The Koch Brothers’ Big Bucks
In case anyone needed a reminder about the kind of forces Democrats will be up against next year, the Koch brothers are putting together their plan to help buy the 2012 elections.
The billionaire industrialist brothers David and Charles Koch plan to steer more than $200 million — potentially much more — to conservative groups ahead of Election Day, POLITICO has learned. That puts their libertarian-leaning network in the same league as the most active of the groups in the more establishment-oriented network conceived last year by veteran GOP operatives Rove and Ed Gillespie, which plans to raise $240 million.
That’s financing for an awful lot of attack ads, nearly all of which will be dishonest, and which a whole lot of voters will believe.
It’ll be interesting, though, to see whether Democrats are able to make the Koch money toxic. We learned last week that there’s ample evidence that Koch Industries made “improper payments” (read: bribes) to “secure contracts in six countries dating back to 2002.” One of those countries, it turns out, is Iran, which has purchased millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment from the Kochs’ company, despite a trade ban and the U.S. labeling Iran a state sponsor of terrorism. The Kochs’ business also stand accused of having “rigged prices with competitors, lied to regulators and repeatedly run afoul of environmental regulations, resulting in five criminal convictions since 1999 in the U.S. and Canada.”
This is the money that’s going to buy elections for Republicans?
Over the summer, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) declared, “Plain and simple, if you do business with Iran, you cannot do business with America.”
Follow-up question for Cantor, who’s accepted tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Koch Industries: those who do business with Iran cannot do business with America, but can they partner with the Republican Party to swing an election cycle?
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly-Political Animal, October 10, 2011
The Occupy Protests: A Timely Call For Justice
Occupy Wall Street and its kindred protests around the country are inept, incoherent and hopelessly quixotic. God, I love ’em.
I love every little thing about these gloriously amateurish sit-ins. I love that they are spontaneous, leaderless and open-ended. I love that the protesters refuse to issue specific demands beyond a forceful call for economic justice. I also love that in Chicago — uniquely, thus far — demonstrators have ignored the rule about vagueness and are being ultra-specific about their goals. I love that there are no rules, just tendencies.
I love that when Occupy Wall Street was denied permission to use bullhorns, demonstrators came up with an alternative straight out of Monty Python, or maybe “The Flintstones”: Have everyone within earshot repeat a speaker’s words, verbatim and in unison, so the whole crowd can hear. It works — and sounds tremendously silly. Protest movements that grow into something important tend to have a sense of humor.
I can’t help but love that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor called the protests “growing mobs” and complained about fellow travelers who “have actually condoned the pitting of Americans against Americans.” This would be the same Eric Cantor who praised the Tea Party movement in its raucous, confrontational, foaming-at-the-mouth infancy as “an organic movement” that was “about the people.” The man’s hypocrisy belongs in the Smithsonian.
Most of all, I love that the Occupy protests arise at just the right moment and are aimed at just the right target. This could be the start of something big and important.
“Economic justice” may mean different things to different people, but it’s not an empty phrase. It captures the sense that somehow, when we weren’t looking, the concept of fairness was deleted from our economic system — and our political lexicon. Economic injustice became the norm.
Revolutionary advances in technology and globalization are the forces most responsible for the hollowing-out of the American economy. But our policymakers responded in ways that tended to accentuate, rather than ameliorate, the most damaging effects of these worldwide trends.
The result is clear: a nation where the rich have become the mega-rich while the middle class has steadily lost ground, where unemployment is stuck at levels once considered unbearable, and where our political system is too dysfunctional to take the kind of bold action that would make a real difference. Eventually, the economy will limp out of this slump, and things will seem better. Fundamentally, however, nothing will have changed.
Does that sound broad and unfocused? Yes, but it’s true.
The Occupy Wall Street protesters saw this broad, unfocused truth — and also understood that the place to begin this movement was at the epicenter of the financial system.
For most of our history, it was understood that the financial sector was supposed to perform a vital service for the economy: channeling capital to the companies where it could be most effectively used. But the rapid technological, economic and political change the world has witnessed in recent decades created myriad opportunities for Wall Street to channel capital to itself, often by inventing exotic new securities whose underpinnings may not exist. The 2008 financial crisis demonstrated the urgent need for reform.
It’s not that investment bankers should be held responsible for all the ills of the world. It’s that Wall Street is emblematic of an entire economic and political system that no longer seems to have the best interests of most Americans at heart.
So a ragtag group — not huge, but idealistic and determined — camps out in Lower Manhattan. A similar thing happens in two dozen other cities. And maybe a movement is born.
Already, after less than a month, commentators are asking whether the Occupy protests can be transformed into a coherent political force. For now, at least, I hope not.
We have no shortage of politicians in this country. What we need is more passion and energy in the service of justice. We need to be forced to answer questions that sound simplistic or naive — questions about ethics and values. Detailed policy positions can wait.
