I won two tickets from the Onion to Saving Our Democracy. It was an all day seminar featuring Rep. Conyers (D-MI), Liz Krueger (D-NY State Senator), David Brock of Media Matters and others. It was sponsored by the New Democracy Project started by Mark Green, the former NY City Advocate and mayoral candidate. The event was held in The Great Hall in Cooper Union where Lincoln spoke in 1860. The theme of the day, Right makes Might, was taken from his speech. This is long but the information inside makes it well worth it. All the good stuff is below the fold.
I'm paraphrasing everything below even though there are quotation marks.
Dr. Robert Franklin - He is a professor of social ethics at Emory University.
He pointed out that the neoconservatives are against both Madison's ideals and the New Testament.
David Cole - He's The Nation's legal affairs correspondent and a law professor at Georgetown.
"You know things have changed when Russia issues press releases saying that they had nothing to do with America's rendition program. They didn't want to sully their human
rights record."
"Of the 93,000 Arabs that were detained or questioned after 9/11, zero have been convicted."
"The only person found guilty was Richard Reid and he was caught by civilians when he tried to light his shoes on fire."
"Just because other presidents did the wrong thing doesn't make it a legitimate excuse."
Esther Kaplan is an author who spoke about the vanishing separation between church and state. She had many good points that are also outlined in PastorDan's diaries.
Michael Waldman - He was a former Clinton speechwriter and he's the director of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU.
He pointed out that the rising costs of judicial races are inviting corruption into the election process.
Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY)
"In the 1980's there was individual corruption. Now it is individual and institutional."
"Every major vote of the last three years has been held between midnight and six AM."
"Procedural rules have been completely erased. `All points are waived' is now standard language in bills. Conference committees re-write bills in Republican meetings. They also add more content after the bills were signed. There is almost no oversight of the executive branch. $70 million was spent investigating Clinton and that doesn't count Whitewater or Ken Starr. Almost zero has been spent investigating Bush in the House."
"Bill Clinton should have indicted people at the inception of the K Street Project."
"There is a ten billion dollar slush fund for drug companies in the Medicare bill."
"The number of lobbyists has doubled in the last three years."
"Federal pre-emption of state rules needs to stop."
Liz Kreuger - (D - NY State Senator)
"Washington is now following Albany's lead. The New York congress is ranked 50th for efficiency and effectiveness."
"The average length of debate in the rules committee is three seconds."
"Only the State Senate leader decided which bill can be voted on. There was a bill, Timothy's Law that allowed mental health to be eligible for health coverage. 95% of the senators supported it but the Republican sponsor wouldn't take the signatures because the Speaker didn't want it passed."
"Sometimes bills aren't even written down when they are being debated."
"The governor's aide signs them with an auto-pen."
"The Sergeant-At-Arms allows people to automatically vote yes if they are not present. They just have to be in the building until nine. Or call before midnight."
"I wrote a bill proposing reform. The state Republicans immediately passed a law saying you can't reform house rules on the floor."
"You can't trust us. Hold us accountable."
Rep. Conyers (D-MI) got the loudest reception of the day. He got a standing ovation.
"I held Downing Street Memo and NSA spy hearings in the House basement because the Republican leadership wouldn't allow me to use any space upstairs."
"The mantra for my first campaign in 1964 was `Jobs, (Political and Economic) Justice, and Peace."
Thomas Blanton is the director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
"In 1958, Governor Earl Long was institutionalized in an insane asylum for blocking the purge of African-Americans from the voting rolls. He said that if someone wanted to keep a secret from his State Attorney General, they should hide it in a law book."
"Transparency protects our society. The Unabomber was caught after his manifesto was published. The DC snipers were caught 3 ½ hours after their car information was released. The 9/11 hijackers would have called off the attacks if their chatter was made public."
"This administration is creating some strange bedfellows. John Cornyn (R-TX) put officials in jail for violating the Freedom of Information Act when he was Texas Attorney General."
Katrina vanden Heuvel - She is the editor of The Nation.
Rep. Conyers couldn't believe that someone so young was the editor. He told her that he thought she was a congressional aide.
"Bush reversed releasing mine safety information. Miner's and their families can't fix what goes wrong if they don't know what happened."
Gary Bass - Founder of OMB Watch and openthegovernment.org
"Secrecy is now past absurd. You're not allowed to fly over nuclear sites but you can't get the maps of their locations. The government won't tell people the locations of pipelines even though they are in plain view."
"Bad guys are going to get the info. Keep it open so the public can offer solutions."
Here is a question from Carly in the audience:
"When I was growing up, I was told the USSR was evil for four reasons:
- They spy on their own citizens.
- They lie to their own citizens.
- They hold fraudulent elections.
- They don't have an open media.
My question to you is what's the difference, aside from degree?
Bill Greider - National Affairs columnist for The Nation
"The marketplace is now Consumers Uber Alles. Workers are seen as the special interest even though they are consumers too."
"9% of Americans are in unions. 53% would like to be."
"Start with the big, obvious problems and work your way down from there."
"We don't want the government to own anything. They wouldn't know what to do with it if they did."
Mike Fishman - leader of the Local 32BJ of the SEIU
The biggest fireworks came when some guy ran down the aisle shouting a question. Everyone else was filling out index cards and pages would send them to the moderator.
"There's a Martin Luther King quote that I like to use, `What's the point of being allowed to sit at the lunch counter if you can't afford a hamburger?'
John Nichols - Washington correspondent for The Nation
"Even if you got rid of the right-wing media, we would still be in the Iraq War. It was large corporations which pushed the misinformation. No one asked any skeptical questions the week before the invasion."
"John Madison warned that the lack of a strong media would foster `tragedy or farce or both'."
"Keep the debate of democracy and social justice, not on technical problems."
"Cross-ownership laws are being submitted to the FCC again. It could create a de facto state run media."
"America fell from #3 in 1995 to #16 now in spreading the internet to all its citizens. It's slated to fall to #50 by 2010."
"Make media the secondary issue that all the splinter progressive groups can agree on."
"MSNBC told Donahue that he needed two conservatives for every liberal guest."
"Rush Limbaugh got syndicated one year after the Fairness Doctrine was repealed."
"People get their information from the Daily Show and the Onion. People got the news from satire in the USSR and apartheid-era South Africa. That's what happens when people lose faith in the news."
David Brock - Founder of Media Matters and author of "Blinded by the Right"
"In 1986, the Washington Times would reach 100,000 subscribers. Now even though Reverend Moon has lost hundreds of millions of dollars, their misstatements can reach millions through the right-wing media."
"MSNBC had the following guests on during the first four hours of the Alito hearing: Pat Buchanan, Frist, and Ed Gillespie, the head of the RNC. There were zero progressive analysts."
"Bill O'Reilly call Media Matters the #1 Smear Site even though we post direct video feeds and transcripts."