The opposition to a solitary big bucks conservative’s drive to gut the finances of Missouri’s two largest cities, via Proposition A on the November ballot – United for Missouri’s Priorities:

…A billionaire has already spent over $1 million out of his pocket to fund a statewide ballot initiative that will force devastating cuts to public services in Missouri’s two largest cities.

This ballot initiative will eliminate the earnings tax Kansas City and St. Louis rely on to provide basic services including police officers, fire fighters, snow removal, garbage pickup, street repair, services for lower-income kids & adults, and medical and emergency care.

By eliminating the earnings tax, this billionaire’s initiative will force massive budget cuts to St. Louis and Kansas City and will lead to increased sales and property taxes…

Their contributors, not as cash flush as the anti-tax billionaire, are gearing up to oppose Proposition A. Via the Missouri Ethics Commission:

CONTRIBUTION OF MORE THAN $5,000.00 RECEIVED BY ANY COMMITTEE FROM ANY SINGLE DONOR – TO BE FILED WITHIN 48 HOURS OF RECEIVING THE CONTRIBUTION

C101069 UNITED FOR MISSOURI’S PRIORITIES [pdf] 8/20/2010

SEIU Missouri Kansas State Council

St. Louis, MO

8/20/2010

$10,000.00

[emphasis added]

CONTRIBUTION OF MORE THAN $5,000.00 RECEIVED BY ANY COMMITTEE FROM ANY SINGLE DONOR – TO BE FILED WITHIN 48 HOURS OF RECEIVING THE CONTRIBUTION

C101069 UNITED FOR MISSOURI’S PRIORITIES [pdf] 8/19/2010

Washington University in St. Louis

St. Louis, MO

8/19/2010

$5,000.00

[emphasis added]

CONTRIBUTION OF MORE THAN $5,000.00 RECEIVED BY ANY COMMITTEE FROM ANY SINGLE DONOR – TO BE FILED WITHIN 48 HOURS OF RECEIVING THE CONTRIBUTION

C101069 UNITED FOR MISSOURI’S PRIORITIES [pdf] 8/18/2010

Missouri National Education Association

Legislative Crisis Fund

Jefferson City MO

8/17/2010

$10,000.00

AFSCME International

Washington DC

8/17/2010

$15,000.00

[emphasis added]

Working people, teachers, and higher education. Hmmm.

These amounts are paltry in comparison to the proponent’s committee – second quarter campaign finance report filed with the Missouri Ethics Commission on July 15th:

Detailed Summary of Committee Disclosure Report

Committe: LET VOTERS DECIDE

ReportDate:

1. TOTAL RECEIPTS FOR THIS ELECTION PREVIOUSLY REPORTED $1,000,545.00

2. ALL MONETARY CONTRIBUTIONS RECEIVED THIS PERIOD $5,818,000.00

9. TOTAL ALL RECEIPTS THIS ELECTION(SUM 1B + 7A – 8A) $6,902,692.67

15. TOTAL EXPENDITURES THIS ELECTION (SUM 10B + 14A) $5,317,303.25

28. MONEY ON HAND AT THE CLOSE OF THIS REPORTING PERIOD (SUM 25 + 26 – 27) $1,585,238.06

[emphasis added]

That’s a lot of cash on hand.

Ah, it’s the golden rule. He who has the gold, makes the rules.

Working people, teachers, and higher education on one side – a billionaire on the other. Class warfare anyone? With that kind of money, wouldn’t it have been easier to run for Governor or U.S. Senate? Just asking. It’d be less obvious.

 Hotflash will have a longer post with more details (her video camera is better than mine,) but I wanted to share some observations from last night’s Organizing for America rally for health care reform at the IBEW Hall in south St. Louis.

I work for a university where a lot of people grumbled when the university president sent us all a letter encouraging us to vote for Proposition 2 (the pro-stem cell research ballot initiative) in the 2006 election, and even then, it was a very gentle ask with an acknowledgement that reasonable people can disagree on the issue.

This strikes me as something much, much worse. Via TPM, Express Scripts, the St. Louis-based pharmacy benefits management company, has sent a letter to its employees strongly encouraging them to use a company web page to sign and send a form letter their representatives in opposition to health care reform without disclosing that they work for a company who would financially benefit if health care reform failed (and left a lot of other people hurting, I might add.)