At some point, these protest encampments will disappear — and, since the nation and the world will not have changed, they’ll be judged a failure. But I’ve got a hunch that this likely judgment will be wrong. I think the seed of progressive activism in the Occupy protests may grow into something very big indeed.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 10, 2011
“Economic Royalists”: The Panic Of The Plutocrats
It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America’s direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.
And this reaction tells you something important — namely, that the extremists threatening American values are what F.D.R. called “economic royalists,” not the people camping in Zuccotti Park.
Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed the modest-sized if growing demonstrations, which have involved some confrontations with the police — confrontations that seem to have involved a lot of police overreaction — but nothing one could call a riot. And there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.
Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.” The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.” My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them.
Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor and a financial-industry titan in his own right, was a bit more moderate, but still accused the protesters of trying to “take the jobs away from people working in this city,” a statement that bears no resemblance to the movement’s actual goals.
And if you were listening to talking heads on CNBC, you learned that the protesters “let their freak flags fly,” and are “aligned with Lenin.”
The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.
Last year, you may recall, a number of financial-industry barons went wild over very mild criticism from President Obama. They denounced Mr. Obama as being almost a socialist for endorsing the so-called Volcker rule, which would simply prohibit banks backed by federal guarantees from engaging in risky speculation. And as for their reaction to proposals to close a loophole that lets some of them pay remarkably low taxes — well, Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group, compared it to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.
And then there’s the campaign of character assassination against Elizabeth Warren, the financial reformer now running for the Senate in Massachusetts. Not long ago a YouTube video of Ms. Warren making an eloquent, down-to-earth case for taxes on the rich went viral. Nothing about what she said was radical — it was no more than a modern riff on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous dictum that “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”
But listening to the reliable defenders of the wealthy, you’d think that Ms. Warren was the second coming of Leon Trotsky. George Will declared that she has a “collectivist agenda,” that she believes that “individualism is a chimera.” And Rush Limbaugh called her “a parasite who hates her host. Willing to destroy the host while she sucks the life out of it.”
What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.
Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.
This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth Warren.
So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 9, 2011
The Truth About Voter Suppression
The national trauma of the 2000 presidential election and its messy denouement in Florida and the U.S. Supreme Court made, for a brief moment, election reform a cause célèbre. The scrutiny of election administration went far beyond the vote counting and recounting that dominated headlines. The Florida saga cast a harsh light on the whole country’s archaic and fragmented system of election administration, exemplified by a state where hundreds of thousands of citizens were disenfranchised by incompetent and malicious voter purges, Reconstruction-era felon voting bans, improper record-keeping, and deliberate deception and harassment.
The outrage generated by the revelations of 2000 soon spent itself or was channeled into other avenues, producing, as a sort of consolation prize, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, an underambitious and underfunded law mainly aimed at preventing partisan mischief in vote counting. The fundamental problem of accepting 50 different systems for election administration, complicated even more in states like Florida where local election officials control most decisions with minimal federal, state or judicial oversight, was barely touched by HAVA. As Judith Browne-Dianis, of the civil rights group the Advancement Project, told me: “The same cracks in the system have persisted.”
But most politicians in both parties paid lip service to the idea that every American citizen had a right to vote, and that higher voting levels of the sort taken for granted in most democracies would be a good thing. “Convenience voting” via mail and early on-site balloting, or simply liberalized “absentee” voting, spread rapidly throughout the last decade, often as a way to minimize Election Day confusion or chicanery. In Florida itself, Republican Govs. Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist relaxed and then abolished the state’s practice of disenfranchising nonviolent felons for a period of time after their release.
No more. In the wake of the 2010 elections, Republican governors and legislatures are engaging in a wave of restrictive voting legislation unlike anything this country has seen since the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which signaled the defeat of the South’s long effort to prevent universal suffrage. This wave of activism is too universal to be a coincidence, and too broad to reflect anything other than a general determination to restrict the franchise.
Millions of voters are affected. In Florida new Republican Gov. Rick Scott signed legislation reversing Crist’s order automatically restoring the voting rights of nonviolent ex-felons. In one fell swoop, Scott extinguished the right to vote for 97,000 Florida citizens and placed more than a million others in danger of disenfranchisement. In a close contest for the Sunshine State’s 29 electoral votes, such measures could be as crucial to the outcome as the various vote suppression efforts of 2000.
As Ari Berman explained in an excellent recent summary of these developments for Rolling Stone, restrictive legislation, which has been introduced in 38 states and enacted (so far) in at least 12, can be divided into four main categories: restrictions on voter registration drives by nonpartisan, nonprofit civic and advocacy groups; cutbacks in early voting opportunities; new, burdensome identification requirements for voting; and reinstitution of bans on voting by ex-felons.
While new voter ID laws have clearly been coordinated by the powerful conservative state legislative lobbying network ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), other initiatives have spread almost virally. Virtually all of these restrictions demonstrably target segments of the electorate — the very poor, African-Americans and Hispanics, college students, and organizations trying to register all of the above — that tend to vote for Democrats.
