Note: I found these emails on a secret thumb drive that was given to me around the same time that Laura Ingraham apparently got secret copies of the Obama Diaries. The emails below are as verifiable as Ms. Ingraham’s book. — Sally

From: glenn.beck@foxnews.com
Date: July 16, 2010 5:55 PM EDT
To: andrew@breitbart.com
Subject: they’re the racists!

G

From: andrew@breitbart.com
Date: July 16, 2010 6:00 PM EDT
To: glenn.beck@foxnews.com
Subject: Re: they’re the racists!

Hang on. I’m working on it.

A

From: glenn.beck@foxnews.com
Date: July 19, 2010 8:20 AM EDT
To: andrew@breitbart.com
Subject: awesomeness

G

From: andrew@breitbart.com
Date: July 19, 2010 8:25 AM EDT
To: glenn.beck@foxnews.com
Subject: Re: awesomeness

You are the wind beneath my wings.

A

From: andrew@breitbart.com
Date: July 19, 2010 8:26 AM EDT
To: glenn.beck@foxnews.com
Subject: PS

I should mention it was edited a bit. But trust me, the rest of the video isn’t that important.

A

From: glenn.beck@foxnews.com
Date: July 19, 2010 6:00 PM EDT
To: andrew@breitbart.com
Subject: that was fast!

PS – I think on tomorrow’s show, I’ll suggest Obama make her czar of his anti-white agenda. Ha!

From: andrew@breitbart.com
Date: July 19, 2010 6:00 PM EDT
To: glenn.beck@foxnews.com
Subject: Re: that was fast!

Just doin’ my level best to expose the left-wing conspiracy.

A

From: glenn.beck@foxnews.com
Date: July 20, 2010 2:24 PM EDT
To: andrew@breitbart.com
Subject: WTF?

The entire video is NOT not important. She was trying to say she learned to OVERCOME her racism. Shit! You’re the total friggin’ racist for manipulating the video — and me. You hate black people AND white people! Especially white people! I feel oppressed.

From: andrew@breitbart.com
Date: July 20, 2010 2:26 PM EDT
To: glenn.beck@foxnews.com
Subject: Calm down

Not my bad. If the NAACP and Obama weren’t so racist, they wouldn’t have fired her. I mean, really, it’s just a video. Don’t these people pay attention to context. I’m the one who should feel oppressed!

A

PS – You’re coming to my rally in DC in August, right? I’m doing it on the anniversary of Dr. King’s March on Washington. I think Dr. King would be honored.

For those who saw me on the Fox Strategy Room this morning and want to know more about Edda Lopez, here’s a video (which I was proud to help film) telling Edda’s awful story about how the banking industry — and lack of regulation — failed her and her family.

Edda’s story had a happy ending — because the community organizing group National People’s Action joined forces with Edda and finally got Bank of America to agree to her original mortgage adjustment. But millions of people like Edda aren’t as fortunate — which is why financial reform was so urgently needed.

My latest popular education video dissects the confidential memorandum that Louis Powell (who went on to be Supreme Court Justice Louis Powell) wrote to the US Chamber of Commerce and titans of business in 1971 warning of the potential demise of corporate domination in America.

Watch the video to learn how big business’ secret plan led to the political situation — and financial wreck — we’re in today.

For more, you can read the full Powell Memorandum and more analysis on the Reclaim Democracy website.

Originally written for the Women’s Media Center blog.

Dear Ms. Palin,

I’m a little confused by your recent video calling for an uprising of “Mama Grizzlies”—the label you give to conservative women who allegedly have their conservative undergarments in a bunch over President Obama’s health care reform, financial regulation and environmental conservation, which will undoubtedly make the world a better place for little cubs for generations but are nonetheless cast by you as anti-mom. I’m not confused by your nonsensical ideological narrow-mindedness. That I’ve come to expect. What I am confused by is how you are now casting your nonsensical ideological narrow-mindedness as protecting “Mama Grizzlies.” Aren’t you the one who hunts bears from helicopters?

