:  “what’s most astounding is that a Republican contest characterized all year by melodrama and comedy now seems headed toward the most conventional and predictable conclusion possible.”

The heavily-publicized debates in the caucuses are sideshows designed to gain the support of a very small segment of the voting population by leveraging social issues. The problem for the Republicans is that they have to convince Americans to vote against their interests for policies which allow the super-rich to continue to accumulate wealth without contributing a cent to the overall needs of society. They do this by conflating the hope of returning to middle-class prosperity with increasing the huge fortunes of billionaires.

It’s this ideological mendacity, created and sustained by think tanks funded by the super-rich, that underlies Paul Krugman’s lament that while “nations with stable, responsible governments — that is, governments that are willing to impose modestly higher taxes when the situation warrants it — have historically been able to live with much higher levels of debt than today’s conventional wisdom would lead you to believe … America, with its rabidly antitax conservative movement, may not have a government that is responsible in this sense.”

Republican rule in practice is showcased in Wisconsin, where a Koch Brothers-funded Tea Party electoral campaign resulted in a corrupted state government carrying out a legislative assault on unions, social welfare, and education funding.

Naked Capitalism posts a convenient list outlining the benefits the brothers obtained from their political spending:

• “From the time they founded the Tea Party in 2009 to today, their wealth shot up from 28 billion to 44 billion, nearly 60 percent;
• They led the campaign against health care;
• The Kochs spend more fighting climate change than anyone or any company in the world;
• The Kochs bankrolled Scott Walker;
• The Kochs wrote Bush’s environmental policies;
• Cato [Koch brothers funded think tank] wrote the Republican Congress’s 1995 legislative agenda, acting as the think-tank for Tom DeLay and Dick Armey.
• The Kochs control up to 35,000 miles of pipelines in the US and Canada, enough to circle the globe 1-1/2 times.”

As well as the legislative branch, the Wisconsin judicial system was corrupted by the intervention of right-wing groups who funded the devastatingly negative election campaign of Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman. “Gableman’s 2008 campaign consisted of blatantly untruthful ads, painting his opponent, Justice Louis Butler, as someone who found loopholes to get a criminal released when Butler had done nothing of the sort. But when he was brought before the court on accusations that he violated judicial ethics by running those ads, Michael Best & Friedrich attorney Eric McLeod succeeded in getting a 3-3 deadlock on the court, effectively letting Gableman off the hook. Little did anyone know at the time that the law firm wasn’t charging for Gableman’s defense… Gableman went on to decide major cases in which Michael Best was involved, including the incredibly important case on whether Gov. Scott Walker’s bill to destroy public union collective bargaining was passed legally. Gableman provided the decisive vote in the 4-3 decision, taking Walker’s side.”

Another example of this fiscal-political corruption on a national scale is banking regulation, where the agencies charged with ensuring a sound banking system are controlled by the banksters themselves. Analyst Adam Levitin writes: “The [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] has repeatedly shown itself to be a failed regulator. It regulates for the industry, rather than regulating the industry … The root of the capture problem here is that the OCC’s budget is paid by the banks. I don’t know about you, but when I pay for a hotel, I expect service. So do the banks. And service they get. The OCC waged an all-out war against state attempts to reign in predatory lending practices in financial services, it coddled the credit card industry for years, it permitted its banks’ subsidiaries to engage in abusive mortgage lending and securitization, and it continues to turn a blind eye to payday-type lending by major banks.  … When the banks call the shots on enforcement, no amount of Dodd-Franking can provide protection against future crises.”

Although Obama’s  re-election campaign has recently coopted the language of the 99 percent against the banks, nobody is under any illusion that his political stance is anything but an attempt to appropriate the change in public opinion brought about by the Occupy movement. His administration has not prosecuted a single banker for clear violations of banking law. It’s possible, however, that despite Obama’s intentions, his rhetoric may legitimize resistance to bank practices at a time when homeowners face a record number of evictions.

The nervousness of the authorities is shown clearly by police aggressiveness against Occupy Wall Street when they re-entered Zuccotti Park at year’s end. When protestors carried in a small child’s tent, police and security guards closed the park until it had been removed. As midnight approached, “a group of protesters grabbed some of the metal barricades that surround the park and began piling them inside. As they gripped the barricades, police officers took hold as well, and a shoving match began, the silver bars trapped in between. At least one police officer fired an arch of pepper spray into the crowd behind those barricades. Moments later, at least a dozen police officers charged into the park, plowing directly into a crowd of people, some of whom were trying to flee, pushing and shoving. One man was thrown down and pinned to the ground by several officers.”

