Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are going under and the economists are surprised. Those of us who actually pay attention to the economy (instead of just getting paid to be "economists") knew that the crash of the housing bubble would put these mortgage giants in danger. (I'm on record from back in October, 2002.)

Okay, we all should know that economists generally don't have a clue, but what should we do about the impending collapse of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae? Well, it would be a devastating blow to the housing market to lose Fannie and Freddie even in the best of times, but it would really be a disaster to let them collapse in the middle of the housing meltdown, at a point where they directly or indirectly finance 70 percent of new mortgages.

So, we have to keep them going, but we also have to make sure the clowns that wrecked these huge companies feel the pain.

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I wish I was "too big to fail". That's what all the talking heads in Washington and on Wall Street are saying about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Collectively they hold $5 Trillion in mortgages. So what is one of the possible outcomes of their problems in the next few weeks? A government bailout! Never mind that it would raise our total government debt by 50%. Never mind that both firms are leveraged to the level of criminal misconduct.

This is what we call Corporate Socialism--the privatization of profit and the socialization of risk and misconduct. Both our current President and Vice President are experts at this since their fortunes are owed completely to corporate socialism. In Bush's case, he was hired by Richard Rainwater to run the Texas Rangers with only one key job attribute: the ability to get the state to pay for the new baseball stadium. When Bush sold out to his buddy Tom Hicks (Clear Channel) he made $14 million on his $500,000 investment.

Dick Cheney is also a case study in the use of corporate socialism for private enrichment. As we have pointed out before, while Secretary of Defense, Cheney set up Halliburton and its KBR subsidiary in the military supply outsourcing business, and then went to work as Halliburton's CEO. For two years work he earned $30.5 million.

Cheney and Bush only have 5 1/2 months left to continue raiding the treasury to remunerate their corporate supplicants who are floundering. Who else is "too big to fail"?

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What is perhaps most interesting and positive about this exchange is that it has us focused on actions that can and should be taken. Not about raising money for a 30 second spot. Not about complaining some candidate did not do what we want. And this of course is the point of movement building.

In a post-Bush world, we need to really move a large ship away from anti-Bush 24/7 and towards actions to build our infrastructure, our issues, our activists for social change.

We, of course, can and will always disagree over some of the specifics. But from my perspective of using film to tell stories to move folks to action, this conversation set off by David's book is very positive in all ways. And much needed.

Michael Kinsley has an incisive opinion piece at TIME/CNN called "Divided They Fall" -- and I urge everyone to read it. Kinsley points out that Republicans are setting aside their gripes about McCain and uniting to do battle, but progressives and Democrats are up to the same old internal sniping: single issue people bashing Obama for moving to the middle or voting a certain way on FISA, when his vote made no difference at all to the outcome; Clintonites using media sexism in the primary as an excuse to threaten to stay home or vote for McCain; fat cats who backed Clinton complaining to the New York Times, along with the blustering egotists like Carville; Jesse Jackson sniping about the common-sense notion that black people might have to be good parents as well as expect help from government.

This leaves one very sad. The social and redistributive stakes in this election are enormous. McCain can easily win if this summer is wasted, if Democrats do not unite and go on the offensive, if funders withold their efforts, if gripers undermine. But that seems to be what we are all doing.

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I'm hearing that that House Democrats are beginning to resist H. Con. Res. 362 which demands that the President take a more militant approach to Iran (as if President Bush needs encouragement along those lines).

The resolution was sailing along, picking up 230 co-sponsors along the way, when suddenly the netroots and various interest groups got wind of the fact that the resolution, as written, could be read as calling for a naval blockade of Iran i.e. war. (The Senate bill, drafted by Evan Bayh, eliminates the blockade language).

Resistance is now growing in the House with two co-sponsors of the resolution -- Robert Wexler and Barney Frank --saying that either the blockade language goes, or they do.

