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The Progressive Change Campaign Committee is at Netroots Nation, and our co-founder Adam Green is on a panel titled “Weak Democrats Vs. Strong Progressives: Lessons From The Social Security Fight” alongside Ai??Reps. Alan Grayson (D-FL) and Mark Takano (D-CA) and Credo Mobile’s Becky Bond talking about how progressives build political power. Blogger Heather “Digby” Parton will be hosting, and we will use the panel to discuss how progressives have been fighting President Obama’s proposed cuts to Social Security benefits and how progressives are fighting back and even proposing to expand these benefits instead. Hear behind-the-scenes stories on power, progressive organizing, and the Democratic Party.

Below you can watch a livestream of the panel, Ai??which will begin at 7:30 PM EST today, with a pre-game conversation starting at 7:15 PM EST.

Click here to share this live stream on Facebook.

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Are you a Daily Kos member? Click here to rec a diary about this event.

Click here to chip in a few dollars to progressive heroes who’ve signed the Grayson-Takano letter promising to vote against any cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits.

PCCC fellow Andrew Villeneuve will also be live blogging the panel as it happens.

Panel Liveblog

Hey everyone, it’s Andrew. Welcome to our live coverage of Weak Democrats vs. Strong Progressives: Lessons from the Social Security Fight. If you’re able to tune in to our livestream above, you’re welcome to follow along from home in addition to reading live updates here in this post. We’ll be getting started in just a few minutes!

4:30 PM: Here we go! Again, we are livestreaming this panel above. Feel free to tune in and watch from home. Heather Parton, who blogs as Digby, will moderate our discussion for the next hour and fifteen minutes.

4:43 PM: …

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) today announced that she will vote against Michael Froman, President Obama’s nominee to be the U.S. Trade Representative. Warren cited her concerns with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a secret trade agreement that the administration has been negotiating that may threaten the worker and environmental rights. The administration has refused to disclose the text of the negotiations to the wider public.

“If transparency would lead to widespread public opposition to a trade agreement, then that trade agreement should not be the policy of the United States,” said Warren in her speech. “I am voting against Mr. Froman’s nomination later today because I believe we need a new direction from the Trade Representative — A direction that prioritizes transparency and public debate,” she concluded.Ai??Read the full text of her speech below the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAgJaIwdXLI

FULL TEXT:

Thank you Mr. President.

I rise today to talk about trade agreements and the impact they have on our economy. Trade agreements affect access to foreign markets and our level of imports and exports.Ai?? They also affect a wide variety of public policy issues – everything from wages, jobs, the environment, and the Internet — to monetary policy, pharmaceuticals, and financial services.

Many people are deeply interested in tracking the trajectory of trade negotiations, but if they do not have reasonable access to see the terms of the agreements under negotiation, then they can’t have real input.Ai?? Without transparency, the benefits from an open marketplaces of ideas are reduced enormously.

I am deeply concerned about the transparency record of the US Trade Representative and with one ongoing trade agreement in particular — the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

For months, the Trade Representative who negotiates on our behalf has been unwilling to provide any public access to the composite bracketed text relating to the negotiations.Ai?? The composite bracketed text includes proposed language from …

Since Glenn Greenwald’s blockbuster story on indiscriminate NSA spying on phone and Internet records, there has been appropriate outrage about American privacy and basic fourth amendment freedoms.

But there has been less attention on the fact that the national security state, largely through its outsourcing to private intelligence and defense contractors like Edward Snowden’s former employer Booz Allen Hamilton, has basically become a welfare program for the very rich. Here are a few numbers showing how:

