“The 100 Rich People Who Run America”: The Ultra-Wealthy Have Taken Over The Political System
We are well past the point that anyone will be shocked or even surprised by how distorted our system of funding campaigns has become, but thanks to some excellent reporting by Ken Vogel at Politico, we now have some interesting new perspective.
We have reached a tipping point where mega donors completely dominate the landscape. The 100 largest donors in the 2014 cycle gave almost as much money to candidates as the 4.75 million people who gave $200 or less (and certainly that number goes from “almost” to “more” if we could include contributions that are not required by law to be disclosed).
Think about this for a minute. This is consequential. It means that candidates running for office are genuflecting before an audience of 100 wealthy individuals to fuel their campaigns. So, whose bidding do we think these candidates are going to do? Is it any wonder that the interests of large corporations and unions get to the front of the line?
Liberal Democrats like to blow their bugles about how all the big money in politics comes from rich Republicans. Actually, as Vogel points out, 52 of the 100 top donors are Democrats, and the No. 1 donor by far is Democrat Tom Steyer, who chipped in $74 million.
At least we’ve achieved some bipartisanship somewhere in our political ecosphere. Both parties are now equal opportunity offenders when it comes to gaming the system.
But I don’t fault Steyer or the Koch brothers for trying to exert their influence on politics and public policy. They have strongly held beliefs and issues they care about deeply, and they are simply spending a lot of their money to try and change things in a direction they believe would be better. Nothing illegal or unethical about that.
But let’s call the system that Citizens United and other rulings and laws have created what it is: an oligarchy. The system is controlled by a handful of ultra-wealthy people, most of whom got rich from the system and who will get richer from the system.
Supporters of the system believe that the $3.67 billion we spent on elections last cycle isn’t really all that much money. An Arkansas poultry company owner and big time political donor, Ronnie Cameron, reflected to Vogel that it’s not so different today than it’s been in the past when, “Our country was founded by the wealthy landowners having the authority and representing all the people.”
He said that out loud. To a reporter. Knowing other people might read those words. Without any apparent irony. Imagine all the poor Americans who will sleep better knowing that a rich Southern chicken farmer is happy to represent their interests.
Vogel gets to the heart of the problem though, reporting that, “When all the donations are tallied and analyzed, 2014 is likely to be noteworthy for two other milestones on the opposite end of the spectrum from the growth of mega-donations: It’s on pace to be the first mid-term election since 1990—the earliest cycle for which the Center for Responsive Politics performed such an analysis—in which the overall number of traceable donations declined. It’s also likely to be the first midterm since 1990 when the candidates’ campaigns spent less than the preceding midterm election.
The decline in candidate spending, though, is more than offset by the increase in spending by super PACs and other groups that can accept huge contributions from the ultra-rich.
That means that fewer and fewer everyday Americans are choosing to contribute to campaigns. In fact, less than 1 percent of Americans donate today. And who can blame them for feeling disenfranchised when they see their efforts dwarfed by the mega donors.
At the same time, campaigns are spending less while the special-interest groups are spending more. So we now have a system that discourages voters from participating and engaging, while rewarding and encouraging special interests to participate even more.
“[O]ur nation is facing a crisis of liberty if we do not control campaign expenditures. We must prove that elective office is not for sale. We must convince the public that elected officials are what James Madison intended us to be, agents of the sovereign people, not the hired hands of rich givers, or what Madison called factions.”
Those are the words not of some liberal Democrat. That’s the prescient echo of Barry Goldwater from 30 years ago.
By: Mark McKinnon, The Daily Beast, January 5, 2015
“A Lingering Problem With Racism”: Black Men; Beware Of Police Officers
It’s one of the best-known lines of any English-language poet — Robert Burns’ reflection on the upper-class church lady who doesn’t realize there’s a louse crawling around on her bonnet. “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us, To see oursels as ithers see us!”
I had an opportunity to see how others see us while vacationing in Italy when news broke of the grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for killing teenager Michael Brown. Across Europe, the news coverage was nonstop. And it wasn’t pretty.