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I agree with the bulk of what Jared said, but there are a few points I'd take issue. Two in particular:

First, I agree there is a lot labor can do to win change locally, but it shouldn't be seen as a substitute for making change happen at the state and Federal level. For example, here (here being Montgomery Co., Maryland) a number of us have been working to have the county government assume some responsibilities for promoting worker safety. As I'm guessing most readers know, occupational health and safety enforcement is grossly underfunded. In fact, there are so few health and safety inspectors in Maryland that it would take them 134 years to inspect every workplace in our state. In response we (we being a coalition of labor and immigrant rights groups) presented our county council with a few modest proposals -- like training building inspectors to identify imminent dangers when they go out to construction sites. That was three years ago and we're still trying to get it done. It's not that anyone has a particular problem with the idea; it's that the county government is so starved for cash that it's hardly able to fund the services they provide now, let alone provide new ones. Eventually we'll make some headway, but nothing we achieve here would come close to the impact of having the Democrats in charge of OSHA.

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David's book captures the awakening of millions of Americans to the hard truth that Americans have been sold a bill of political goods. You can promise people and trick them for a long time in a wealthy democracy, but over time reality sets in and people start to ask themselves why things are not as they were told they would be, are not as they are being told they are. War is not peace. Ignorance is not knowledge. Stagnating incomes are not morning in America.

And David also shows that the unrest is not limited to any one group or political point of view. It is broad, deep and worrisome to the stability of our society.

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I agree with my friend David that a new populism may be taking shape in America. My question is whether it can be a populism that doesn't only speak to the anger of the middle aged and older, but also stirs the idealism of the young. That's a tall order, but Barack Obama's campaign is convincing me that it just might be possible.

Maybe it's a function of his age, but Obama seems to grasp something about younger workers today that older lefties like me usually miss: it's that while people in their 20s and early 30s are acutely aware that their jobs are much less secure than the ones their parents had, they're not necessarily angry about it. Don't get me wrong: they'll tell you it sucks and that they wish they had a better deal at work, but the deep resentments that tend to stoke up populist uprisings just aren't there. One of the reasons why is that it's hard to convince people they've been robbed of something they never owned.

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Senator Obama's decision to include Israel in his overseas tour makes a lot of sense. Although he has been there before, the ever-changing Israeli scene needs to be experienced first-hand. I only hope Obama is not going to Israel in order to impress a small but vocal minority of Jewish Democrats who are uncomfortable with his candidacy.

I say that because, from what I have heard from those voters, there is nothing Obama can say or do that will bring them around. They do not trust him not because of what he says but because of who he is. They suspect that, no matter what he says, his sympathy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not limited exclusively to Israelis but also extends to Palestinians. After all, how can an African-American whose father's people were African Muslims not have sympathy for Palestinians as well as for Jews?

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A number of commentators in yesterday's post said that if liberals were to take labor issues seriously, they needed more education on them. Since I've been trying to do that on and off here at TPM and before on my own blog, I thought I'd compile a sampling of posts in one place as a start. Many of them have links to other resources on labor that folks will hopefully explore.

Start with Why Unions? Labor 101- a compilation of older labor posts I put together over at DailyKos to explain carefully why liberal activists should take union issues seriously, as a human rights issue, as a way to increase wages for workers (both in and outside unions), how unions strengthen the overall economy, why overall progressive policy depends on a strong labor movement, how labor historically supported the advance of civil rights, and the legal and economic challenges facing labor that liberals should take more seriously.

Then jump below the fold to a sampling of other more recent posts I've linked to on labor as a human rights issue, the brilliance of labor strategies that liberals don't know about, right wing myths about unions, and labor and trade debates

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David's answer to my question made a lot of sense. I want to pick up on one part of it: expanding the labor movement, and to put in a plug for a law that could make an important difference in realizing the goal.

