“… And Justice For All”: The Rule Of Law Defines Civilization And Underpins America’s Precious Democratic Experiment
I’m a little emotional about same-sex couples accepting Alabama Probate Judges’ time-honored offer to newlyweds “You may kiss”. These marriages are all the sweeter because when we were married by an Alabama Probate Judge three decades ago, it was a very different world. Sorta.
Those were the days of “I now pronounced you man and wife.” Unmistakably, a man was a man whatever his marital status. Once married, a woman was reduced to her role. We’d already warned the Judge off the the “obey” thing, but he informed us that another trip to the courthouse and a formal petition — fifty bucks, please — was required for me to reclaim my own surname. It had legally vanished with “I do”. It is a privilege to see justice finally promised to another oppressed group. And what additional satisfaction it is to have a front row seat, watching seemingly immovable traditions — reserving marriage for some, refusing it to others, arbitrarily elevating some over others — dissolving before the irresistible force of a Federal Judge’s orders overturning Alabama’s law banning same-sex marriage — celebration time.
A victory of this proportion is for everyone, a lesson on a grand scale. People died for these rights. Credit especially the martyred San Francisco Board of Supervisors Harvey Milk and his profound insight: “‘Coming out’ is the most political thing you can do.” When individuals risked everything to be true to themselves, debilitating stereotypes dissolved into the faces of our family members, neighbors, friends and coworkers. Millions shared the honor when Mr. Milk was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2009. Our world is improving because people were brave.
Would that the heroic reporter Dudley Clendinen had lived to see this turn of events. His Out for Good, which we explored with him in 1999, remains an important report on harsh realities still endured by too many homosexuals in the world and in America. The particulars of people’s private lives continue to elicit sensational and hate-filled reactions. Still.
Not surprising is the recalcitrance of the “Ten Commandments” Alabama Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court Roy Moore. Nor is this appalling defiance of the Federal Judge’s direct order out of character. In 2003, his own colleagues removed him from office for defying the law. What does it say for the voting majority in Alabama, that In 2012 they returned him to the same position?
I am amazed that half the judges in the State defied their Chief Justice. Perhaps they realized his argument is “so 1832”, dating back as it does to South Carolinian John C. Calhoun’s (and later the Confederacy’s) notion of “nullification“. Maybe those law-abiding Probate Judges didn’t want to be counted among the more recent neo-nullification gang: Orval Faubus, George Wallace, Lester Maddox and now, notably, the list includes the former Governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee (who’s also voiced suspicions about dancing).
Whatever their motivation, it’s a breath of fresh air that so many Alabama Probate Judges obeyed the Federal court order and married whomever chose that august and demanding path. This is all the more noteworthy given their Chief Justice’s recalcitrance, which carries the distinctive stench of oppression still lingering across America from white supremacists imposing equally noxious restrictions based on race as well as gender.
The rule of law defines civilization and underpins America’s precious (and precarious) democratic experiment. A less privileged individual would go to jail for the kind of defiance we are witnessing. A senior judge flagrantly breaking the law with apparent impunity is a sad spectacle, even in long-benighted Alabama.
Ultimately, justice will win out in a just polity. Still, it should not be necessary to overcome the willful injustice of atavistic elements of our judicial system.
By: Paula Gordon, The Blog, The HUffington Post, February 22, 2015
“The Plutocrat Politburo”: The Koch Brothers Don’t Care If You Care About Their Plans To Buy 2016 Election
The Koch brothers are done being shy. That’s the conclusion one would have to draw from the fact that they just announced that they hope to spend $889 million on the 2016 election, an unprecedented amount of outside money. It won’t all be theirs — they’re assembling a kind of Plutocrat Politburo, a group of billionaires and zillionaires who will contribute to the cause — but with a combined worth of over $80 billion, they’ll surely be the ones opening their ample wallets the widest and determining the strategy and the agenda.
But unlike some previous reporting on Charles and David’s political efforts, this revelation — which comes from a gathering in beautiful Rancho Mirage of Freedom Partners, the organization through which the Kochs and their allies will distribute all these millions — didn’t require any secret meetings with anonymous sources to unearth. They just told everyone. Here’s the Post’s story on it, here’s the New York Times’ story on it, and here’s Politico’s story on it, all complete with ample details and on-the-record quotes. Reporters may not have been invited into the private meetings at the gathering, but they were allowed to hang around and talk to the participants. And no fewer than four potential GOP presidential candidates (Scott Walker, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz) showed up as well, obviously unconcerned about any charge that they’re kowtowing to the uber-rich.
