Grassroots Network Gets Human Rights Into Budget Law

A recent briefing introduced me to a state budget campaign launched by the Vermont Workers’ Center. It’s quite different from most budget campaigns I’m familiar with.

And I think there are things that advocates –and everyday concerned citizens — can learn from it. So let me tell you a bit about it.

The Workers’ Center is a grassroots network that’s branched out from workplace issues to “the full range of issues of concern to working people.”

Two years ago, they racked up a significant victory — a law that promises to make publicly-funded health care a right for everyone who lives in Vermont.

Now the Center has turned its attention to the broader issue of state spending and revenue policies. And again, they’ve racked up a victory.

In this case, it’s an amendment to the state’s budget law that establishes basic principles for the budget — what it should do and how it should be developed.

The latter has to do with processes for public participation. These are still in the development stage, but apparently moving toward completion.

The what-the-budget-should-do part is potentially more revolutionary — and for two reasons.

First, it adopts a human rights framework. “Spending and revenue policies,” it says, will “recognize every person’s need for health, housing, dignified work, education, food, social security and a healthy environment.”

This is far more than the symbolic gesture the DC Council made when it declared the District a human rights city. And it’s much broader than the Illinois anti-poverty strategy I wrote about some time ago.

The Vermont law essentially provides a test for virtually any spending proposal. Does it “advance human dignity and equity”? Does it help meet any of the specified needs — or more generally, “promote economic well-being … and a vibrant economy”?

Also revolutionary is the notion that the costs of meeting the Vermont people’s needs should drive revenue policies.

That, at any rate, is how a director at the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative — one of the Workers’ Center’s lead partners — characterizes the “reframed” budget purpose.

As we all know, budgeting generally works very differently.

First, there’s a revenue projection and some sort of account of what the government spent and would have to spend to keep operating as it has. Also, in some cases, a spending target, e.g., the federal deficit reduction targets enshrined in the Budget Control Act.

Then the money gets divvied up — first by the chief executive, e.g., the President, the state governor, then by committees in the legislature and finally by the legislature as a whole.

Okay, I know this is over-simple. In most states, for example, the governor can veto particular items in the budget the legislature has passed — or in all but one state, the whole damn thing.

And, of course, Congress can do whatever it chooses with budgets enacted by the District of Columbia.

Nevertheless, there’s always a fixed amount of money to spend — even if the evolving budget includes revenue raisers.

Organizations representing different interests and/or communities contend for the biggest share of the budget pie they can get. This often means defending the share of the pie they’ve got — over and over again as the years roll on.

Conflicts among them may be smoothed over. That’s part of what broad-based coalitions are for. But I doubt any interest group has sat out a budget season in deference to another.

The end result is winners and losers, even within what we might call the human needs community.

This is what the Vermont Workers’ Center seeks to replace with its People’s Budget, which would stand the customary budget process on its head.

Costs of meeting people’s basic needs would come first. Revenue raisers would follow, if needed to meet those costs.

I’ve some doubts about how this process will fare when the rubber hits the road.

Will Vermont legislators actually pass tax increases sufficient to fulfill the human rights vision embodied in the budget law?

Or will there be the usual push-and-pull between spending and revenue policies? And the usual competition among interests, including the big one between those who want more spending and those who think their taxes are already too high?

Guess we’ll have to wait and see. And hope that the experiment pans out. Because it could become a model for budget reforms elsewhere.

Even in its infancy, it gives us a fresh way of thinking about how budgets are made — and what we do (and don’t). We all, I think, can benefit from that.

Did Twitter Decide the Presidential Debates?

Shortly before the first Presidential debate, I got an e-mail urging me to tweet three specific questions to Mitt Romney. The subject line read, “The debate will be decided on Twitter.”

Oh sure, I thought. A bunch of us tweet Romney and he’ll address these questions. “How do you plan to create jobs when you keep shipping them overseas?” Etc.

But this wasn’t what the sending organization had in mind by deciding the debate. It had borrowed its subject line from a recent Politico post, which itself was borrowing from a couple of other sources.

They were saying that real-time tweets would shape the post-debate story reporters would tell.

At the very least, the initial Twitter conversation among political reporters would decide who won and who lost, Nathan Gonzales at The Rothenberg Political Report predicted.

New York Times political blogger Michael Shear also views Twitter as a tool to influence debate coverage, but for the campaigns, not the likes of thee and me and only when neither candidate is the obvious winner.