I’m asking because, lately, you’ve been shellacking yourself with the varnish of feminism. A few months ago, you gave a speech describing yourself as leading an “emerging, conservative, feminist identity.” Now I don’t want to second guess an experienced, political operative such as yourself, but I imagine you’re trying to broaden your base from beer cozy-carrying white men to breast milk-carrying white women. Smart. Especially given that black folks, Latino immigrants and those latte-drinking upper-middle class whites seem rather cold to your aw-shucks-statesmanship and thinly veiled cultural warfare.

But in courting the mommy set, doncha you think that your anti-mom policies—like opposing efforts to guarantee equal pay for equal work, supporting tax cuts for the super rich that will kill funding for public schools the rest of us rely on, objecting to federally subsidized health care and child care—make you, what’s that big word… hypocritical? Like, um, claiming to champion “Mama Grizzlies” while personally owning several dead grizzly bears? Should the fact that, as governor of Alaska, you passed laws to encourage the extinction of bears be seen as a warning? Are you luring America’s women into the same sort of trap?

Just as your “nature” strategies have systematically killed off the bear population in Alaska, the policies you promote have been shown to kill jobs, economic prosperity, the pursuit of higher education and retirement savings—in other words, making the secure and prosperous American family all but extinct. Seems to me you’re about as pro-woman as you are pro-bear.

As a potentially explanatory digression, I understand that sport hunters like yourself mainly target male grizzly bears. If in fact you have some covert agenda to grow the lesbian bear population, killing the male grizzlies in order to create a Sapphic grizzly heaven, then frankly that’s an armed helicopter I might be able to board. You say, “Gay bears!” I say, “Grrrrrreat!”

Or, now that I think of it, perhaps the real trajectory of your strange bedfellows political base-building is to sidle up to gay male bears. I assume you know that, for decades, rotund and hairy men in the gay community have been nicknamed “bears.” Google “gay male bears” and you’ll get a very graphic idea of what I’m talking about. Given the aforementioned unlikelihood of the Republican big tent bending its ideological tent poles enough to welcome blacks and Latinos and the white upper-middle class, I can see the Palinesque logic of where you’re headed.

The inherent alignment between you and the hairy homosexual population is obvious. You both represent extremely fringe but nonetheless influential subcultures. You both have an affinity for animal skins. And, in both cases, your ideal man looks a lot like Todd. It’s a political match made in San Francisco.

But, um, if that’s not where you’re headed well, then, I’m lost. I cannot think of a more anti-woman candidacy than your vice presidential bid in 2008, which suggested that women’s assent to leadership can and should be based solely on cute looks and folksy sweetness rather than serious experience and competence equal to any man. The fact that there are hundreds of women far more qualified than you to be vice president of the United States of America but you emerged from the election as the new figurehead of women in politics undermines the fight of other women to be taken seriously in the public arena.

Even more, your conquest for cultural and political power through co-opting “Mama Grizzlies” is nothing more than a big business, anti-family agenda in drag. You said in an interview that the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which would lengthen the period of time for which men and women could sue regarding very overt cases of pay discrimination, would be a “boon to trial lawyers.” Uh, yes, women who had been systematically discriminated against on the basis of their sex and paid less than male colleagues would need to hire lawyers. But the law (which passed despite your objections) is really a boon to fairness and equal opportunity. It only hurts big business that, over the years, has relied on paying women less in order to increase their own margins of profit. You’d think that would be something to growl about…

In a nutshell, Ms. Palin, you are no feminist—and women across the country, whether they’re soccer moms or hockey moms or “Mama Grizzlies” or not even mothers at all, can see through your hypocrisy and easily spot your fangs and claws.

Yours truly,

Sally Kohn

I was on Fox News this morning and, in the wake of the NAACP resolution calling on the Tea Party to denounce its racist extremist elements, the panel debate was about whether or not there are explicit racist elements in the Tea Party. Come on. Of course there are.

The folks denying Obama is a citizen despite a clear birth certificate and birth announcement. The signs that say “we have a lyin’ African in the White House” or “monkey see, monkey do” or my personal favorite, “What you talkin’ ‘bout Willis?” The fact that overt White Supremacist organizations have called for support of the Tea Party movement and Tea Party candidates, including Rand Paul, have explicitly drawn on White Supremacist groups like Stormfront to raise money for their causes. There is overwhelming and undeniable evidence that very ugly, very vitriolic racists have linked up with the Tea Party.