David stresses the critical role labor has played in progressive politics. There are good local examples with pretty high visibility, like living wage laws, that typically have labor activists somewhere in the mix. Wal-Mart Watch, a project started by the Service Employees International Union, has had great success in forcing better compensation and labor practices at that retail behemoth. And on the economic front, the union advantage in terms of wages, benefits, vacations, etc., are well known and thoroughly documented (though what with globalization and the long-term slide in union membership, even unions' bargaining power ain't what it used to be).

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The deteriorating situation in the West Bank is somewhat of a forgotten story at the moment, but deteriorating it is. A random look at stories that appeared in yesterday's press show how dreadful the situation has become. It is on the West Bank that the two-state solution will ultimately be realized--or collapse. The Gaza ceasefire is crucial, but it's the realities in the West Bank that are eroding the achievability of a peace agreement everyday.

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One of the topics I discussed with Diane Rehm yesterday on her nationwide NPR show was the FISA fight, which Nathan Newman just referenced. I suggested that the effort by Netroots activists to use Obama's own website as a tool to pressure Obama to back off his endorsement of a right-wing FISA proposal is valiant, worthwhile and a smart way to use the Establishment's rules against the Establishment (to paraphrase the great uprising organizer Saul Alinsky). In this case, uprising activists used the latitude granted by a presidential nominee's website to pressure that presidential nominee to do the opposite of what that presidential nominee is doing - and this offers some hope for today's uprising.

Then again, Obama threw the progressive movement under the bus, voting for warrantless wiretapping and for immunity for telecom companies.

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Just how daunting the challenge Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey faces in restoring the reputation of a Department of Justice (DOJ) severely tarnished by political scandals was again demonstrated by a recent government report documenting that senior DOJ officials had based hiring decisions for non-political career positions on the applicants' political and ideological affiliations in violation of Department policy and federal law. This politicization of the Department's hiring process for career employees harms the Department's credibility and effectiveness, and sends the wrong message to lawyers of all political stripes who seek to engage in public service, as a lawsuit filed by one of the students discriminated against suggests.

The report, issued jointly by the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General (IG) and Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), shows that highly qualified attorneys and law students who applied for the Department's summer intern and career honors program -- the exclusive means by which DOJ hires recent law school graduates and judicial law clerks without prior experience -- were "deselected" because of their association with "liberal" organizations.

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I'll admit that part of my annoyance at the full court obsession with FISA is that it reflects the broader liberal blog obsessions with goo-goo process issues, as opposed to a populist focus on the core economic and social justice issues that matter in most peoples' lives. Doug Kendall, who I have the most serious respect for, has the best critique I've seen (written with Dahlia Lithwick) of Obama's defensive responses to the guns and death penalty cases at the Supreme Court. However, his point is that Obama should have played offense by highlighting the pro-big business decisions of the Supreme Court this session-- something most of the blogs haven't done either.

As I noted last week, state regulations of business lost out in nearly every single case decided, and even the "liberal" Justices joined many if not most of the major decisions.  Which reflects modern elite liberalism too well that you can distinguish liberals from conservatives on a death penalty case, but when corporations are trashing workers rights, suddenly the differences can get a little fuzzy.

And what really annoys me is that in the major union decision of the term, Chamber of Commerce v. Brown, one of the most anti-union results in decades, there was essentially zero commentary across the blogs.

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David Sirota's post this morning reminds us that real change starts at the state and city level. In California, we have been experimenting with this New Federalism for the last five years, much to the consternation of the Bush Administration and the Republican Party. Whether on the issue of auto emissions, appliance efficiency, stem cell research or financial records privacy we have moved in a progressive direction despite the efforts of Bush and Cheney to stop us. Our market power as the 7th largest economy in the world allows us to force automakers to be more efficient. We don't need the EPA. We only need them to stop blocking our laws.

The reason The Uprising is so important is that Sirota understands that the forces of leadership and change will come from a networked, bottom-up set of forces rather than the centralized, hierarchical world view that is quickly losing its grip on power.

