“The Morality Brigade”: Our Democracy Needs To Be Protected From The Depredations Of Big Money
We’re still legislating and regulating private morality, while at the same time ignoring the much larger crisis of public morality in America.
In recent weeks Republican state legislators have decided to thwart the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in “Roe v. Wade,” which gave women the right to have an abortion until the fetus is viable outside the womb, usually around 24 weeks into pregnancy.
Legislators in North Dakota passed a bill banning abortions after six weeks or after a fetal heart beat had been detected, and approved a fall referendum that would ban all abortions by defining human life as beginning with conception. Lawmakers in Arkansas have banned abortions within twelve weeks of conception.
The morality brigade worries about fetuses, but not what happens to children after they’re born. They and other conservatives have been cutting funding for child nutrition, healthcare for infants and their mothers, and schools.
The new House Republican budget gets a big chunk of its savings from programs designed to help poor kids. The budget sequester already in effect takes aim at programs like Head Start, designed to improve the life chances of disadvantaged children.
Meanwhile, the morality brigade continues to battle same-sex marriage.
Despite the Supreme Court’s willingness to consider the constitutionality of California’s ban, no one should assume a majority of the justices will strike it down. The Court could just as easily decide the issue is up to the states, or strike down California’s law while allowing other states to continue their bans.
Conservative moralists don’t want women to have control over their bodies or same-sex couples to marry, but they don’t give a hoot about billionaires taking over our democracy for personal gain or big bankers taking over our economy.
Yet these violations of public morality are far more dangerous to our society because they undermine the public trust that’s essential to both our democracy and economy.
Three years ago, at the behest of a right-wing group called “Citizen’s United,” the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to big money in politics by deciding corporations were “people” under the First Amendment.
A record $12 billion was spent on election campaigns in 2012, affecting all levels of government. Much of it came from billionaires like the Koch brothers and casino-magnate Sheldon Adelson —seeking fewer regulations, lower taxes, and weaker trade unions.
They didn’t entirely succeed but the billionaires established a beachhead for the midterm elections of 2014 and beyond.
Yet where is the morality brigade when it comes to these moves to take over our democracy?
Among the worst violators of public morality have been executives and traders on Wall Street.
Last week, JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s biggest bank, was found to have misled its shareholders and the public about its $6 billion “London Whale” losses in 2012.
This is the same JPMorgan that’s lead the charge against the Dodd-Frank Act, designed to protect the public from another Wall Street meltdown and taxpayer-funded bailout.
Lobbyists for the giant banks have been systematically taking the teeth out of Dodd-Frank, leaving nothing but the gums.
The so-called “Volcker Rule,” intended to prevent the banks from making risky bets with federally-insured commercial deposits – itself a watered-down version of the old Glass-Steagall Act – still hasn’t seen the light of day.
Last week, Republicans and Democrats on the House Agriculture Committee passed bills to weaken Dodd-Frank – expanding exemptions and allowing banks that do their derivative trading in other countries (i.e., JPMorgan) to avoid the new rules altogether.
Meanwhile, House Republicans voted to repeal the Dodd-Frank Act in its entirety, as part of their budget plan.
And still no major Wall Street executives have been held accountable for the wild betting that led to the near meltdown in 2008. Attorney General Eric Holder says the big banks are too big to prosecute.
Why doesn’t the morality brigade complain about the rampant greed on the Street that’s already brought the economy to its knees, wiping out the savings of millions of Americans and subjecting countless others to joblessness and insecurity — and seems set on doing it again?
What people do in their bedrooms shouldn’t be the public’s business. Women should have rights over their own bodies. Same-sex couples should be allowed to marry.
But what powerful people do in their boardrooms is the public’s business. Our democracy needs to be protected from the depredations of big money. Our economy needs to be guarded against the excesses of too-big-to-fail banks.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, March 25, 2013
“Political Whiplash”: On Gay Marriage, GOP Is Damned If the Court Does, And Damned If It Doesn’t
However the Supreme Court rules on the question of gay marriage, Prop 8, and the Defense of Marriage Act (or DOMA, as it’s widely known), the rapid shifts in how the country views same sex marriages is giving the GOP a case of political whiplash, as some leaders try to go with the flow and others scream “stop.”
On the one hand you have Karl Rove envisioning a pro-gay-marriage Republican presidential nominee in three years; on the other, you have former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee predicting a cataclysmic split in the Republican Party if that happens. If Republicans do flip on gay marriage, Huckabee said last week, “they’re going to lose a large part of their base because evangelicals will take a walk.”