Both Gonzales and Shear focus on what we could call insider conversations. The promise in my e-mail was that I, along with lots of other tweeters, could interject ourselves and thus shape the post mortems.

We’ve no way of knowing, I suppose, what prompts journalists to fix on particular story lines — other than obvious things like what they and their editors think is newsworthy, e.g., winners and losers, and the political bias of the source they write for.

There may, however, be some limited evidence for the influence of mass tweeting.

For example, we know that some major progressive organizations tweeted fact-checks as the first two debates were going on. They’ve got reporters following them — and others who presumably broadcast the more notorious non-facts to their own followers.

And it’s certainly the case that we’ve had a spate of columns on misstatements, distortions, evasions and Romney’s latest disclaimers of positions he’d espoused, even just a few weeks ago.

But they weren’t the post-debate narrative. And they don’t show much of anything about how we grassroots tweeters can shape — let alone decide — a major political debate.

Which brings me to a somewhat different Twitter campaign.

Greg Kaufmann at The Nation launched it with a hashtag — #TalkPoverty — a shorthand, as hashtags must be, for an effort to “push the issue of poverty into the mainstream political debate.”

The post I’m linking to here was the first in a series that focused on questions posed by experts. We could tweet the articles and/or the individual questions, of course.

The Half in Ten Campaign called on its supporters to tweet about poverty issues, using the #TalkPoverty hashtag. It even sponsored a webinar to get novices up to speed on Twitter and created a prefab tweet for anyone who was still timid or just plain busy.

Kaufmann and others, including Half in Ten, gave us the Twitter handles, i.e., user names, for the debate moderators so that we could tweet factoids and questions directly to them.

Well, there sure were a lot of #TalkPoverty tweets — a new crop every day for weeks. I’m told they reached, on average, nearly 350,000 Twitter followers a day — twice as many on debate days.

Anyone who watched the first debate knows what happened — or rather, didn’t happen.

One use each of the words “poor” and “poverty” — both by Romney and neither in the context of saying what, if anything, he’d do to help the people he fleetingly referred to.

Even a broader content analysis, including words and phrases like “low-income,” “welfare,” “food stamps” and “Medicaid,” found that only 10% of the candidates’ statements focused on poverty.

On the other hand, the virtual silence on poverty as a policy issue did become one of the post-debate storylines — not, of course, as often told and retold as the emergence of yet another Romney, the President’s apparent funk or the mystifying tax numbers.

Some columnists were prompted to write about the issue that “went missing,” as the Washington Post‘s Jonathan Capehart put it.

Did this secondary narrative — Twitter-shaped or otherwise — influence the content of the second Presidential debate? Did the ongoing tweet stream itself have an impact?

Not so as you’d notice. But then the second debate consisted largely of answers — or talking points passed off as answers — to questions from the audience.

Not much interest in the plight of poor people there, we gather.

Or perhaps moderator Candy Crowley, who chose the questions, thought that the rest of us wouldn’t be all that interested, judging from her many years of experience as a political reporter and post-debate narrative creator.

Kaufmann thinks that Obama did talk poverty, though without using the p-word.

The policies he cites would certainly be better for poor people than Romney’s tax cuts for small businesses. But I think it’s a stretch to view them as policies specifically designed to fight poverty.

Perhaps, as Kaufmann’s expert interviewee says, the word “poverty” evokes such negative stereotypes that candidates can’t break through if they use it.

If that’s true, then doubly so for proclaiming a renewed war on poverty.

Bits on Uphill Battles — and Downward Falls

Another scrapbook of fragments that didn’t get into posts I’ve written, plus some thoughts I had along the way.

Winning Battles, But Not the War

As I wrote about amendments that didn’t get into the Senate’s Farm Bill, I realized, again, what hard times we progressive advocates face.

Basically, we’re reduced to giving thanks — even to legislators themselves — because bills that affect low-income people aren’t as bad as they could have been.

We see this not only nationally, but here in the District of Columbia.

The Fair Budget Coalition, for example, proclaimed victories when high priorities, e.g., homeless services, a delay in further TANF benefits cuts, got into the list of things that will get funding if the Chief Financial Officer predicts more revenues — lots more — than the estimate the budget was built on.

Not faulting FBC  here, especially when the coalition — and others — averted some truly harmful cuts and got some money back in the Housing Production Trust Fund as well.

But I long for victories that actually move us forward.

Upward Mobility in Black and White

My recent post on the Pew Center’s economic mobility report alluded to its findings on blacks born to low-income parents. I’d wanted to include them, but the draft was already pushing against my somewhat indulgent word-count limit.