“They (police) got very aggressive and started pushing people and pepper-spraying people,” protester Jason Amadi told USA Today. … “People were collecting all the barricades and making kind of a big heap of them in the middle of the park,” said Melanie Butler, of Brooklyn. “And we were standing on it with our Occupy Wall Street banner.” After the arrests, the crowd began to thin out. A smaller group of about 100 people marched in a circle near the park and then most of them left, Amadi said. “Many of us there felt that it was a symbol of the new year, of what was to come,” he said. “People protesting peacefully, but without fear.”

“Occupy/We are the 99 percent” movement takes steps towards a clearer strategy

The decisive defeat by referendum of Ohio’s anti-union legislation on Tuesday was a clear rejection of Tea Party Republican assaults on unions and social programs. Across the country, from Iowa to Mississippi, Maine and Arizona, right-wing initiatives were repudiated by large margins. The votes show that the public never really supported Tea Party policies: they were conned in 2010 by demagogic rhetoric which appealed to a sense of losing ground economically.

Washington Post writer E.J. Dionne describes the vote as a rebellion against Republican “overreach” which should guide them to back away from social-issue extremism. But he assumes that the Republicans are capable of returning to a centrist policy: their presidential candidate circus has given no indication that this is possible.

Political commentators have seen the Ohioans’ rejection of mandatory healthcare plans as inconsistent: but it’s not difficult to understand. Voters were not expressing support for the Democratic party leadership and don’t want to be chained to making regular subsidies to insurance and pharmaceutical companies any more than they do to one for the banks. Their motivation is to resist corporate encroachments on living standards: a survey of those voting in Ohio revealed that 57 percent believed “Republicans backing Kasich’s law are putting the interests of big corporations ahead of those of average working people.”

Union support cohering around the Occupy movement, from the base rather than the top, is a clearer indication of the public mood. Union activists are adopting some of the direct action tactics of the occupiers, and have provided material and political support to the occupations. The New York Times reports that: “A dozen Verizon workers plan to begin walking from Albany to Manhattan on Thursday in a ‘March for the 99 percent.’ … In Los Angeles, labor leaders have repeatedly lobbied Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa not to evict the protesters.”

The Occupy movement has its problems – the weather, security, and a drumbeat of official concerns about public safety – but they are addressing them imaginatively in New York through the use of large military tents for communal use, which not only provide more warmth but make it easier to maintain occupiers’ security. They are oriented outwards to the public: together with initiatives to join with grassroots groups in minority/immigrant communities, a march from New York to Washington, called “Occupy the Highway,” is taking their message into communities not normally reached by political movements. The march will go through Trenton, Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore, as well as smaller cities. And they are due to arrive when the congressional supercommittee announces its decisions on cutting social welfare, in order to focus attention on the continuing tax cuts for the super-rich.

In Oakland, a fatal shooting near the camp has intensified the pressure to close down the occupation as the mayor now calls on protesters to disband, but the biggest problem facing occupiers is the political paralysis of the General Assembly in the face of an ideological incoherence introduced by a concentration of dissident anarchists.

These anarchists are rushing to throw themselves into street battles with Oakland’s militarized police when the real fight is to win over the public in a way which creates divisions among state forces. KALW reporter Ali Winston comments: “A lot of the momentum that built up before the General Strike seems to have stalled, and that is due in no small part to the chaos that broke out late in the evening following the General Strike. There has been a lot of soul searching about the failed occupation of the vacated Travelers Aid Society on November 2. … many of the people involved in that action, not all of them, were actually visitors to Oakland from other west coast areas, such as Olympia, Washington, Santa Cruz, and Modesto in California, which are communities where there are large anarchist elements as well.”

Wednesday night’s General Assembly voted to march Saturday in support of Egyptian activists, but had difficulty reaching a decision on a resolution disavowing black bloc tactics. Oakland North reported some of the discussion: “‘Violence and vandalism only leads to one thing,’ one middle-aged protester with long hair said from the stage during the ‘pro and con’ portion of the meeting.  ‘They escalate, we escalate, and this thing does not end well.’ ‘We can’t start developing ways to police people’s behavior,’ said another man from the stage.” However, after the shooting on Thursday the general assembly declared: “This is what we are fighting against” and “This is a peaceful revolution.”

America is not a dictatorship: black bloc vandalism only alienates the majority the movement needs to win over. One participant in the Oakland general strike notes: “there is this consistent need by black block anarchists to be coercive with their tactics, by bringing property destruction to [nonviolent protests] without any kind of agreement from others who are participating … The use of property destruction around the general strike was terrible strategy as we are now seeing with the footage that has been broadcast across the globe. … The events that followed left a sour taste for everyone as local small businesses were smashed and vandalized. … With this masculine centered eroticism of property destruction, there also appears to be a general sense of entitlement around ownership of a protest event.”