$763,000: That’s the reimbursement cap for defense contractors — almost twice what President Barack Obama makes and over three times what vice president Joe Biden makes. Repeated attempts to lower this cap have failed.
3.2 Percent: That’s the unemployment rate in Arlington County, Virginia, the hub of the intelligence contractor state and location of the headquarters of Booz Allen Hamilton. InAi??In January 2010, during the height of the recession, the widerAi??United States had an unemployment rate of 9.8%, while ArlingtonAi??maintained an unemployment rate of only 5.1%.
50-60 Percent:Ai??In 2007,Ai??that was the estimated percentageAi??of “the workforce of the CIA’s most important directorate, the National Clandestine Service (NCS), responsible for the gathering of human intelligence,” that was “composed of employees of for-profit corporations.”
70 Percent: That’s the percentage of the intelligence community’s secret budget that has gone to private contractors, despite the fact that only one in four intelligence workers is a contractor — a sign that the privatization of the security state is driving up costs.
$107Ai??million: The amount the top executives at the top five Pentagon contractors made. That’s “43Ai??percent more than the heads of the five biggest U.S. banks, who made $75Ai??million.”
$20 Million:Ai??That’s the compensation of Booz Allen Hamilton’s top five employees in the 2010 fiscal year. TheAi??Washington Post reportsAi??that the “Ai??vast majority of” the company’s revenue “about 98 percent…comes …

Yesterday, eight progressive organizations — the Progressive Change Campaign Committee,Ai??MoveOn, DFA, CREDO, Rebuild the Dream, Wolf PAC, Working Families Organization, and Daily Kos — sent an open letter to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Rep. John B. LarsonAi??(D-CT), chairman of theAi??House Democrats’ Task Force on Election Reform, and Ranking Member Robert Brady (D-PA)Ai??urging them to take up legislation to create real citizen-funded elections — and not a weaker system that would reward candidates who continue to rake in big-dollar contributions. The letter reads as follows:

Leader Pelosi, Representative Larson, and Ranking Member Brady:

We have been following the work of the Task Force on Election Reform. We write to applaud your leadership and attention to the critical issue of campaign finance reform ai??i?? and to inform you that we stand ready to mobilize millions of Americans around strong legislation that brings forth citizen-funded elections for Congress.

For us, the goal of such legislation is to increase the power of ordinary Americans in our democracy and to incentivize candidates to spend their time talking with ordinary Americans instead of special-interest donors. We ask you to put the full weight of Democratic Leadership behind a bill that achieves those goals ai??i?? a bill such asAi??The Fair Elections Now Act (HR 269, Yarmuth)Ai??andAi??Grassroots Democracy Act (HR 268, Sarbanes).

While these two bills have differences, their core similarity is that they create a robust system of matching funds for candidates who opt to only raise small-dollar donations. This would be game changing. Candidates would be incentivized to spend their time courting ordinary Americans and would have dramatically less incentive to court big-money, special-interest donors. We understand that progress is being made on merging these bills into one, and we look forward to rallying the public around such a bill.

We cannot get behind …

The Obama administration is currently working with numerous countries to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) a massive new trade agreement. Labor, environmental, and human rights groups worry that this trade deal may undermine financial regulation, offshore American jobs, reduce environmental protections, and decrease access to medicine.

The best way to ensure this does not happen is to let Americans know what’s happening in the negotiations. Unfortunately, while over 600 corporate advisors have access to these negotiations, most Members of Congress, the public, journalists, and civil society do not.

Today, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) called on U.S. Trade Representative nominee Michael Froman to reveal these secret trade negotiations by revealing the bracket text of the agreement or at least provide information on the level of detail on negotiations made available to advisory committees. From the text of a press release from Warren’s office, detailing a letter to Froman:

United States Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) today, in a letter to United States Trade Representative (USTR) nominee Michael Froman, called on his support for increased transparency in trade negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Sen. Warren expressed concerns about the Administration’s record of transparency specifically during the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations.

“If members of the public do not have reasonable access to the terms of the agreements under negotiation, then they are unable to offer real input into the process,” Senator Warren wrote in the letter. “Without transparency, the benefit from robust democratic participation – an open marketplace of ideas – is considerably reduced.”