For most Europeans, the failure of the grand jury to indict, and resulting riots in Ferguson and other cities, was just further proof that a country that brags of its human rights record has itself a serious, continuing problem with racism. On German television, a special program on racism in America opened with the chilling observation: “For half a century, the land of the free has been trying to overcome racism and discrimination — with doubtful results.” French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira summed up her impressions on Twitter: “Racial profiling, social exclusion, territorial segregation, cultural marginalization, firearms, fear, fatal cocktail.”
Of course, nobody enjoyed rubbing our nose in it more than Russia. After years of our condemning the Russian government for its denial of basic human rights, this was their chance to get even. Russia’s foreign ministry, which dubbed the unrest a “color revolution,” cited the riots as evidence of “systematic shortcomings of American democracy.”
It’s uncomfortable to hear such criticism, especially from nations that are hardly paragons of virtue. Yet, they are right! We do have a lingering problem with racism in this country. We might as well admit it, and we’d better start dealing with it. We saw it in Los Angeles with Rodney King. We saw it in Sanford, Florida, with Trayvon Martin. We saw it in Ferguson with Michael Brown. And now we see it, once again, on Staten Island, with Eric Garner. Add to these cases that no doubt go unreported every day nationwide.
As shocking as the grand jury’s decision in Ferguson might be, the Staten Island grand jury’s decision not to indict is even worse — because they were presented with so much more evidence. Starting with a video of the entire incident, on which Garner can be heard repeatedly warning “I can’t breathe,” as Officer Daniel Pantaleo locks him in a chokehold while four or five other police officers hold him down, face pressed into the sidewalk. They then leave him lying there for more than five minutes — handcuffed, not breathing, without administering any aid — until an ambulance arrives. And there’s no doubt how he died. The medical examiner ruled that Garner’s death was a homicide caused by the chokehold — the use of which is banned under New York Police Department rules.
Yet, despite such clear evidence of police abuse, the grand jury refused to indict Pantaleo, who thereby joined Darren Wilson as the latest white police officers to kill an unarmed black man and get away with it. Garner, meanwhile, joined Michael Brown as two of their latest victims, neither of whom deserved to die. Michael Brown’s crime? Walking down the street in Ferguson. Eric Garner’s crime? Allegedly selling loose cigarettes on the streets of Staten Island without a license. Would a young white man have been killed by police for such minor offenses?
Hopefully, the back-to-back deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner will serve as the two-by-four between the eyes necessary to wake all of us up to the need to confront the issue of race head-on — and not forget about it until the next headline-grabbing event. Yes, we’ve made a lot of progress since the days of Jim Crow. But the evidence of continuing racial discrimination is overwhelming: in racial profiling of young blacks by law enforcement, in the disproportionate number of blacks in prison, in a lack of representation in elective office and executive suites and in court decisions upholding restrictions on voting rights.
President Obama should take the lead by appointing a National Commission on Racism to hold hearings around the country, study the problem and make recommendations for action at the federal, state and local level. We can no longer accept a reality where an African-American occupies the Oval Office, yet a young black man can’t walk down the street without being stopped and questioned — merely because he’s black. It sounds harsh to say it, but it’s true. More than anyone else today, black men have much to fear when confronted by white cops.
By: Bill Press, Host, Nationally Syndicated Radio Show, Full Court Press; The National Memo, January 5, 2015
“Lax Gun Laws”: Gun Proliferation Fuels Homicide Rates In The Americas
Poor and middle-income nations of Latin America and the Caribbean are the most homicide-prone countries in the world, according to an analysis of a new United Nations report on violence. And because of lax gun laws, it found, far more homicides are committed with firearms in the Americas than in any other part of the world.
The analysis of the Global Status Report on Violence Prevention 2014, published last week by the Pan American Health Organization, reported that the highest homicide rates were in Honduras, Venezuela, Jamaica and Belize, with the Honduran rate — 104 killings per 100,000 population — nearly double that of the next deadliest countries. By contrast, the lowest homicide rates in the Americas were in Canada, Antigua and Barbuda, and Chile. Canada’s was less than two per 100,000 population, while others were below five. The homicide rate in the United States was 5.3 per 100,000.