So the Kochs appear to have concluded that the efforts by Democrats (especially Harry Reid) to turn the Koch name into a symbol of everything that’s wrong in American politics have failed. No longer must they cower in their mansions and take pains to conceal their political spending, fearful of the piercing barbs aimed by liberal politicians and commentators, when all they want is for Americans to fully appreciate the majesty of laissez-faire economics. Free at last, free at last, thank Citizens United, they’re free at last.
If you were expecting journalists to express much consternation at the idea that a group of the super-wealthy are openly announcing their intention to buy the next election, you’ll be disappointed. Instead, the news is being reported more like that of a record-breaking contract for a professional athlete: wonder at the sums involved, but precious little moral outrage. That’s mostly because political reporters tend to believe that election campaigns are already nothing but a parade of deception and manipulation, an enterprise that’s inherently corrupt. So what’s a little more corruption?
There’s no doubt that the behind-the-scenes machinations are fascinating to anyone interested in politics. By putting themselves on par with or even above the parties, the Kochs will make the conflict within the Republican Party even more complex, and potentially vicious, than it already was. Ken Vogel of Politico described the move as “a show of dominance to rival factions on the right, including the Republican National Committee.” What happens when the insurgents are even better funded than what we’ve taken to calling the establishment? It will certainly be interesting to find out.
In any case, the Kochs are probably right that they have little to lose by being public about their plans. Yes, they’ll have to absorb some stern editorials, and maybe even some ads from the DNC criticizing Republican politicians for associating with them. But weighed against what they have to gain by putting nearly a billion dollars into the next presidential campaign — more than the two parties spent, combined, in 2012 — that’s a price so small it’s barely worth worrying about.
In his 2003 novel Jennifer Government, Max Barry imagines a future in which the penetration of capitalism and marketing has become so total that people take the names of their corporate employers as their own last names; characters are called things like John Nike, Nathaniel ExxonMobil, and Calvin McDonalds.
We may not have gotten quite that far yet, but the next Republican president — whether that person is elected in 2016 or after — will have been sponsored, supported, elevated, and outfitted by the Koch brothers and their friends. Should a Republican candidate they don’t like show promise in the primaries, he will surely be crushed by the awesome machine they’re building. The winner may not take their name (Scott Walker-Koch, perhaps?), but he or she will be in their debt to a degree we have not previously contemplated. And the consensus will be that that’s just how things work now.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, January 27, 2015
“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
“To A Healthier Democracy”: Ending Armageddon
Meg Greenfield, the late Post editorial page editor, counseled against writing in “High C” all the time. By this she meant that an editorialist or columnist who expressed equally noisy levels of indignation about everything would lack credibility when something truly outrageous came along that merited a well-crafted high-pitched scream.
We now seem to be living in the Age of High C, a period when every fight is Armageddon, every foe is a monster, and every issue is either the key to national survival or the doorway to ruin.
This habit seems especially pronounced in the way President Obama’s adversaries treat him. It’s odd that so many continue to see Obama as a radical and a socialist even as the Dow hits record levels and the wealthy continue to do very nicely. If he is a socialist, he is surely the most incompetent practitioner in the history of Marxism.
The reaction to Obama is part of a larger difficulty that involves pretending we are philosophically far more divided than we are. In all of the well-off democracies, even people who call themselves socialists no longer claim to have an alternative to the market as the primary creator and distributor of goods and services. The boundaries on the left end of what’s permissible in the public debate have been pushed well toward the center. This makes the hysteria and hyperbole all the more incomprehensible.
But let’s dream a little and assume that the American left signed on to the proposals put forward by Lane Kenworthy of the University of California-San Diego in his challenging (and, by the way, very pro-market) book “Social Democratic America,” published this year. Kenworthy’s argument is that we can “successfully embrace both flexibility and security, both competition and social justice.”
His wish list is a straightforward set of progressive initiatives. A few of them: universal health insurance and early education, extensive new help on job searches and training, a year of paid parental leave, an increased minimum wage indexed to prices, expansions of efforts that supplement wages such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the government as an employer of last resort.
His program, he says, would cost around 10 percent of our gross domestic product. Now that’s a lot of money, and the debate about whether we should spend it would be anything but phony. Yet would such a level of expenditure signal the death of our constitutional system? Would it make us like, say, Cuba? No and no. It might make us a little more like Germany, the Netherlands or the Scandinavian countries. We can argue if we want to do this, but these market democracies happen to share with us an affection for freedom and enterprise.