The self-centered individualism of the dissident anarchists and their attitude to property mirrors that of the financial elite they are protesting: they think that simply taking possession of something gives them the right to dispose of it as they see fit. But what has to be changed is social acceptance of the right of individuals to privately “own” and control resources needed by the community, be it water supplies or buildings. This right is enforced by the state, but a democratically-based state can only govern if it is recognized as legitimate by the majority of citizens.

In other words, activists can’t substitute their own actions for a necessary political and ideological change in the whole of society. “Occupy Wall Street/We are the 99 percent” is developing and counterposing a new morality to the property owners of Wall Street through the use of nonviolent actions which to date have successfully challenged the legitimacy of the financier-controlled political system.

“We are the 99 percent” movement opens up a new historical moment

“Occupy Wall Street/We are the 99 percent” has announced that “A new uncompromising movement against NYPD’s notorious Stop & Frisk program began yesterday [Friday] as hundreds of demonstrators marched from the Harlem State Office Building to Harlem’s 28th precinct. At the station, Cornel West, author and Princeton professor, Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party, Rev. Stephen Phelps, interim senior minister of Riverside Church, and dozens of others were arrested in an act of non-violent civil disobedience. Among those arrested and protesting was a large contingent from downtown’s Occupy Wall Street.”

This extension of the OWS protest is an important step in broadening the campaign. An “Occupy Harlem” protest is due to start next week, and if successful will not only challenge the unconstitutional police harassment experienced by African-American and Latino youth in New York, but also involve these youth with OWS’s struggle against bank control of the political system. This would be a huge breakthrough for the movement.

OWS’s direct action tactics have also re-energized the unions, not at the leadership level, which is still oriented to the Democratic leadership, but at the more militant base. Bloomberg Businessweek reported that on Friday “dozens of Occupy Wall Street protesters joined the picket line outside Sotheby’s, the Manhattan auction house, where 42 unionized art handlers have been locked out in a labor dispute since July 29. ‘Walking around in a circle outside that building is not an easy job,’ said Jason Ide, the 30-year-old president of Teamsters Local 814, which represents the handlers and commercial movers. ‘When they show up, our guys feel a real kick because they care’.”

The reason the protests resonate with so many different social groups is because of the long-term deterioration in people’s living standards which is now accompanied by an acceleration of job layoffs and increased poverty since the bank crash of 2008. This is grudgingly verified by Businessweek, “Income and wealth inequality in America have been growing for decades with little public outcry. The catalyst for the [OWS] movement now is that during the worst financial crisis since the Depression, there is a perception that Wall Street and the wealthy were taken care of while average folks suffer. That isn’t a fringe view. … One of the critics of the Wall Street demonstrations cited a survey showing that three-quarters of the protesters favored higher taxes on the rich. In major U.S. media polls – by the Wall Street Journal/NBC News and Bloomberg News/ Washington Post – two-thirds of the public agree.”

This is very different from the Tea Party whose support from conservative whites stemmed from blaming government for their loss of privilege. The televised search for a Republican presidential candidate reveals the Tea Party’s shrinking base by its increasing extremism and denial of human empathy for the sick, gay soldiers, and unemployed. The vicious demonization of OWS by Tea Party spokespeople like Glenn Beck reflects the fact that their support relied on a monopoly of a populist rhetorical space.

The mass support for the Occupy protests is not going to fade away, since a much greater banking crisis is on the horizon. Bank failures in Europe and the euro’s convulsions threaten to hit Wall Street hard, and in defiance of regulatory bodies Bank of America has moved some of its toxic exposure to the European debt crisis from its subsidiary Merrill Lynch to the main Bank of America account where they are insured by the FDIC and ultimately become the liability of the taxpayer.

At the same time, the government is paralyzed by the rightward ideological push of the Republican Tea Partiers, which Obama’s administration has implicitly accepted by setting up the bipartisan “Gang of Six” to agree on a $1.5 trillion reduction in the federal budget which will further contract the economy leading to further job losses, and dismantle the social safety net. This in turn will draw many more into support for the OWS movement’s confrontation of the political system.

The historical moment we are in is a different one from the period of resistance to union-busting laws in Wisconsin, which was the precursor to the OWS movement, even though only a few months have passed since then. At that time, the Tea Party Republicans appeared ascendant by using their control of the state legislature to steamroller through their agenda. The union leaders led the reaction against them which focused on reversing state laws, although this was extended by the occupation of the state Capitol building in Madison.

