Ed Schultz broadcasts live from lower Manhattan, the site of the Occupy Wall Street protests, and talks to the protestors about their mission. Justin Elliott of Salon.com and Laura Flanders of Free Speech TV join Ed to discuss the movement as it continues into its third week.
Mike Papantonio (and Laura Flanders) appear on The Ed Show to talk about the ongoing debt fight and why the GOP is so desperate to deliver for their corporate masters.
A year ago I was freezing on the Mall with a few million others, watching the inauguration of a new President. Today I'm sweltering in my unnaturally hot office, fearing the inauguration of a new movement.A year ago, the mall was packed with grassroots democratic voters; young people, people of color, and activated independents whose massive discouragement with the political status quo had driven them to dig down, dismiss the conventional nay-sayers and work hard for change and for Obama.
On inauguration day, this program, live in Washington, raised the question to voters. "If we are the ones we can believe in, and change is not simply about someone else, namely a president, what will progressives inaugurate?"
A year on it looks as if it's not progressives who've spent the year inaugurating. If the Democrat's loss in Massachusetts is anything to go by, it's the anti-Obama Right who've spent the year creating a movement: some of it racist, some corporate, and some plain desperate.
As John Stauber at the Center for Media and Democracy writes today, Scott Brown's Massachusetts win got a shot in the arm from a Tea Party-organized online money-bomb and get out the vote campaign, which borrowed tactics from Obama's netroots to raise way over a million dollars online in 24 hours and turn out voters.
"Freedomworks and other groups behind the Tea Party populists have long claimed that they would create the Right's equivalent of MoveOn, and they have." writes Stauber. I'd bet my lunch corporate anti-change donors didn't hurt either.
Nonetheless, the Right's MoveOn is only half the equation. Democratic leaders are the other. From war, to health care, to the Employee Free Choice Act, Democrats in the Obama administration have walked away from every proposition that stood a chance of igniting their grassroots base. Those now calling Coakley smug, know whereof they speak. Smugness is epidemic.
Laura Flanders of GRITtv appears on MSNBC’s Ed Show to discuss the Stupak amendment to the health care bill and what progressives need to do next. Faced with a Heritage Foundation fellow claiming that the bill only preserves the status quo, Laura makes the point that amendment takes a huge step back to the days of back-alley abortions, and says that progressives need to “turn up the heat” on the pro-choice legislators and president that we elected last fall.
Amy Goodman called it the Access of Evil...When pushed about the timidity of their questions to people in power, reporters will often--even more timidly--squeak something about their fear of losing access to their subjects.
Access they say, is what keeps them in a position to pose questions, score interviews, and keep their bosses happy. It can be an overrated thing. Segregation, for example, didn't stop the country's best black reporters from covering Southern government in the civil rights struggle. Nonetheless, it's not very democratic what happens in the East Room press conference room. The White House Controls who attends and who gets called on as White House press corps veteran Helen Thomas discovered to her credit when she was banished to the back of the room after raising prickly questions of the Bush Administration.
President Obama has pledged more open interactive government. After the November election, his team invited citizens to submit and vote on questions at Change.gov, pledging that his staff would answer. About 120,000 people wrote more than 86,000 original questions, and millions of votes were cast. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, did answer several of the citizen questions, but he also ignored the one that drew the most support, about investigating torture and surveillance abuse.
Soon afterward, ABC's George Stephanopoulos pressed Obama to address the unanswered question in an interview, citing its strong public support. After the same question was asked by a Huffington Post reporter at Obama's first press conference, the citizen question project suddenly disappeared at the Change.gov website.
Well now some independent media giving the president another chance. The Nation magazine is teaming up with others to gather questions from you, the public. "Ask the President" uses an interactive portal that enables people to write in questions or submit them as videos. They'll be voted on and posed by a reporter in that East Room press conference, assuming that reporter gets called on.
We’ll have more information on our site. And we look forward to playing your questions here.
We also look forward to the answers. This assumes, of course, that President Obama agrees to participate. I guess that's the first question.
Barack Obama