So here they are, plus some additional race gap facts.

• The percent of blacks who grew up in the bottom fifth of the income scale is nearly six times greater than the percent of whites — 65% as compared to 11%.
• More than half (53%) of blacks stay there, while only a third of whites do.
• Well over half (56%) of blacks raised in the middle fifth fell down to the second or bottom fifth as adults. Less than a third (32%) of whites raised in the middle fell.

What about blacks in the top two fifths? The Pew analysts say the percent — even for both together — is too small to calculate mobility “with statistical certainty.”

Not, I think, surprising. What is to me is how much more slippery the middle rung on the ladder is for blacks.

Disparities in parental income, education and employment opportunities — all in part reflecting persistent race discrimination — can explain why it’s harder for blacks born at the bottom to climb the ladder.

But what accounts for the greater downward mobility — the reverse, if you will, of the American Dream?

Part of the answer apparently is that the median family income for blacks is lower than for whites in every fifth that can be reliability estimated. So even a relatively small income loss can drop them into the next fifth down.

But the plummet to the bottom fifth calls for more explanation than I can ferret out of the report.

Life Is Unfair, in Economese

Found this in a very wonky paper by economists Flavio Cunha and James Heckman: “The best documented market failure in the life cycle of skill formation … is the inability of children to buy their parents and the lifetime resources they provide.”

In other words, children born to parents who’ve got the education, temperament, time and money to invest in developing their cognitive and noncognitive skills, e.g., perseverance, self-control, aversion to risky behaviors, are more likely to become economically and socially successful than children who by “accident of birth” have parents who don’t.

We knew this, of course. And the Pew report indirectly confirms it. But whoever knew it was a defect in our free market system?

Open Court Proceedings Could Change the Child Welfare Narrative

Professor Matthew Fraidin sent “a small, friendly amendment” to my post on child welfare narratives. I said that he had previously focused on the need to open now-secret child welfare proceedings, but had turned his attention to narratives.

He explains that the two issues are intimately inked, as follows:

As I pointed out in an article in the Maine Law Review, the closure of child welfare courts plays an important role in creating the inaccurate narrative by suppressing stories other than horror stories.

My speech at the University of Michigan, which you discussed in your post, is an effort to depict the narrative that might exist if the much more common, much truer stories of child welfare could be told — stories of racial disparity, stories of child taken from their families unlawfully and unnecessarily, stories of lawyers who haven’t met with their child or adult clients, stories of judges who openly ignore the law.

Laws creating secret courts not only limit the people who may enter and observe the proceedings. They also limit the stories that may be told by those allowed to enter.

In other words, a lawyer involved in a child welfare case may enter the courtroom and review the documents in the court file, but s/he may not talk, i.e., tell stories, about what s/he knows or has seen or read.

In fact, the only lawfully-allowed stories are stories of criminal acts — murders, brutal injuries or severe neglect, for which adults are charted as criminals. But those don’t come from the child welfare cases and courtrooms.

In those instances, someone gets arrested, and the law places no limit on the information the policy may share with reporters. Reporters then tell the gruesome story beneath a screaming headline. And THAT creates and perpetuates the inaccurate narrative!

If child welfare courts were open to the public and press, the narrative would be much more nuanced, to say the least. We would read a diverse array of stories, including stories about lackluster lawyers, caseworkers and judges.

Most importantly, we would read about children who were taken, terrified, from their schools and homes and families, but didn’t need to be.

We’d read about children who were doing better at home than in foster care. We would read about parents who love their children, and children who love their parents and siblings, children who miss their homes and wither in foster care.

Those new stories might change our collective mindset about the child welfare system so that we would no longer think of it simply as a holding pen for animalistic parents and their children, who, inevitably in our minds, are fruit that doesn’t fall far from the tree.

“Child welfare” would be a much more complex phenomenon.

The D.C. Citizen Review Panel’s recent findings suggest that there are literally hundreds of children in foster care unlawfully and to their detriment.

The many, many stories that could be told about those children would convey a much richer, more realistic and less stereotyped image of the parents.

In the meantime, the ideas summarized in my HuffPo article represent an effort to start changing the inaccurate, destructive narrative, even in jurisdictions like the District of Columbia where child welfare proceedings are held in secret.

In my opinion, secret courts protect from challenge the inaccurate narrative created by racial bias and sensational horror stories.

You got it exactly right, Kathryn. “Chang[ing] the stories in our heads” can help us tell accurate stories, which happen to be the ones made illegal by secrecy laws.