And when it comes to High C, there’s nothing quite like our culture wars, in which disagreements about social issues are seen as battles between libertines and bigots. When I look around, I see a lot of liberals who live quite traditional family lives and even go regularly to churches, synagogues and mosques. I see a lot of conservatives who are feminists when it comes to their daughters’ opportunities and who oppose bigotry against gays and lesbians.
The ideological resolution I’d suggest for the new year is that all sides stop fighting and pool their energies to easing the marriage and family crisis that is engulfing working-class Americans.
This would require liberals to acknowledge what the vast majority of them already practice in their own lives: that, all things being equal, kids are better off with two loving and engaged parents. It would require conservatives to acknowledge that many of the pressures on families are economic and that the decline of well-paying blue-collar work is causing huge disruptions in family formation. I’d make a case that Kenworthy’s ideas for a more social democratic America would be good for families, but let’s argue it out in the spirit of a shared quest for remedies.
Maybe it’s asking too much, but might social conservatives also consider my friend Jonathan Rauch’s idea that they abandon their campaign against gay marriage in favor of a new campaign on behalf of the value of committed relationships for all of us?
Disagreement is one of the joys of freedom, so I am all for boisterous debate and tough political and philosophical competition. It’s how I make my living. But our democratic system would be healthier if it followed the Greenfield rule and reserved the harshest invective for things that are genuinely monstrous.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 28, 2014
“Our Democracy Is Dying”: For All Intents And Purposes, Our Government Is Merely The Handmaiden Of Corporations
In case anybody hasn’t noticed, democracy in America is dying now. This isn’t an overstatement; it’s a fact. Corporate interests dominate our politics so much at this point that our government, for all intents and purposes, is merely its handmaiden. Whatever Wall Street wants, Wall Street gets. Corporatism is the new order of the day. One political party stands for it; the other political party won’t stand against it.
The word inertia means the tendency of an object to move in whatever direction its been moving until and unless there’s the introduction of a counterforce, and the Democratic Party is simply not providing the necessary counterforce to the corporatist agenda so exalted by the Republicans. Such a possibility is undermined by Democrats with corporatist agendas of their own. Watch them trying to sideline Elizabeth Warren as I write this. It’s all gotten so terribly predictable.
Some people are pussyfooting around the word, but others are realizing it’s time to say it: we need a peaceful revolution in America. In the words of President John F. Kennedy, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” The American people have simply got to stand up now. This isn’t the time for any of us to go mute – whether it’s those who feel there’s no point in saying anything, or those who feel there’s too big a risk in saying anything. And you know who you are.
The social revolution we need is comprised of two major categories: What we say No to, and what we say Yes to. In the American Revolution, with the Declaration of Independence we said no to what we would no longer accept (living under British rule). In ratifying the Constitution, we said yes to what we would do instead (form our own system of government). The template was genius then, and it’s genius now. Today, we need to say no to a situation in which our government is bought and paid for, and yes to a return to democracy. Nothing short of an historic, nothing namby-pamby-about-it, serious social movement will take us out of our free fall and set America back on the track to real liberty. Today, lobbyists – not the people – are in control. And that is not freedom.
The situation has shaken out – and thank you, Senators McConnell and Reid for adding to the disaster of Citizens United by upping the amount people can contribute to political parties; that really helps (not) – in such a way that nothing short of a Constitutional Amendment will stop the big money flowing into our political campaigns like poison into the veins of our democracy. The best bet now — given the resistance within both major parties to seriously taking down the dastardly “For Sale” sign posted on the front yard of our government — is for the people ourselves to call for a Constitutional Convention, state by state. And that’s what has started to happen.
If something inside you says, “That’s true,” then I hope you get active. We’re in serious straits now and things won’t get better by themselves. In denial about this? Go stand over there. Too cynical to think we can change things? Go stand over there. Too sedated to be upset yet? Go stand over there. An apologist for the system? Go stand over there. Ready to kick ass? Go to http://www.wolf-pac.com/ and express yourself big time. Work with that organization, or with any other you like. But this isn’t a time to sit on the sidelines. Our democracy is sick – it is really, really sick — and all of us are needed now to nourish it and make it well.
By: Marianne Williamson, The Blog, The Huffington Post, December 14, 2014
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