So the immediate question facing conservatives is what outcome they should be quietly rooting for when the Supreme Court hands down its decisions. I think Hot Air’s Allahpundit has it about right:
I’ve read a bunch of pieces lately claiming that SCOTUS striking down gay-marriage laws will actually be a gift to GOP politicians because it’ll take this issue off the table. Rubio and Paul and Jindal et al. won’t have to squirm over whether to endorse SSM, back a federalist approach to the issue, or oppose it on the merits. They can just shrug and say “The Court was wrong but whaddaya gonna do?” and move on to other business. Take it from Huckabee: That won’t happen. Abortion’s technically been “off the table” for 40 years and yet it’s still an absolute litmus test for any potential GOP nominee (and any potential Democratic nominee too).
He goes on to argue that the best case for Republicans is for the court to hold up Prop 8, allowing pols to oppose it but say it should be up to the states. (It’s a rule of politics that in most cases when federal candidates insist a tough issue be left up to the states, they’re trying to avoid pissing off an important constituency.) Note that the “best outcome” is still pretty bad for the GOP: Young voters, who overwhelmingly favor gay marriage, and—oh yeah—voted in greater numbers in 2012 than seniors, will see through a pol trying to play both sides of the issue.
It’s also worth noting here that the Roe parallel works, but only to a point. As Media Matters’s Lara Schwartz wrote yesterday, the notion that the 40-year-old decision polarized the issue is nonsensical. As Yale Law School’s Linda Greenhouse (who used to cover the court for the New York Times) and Reva Siegel relate, “To the question of whether one can avoid conflict over such issues by avoiding courts, the answer from an accurate pre-history of Roe v. Wade is: no. The abortion conflict escalated before the Supreme Court ruled.”
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, March 26, 2013
“The Corporate Predator State”: This Isn’t The Free Market, It’s A Rigged Market
Bipartisan agreement in Washington usually means citizens should hold on to their wallets or get ready for another threat to peace. In today’s politics, the bipartisan center usually applauds when entrenched interests and big money speak. Beneath all the partisan bickering, bipartisan majorities are solid for a trade policy run by and for multinationals, a health-care system serving insurance and drug companies, an energy policy for Big Oil and King Coal, and finance favoring banks that are too big to fail.
Economist James Galbraith calls this the “predator state,” one in which large corporate interests rig the rules to protect their subsidies, tax dodges and monopolies. This isn’t the free market; it’s a rigged market.
Wall Street is a classic example. The attorney general announces that some banks are too big to prosecute. Despite what the FBI called an “epidemic of fraud,” not one head of a big bank has gone to jail or paid a major personal fine. Bloomberg News estimated that the subsidy they are provided by being too big to fail adds up to an estimated $83 billion a year.
Corporate welfare is, of course, offensive to progressives. The Nation and other media expose the endless outrages — drug companies getting Congress to ban Medicare negotiating bulk discounts on prices, Big Oil protecting billions in subsidies, multinationals hoarding a couple of trillion dollars abroad to avoid paying taxes, and much more.
But true conservatives are — or should be — offended by corporate welfare as well. Conservative economists Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales argue that it is time to “save capitalism from the capitalists,” urging conservatives to support strong measures to break up monopolies, cartels and the predatory use of political power to distort competition.
Here is where left and right meet, not in a bipartisan big-money fix, but in an odd bedfellows campaign to clean out Washington.
For that to happen, small businesses and community banks will have to develop an independent voice in our politics. Today, they are too often abused as cover for multinational corporations and banks. The Chamber of Commerce exemplifies the scam. It pretends to represent the interests of millions of small businesses, but its issue and electoral campaigns are defined and paid for by big-money interests working to keep the game rigged.
An authentic small-business lobby has finally started to emerge, as William Greider reports in the most recent issue of the Nation. The American Sustainable Business Council, along with the Main Street Alliance and the Small Business Majority, are enlisting small business owners to speak for themselves — and challenging the corporate financed propaganda groups such as the Chamber and the National Federation of Independent Business. Their positions often align with those of progressives. They loathe the big banks and multinationals that work to undermine competition.