If you Tea Party folks find this accusation so offensive, I would think you’d be all in favor of the NAACP resolution. Seems to me it’s just calling on the Tea Party affiliates to do exactly what, defensively, you’re doing in reaction to the resolution — distance yourselves from this explicitly hateful wing of your movement. Why not?

So what’s more interesting, I think, than pointing out the obvious existence of explicit racist extremists in the Tea Party is examining whether the Tea Party as a whole, by its very nature, is intentionally, implicitly built on racial resentment. In this regard, the NAACP resolution might be considered tame — it goes to great pains, as many other liberals have, to suggest that only a few folks in the Tea Party are racist but by no means the entire enterprise. I say: Not so fast…

Now, racism is a loaded word. And it tends to (though by no means needs to) connote personal animus. Colloquially, when we call someone a racist, we generally mean that they think themselves and their race inherently superior to another race by virtue of the color of their skin. I’m not going to wade into the question of whether all Tea Party individual members are racist. For full disclosure, the fact of the matter is I think everyone born in America grows up to unconsciously believe that white people are superior to people of color, just as we grow up to believe men are superior to women, straight people are superior to gay people and so on. No, it’s not taught explicitly in schools, but we humans are good at picking up the coded residues of inequality throughout our society. When we see only white men in power, we internalize the idea that only white men should be in power. When most media representations of black folks focus on poverty, drugs and crime, we internalize the idea that black people have a greater inherent tendency toward troubled behavior. This is the way inequality replicates itself — not by a bunch of folks sitting around in a room and deciding, yes, black people should still have higher rates of unemployment and women should earn only $0.76 for a man’s dollar — but because patterns of injustice play out all around us and, like the proverbial fish swimming in water, we don’t notice the bias because it’s all we’ve ever known. We learn to notice race but not racism — so the swimming in bias continues.

Which means, don’t tell me you haven’t noticed the President is black…

In this context, racism remains a perfect political trigger point, especially for white Americans. It always has been. From the beginning of American history, the Founders — who were wealthy white landowners — tapped into racial resentment and the (then explicit) sense of racial superiority among poor white folks to get buy in for a political system that for a long time disenfranchised not only black folks in America but un-landed white folks too. The argument that you should support policies that help the white elite and privileged still holds sway today, as working class white folks voice support for tax cuts and slashing of government programs the result of which very explicitly helps the rich and hurts the rest of us (including working class white folks themselves).

But over the years, it’s become less acceptable to be overtly racist. So code words became the norm. In the 60s it was “state’s rights”. In the 80s and 90s it was “personal responsibility”. And as much as I consider myself a proud American, I’m afraid to say that the code word today is “patriotism”. It avoids being explicitly racist while very clearly harkening back to a time when not only all our political leaders were white (and male) but where black folks were enslaved. And it has a very scary, violence-threatening edge — see, for instance, the campaign video by the thankfully-defeated Alabama Tea Party candidate Rick Barber calling on “good patriots” to “gather your armies”.

No, Tea Party folks protest — this is all about fiscal responsibility and the deficit. Then where were you during George W. Bush’s presidency when he took the nation from a record surplus to a record deficit and created the economic mess we’re in? Why didn’t you question his competence? Or his citizenship? In February 2009, a poll revealed that the deficit ranked sixth on a list of concerns voters have nationally, behind ending the war in Iraq and fixing our broken health care system. The deficit is nothing but a seemingly non-partisan, non-racialized shill. The Tea Party has no problem with deficit spending to finance wars and tax breaks for the rich and big business. But it does have a problem with government spending that is presumably helping poor people and people of color. Never mind that Obama’s policies help even more working white folks. Conservatives and the Tea Party are tarnishing the idea of government spending — and, by extension, government in general — by implying that government helps black people and immigrants but hurts white people, while big business helps whites. Facts and forty years of economic and social history otherwise be damned!