The text of the opposition form letter:

I appreciate that Congress is considering reforming our health care system to lower costs, improve quality and expand access to the uninsured. However, I am concerned at the pace at which Washington seems to be moving.

Health care is something very personal to me. I have good employer-provided benefits and affordable prescription drug coverage. It is important that health care reform not undermine my current benefits.

* Please take the time to get reform right

* Build upon the successes of the current, employer-based system

* Support policies that will actually lower health care costs

* Avoid a vast expansion of government spending, especially in the current economic climate

Our health care system delivers some of the best quality in the world, but it is an extremely complex system. It is critical that Congress take the time to get reform right.

Thank you for your attention to this important matter.

Note that several of the points dovetail with the same GOP talking points written by people who have admitted that they intend to stop health care reform. They claim to want to avoid an expansion of government spending, to preserve the “successes” of our current employer-based system, and that we need to slow down the pace at which health care reform is moving through Washington.

What, is 60 years too slow? Is maintaining a system in which you have to be employed at your current job in order to keep your health care coverage really worth it? To the executives at Express Scripts, of course it is. It’s worth it because the execs preserve their own massive profits with the status quo, and I don’t expect them to do anything other than fight to maintain the current system. On the other hand, let them make their case in public, and not stoop to cajoling their own employees into an astroturf operation.

I’ll also just note that Express Scripts is no stranger to controversy. They settled a 2004 lawsuit from the State of New York over charges that they defrauded the state of over $100 million in prescription drug rebates. They also provided human growth hormone (HGH), a banned performance-enhancing supplement, to “well-known athletes”, and paid a $10.5 million fine for the transgressions.

Somehow I don’t see Mayor Slay or Mayor Funkhouser taking this step:

It’s now time to meet the carbon challenge. Our second goal for the next four years is to put L.A. on a path to permanently break our addiction to coal. Coal currently accounts for roughly 40% of the DWP’s power portfolio. Breaking the coal habit is a long term proposition demanding a long-term commitment. It’s going to require investment from ratepayers. Our future depends on pricing power in relation to the environmental cost.

During my first term, we set high standards for green development and we’ve taken action to meet them. Los Angeles will get 20% of its energy from renewable sources by next year. We rolled out the most far reaching green building standards of any big city in America.

And this month, the largest city-owned wind farm will start delivering clean power to L.A.’s families. Moving forward we’re aiming to get 40% of our power from renewable sources by 2020 and go 60% carbon-free by the end of the next decade.

Today, I am directing the CEO of the Department of Water and Power to take every action necessary to reach these goals and eliminate the use of coal by 2020. Meanwhile, we’re going to move beyond the clean air action plan – the most aggressive effort to cut emissions at any port worldwide. We are going to electrify goods movement at our harbor.

I mean, Peabody Energy’s HQ is in Saint Louis. So is Arch Coal’s. They are the number one and number two private coal companies in the entire world.

Next Saturday at 1:00pm, there will be a demonstration in downtown Saint Louis to show support for the idea that we need another solution to our banking crisis other than a willingness by the government to endlessly supply money to the same people who have shown no ability to manage it in the past. The protest will be part of A New Way Forward, a larger set of demonstrations taking place all across the country, with approximately 60 organized so far. Even Springfield, MO will have something going on!

So what will the protests look like? As I wrote about previously, the beauty of it is that the national organizers have proposed a message and a fairly straightforward solution: Nationalize, Reorganize, Decentralize. Nationalize the problem financial institutions, reorganize them by sorting out the bad assets and removing the leadership that got us into this mess in the first place, and then re-privatize them into smaller, healthier units that will no longer remain toxic to the political and economic health of our country.

Within the framework of that idea, local organizers are free to come up with whatever creative way we can use to express the ulitimate goal of decentralization. In North Carolina, on account of the protest taking place the day before Easter, organizers are holding a “Nest Egg Hunt”, where messages are placed inside plastic eggs and hidden around the demonstration site. In New York near Wall Street, organizers are putting together a “bank run”, a sort of combination of a fun run and a tweaking of the banks. Others are doing a zombie bank flash mob, where a group of people quickly assemble in a bank lobby and stumble out en masse wearing zombie masks or zombie makeup.