In the poor and middle-income countries of the Americas, shootings accounted for 75 percent of all murders. In the United States, they accounted for 68 percent. No other region of the world comes close to that; by contrast, in Europe, Africa and Asia, where guns are harder to come by, murders were committed with guns 32 percent of the time or less. Stabbings were more common.
The United Nations report was published jointly by the World Health Organization, the United Nations Development Program and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
It recommended that countries restrict access to guns and alcohol, teach adolescents to resolve conflicts without violence, and start campaigns to decrease violence against women, children and older people.
By: Donald G. McNeil, J., The New York Times, December 15, 2014
“Presidents And The Economy”: Serious Analyses Of The Reagan-Era Business Cycle Place Very Little Weight On Reagan
Suddenly, or so it seems, the U.S. economy is looking better. Things have been looking up for a while, but at this point the signs of improvement — job gains, rapidly growing G.D.P., rising public confidence — are unmistakable.
The improving economy is surely one factor in President Obama’s rising approval rating. And there’s a palpable sense of panic among Republicans, despite their victory in the midterms. They expected to run in 2016 against a record of failure; what do they do if the economy is looking pretty good?
Well, that’s their problem. What I want to ask instead is whether any of this makes sense. How much influence does the occupant of the White House have on the economy, anyway? The standard answer among economists, at least when they aren’t being political hacks, is: not much. But is this time different?
To understand why economists usually downplay the economic role of presidents, let’s revisit a much-mythologized episode in U.S. economic history: the recession and recovery of the 1980s.
On the right, of course, the 1980s are remembered as an age of miracles wrought by the blessed Reagan, who cut taxes, conjured up the magic of the marketplace and led the nation to job gains never matched before or since. In reality, the 16 million jobs America added during the Reagan years were only slightly more than the 14 million added over the previous eight years. And a later president — Bill something-or-other — presided over the creation of 22 million jobs. But who’s counting?
In any case, however, serious analyses of the Reagan-era business cycle place very little weight on Reagan, and emphasize instead the role of the Federal Reserve, which sets monetary policy and is largely independent of the political process. At the beginning of the 1980s, the Fed, under the leadership of Paul Volcker, was determined to bring inflation down, even at a heavy price; it tightened policy, sending interest rates sky high, with mortgage rates going above 18 percent. What followed was a severe recession that drove unemployment to double digits but also broke the wage-price spiral.
Then the Fed decided that America had suffered enough. It loosened the reins, sending interest rates plummeting and housing starts soaring. And the economy bounced back. Reagan got the political credit for “morning in America,” but Mr. Volcker was actually responsible for both the slump and the boom.
The point is that normally the Fed, not the White House, rules the economy. Should we apply the same rule to the Obama years?
Not quite.
For one thing, the Fed has had a hard time gaining traction in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, because the aftermath of a huge housing and mortgage bubble has left private spending relatively unresponsive to interest rates. This time around, monetary policy really needed help from a temporary increase in government spending, which meant that the president could have made a big difference. And he did, for a while; politically, the Obama stimulus may have been a failure, but an overwhelming majority of economists believe that it helped mitigate the slump.
Since then, however, scorched-earth Republican opposition has more than reversed that initial effort. In fact, federal spending adjusted for inflation and population growth is lower now than it was when Mr. Obama took office; at the same point in the Reagan years, it was up more than 20 percent. So much, then, for fiscal policy.
There is, however, another sense in which Mr. Obama has arguably made a big difference. The Fed has had a hard time getting traction, but it has at least made an effort to boost the economy — and it has done so despite ferocious attacks from conservatives, who have accused it again and again of “debasing the dollar” and setting the stage for runaway inflation. Without Mr. Obama to shield its independence, the Fed might well have been bullied into raising interest rates, which would have been disastrous. So the president has indirectly aided the economy by helping to fend off the hard-money mob.
Last but not least, even if you think Mr. Obama deserves little or no credit for good economic news, the fact is his opponents have spent years claiming that his bad attitude — he has been known to suggest, now and then, that some bankers have behaved badly — is somehow responsible for the economy’s weakness. Now that he’s presiding over unexpected economic strength, they can’t just turn around and assert his irrelevance.