When David sent me galleys of The Uprising, I only knew I loved the title and had no idea what to expect. And I had no idea this would be a honest to goodness page turner. I am glad he no longer lives in DC for I fear for his safety given the revolution from the ground he is encouraging (just half kidding).

The book raises important issues that we MUST address. You wont agree with everything but as we enter a new world order where we are no longer united by hatred of Bush we need to return to some basic questions.

The fact that virtually the entire progressive movement has become almost exclusively involved in electoral politics is a function of the terrible damage Bush and neocons have done to our country. But with the clear end of this era, we need to be thinking about the day after the presidential election.

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On July 13 the new EU president, Nicolas Sarkozy, will re-launch his idea of forming a community of nations on the southern side of the Mediterranean. Instead of joining the EU, nations such as Turkey, Jordan, and Israel will be called upon to form a union of their own, which in turn will have a close relationship with the northern community, the EU. It is an idea whose time has come (and which we have been advocating since 2004).

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While the full United States Senate takes up the subject of wiretapping by the government, the Senate Commerce Committee will take up the subject of wiretapping by private industry. It's a tossup which one is more scary.

The Senate vote scheduled for today (July 9) on the bill to grant the Executive Branch almost unlimited authority to wiretap private citizens without any judicial oversight. Just before the votes, the Commerce Committee will hear testimony from Robert Dykes, the chairman of NebuAd, a controversial company recently in the news because his group came up with a novel way of getting detailed information about Internet users. NebuAd wasn't satisfied to get information only from a customer's use of one Web site. Instead, they want to see everything that a Web surfer does online.

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John McCain:

"Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that's a disgrace. It's an absolute disgrace, and it's got to be fixed." [Transcript available from Congressional Quarterly]

What I don't understand is why reporters don't ask: If Senator McCain doesn't want payroll taxes to fund Social Security (as has long been the case), then how does he propose to pay for it?

Some have argued that payroll taxes should be scuttled and retirement funded from a carbon tax. Other plans abound. But what is John McCain proposing?

We've been seeing in the blogs and otherwise a lot of beating up on Obama for "moving to the center", which is odd statement about a candidate who in the last few weeks has:

• Come out against the California gay marriage amendment
• Promoted details of a tax plan which would taxes for the working poor and middle class by thousands of dollars each, while massively increasing taxes on the wealthy
• Condemned bad trade deals, enough to raise the ire of the news pages of the Wall Street Journal (which under Murdoch are morphing into as rightwing as the old editorial pages) which characterized his stance as "likely to rile allies."
• And just yesterday called for overhaul of the 2005 bankruptcy bill and denounced McCain for his support of the bill and the banking industry "at the expense of hardworking Americans.''

This is all pretty straight up populist positioning, something I argued Obama should have done more of in the primary earlier, which might have shortened that race considerably, something I think David Sirota would probably agree on in thinking about the economic anger rising across the country.

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Note: I'm going to be on Diane Rehm's NPR show today (7/9) from 11am to noon EST to discuss many of these themes. I'm also scheduled to be on CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight sometime between 7pm-8pm EST tonight. Tune in.

Jared Bernstein asks, "What steps ought we be taking now that will ultimately give progressive uprisings a public conduit through which their goals can be achieved?"

This is the $64,000 question - or, in the age of the Iraq War, the $1 trillion question.

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John McCain seems to find himself in a mad dash to demonstrate that he really doesn't know much about economics Social Security.

Bob Somerby at Daily Howler catches him out, on Monday, saying this to a town meeting in Denver:

I'd like to start out by giving you a little straight talk. Under the present set-up, because we've mortgaged our children's futures, you will not have Social Security benefits that present-day retirees have unless we fix it....Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that's a disgrace. It's an absolute disgrace, and it's got to be fixed....Here's a chart. Here's how much is coming in. Here's how much is going out. And here's where there's more money going out than coming in, and here's where there's no money left.