Now we’re in a financial crisis and everyone is feeling the pinch. Our natural human inclination and political necessity is to find someone to blame. If you’re a working class white person in this situation, you have two options. First, you can blame the super-rich (mostly) white elite who have rigged our economic and political system for their sole gain over the last 40 years and stuffed their pockets while your real income and quality of life has declined. But frankly, that would mean rejecting the myth that’s been propelling you all these years — that if you worked hard enough, you too could be Bill Gates — and instead accepting the unfortunate fact that, in America, extreme wealth is much more often a product of inherited position and pre-existing status than hard work. Because that’s how the existing elite have written the rules of our economy. But that’s a hard pill to swallow. So let’s blame people of color and immigrants. You’re in the sinking ship that is the American economy and a convenient solution is simply shoving some people overboard. You’re not struggling to make ends meet because the economy is fundamentally unfair and rigged against you and most of the rest of us. No! You’re struggling because black folks and immigrants are cheating and loafing off government and getting a free ride. Which makes me wonder if you’ve visited an inner-city housing project or immigrant farmworker camp and seen just how un-cushy some folks have it…

Conservative elites and big business have for some time intentionally triggered the racial resentment option instead of — gasp! — exposing their own protection and perpetuation of extreme economic inequality and thus risking all their power and fortune. Luckily for them, just when the economy as we know it was teetering at the precipice of public confidence — when we finally saw the horrors that deregulation and run amuck Wall Street greed create — America elected its first black president. It was a perfectly convenient way for the super-rich elite to, again, fan the flames of racial resentment as the scapegoat for our economic mess to avoid the blame being placed where it really belongs. This is why poor people were blamed for bad loans, not lenders. And this is why the Tea Party is questioning Obama’s fundamental competence and contending he wants to help black Americans but not whites.

How else can you explain the fact that the Tea Party supposedly grew out of public anger about the big bank bailouts but is now opposing financial sector reforms that would hold big banks accountable and make the financial sector work for average investors again? I do not think most of the Tea Party leaderships’ agenda is about explicitly perpetuating racism and racial insensitivity. But I do think the Tea Party is intentionally fanning flames of racial resentment to distract attention from the real problems — and real solutions — that would put big business and big banks in check and actually help all working Americans, including white folks.

So, do I agree with the NAACP resolution? Absolutely. With two caveats. First, it’s pretty safe for the NAACP to indeed play to its base with this (still relatively tame and incontrovertible) resolution. But what I’d really like to see are white liberal organizations take the same level of responsibility to call out racism in the Tea Party as well as throughout the political and social sphere — left and right, by the way — and be strong advocates for racial justice. There are a few examples of white groups and leaders doing this but nearly enough. Second, I do think that the NAACP is clearly drawing on the Tea Party’s current publicity to activate NAACP membership and generate attention and energy for the organization’s efforts at revitalization. That’s understandable, but it’s emblematic of a general trend on the left right now to jealously ogle at the seemingly vast and energetic Tea Party on the right while bemoaning the ossified, stale, centralized organizations on the left that are vestiges of vibrant movements of the past but lack that character today. This is exemplified in the debate as to whether the left right now is disappointed and dejected, in part by the rise of the Tea Party at the same time as the failure to pass truly progressive legislation in the context of Obama’s centrist approach to policy and power. Much more could be said on this (stay tuned) but suffice it to say I think the left should pay less attention to the Tea Party minority and more attention to the vast majority of Americans who are hurting in this economy and desperate for real solutions, the kind of bold and transformative solutions that frankly neither political party is putting out. Let’s build a vast and vibrant new movement around our agenda, not merely on the back of Obama’s election or, now, in reaction to the Tea Party.

In my exclusive interview with a Tea Bag, the true story of the Tea Party is revealed. Who knew that a bag of loose leaf could be so loose lipped?!?!

Please watch, “like” on Facebook and share with everyone you’ve ever met!

This piece was originally published on AlterNet.

It’s not surprising that the mainstream media is paying little attention to the 15,000-plus community organizers and progressive activists gathered in Detroit, Michigan this week for the second United States Social Forum. After all, the center-left political establishment isn’t paying attention either.