Democratic legislators and the graduate students’ union in Wisconsin led the occupation from the beginning, and it was this occupation of public space that became the focus for large demonstrations of support. The occupiers organized themselves with the same kind of horizontal democracy as OWS, although the mass movement still considered Wisconsin Democrats its leadership. The defection of 14 state senators to Illinois was a form of direct action within the political system that denied governor Walker a quorum on his anti-union budget bill, and gave validation to mass actions in Madison and around the state.

However, the union-led movement had difficulty connecting with other struggles in Wisconsin against bank foreclosures and other social issues because of their focus on restoring collective bargaining. Despite these limitations, in a state divided between Democratic-voting cities and mainly Republican rural areas and Milwaukee suburbs, Wisconsin Democrats showed energy and commitment to an election recall campaign which succeeded in reducing Walker’s senate majority to one, and are set on recalling Walker himself next year. The success of the “Occupy Wall Street/We are the 99 percent” movement is now rebounding back on Wisconsin and “Occupy” protests are springing up around the state and taking up social issues on a much broader front.

This will become a problem for the Democratic party leadership nationally, since they are heavily indebted to Wall Street, but on the other hand must respond to the mass movement (particularly at the local level). The divisions which will inevitably manifest themselves within the party open up opportunities to replace corporate Democrats with progressives who support the aims of OWC, which would be a parallel expression of the occupation movement.

Cooperation for Occupation: Stay True to the 99 Percent

David Graeber of Goldsmiths University in London, who was instrumental in establishing the horizontal democratic orientation of “Occupy Wall Street/We are the 99 percent,” gives an extremely interesting account of his role in its formation and his take on the success of the movement in Naked Capitalism.

The whole piece is well worth reading, but I was particularly struck by his description of the generational base of OWS, and how its radicalism has been marked by Obama’s political trajectory: “We must remember that in 2008, the youth vote went overwhelmingly to Barack Obama and the Democrats. We also have to remember that Obama was running, then, as a candidate of “Change”, using a campaign language that drew liberally from that of radical social movements … This, combined with the fact that Obama was Black, gave young people a sense that they were experiencing a genuinely transformative moment in American politics. … How, then, do you expect a young American voter to feel, after casting a vote for a fundamental change to our political and economic system, on discovering that in fact, they have elected a man who twenty years ago would have been considered a moderate conservative?”

The impact of their initiative on other generations is remarkable. Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch was at Zuccotti Plaza when members of the SEIU arrived fresh from a demonstration of their own in the Wall Street area. He graphically described the scene: “The energy was sky-high, the excitement palpable, the chanting and cheering loud as they looked down on what could only be described visually as a hippie encampment. Had this been the 1960s, conflict would undoubtedly have followed.  I found myself with a burly white guy wearing a red Communications Workers of America T-shirt on one side of me and a young black woman with a yellow SEIU T-shirt on the other.  He promptly commented with indignation and accuracy: ‘You know, we were saying the 1% and the 99% for like five years and nobody paid attention because we’re unions, we’re the wallpaper!’

“I braced myself for the coming diatribe against the Zuccotti Park protesters for appropriating the slogan and grabbing the glory.  Instead, he continued with unmistakable enthusiasm, ‘You know, it’s great that these kids have taken it and put it on the map!’  At which point the young woman next to me chimed in with equal enthusiasm, ‘It’s not just the unions any more!  It’s bigger than that!’ ”

That phrase was very telling. It expresses accurately that a mass movement which has been building up for some time is taking inspiration from the defiance and sacrifice of those occupying the park. It’s in the tradition of the liberal-labor coalition that opposed Wall Street in the 1930s and which led to the creation of the New Deal, but it’s a more encompassing pluralist movement that embraces the educated youth, the poor, the immigrant, African, Hispanic, Asian and native Americans, the Hood, the middle class, even sections of the financial aristocracy.

The power of the occupation stems not only from the determination of the occupiers, but also from the symbolic strength of its defiance of Wall Street and its defenders, which galvanizes masses of people who identify with the resistance. The occupiers themselves are still vulnerable: Bloomberg has already issued a veiled threat to their continued occupation by declaring that tents in Zuccotti Park goes beyond the right of freedom of speech and assembly, and the authorities are continually looking for ways to denigrate and isolate the protesters.

These threats mean that it would be a major mistake for OWS to ignore the support of unions and other organized groups in the name of revolutionary purity, even support in the form of elected politicians prepared to stick their necks out to prevent the occupation being broken up. There are many different ways in which the support of the mass movement will be expressed, and the occupiers in the course of their deliberations need to find ways and means to work with them.