Here in Saint Louis, we’re going to use the opportunity of having a large group under the Arch to hold a massive phone bank to tell our elected representatives to stop dribbling hundreds of billions of dollars to the banksters, and to hold those accountable who got us into this mess in the first place. We’ll have giant banners with the phone numbers of our Senators (bring your cell phone and use those free weekend minutes!), and we’ll also have preprinted cards to sign and send to our representatives in the US House.

I hope to see you next Saturday. If you’re not in the area, you should consider going to one where you’re at, or even organizing your own. The national organizers have made that simple; they’ve provided some tips for holding a rally and getting the word out, and even sample press releases and flyers for you to print out and use.  And they are easy to get a hold of if you need any more guidance.

Whatever you do, please don’t miss this opportunity to send a message to our elected leaders that we need a real solution to this mess. We can’t continue this process of socializing the massive risks these guys have been taking with our money, and then privatizing the rewards. Simply continuing to give them money and then slapping a few regulations on them will not suffice. We need a real systemic change, and we need to let President Obama and our other elected leaders know it. It’s the only way things are going to change.

Despite all the silliness in comments, something positive did come out of my critique of Maida Coleman’s website. The original complaint – the blog – still remains essentially unused, but the issue sections are fleshed out with more content and hyperlinks to articles backing them up. And Maida has her Senate record posted on the front of the website. There’s still a lot of problems, like the fact that half the landing page is taken up with a giant slogan and picture of Maida, instead of setting aside a space for links to a volunteer page and a contribution page, but I’ll give her credit for improving it.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user nancyscola. Disclaimer: Mike Lux will be at our blogger meetup, but I make no promises regarding Josh Brolin.

Maryb2004 has put together St. Louis area blogger meetups several times over the last couple of years, including a lovely picnic in Tower Grove Park last summer. So it’s perhaps fitting that one of her favorite bloggers on the national scene, Michael Lux, will be our special guest at The Dubliner in downtown St. Louis this Friday, March 20th at 4:30 PM for happy hour. Michael is in town to kick off the Grand Opening weekend of Left Bank Books new downtown location with a talk and sign copies of his new book The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be. The Left Bank Books event will begin at 7:00 PM. (I also hear there will be an introduction at Left Bank Books from a surprise guest, but I’ll have to stay hush on that for now.)

You can be forgiven, I suppose, for not knowing who Mike Lux is. I certainly had no clue who he was in the summer of 2007,  when I had first heard of him. He suddenly appeared alongside Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers at OpenLeft.com, after the two split off from MyDD.com to do their own thing. At that site, he has offered invaluable commentary on the 2008 presidential primary season (particularly on Iowa), and put into contemporary context some of the hard lessons learned by progressives in the 1990s.

It’s not surprising that Mike would offer such a compelling voice at OpenLeft. He’s been in politics since the 1970s, working first locally in Iowa and later becoming senior staff on the Joe Biden and Paul Simon presidential campaigns. He cashed in those connections to become a lobbyist… for the AFL-CIO. In 1992 he worked in the Clinton/Gore campaign as National Constituencies Director, and later served in the Clinton White House, helping to coordinate the first budget battle (we won) and the health care reform battle (we know how that went.) After he left the White House, he again cashed in his connections… to work for major liberal organizations like People for the American Way. He was one of the first inside the Beltway to understand the power of Internet organizing by working with Wes Boyd and Joan Blades on their online petition to censure President Clinton and “move on” from the Lewinsky scandal. The result of that online petition is MoveOn.org. I haven’t read his book yet, but I’ll be sure to pick up a copy on Friday.

One of the great things about the blogosphere is that it allows ordinary citizens to have a voice and medium with little added effort or startup cost. It allows us to share our experiences and our ideas with one another, with people you would probably never meet in the offline world, and get feedback from those same people.  What many so often fail to understand is that the online world is not only beneficial for those who haven’t ever had access to policymakers – it’s good for those at the top to share their experiences and ideas, and just as importantly, to hear feedback, too.