Greider reports on the antipathy these small business owners have for the big guys. Camille Moran, president and chief executive of Caramor Industries and Four Seasons Christmas Tree Farm in Natchitoches, La., rails against the “Wall Street wheelers and dealers.” They knew, she argues, that they “ would get no sympathy saying that ending the high-income Bush tax cuts would hurt them, so instead they pretend it would hurt Main Street small business and employment. Don’t fall for it. . . . That’s a trillion dollars less we would have for education, roads, security, small business assistance and all of the other things that actually help our communities.”
ReShonda Young, operations manager of Alpha Express, a family-owned delivery service in Waterloo, Iowa: “We’re not afraid to compete with the biggest delivery companies out here, but it needs to be a fair fight, not one in which big corporations use loopholes to avoid their taxes, stick our business with the tab.”
Polls show these aren’t isolated views. The ASBC, the Main Street Alliance and the Small Business Majority sponsored a poll by Lake Research of small business owners. Ninety percent believe “big corporations use loopholes to avoid taxes that small businesses have to pay,” and three-fourths said their own businesses suffer because of it.
The ASBC and its allies have the potential to become what Jamie Raskin, a Maryland state senator, dubbed a “Chamber of Progress,” a small-business voice that is willing to take on the big guys that tilt the playing field.
The possibilities are endless. Wall Street argues for rolling back financial regulation on the grounds that it hurts community and small banks. What if community and small bankers joined the call of conservative Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher to break up the big banks?
Multinational executives have just launched the “LIFT America” Coalition to push for a territorial tax system that would exempt from U.S. taxes all profits reported abroad. ASBC and its allies could rally small businesses to demand closing down overseas tax havens and imposing a minimum tax on profits sitting abroad, so that they didn’t face a higher tax burden that their global competitors.
In today’s Washington, powerful corporate interests stymie progress on areas vital to our future. Can a right/left, small-business/worker odd bedfellows alliance emerge to counter the predatory interests? We can only hope so.
By: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 26, 2013
“Surrounded By Hacks”: Scott Walker Hires Torture Apologist To Ghostwrite Campaign Book
Looks like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is going to try to be president now. Robert Costa reports that Walker is “collaborating on a book with Marc Thiessen, a former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush.” It’s not like a sci-fi robot murder mystery that takes place in the distant future on Ganymede, either: It is an I would like to be president sort of book, “with stories about his family, his values, and his rise to power.” It will probably be boring.
But just because it will be a boring book doesn’t mean that its existence isn’t interesting.
Thiessen is a very poor Washington Post opinion columnist who wrote a book in which he strung together a series of distortions in support of the thesis that torture is great. Before the book and the column gig, he was a speechwriter for George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. (Before that, Thiessen spent six years as a spokesperson and “policy adviser” to unreconstructed white supremacist Sen. Jesse Helms, which is another thing that should effectively bar him from participating in civilized society.)
Thiessen likely got the job because he’s written a bunch of columns lauding Walker as a leader at the forefront of the “GOP revolution.” In 2012, he called for Romney to select Walker as his running mate, writing, “Barack Obama is afraid of Scott Walker.” (Thiessen also wrote that a victory for Walker in his then-imminent recall election “would make Walker the instant front-runner for the GOP vice presidential nod.” Walker won, and did not become a front-runner for the vice-presidential nod.)
The book is clearly more about national ambition than it is part of Walker’s 2014 reelection campaign. He does not need help with name recognition in Wisconsin, and Thiessen has no connection to the state at all. Walker also just went to CPAC and plans to visit Iowa and give a speech to one of their thousands of random GOP groups this spring. He’s a Midwestern governor, roughly half of his state approves of him, and the conservative activist base loves him. It would almost be stupid if he didn’t give running for president a shot.
Walker’s decision likely got a bit easier this month, when the three-year investigation into the unusual amount of illegal campaign activity carried out by some of his appointees and fundraisers concluded without Walker facing any charges or specific allegations of wrongdoing. Six individuals connected to Walker were charged with crimes. Two of his aides each separately looted a fund intended for a picnic for veterans and their families. Timothy Russell, who worked closely with Walker in various jobs for a decade, was sentenced to two years in prison.
Walker’s repeated appointment of Russell to various positions suggests that a Walker administration would be, like the Bush administration, full of political hacks whose only qualifications for their posts will be either ideological certitude or fundraising ability. His hiring of Marc Thiessen is evidence that he has no strategic or moral issues with the Bush administration’s foreign policy. For a party that’s desperate to reform its image without changing a thing about its policies, he’s as good a candidate as any. He just better make sure his book doesn’t accidentally express any opinions about immigration reform.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, March 25, 2013
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