Why is it that the Tea Party — the right-wing edge of the conservative political sphere — exerts a gravitational pull on the Republican party and the conservative mainstream while the United States Social Forum and the leaders and groups gathered here, who represent the left of the liberal mainstream, are disregarded as marginal and irrelevant — that is, if they’re regarded at all?

For those of you who, like the center-left political establishment, think the United States Social Forum sounds like some sort of debutante ball, allow me to explain.

In 2001, social movement leaders in Porto Alegre, Brazil, convened the first-ever World Social Forum as a space for progressive activists from around the globe to meet, learn and strategize with one another to strengthen the fight for justice, peace and equality worldwide. The World Social Forum’s guiding vision is summed up in its motto: “Another World is Possible.” Eventually, activists in the United States, wowed by the powerful experience of attending World Social Forums in Brazil, India and Africa and responding to calls from international activists that progressive change in the United States was critical to staunching injustice around the world, initiated the United States Social Forum. The first was held in 2007 in Atlanta, Georgia; the second this week in Detroit. Both U.S. Social Forums grew out of extensive regional and local social forum processes as well as nationwide planning committees, which were integral to the bottom-up formation of the forum

The Tea Party, which few had even heard about a year ago, is courted by prospective political candidates and established Republican leadership alike. Tea Party leaders like Sarah Palin command $100,000 speaking fees and major news outlets write headline stories about Tea Party activists and actions. By comparison, there is not a single nationally recognized speaker on the dais at any of the United States Social Forum plenaries, no Democratic party candidates bombarding the Forum or its constituent organizations for endorsements and no mainstream liberal foundations are backing the effort.

There are three possible explanations for why the Tea Party is treated as a force to be reckoned with on the right while the Social Forum is treated as fringe. The first is compositional. While the United States Social Forum gathers a disproportionately large number of poor people and people of color, repeated polls have shown that the Tea Party is predominantly comprised of financially well-off white men. Well-to-do white males generally have greater influence on the powers that be in our society than poor people of color. Of course, from the perspective of progressive activists, this is one reason why the Social Forum is needed, so accepting the permanence of this dynamic would be instantly self-defeating.

A second possible explanation for the Tea Party’s power and prominence as compared with the Social Forum is temporal. Shiny, new things always catch our eye, including our collective political eye, more than old and seemingly tired things. The progressive/left conglomeration of organizations and ideological perspectives that comprise the United States Social Forum have, literally or metaphorically, been around in American politics for decades.

And even where that’s not the case — for instance, very recent and innovative formations like the Domestic Workers Union or Right to the City Alliance — the reality is that the anti-oppression, pseudo-Marxist, liberation rhetoric they adopt often finds them lumped in with their old left brethren. On the right, although it is arguably old Moral Majority social invective married with old Club for Growth fiscal constraint, the Tea Party successfully packaged itself as a new reaction against the (also supposedly new) politics of President Obama. Even in movements, marketing matters. The left either has something new to offer but is failing to package it as such or has nothing new at all.

The third possible explanation may be the most deep and intransigent — it is psychological. Perhaps because they are largely white and well-to-do and male, perhaps because they grow out of recent political movements with very significant ambitions of power (including the Moral Majority and Club for Growth), the Tea Party is profoundly majoritarian in its rhetoric and vision. The Tea Party claims to represent mainstream America. According to the “Take America Back” platform put forth by Tea Party front organization Freedom Works, trumpeted by Fox News host Glenn Beck: “The Tea Party’s common-sense agenda of fiscal conservatism now represents the very middle of the American political spectrum.”

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the left wing of progressive politics as represented at the Social Forum does not evidence equivalent majoritarian convictions or aspirations. The closest workshops along these lines at the United States Social Forum are in the vein of “new majority” organizing among black and brown constituencies that are rising in demographic proportion.

Most everything else can be summed up as parsing identity politics (the difference between being “gender queer” or “transgendered”) or perfecting a left analysis of issues (for instance, on how the ecological crisis is rooted in the shortcomings of capitalism). While some workshops focus on building policy campaigns or electoral campaigns that might necessarily mean recruiting more middle-of-the-road, mainstream constituencies, what is palpably absent — in workshop proposals and hallway conversations — is any overarching belief that the assembled grassroots movements already legitimately represent the mainstream of America.