That’s why I’m glad Mike is blogging at OpenLeft.com, and why I’m glad he’ll be with us at the Dubliner this Friday at 4:30 PM and at Left Bank Books Downtown at 7:00 PM. Don’t miss it!

Maida’s campaign blog is awesome.

A while back, in one of his many posts here arguing against Slay’s re-election, our good friend ashriver cited the Saint Louis American’s Political Eye as a credible source. When questioned on the reliability of the Political Eye, ashriver defended it as one of reputation. If they consistently passed along unsubstantiated gossip, then the P.E. would get a bad reputation as an untrustworthy source of information. Setting aside that many purveyors of false information and innuendo find their way onto every network and every editorial page in the country, I’ll present an example of why ashriver and others shouldn’t be so quick to accept the word of the Political Eye as the gospel truth.

Ever since Denise Watson-Wesley Coleman surprised the St. Louis political establishment by filing for the St. Louis mayor’s race, Slay’s critics have suspected that Coleman filed at the urging of Slay or his allies. In other words, she is supposedly a stalking horse, a false candidate in the race only to peel off confused voters who couldn’t remember whether they wanted to vote for Denise Coleman or Maida Coleman. Outgoing Senate Minority Leader Maida Coleman, who had been long rumored to be interested in the race, finally announced her intention to run in the last week before the filing deadline, only to opt for an independent run after Denise Coleman’s surprise filing.

Currently, Slay’s critics are casting about for proof that Denise Coleman is a stalking horse, without much success. A couple of weeks ago, the Political Eye’s evidence was that a Slay statement prepared in advance referred to “Ms. Coleman” rather than to “Maida Coleman”. Pretty lame stuff. The latest weak attempt refers to Denise’s website:

“The big red flag for me is that Denise Watson-Wesley Coleman had a professionally done campaign website operating just a few days after she claims she had a revelation to run. It would seem it was worked on before she was inspired and had to cost a couple of thousand dollars. She has apparently filed no Statement of Committee Organization, and one is required 20 days after the first contribution comes in and they reach $500. So who did the site, what did it cost and when was it done? If she claims a friend or relative did it, it would still be considered an in-kind contribution and put her over the $500 mark. It will also have to be reported on her first report,” this person writes.

Well, a casual glance at Denise’s website showed me the opposite of what that “astute city observer” claims. If it was a “two thousand dollar” website prepared well in advance, it probably would look more like Irene Smith’s website, which is clean and well-designed, rather than cluttered with a couple of typos like Denise’s. I tend to believe Denise’s campaign finance report, which shows that it was begun the day after Denise filed for office. And I tend to believe Denise and some of her closest supporters, who told me more than a month before the filing deadline that Denise was mulling  a run against Slay. Her team cut their teeth in the local organizing effort for Obama, who also inspired Denise to shoot for the seemingly impossible. Perhaps she’s naive, and perhaps she’s a longshot, but she definitely isn’t a stalking horse.

Personally, I’m agnostic on Slay. My own neighborhood has improved over the last eight years, and is finally beginning to perform closer to its potential. It’s safer and more businesses have moved in, and it even retains a diverse mix of people of different races and income levels. I don’t know if Slay can personally take credit, but he hasn’t gotten in the way, either. I also understand that not every neighborhood has had the same results as mine during Slay’s two terms, so I’m open to critiques on what he has done wrong and how someone else might do better.

But what turns me off as a swing voter is this bullshit insider baseball criticism of an idealistic candidate and of Slay. Nobody cares about it except the people who already see Slay as someone behind every problem in the city, and they’re already on your side. Give me something tangible and you might persuade me to take you seriously again.  

Hotflash and I had the opportunity to see the Democratic candidates for mayor up close late last week at a meeting of the 15th Ward Democratic Club. (Many thanks to Jan and Greg for organizing the event!) And I do mean up close – I was up in the front row, close enough to see the mayor’s leg twitching nervously as he delivered his opening statement, and Maida Coleman sat down right behind me, I suppose just to take in the show and research the opposition. Despite just wrapping up service as the Democratic leader in the Senate, Maida is an independent candidate for mayor and was not allowed to speak at the forum.