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Disclosure/background notes to start:

• David is a friend, and I like him.


• When TPM asked me to review it, so I figured I'd better read it (already had a copy, but hadn't started). I figured I'd do it a bit at a time, posting after I'd read a good chunk. So far, I really like the book.


• I share the bias that we are potentially entering a new political era. (Many have been pushing for/predicting this for a handful of years--our contribution was the convention-winning video we submitted in 2004 suggested a new progressive era.) Discussions like this are important sparks.

Sirota makes the case for populist politics. Many readers of TPM self-describe as progressives. I address the intersection.

Populism and Progressivism: Sirota aptly defines populism as politics that have popular support but get short shrift from elites. For purposes here, I'll define progressivism as forward-eyed championing of the public interest through common action (with a healthy recognition of the marginal utility of wealth--that is, a dollar for someone without is worth more than another person's millionth dollar). We can quibble on definitions; hopefully these'll work for now.

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I think it was the British comedian Alexei Sayle who used to do this routine riffing off of Tracy Chapman's song about revolution. He'd play it for awhile, and then stop it suddenly right when Tracy was singing "there's a revolution coming." And he'd shout, in a very uppercrust accent, "No, there's not!"

I thought about that when I read David's post, but he's the guy that's been going around with his ears close to the ground, and he's got very acute hearing for this kind of thing. So if says something is percolating, I believe him.

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INDIANAPOLIS AIRPORT - Sitting in the airport getting ready to post for the TPM Book Club while waiting for a flight to D.C., I got this email from a friend in progressive politics:

I'm reading The Uprising now and I'm wondering how you think (the new Health Care for America Now (HCAN) coalition) going to work? Is this another AAEI? Or something better that will build real grassroots support? I like the idea of targeting Blue Dogs and putting organizers on the ground.

My friend is referring to the controversial chapter in The Uprising about Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI), which was also excerpted in In These Times.

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As I write, Senator Obama is giving a major policy speech on bankruptcy. So far as I know, he is the candidate to discuss consumer bankruptcy in a general election. I can think of many reasons that bankruptcy is a terrible subject for someone running for president. It is very technical (hard to wedge into a sound bite). It is depressing (no one wants to think about going bankrupt). It will annoy big-money interests (financial services gave big money to pass the current bankruptcy laws).

Savvy handlers would advise against it. So why would Obama make bankruptcy relief a visible part of his platform?

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On Tuesday, July 8, a new campaign will be launched - for Health Care for America Now! - at press conferences in Washington and 55 other cities and towns. We at the Campaign for America's Future are proud to play a leadership role in launching this much-needed campaign, led by 100 national and local organizations. The steering committee includes ACORN, AFSCME, Americans United for Change, Campaign for America's Future, Center for American Progress Action Fund, Center for Community Change, MoveOn, NEA, National Women's Law Center, Planned Parenthood, SEIU, UFCW, and USAction - not a bad core group to make history with. And now is the time!

Profound economic changes are convincing the public that we need to take action together to build a healthy, sustainable economy and ensure real security for all families. And that includes, first and foremost, making sure everyone has quality, affordable health care.

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"Uprising" is a history-flavored word. It reminds us of elementary school book reports on the Revolutionary War and bold passages from the Declaration of Independence insisting "that whenever any form of government becomes destructive...it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it." But as I found over a year of reporting for my new book, The Uprising, these mass insurrections are not just phenomena of the past. Indeed, America is in the throes of a powerful new uprising right now - one whose specifics I'm looking forward to discussing this week at TPM's book club.

As we will explore this week, this uprising is happening on both the Right and the Left. Like most revolts, it is rooted in a backlash to an Establishment widely seen as corrupt and morally decayed. This uprising has more picket signs and protests than pitchforks and pistols (though I certainly saw some of those down at the Mexican border when reporting on the Minutemen). It is a social phenomenon that is impacting all aspects of public life -- our pop culture, our media, and most significantly, our upcoming national elections. It could take our country in a very different direction -- perhaps positive (think universal health care, an end to the Iraq War, new trade policies), perhaps frighteningly negative (think immigrant bashing and a war with Iran).