Mainstream liberals, especially in Washington, have bought into the false dichotomy that there is a necessary trade-off between seeking political power versus sticking to one’s ideological beliefs. The Democratic party, the Obama administration and many Washington-based advocacy organizations have picked the side of political pragmatism. It would appear that the left wing of the left has also bought into this false dichotomy and chosen the ideology end of the imaginary see-saw. But what if more Americans agree with the Social Forum crowd than the DNC? Perhaps even a governing majority? In November 2009, a BBC poll found that 63 percent of Americans felt that capitalism in its current form wasn’t working for them. What if the Social Forum crowd claimed to represent that 63 percent — and then some?

In his argument for hegemony as a left-wing aspiration, Antonio Gramsci wrote that before actually winning power, a political movement must believe it can win power and have a vision for how to use it. Yet the psychological failure to claim hegemonic aspirations — let along make significant progress toward realizing majoritarian power — can be linked to what another left philosopher, Frantz Fanon, dubbed the psychology of oppression. Communities so accustomed to personal and political marginalization have a hard time even imagining themselves as the ones wielding power as opposed to those over whom power is being wielded. Such hopelessness focuses a movement inward, leading to the kind of internecine fights around identity politics and issue positions that frequently divide the left. This explains United States Social Forum workshops like “The Struggle for Single Payer in the Time of Obamacare,” piling onto the conservative attack on liberal policy in the name of left-wing ideological purity.

Without a doubt, it is easier to fight for the preservation of the political past — even if it’s a revised, overly rosy past in the case of the Tea Party and its supporters — than advance a new, progressive vision that critiques and contrasts with the status quo. And the publicity showered on the Tea Party by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and others blows a certain wind at the back of right-wing ideas storming the mainstream media. Then again, the Social Forum motto grows directly out of the slogan put forward by neo-liberal economists and politicians who, to make the case for economic globalization when it was a relatively new concept, insisted “There is no alternative.”

But perhaps, learning from the hegemonic aspirations of the economic and social right, the motto of the Social Forum left should also be “There is no alternative” — arguing that the progressive vision for a transformed and better future is, indeed, inevitable. Sure there are plenty of cultural and structural barriers that incline the left to be marginalized and, thus, languish in internal process. Nonetheless, one cannot help but wonder how the United States Social Forum and the left in general would be different if convinced they represent the majority of Americans and deserve real, ruling power.

In an election year marked by voters’ unprecedented distaste for incumbents, it is still remarkably difficult to be a challenger. Consider Desiree Pilgrim-Hunter’s race to unseat New York State Senate Majority Leader Pedro Espada.

Espada has been charged in several incidents of corruption throughout his time in office. Though he claims a residence in his Bronx, NY, district, it is widely known that Espada’s primary residence is a $700,000 Westchester home far away from the poor and working class folks he supposedly represents. In 2009, Espada gained attention by switching to the Republican party in order to give Republicans control of the Senate. He eventually switched back, re-gaining control for the Democrats but only after extorting the position of Majority Leader. Oh, and then in April 2010, Espada was indicted for stealing $14 million from a non-profit health clinic he founded.

Still, in a sign that the party machine, though squeaky, continues to roll, Pedro Espada is running for re-election.

Desiree Pilgrim-Hunter is running to replace him. Pilgrim-Hunter has lived — and still lives — in the Bronx for more than two decades. She’s a highly respected community leader, a leader with the Northwest Bronx and Clergy Coalition — one of the area’s most respected community groups — and board president of the Fordham Hill Cooperative, the largest housing complex in her district. As a community leader, she has delivered concrete victories for the district. Notably, Pilgrim-Hunter led the campaign to stop New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg from converting a neighborhood armory into a shopping center and instead push for community development uses of the community space. Not only is Desiree is exactly the kind of authentic community representative we would hope to see in elected office, but a potential bright spot of the generally reactionary, anti-incumbent energy this year is that people like Pilgrim-Hunter — from the community, not the party establishment — might actually win.