The 15th Ward Democratic Club held an open candidate forum for Democratic candidates on a night where the temperature hovered in the single digits. Despite this, a good 20 or 30 people turned out, not including the  entourages of the various candidates. I didn’t take very accurate notes on what each candidate said, and a couple of problems with the camera prevented us from getting all of the gory details down on film. Hopefully Hotflash will have some YouTube clips for us soon so you can see for yourself at least some of what was said. All in all, though, I was more impressed with each of the candidates than I was going into the meeting.

More below the fold.

Mayor Slay’s opening statement seemed to me to be the workmanlike speech of an accomplished technocrat, full of stats on investment and paint by the numbers accomplishments. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I mean, it’s good to have a public servant who is rational and data driven, and this is the way Slay presents himself. He delivered the speech crisply and smoothly. As for the data itself, I’m not an expert, but I’m sure we’ll see a variety of partisans putting it in a different light between now and Election Day.

The only time Slay seemed to be agitated was when asked about Sherman George. He definitely knew the question was coming (as I recall it was something along the lines of “Would you have done anything differently regarding the situations in the fire and police departments?”) as his answer was logical and direct. He didn’t get angry or overly emotional or sentimental about the situation, but at times, he failed to complete sentences before rephrasing the sentence in another manner, and he repeated several points almost one after the other.

Denise Watson-Wesley Coleman was almost the polar opposite of Slay. Instead of coming across as a technocrat, her speech was almost completely filled with her passions. She’s obviously never been a candidate before, as her speaking style is still very rough and she began very tentatively. She did find her stride at one point, and perhaps the most entertaining point was when she glared over my left shoulder, right at Maida Coleman, and stated that she was beholden to no other interest or politician except the ideals for which she is running. I would have given anything at the point to have been seated on the other side of the room so that I could have seen Maida meet that gaze!

There’s a lot for Denise to work on if she’s going to become a formidable candidate. She didn’t have details at her fingertips like Slay did, or even a factoid she could steer the answer to if she truly didn’t have an answer. For example, she was asked what she would do about rising homelessness in St. Louis, and she responded that there were programs in Saint Louis to deal with homelessness, and she would look into getting more programs. Not exactly the most specific answer there.

Irene Smith closed out the night. A bit rushed, as the library’s closing time drew near even as she began, Smith struck a sweet spot between Slay’s managerial prose and Coleman’s fire. Like Coleman, Smith’s opening statement was heavy on biography. (Slay didn’t have to mention his biography – clearly the last eight years of his career massively outweigh everything else he’s done in terms of this campaign.) But she transitioned smoothly from her own career to the specific problems the city faces, possible solutions, and how her own previous experience matches those solutions. She’s a good public speaker, too – she effectively managed dramatic pauses for emphasis and wove larger themes into her specifics.

From people I talked to right after the forum and in the intervening week, I don’t think Slay is the lock that his overwhelming financial and institutional advantage might otherwise signify. The people I’ve talked to – regular voters, not political junkies – are very open to looking at the alternatives to Slay. A couple even recalled Smith’s incident in the aldermanic meeting back in 2001, but didn’t seem to care. All the caveats about anecdotal evidence, of course. So while Slay looks to be an easy winner, it will be interesting if a challenger gets enough funding and/or grassroots support to get their message out.

A point of disclosure and a caveat. First, I’ve given advice to Coleman’s campaign on Internet outreach. I know some of the people who are helping Denise with the campaign, and I know how tough a race they are facing. The least I could do was give them a few pointers based on what I learned working on the Margaret Donnelly campaign. It’ll be up to them to make good use of them, if they can.

Also, apologies for posting so late about the forum. I’m swamped at work and had all the usual chores in the intervening week between the candidate forum and now, plus the inaugural celebration, so I wasn’t able to post in the meantime. So there’s the caveat that I have probably failed to recollect a personal story that Slay shared, or some relevant policy details that Coleman told, that destroys my neat little characterizations of their appearances. In that respect, you, the reader, should treat this less as a news article than the personal feelings of an average voter. Hopefully, hotflash can balance that out with some YouTube clips that can allow you to form your own impression.