Sen. Warren highlights the Administration’s unwillingness to provide to the public composite bracketed text relating to the negotiations. This text includes proposed language from the United States and other countries, and serves as the focal point for negotiations. She noted that the Bush Administration, while not embracing full transparency, at least released a scrubbed …

The Guardian has just published an article about and video interview with the man behind the NSA leaks. 29 year-old Edward Snowden works for the massive defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton and is a former technical assistant to the CIA. Snowden explained to the Guardian that he realized he was risking extreme harm to himself by revealing the government’s spying programs, but that he wanted the public to know the truth about the massive surveillance state. “What they’re doing” poses “an existential threat to democracy”, he warned, and also said that the NSA “routinely lied to Congress,” which would be a crime.

We’re raising money for aAi??Edward Snowden Legal Defense Fund to help him defend himself and tell his story. Can you chip in $10 and tell others too?

Read more from The Guardian:

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history isAi??Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for theAi??CIAAi??and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.

The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. “IAi??have no intention of hiding whoAi??IAi??am becauseAi??IAi??knowAi??IAi??have done nothing wrong,” he said.

Snowden will go down in history as one of America’s most consequentialAi??whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning. He is responsible for handing over material from one of the world’s most secretive organisations ai??i?? theAi??NSA.

In a note accompanying the first set of documents he provided, he wrote: “IAi??understand thatAi??IAi??will be made to suffer for my actions”…

He …

After last week’s explosive revelations from The Guardian and Washington Post about the government’s massive spying and cyberattack programs, there has already been one important victory — the United States is once again debating its massive security state.

Here’s empirical data showing that. Google Trends maps news headlines over time. Here’s a headline search from 2004 to the present. As you can see, news about spying hasn’t been this high since January 2006 (approximately the time of the Bush-era NSA scandal):

MSNBC reportsAi??that “the PCCC is…marshalling an organized response.” Click here to sign aAi??Ai??petition calling on Congress to immediately investigate this surveillance and share the results with the public. Click here to sign on.

Today, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) — the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus — issued a statement condemning the NSA spying programs revealed this week:

ai???This indiscriminate data collection underminesAi??Americansai??i?? basic freedoms.Ai?? While there are legitimate law enforcement uses for this data, the scope of the program isAi??aAi??serious case of mission creep andcreates a veryAi??slippery slope.Ai?? Gathering this data just in case it contains something useful does not qualify as an urgent law enforcement exercise.

ai???Our citizensai??i?? right to privacy is fundamental and non-negotiable. Domestic surveillance should only be conducted when there is an imminent need for information.Ai??The dragnet nature of this tracking suggests there was no such imminent threat, making this is a misuse of sections of the Patriot Act to collect the personal information of millions of Americans.Ai??The program weai??i??re hearing about today seems not to respect that boundary.Ai??It, and any other programs the NSA is running with other telecom companies, should end.ai???

Weai??i??ve launched a petition calling on the House and Senate Judiciary committees to immediately investigate this surveillance and share the results with the public. Click here to sign on.Ai??

Last night, news broke that the NSA had requested and gained access to the phone records of millions of Verizon customers. Today, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) put out a statement condemning this massive surveillance program:

“This type of secret bulk data collection is an outrageous breach of Americans’ privacy. I have had significant concerns about the intelligence community over-collecting information about Americansai??i?? telephone calls, emails, and other records and that is whyAi??I voted against the reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act provisions in 2011 and the reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act just six months ago.ai???

ai???This bulk data collection is being done under interpretations of the law that have been kept secret from the public. Ai??Significant FISA court opinions that determine the scope of our laws should be declassified. Can the FBI or the NSA really claim that they need data scooped up on tens of millions of Americans?ai???

We’ve launched a petition calling on the House and Senate Judiciary committees to immediately investigate this surveillance and share the results with the public. Click here to sign on.Ai??

The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald tonight reported that the government’s National Security Agency ordered Verizon to turn over the phone records of millions of Americans for a three-month period starting this April and ending July 9th:

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largestAi??telecomsAi??providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order,Ai??a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk ai??i?? regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.

Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.

The disclosure is likely to reignite longstanding debates in the US over the proper extent of the government’s domestic spying powers.

We’ve launched a petition to the House and Senate Judiciary committees to immediately investigate the NSA’s conduct and share the results with the public. Click here to sign our petition.