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David Sirota will be joining us this week at TPM Cafe Book Club to talk about his new book: The Uprising. His first post will be today, and I'll let him introduce the argument.

Joining him will be Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films, writer and consultant Jim Grossfeld, Jonathan Taplin, Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute, Pulitzer Prize winning author David Cay Johnston and Jefferson Smith of the Bus Project.

As usual, one has to turn to the Israeli media for the kind of discussion of the Middle East that one can not find here.

In this piece, Ha'aretz columnist Gideon Levy argues that Israel cannot survive by bombing its antagonists into submission. "Israel never thinks in terms of beyond tomorrow. It acts like a person who puts buckets in a house with a leaky roof instead of thoroughly fixing the roof. So we bombard Iran, and even if it is successful and we do not have to pay a heavy price for it - a dubious scenario - what happens then? What will happen when Egypt wants a bomb? Will we bomb again? And Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Iraq? And perhaps Hezbollah has some "dirty bomb" or other? And will we "allow" Turkey to go nuclear? Will we bombard and bombard, and live forever by bombardment?"

Read what Levy has to say. You won't find a column like this in the Washington Post or the New York Times.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is not terribly optimistic about the success of the housing bailout bill going through Congress. They project that 35 percent of the homeowners "helped" under the plan, or 140,000 families, will find themselves again facing foreclosure. The reason for the pessimism is that the lenders get to decide which loans enter the program. Naturally, they will pick homeowners who they think will be the least likely to make it.

I wonder what the folks who support this bill will tell those 140,000 families? Many of these families will struggle to make their mortgage payments for 2 or 3 years, sacrificing health care, child care and other necessary expenses in a hopeless effort to hang onto their home. At their end of their struggling, they will end up out on the street, foreclosed a second time.

That is what Washington policy wonks call "asset building."

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Obviously, the media gives a great deal of play to Karl Rove's comments. Not just Fox, but everyone reports with great attention his words. But meanwhile Mr. Rove refuses to testify to Congress. There's no law that I'm aware of which supports his position. He seems to be a willful lawbreaker. Does that not deserve mention when he is on TV or in newspapers?

I don't understand why the media, which should prize transparency as the lifeblood of reporting, doesn't seem to care about whether officials in the Administration explain themselves in public, and indeed welcomes such figures into the ranks of the media.

I spent this past Friday night, otherwise known as the 4th of July, at a pleasant backyard barbecue, but this was not in a leafy U.S. suburb; rather it was in Beit Hanina, a Palestinian town that is incorporated as part of greater Jerusalem, and sits outside of Jerusalem proper on the sandy hills of the West Bank. Across the newish highway from Beit Hanina is a large Jewish neighborhood, Pisgat Ze'ev, also within the Jerusalem lines, but actually an expanding Jewish settlement that backs up to the settlement block that extends to Ramallah and its outlying villages, all of this within a few square miles.

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I just wanted to call people's attention to an interesting piece in the New York Times about how businesses are now more openly supporting the liberalization of rules governing the employment of undocumented workers. This comes as a reaction to the stricter rules that state legislatures have been pushing -- such as revoking the business licenses of companies found to be employing undocumented workers, making it a felony to work illegally, etc. These strict local rules, much like the federally-created employer sanctions program, often end up pushing the employment of undocumented workers even further underground -- thus increasing opportunities for exploitation. Although these employers do not likely have the interests of their workforce in mind in taking a stance for more liberal rules, perhaps the pressure that they generate will push this country and its states to adopt a more reasonable policy on employing undocumented workers. Here is the link: "Employers Fight Tough Measures on Immigration."