But party politics continue to stand in Pilgrim-Hunter’s way.

Jose Gustavo Rivera, a life-long Democratic party operative who was most recently Director of Outreach to New York’s other recent party-installed politician, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, was put forward by the Democratic political machine establishment as their alternative to Espada. After all, even if there’s a change of faces in the state capitol, party insiders and benefactors can’t stomach a change of loyalties. They want their own man in office. They don’t really care who as long as he’s theirs.

Rivera is a smart guy and no doubt his heart is in the right place. But his candidacy reveals everything that is wrong with politics today. Rivera has never been involved in his local community. Not once. In fact, Pilgrim-Hunter organized hundreds of community meetings blocks away from Rivera’s home over the last several years. Rivera never came once. But Rivera knows the right people in the Democratic Party and in Albany. All too often, the best financed candidate wins and the best financed candidates are either self-funded millionaires or the candidates picked by and blessed by the party establishment (either Democrat or Republican) and thus significant choices have already been made for them. Even in the case of contested primaries, unfortunately there’s rarely a contest — the deck is stacked toward the status quo insiders.

Pilgrim-Hunter is doing what community leaders do best — bucking the conventional wisdom to upend the status quo. Without Pilgrim-Hunter and other leaders with the same spirit to triumph in the face of adversity, the Bronx and District 33 would have been left for dead decades ago, written off by a city that generally cared more about Manhattan, and more about Wall Street in specific. But just like the residents of the Bronx bravely persevere through recessions and crime and neglect from the city and state, Pilgrim-Hunter is bravely persevering to run against Espada and against the insider party machinery.

Pilgrim-Hunter’s candidacy is a glimmer of hope for the Bronx, New York. But the challenges she faces are a glaring warning sign for the state of our democracy nationwide.

When I first arrived at Edda Lopez’s house, I wondered how this elderly woman lives on the second floor of her elevator-less home despite being wheelchair bound. After an hour with Edda, I no longer wondered. Edda is a fighter. She fought for her family and her way of life, persevering even after her home burned down and her husband died a few years later. And now, Edda is fighting Bank of America.

Bank of America services one out of every four mortgages in the United States and is responsible for more foreclosures than any other bank in the country. And now Bank of America is foreclosing on Edda.

Edda lives in Bronx, NY, on a tree-lined side street with playgrounds and parks nearby. You think it might be different, being in the big city, in one of the poorest parts of the nation. But Edda’s block looks a lot like the small towns and suburbs that speckle our country. You would feel right at home in her cozy living room or the wide front porch Edda’s husband once built with her sons.

When Edda’s husband died in 2005 and she lost her job in 2008, she still held on. Edda was approached by a mortgage re-financing company who promised to lower her monthly payments. But buried in hundreds of pages of documents were loopholes and scams. Edda was surprised to find herself an unwitting victim of predatory lending and a sub-prime mortgage. Her payments actually went up.

She tried again. Edda re-negotiated her mortgage with another, more-reputable bank and got her payments down to $2,101 a month, which she could handle. Everything was fine until, in early 2010, Bank of America bought Edda’s mortgage and announced her payments would be at least $1,000 higher. What? Edda called Bank of America and only then found out that they had rejected her modification and Bank of America considered Edda behind on her loan for failing to pay the higher amount all along. On the phone — and only because she called them — Bank of America told Edda Lopez that her home would be sold at auction on June 26, 2010.

To all those who blame the hundreds of thousands of families facing foreclosure for their predicament and argue that big businesses like Bank of America should be able to do whatever they want, whenever they want, in the spirit of “free market” capitalism and the American way, you need to meet Edda Lopez. Edda is just like the many other hardworking Americans, struggling to play by the rules and reach their dreams but repeatedly knocked down by cheating, greedy corporations. Since when did the American dream turn into corporate-only heaven?

