It seems that, in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, which allowed uncontrolled corporate money into elections, that (surprise!) Republicans have a huge warchest from outside actors like the Chamber of Commerce:

On the left hand side of the chart is a list of ten Republican aligned institutions, ranging from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the Family Research Council. Next to it is a column listing the amount of money each group has pledged to spend by Election Day. A third column on the right details what those groups actually spent in 2008 on federal elections.

The number at the bottom delivers the key message. If their pledges are fulfilled, these ten groups will unleash more than $200 million in election-focused spending -- roughly $37 million more than every single independent group spent on the 2008 presidential campaign combined. This time around, almost every single penny will be going to Republican candidates or causes.

So, how did this happen?

First, Democrats didn't make an all out effort to torpedo either Roberts, or more reasonably, Alito. With both on the Supreme Court, decisions like Citizens United were inevitable.

Second, when given a historic opportunity to break the power of the rich and corporations by not bailing them out, Democrats bailed them out. They did not make shareholders get wiped out (as they deserved, they took the profits from housing bubble fraud, after all) and they did not let the bondholders take their losses. Be very clear, this was never about saving the economy, the trillions of dollars used to bail out these corporations could have been loaned directly to consumers and businesses which needed loans. In fact, at this point, it is entirely likely that bailouts made things worse, not better.

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Senator Al Franken is quickly taking a stand with working families across America and signed on to sponsor his first bill and guess what it is. Yep, The Employee Free Choice Act.

Hours after he was seated, Sen. Al Franken, D-MN, let it be known that he would be sign on as a co-sponsor to the Employee Free Choice Act, the labor-backed provision that would allow unions to more easily organize, as his first legislative activity.

"I just became a cosponsor of my first bill in the Senate, the Employee Free Choice Act," the Minnesota Democrat declared at a gathering at the AFL-CIO on Tuesday evening.

Despite taking a backseat in terms of media attention, EFCA remains very much a hotly-debated measure within the halls of Congress. And while Franken's vote will likely boost Democratic efforts on health care and judicial nominations (he is poised to sit on the HELP and Judiciary Committees) it could be on labor matters where his voice is most felt. Certainly the union community, which is pushing for a vote on EFCA sometime this year, feels relieved that it is one senator closer to preventing a Republican filibuster on the measure.

Franken, who was officially sworn into office on Tuesday after an eight-month recount, told the AFL-CIO crowd that he shared common interests with them. According to Eddie Vale, a spokesman for the union group, Franken described the long tradition that exist in Minnesota of "having two Senators who are very pro workers and working families." "He said it was an honor to be sworn in today and walk through the aisles with Mondale and to be sworn in on Paul Wellstone's Bible," Vale recounted. "He stressed that both men were champions of the labor movement."

Paul Wellstone would be proud.

It looks like Arlen Specter is coming to terms with the cold reality that he can't be a "Democrat" and stand in opposition to working families. As usual, the Republican-like Ben Nelson does as much damage as he can to good progressive legislation like EFCA.

“Card Check” deal is a “fool’s errand”Sen Ben Nelson, D-NE, told me he does not see a deal happening this year at all. He sees no way to put a compromise together that’s pallatable. “You take away the arbitration issue, and you still have the ‘card check’, so that doesn’t work. You take away the ‘card check’ and you still have the arbitration problem. And if both go away, you’re left with nothing. It’s a fool’s errand to do this. I just don’t see an agreement happening,” Nelson said.

Way to go, Ben! That's acting like a good FOX News Democrat. But as soon as this report comes out, there's news of a compromise in the works with Specter being part of the solution.

Feinstein, Specter Compromises Pave the Way For Passage of Employee Free Choice Act

New compromise measures from Dianne Feinstein and Arlen Specter may pave the way for the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).

As Harkin says, the Feinstein compromise has the advantage of "protecting the secret ballot, so people can do it in private," which neutralizes that particular right-wing criticism of the bill.

The other bone of contention has been arbitration clause of the Employee Free Choice Act. Specter himself supports "last best offer" arbitration. It's also called "baseball arbitration," and has incentives to get both parties to quickly make their best, most reasonable offer. Bill Samuel of the AFL-CIO says "we're open to that."...read on

I'm tired of hearing excuses and I'm tired of Democrats like Ben Nelson and Evan Bayh that block real change in America.

ConsumerAffairs.com:

Under heavy fire from critics for the bank's losses in the economic meltdown, former Bank of America chairman Kenneth Lewis will step down as chairman, to be succeeded by Dr. Walter E. Massey. Lewis will remain as President and CEO.

All 18 board members were said to "comfortably" resist votes to remove them from the board, but the vote to split the duties of chairman into different posts was successful. Massey, an accomplished scientist and a member of many corporate governing boards, most recently served as president of his alma mater, Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.

The announcement came after a raucous shareholder meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina today, where investors and activists grilled him for pushing the acquisition of debt-riddled Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch, as well as for accepting billions in taxpayer money during the first round of bailouts of the financial market last year.

Countrywide, formerly the world's largest mortgage lender, was acquired last year by Bank of America for $4 billion amid rumors that it would seek bankruptcy protection due to mounting losses from the collapsing housing market. The additional acquisition of Merrill Lynch saddled the banking giant with an estimated $70 billion in capital losses, while shareholders saw their investments drop by an average of 76 percent.[..]