So is the president responsible for the accelerating recovery? No. Can we nonetheless say that we’re doing better than we would be if the other party held the White House? Yes. Do those who were blaming Mr. Obama for all our economic ills now look like knaves and fools? Yes, they do. And that’s because they are.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 4, 2015
“Who Should Investigate Police Abuse?”: When Local DA’s Investigate Local Police Officers, There Is An Inherent Conflict Of Interest
The national conversation about police abuse will shortly take a new turn. Following the failures of local grand juries to bring charges against the white police officers who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner, in Staten Island, protesters around the country took to the streets. Then, after the murders of the New York police officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu in Brooklyn on December 21st, a fierce backlash against the anti-police protests began. The result is a sour standoff, with opposing sides united only in their sense of victimhood. Protesters shout “I can’t breathe,” and cops turn their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio—but now what?
To date, one serious proposal for reform has emerged. On December 8th, Eric Schneiderman, the Attorney General of New York, proposed that Governor Andrew Cuomo name him, Schneiderman, as an independent special prosecutor to investigate and, if appropriate, prosecute police officers in any situation where they cause the death of a civilian. As Schneiderman noted in his letter to the governor, the proposal seeks to address a real problem. When local district attorneys investigate local police officers, there is an inherent conflict of interest. In virtually all usual circumstances, police and prosecutors are partners, working together to build cases against defendants. This is especially true in a place like Staten Island, where the elected district attorney, Dan Donovan, both works closely with the police and answers to many of them as his constituents. As Schneinderman noted, on the rare occasions when prosecutors investigate the police, even when all parties act with the best of intentions, “the question is whether there is public confidence that justice has been served, especially in cases where homicide or other serious charges against the accused officer are not pursued or are dismissed prior to a jury trial.” Cases, in other words, like those of the officers who killed Brown and Garner. (Cuomo has hedged in response to Schneiderman’s idea, saying that he wants to weigh a full package of reforms.)
Schneiderman’s proposal met with a fiercely negative response from an unexpected quarter. Kenneth Thompson, the newly elected district attorney in Brooklyn, blasted Schneiderman’s proposal as “unworkable” and an insult to the state’s sixty-two elected district attorneys. Thompson, a Democrat, is hardly a mouthpiece for his colleagues in law enforcement; he defeated an incumbent district attorney, in significant part, by criticizing the cozy relationship between police and prosecutors in the borough. In his objections to Schneiderman’s proposal, Thompson pointed to potential practical problems—saying that it would stretch the attorney general too thin, particularly if it came to include all accusations of police brutality, not just those that ended in death. But Thompson’s objections were also more profound. “As the duly elected district attorney of Brooklyn, I am more than able to thoroughly and fairly investigate any fatality of an unarmed civilian by a police officer,” Thompson said. Indeed, Thompson recently brought a police-brutality case against two officers, and is investigating the recent police-shooting death of an unarmed man in a housing project.
The conflict between Schneiderman and Thompson illustrates a paradox, even a contradiction, in the criminal-justice system. New York, like most states, has a regime of elected countywide prosecutors. The idea is that law enforcement should respond to the needs of the local community, and for the subjective needs of the community to be paramount. But the system also demands objectivity—an ideal of justice untainted by the special interests of the locals. This is the heart of the conflict over Schneiderman’s idea, and both sides can point to examples that prove their point. It is true that local prosecutors like Thompson have, on occasion, brought successful cases against local police officers. And outsiders, who are not subject to the usual checks and balances on prosecutors, can abuse their freedom. “When you start to talk about special prosecutors—do we really want another Ken Starr?” Frank Sedita, the Erie County District Attorney, asked in response to Schneiderman, referring to the federal independent counsel who led the investigation of President Bill Clinton. The risk, according to Sedita, is ending up with “somebody who is not accountable to the public and specifically not accountable to the citizens of that county.”
Schneiderman’s idea has considerable appeal; his judgment in the Eric Garner case would surely have had more credibility than the one rendered by Donovan. Still, special prosecutors are not necessarily good or bad. Like the locals they replace, they are only as good as the cases they bring, or refrain from bringing. That, ultimately, will rest on the good judgment of the individuals involved, and no one has yet figured out a way of putting the right person in place all the time.
By: Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker, December 30, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 