You can watch a video about Edda Lopez and sign a petition to protect her home at http://showdowninamerica.org/edda-lopez. The community organization National People’s Action has made over 23 formal requests to meet with Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan to demand an end to unjust foreclosures for Edda and thousands of other American families. Today, Edda will at a vigil outside the $1 billion Bank of America Tower in New York along with her family, community leaders and clergy members praying that Bank of America does the right thing. It’s a sad day in America when hardworking families are reduced to praying for their livelihoods to the gods of big banks.

There’s a movement afoot to repeal the 17th Amendment of the United States Constitution which allows for the two US Senators from each state to be “elected by the people thereof.” As proof that the Tea Party wants to infringe on your democracy and make it easier for elite corporate interests to control Washington, they want to take away our vote and allow state legislators to secretly appoint Senators through back-room deals.

So apart from the obvious contradictions of claiming to be a populist, patriotic movement while attacking the popular vote and the democratic traditions of our nation, why else is repealing the 17th Amendment a bad idea?

One of the central themes of the Tea Party is the idea of returning to and honoring our Founding Father’s intent. Glenn Beck, who hosts Founders’ Friday every week on his show, recently evoked James Madison — who Beck called a “little cutie pie” — to make the case for repealing the 17th Amendment and taking American back to 1776.

Before we get too misty eyed and nostalgic, let’s remember what America was like in 1776 — and why the 17th Amendment was such a vital addition down the road.

The vaunted leaders at the Constitutional convention were all very wealthy, very white men and included the largest slave owners in the colonies. None of the Founders were very pro-equality on the subject of race, but some were more opposed to slavery than others. In particular, the North was more opposed to slavery than was the South. And the North had more people. So the South was worried that, if the new nation were just based on the popular vote alone, it would have less power and slavery would be abolished.

They created a Constitution to preserve slavery, with all sorts of compromises to appease the South and keep it — and slavery — in the union.

For instance, the North only wanted free persons to be counted for purposes of apportioning seats in the House of Representatives. But the South, which hand tons of slaves, wanted slaves to count too — even though they (like all black folks at the time) couldn’t vote. So the genius Founders agreed to count slaves as 3/5ths of a person, which gave the South more power in the House. This wasn’t changed until the 14th Amendment in 1868. (Maybe the Tea Party wants to repeal that one, too…)

The Senate was also created to give more power to the slavery-loving South — so less populous Southern states would have just as much say in the Senate — two seats — as more crowded Northern states. Why make Senator’s appointed by legislatures instead of elected by the people? Like the Electoral College — which unfortunately still remains — the point was to “insulate” politics from popular will. This was Madison’s idea of democracy. He said, “A pure democracy is a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person.” Glenn Beck and the Tea Party, by siding with Madison on this point and wanting Senators to be appointed, are siding with the idea of elite rule by a very few rather than true, popular democracy. The inspiration, by the way, for this original idea of the Senate was the House of Lords in England. While “the people” were represented in the House of Commons, the other branch were only appointed from wealthy landowners and elites — who would make sure that the interests of the people would never completely win out over the interests of the wealthy, privileged elite.

The Tea Party doesn’t want state laboratories of democracy. They want elite fiefdoms ruling every level of government. It’s no accident that the state legislators the Tea Party and Glenn Beck want to give more power to are disproportionately wealthy and white — um, just like the Founding Fathers. The 17th Amendment originated after exposes in the early 1900s showed already-well-to-do state legislators using their Senate appointment power to get even richer.

Now, let’s get one thing clear. I think the Founders are great. I think the Constitution is great. I think our nation is great. But not perfect! The Founders, actually, recognized this too. They created a living, breathing document for a living breathing nation — that could be changed as needed. It was that little cutie pie Madison, for instance, who wrote the Bill of Rights — the first 10 amendments to the Constitution. (If we’re gonna start repealing amendments, let’s start with the 2nd instead!)

Madison said, “The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.” So the question is, who do you trust more? Do you trust the American people to directly elect our government? Or do you want to give more power to state legislators for them to potentially abuse? Do you want to believe that the American people can wisely change and carryout the governance of our nation, including amending the Constitution? Or do you think that a few wealthy elites from centuries ago still know absolutely best how our country should be run today?

Gee, I guess I put more faith in the American people than Glenn Beck or the Tea Party do.