The Service Employees' International Union (SEIU) launched a campaign to remove Lewis as chairman, after it was revealed that Bank of America used $25 billion in taxpayer money it received for executive compensation and buyouts of competitors, while squeezing the credit lines of its customers.

SEIU actually liveblogged the shareholder's meeting and deserves all sorts of credit for really holding Lewis's feet to the fire.

I think Lewis should just be grateful that the shareholders didn't opt to treat him the way that Icelanders have treated the bankers that caused their financial crisis. Just sayin'...

Digby, Howie Klein, Robert Greenwald and myself co-hosted a blogger get together at Brave New Films Tuesday afternoon to meet with a true progressive candidate named Tom Geoghagen. He's running to grab Rahm Emanuel's vacant seat in IL. and and showed off his progressive chops big time. He was very impressive as he spoke about many issues that would have a huge impact on America if he's able to win that seat. He's a real leader, not some yes man and as a labor lawyer he knows what's been happening to working class families all across America. He touched on an interesting concept that I haven't heard any one else touch on.

Since we've spent so much money bailing out the financial institutions, Tom thinks that working families should get the same consideration when it comes to their own credit record and with some help they should get the same fresh start as the banking industry was given. Without the private jets and huge bonuses of course.

After he spoke for about 30 minutes and then a Q&A, Robert and Howie grabbed me unexpectedly and off I went into the studio with Tom to ask him to explain in simple terms what the Employee Free Choice Act really is since there's so much misinformation littering the airwaves about it by the corporate elites.

It's insane watching the right wing freak out over the fact that all this act does is give the employees and not the employers the choice of how to unionize. That's it. In this video, Geoghagen gives a very straight forward answer that dispels a lot of the anti-union nonsense that the Orrin Hatches of the Republican party are spewing. After meeting him, listening to him and speaking with him about the issues, I'm convinced he's an excellent choice for Rahm's seat and is a person that I am fully endorsing.

Howie writes:

Yesterday I got to hear author and congressional candidate Tom Geoghegan speak live. Robert Greenwald and the folks at BraveNewFilms hosted a blogger get-together for the progressive candidate running in Illinois' 5th CD. I knew he was already a good candidate from his writing and from trusted friends in Chicago; that's why we endorsed him and added him to our ActBlue page. But seeing him live... it's like the difference from hearing a band's recorded songs and seeing a live concert.

Katha Pollitt called him "the next Paul Wellstone" in The Nation and Thomas Frank wrote that he's a "true reformer" in the Wall Street Journal. This morning Don Rose endorsed his candidacy in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Arlen Specter dealt a serious blow to the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.

Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, said he opposes the “card-check” union organizing measure, dealing a setback to U.S. labor’s top legislative goal. Specter said that he is likely to be the “decisive vote,” to block the Democratic-backed bill that would make it easier to form unions.

“The problem with the recession makes this a particularly bad time,” Specter said on the Senate floor today. Employers fear the measure “will result in further job losses,” he said.

Back in 2007, Specter voted for "cloture"which means that he cut off the debate of the topic and stoped Republicans from whining about it which is a show of support for EFCA, but now he's using his "cloture" vote as a way to give him a cowardly excuse not to vote for it this time.

In voting for cloture - that, is to cut off debate - in June 2007, I emphasized in my floor statement and in a law review article that I was not supporting the bill on the merits, but only to take up the issue of labor law reform. Hearings had shown that the NLRB was dysfunctional and badly politicized. When Republicans controlled the Board, the decisions were for business. With Democrats in control, the decisions were for labor. Some cases took as long as eleven years to decide. The remedies were ineffective.

UPDATE I: Specter’s Defection On EFCA Fails To Win Over Right Wing

If Senator Arlen Specter had hoped that bailing on the Employee Free Choice Act yesterday would make him the toast of the town among his right wing critics, he probably woke up this morning feeling like he has a pretty crushing hangover — after doing a lot of drinking alone.

Conservative groups and politicians, far from won over by Specter’s announcement, continue to hammer away at the embattled Senator, suggesting that his abrupt move on EFCA will do little or nothing to reduce his vulnerability to a primary challenge from the right...read on

Howie Klein sizes up the playing field to see what our options are.

The math says that if Ted Kennedy is healthy enough to vote and Al Franken gets seated and all the Democrats-- including Evan Bayh's anti-Obama bloc-- all continue to back the bill (even WalMart's cowardly Democrats, Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor), then Employee Free Choice passes if Specter sticks to his guns.

With today's craven and cowardly announcement by Specter, more worried about his primary challenger from the fringes of the Republican right than about his own dignity or, more important, Pennsylvania working families, the Democrats will either have to put off the vote until after the 2010 election or persuade either Olympia Snowe (R-ME) or retiring George Voinovich (R-OH), neither of whom is a union-hater, to switch their votes.

Big Business is quite happy with his choice, but in reality it makes no sense. The right already hates him and he's in a state where jobs are needed. He's taking the path of going far right to try and appease the wingnut base, but he knows they will never be appeased np matter what he does. He will still face a primary challenge. (See Jason Rosenbaum for more on this point.)

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