Virtually all have been justified by their sponsors as measures to prevent “voter fraud,” a phenomenon for which there is remarkably little evidence anywhere in the country. As Tovah Andrea Wang, an election law expert at Demos, has concluded: “[L]aw enforcement statistics, reports from elections officials and widespread research have proved that voter fraud at the polling place is virtually nonexistent.” The Bush administration’s Justice Department tried to a scandalous degree to find cases of voter fraud to prosecute, and failed.
But as Marge Baker, executive vice president of People for the American Way, observes:
So-called anti-fraud laws are almost always thinly veiled attempts to prevent large segments of the population from making it to the ballot box … low-income voters, college students, people of color, the elderly. The people behind these laws know that there is no “voter fraud” epidemic. They just want to make it as difficult as possible for certain types of people to vote.
If so, is the motivation simply and purely partisanship? That’s the conclusion reached by former President Bill Clinton, who told a Campus Progress audience in July: “They are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 electorate than the 2008 electorate.”
The prevalence of restrictive measures in key 2012 swing states certainly reinforces this impression. With Scott’s order Florida rolled back the early voting that played a key role in Obama’s 2008 victory. New voter ID laws were pioneered in Indiana, the red state most famously carried by Obama in 2008. A voter ID bill passed in the Legislature in North Carolina, but was vetoed by the governor, a Democrat.
Cynical as such actions may seem, they do reflect an ideology. For some conservatives, however, there is a deeper motive than partisanship that helps explain the rapid proliferation of restrictive legislation. It hearkens back to much older debates over the franchise that raged from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries: the belief that voting is a “privilege” rather than a right, and one best exercised by “responsible” or “productive” members of the community. And it’s not really surprising that old-school doubts about the very concept of “voting rights” have accompanied the dramatic rise to power of “constitutional conservatives” who strongly believe that no popular majority should have the power to modify fixed concepts of property rights and limited government as handed down by the Founders, who themselves acted (according to many Tea Partyers) according to a divine mandate.
You hear echoes of this ancient anti-democratic conviction scattered all across the Tea Party Movement and among many state legislators active in voting for restriction legislation. Tea Party Nation president Judson Phillips created a furor in November of 2010 by suggesting that voting should be restricted to property owners, as it often was prior to enactment of the 15th Amendment.
Minnesota House Speaker Kurt Zellers flatly claimed voting was “not a right” during debate over a photo ID bill (a statement he later partially walked back). So, too, did Florida state Sen. Mike Bennett in a similar debate. Republican legislators and party leaders in Wisconsin, Maine and New Hampshire said all sorts of disparaging things about the civic qualifications of college students in the process of seeking to keep them from voting on campus.
Suffusing much of this sentiment is the pervasive Tea Party fear that voters without “skin in the game,” that is, “property ownership or significant tax liability,” will be prone to voting for big government and “welfare” at the expense of “productive” citizens. Few would publicly go so far as right-wing author Matthew Vadim, who briefly became a Fox celebrity for his argument that registering poor people to vote is “like handing out burglary tools to criminals,” since they “can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians.”
But throughout the conservative and Tea Party subculture you find countless people who subscribe to the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” (popularized by Glenn Beck) that liberals have been engaged in a deliberate effort for decades to buy votes with expanded welfare benefits. And from practically the moment the financial crisis exploded, a preferred conservative-activist interpretation (advanced most aggressively by presidential candidate Michele Bachmann) has involved an elaborate variation on the Cloward-Piven Strategy.
The story is that the obscure community organizing group ACORN utilized the provisions of the Community Reinvestment Act to destroy the housing and banking industries with mortgages for shiftless poor and minority borrowers who were then encouraged to elect “socialist” politicians like Barack Obama to bail them out. This particular conspiracy theory has been especially potent since ACORN’s often-clumsy voter registration efforts also happen to be at the very center of Republican claims of widespread voter fraud.
Conservative suspicions that letting poor people vote leads to “socialism” have been most evident in the strange furor among tax-hating Republicans about the number of Americans who do not have net federal income tax liability. These “lucky duckies” (as the Wall Street Journal famously called them in a 2002 Op-Ed deploring the low taxes paid by the poor) have no “skin in the game.” Thus, as the Journal put it, “can hardly be expected to care about tax relief for everybody else … [and] are also that much more detached from recognizing the costs of government.”
While it’s unlikely Republican politicians will come right out and advocate higher taxes on the poor (although some “fair tax” schemes calling for a shift to consumption taxes would have the same effect), the resentment of them as freeloaders who get to “vote themselves welfare” probably does operate as a fine rationalization for placing landmines on their path to the voting booth.
All in all, the conservative commitment to full voting rights, which used to be a bipartisan totem that Republican operatives undermined in the dark and out of sight, is probably dead for the foreseeable future. And the war on voting will continue.
By: Ed Kilgore, Salon, September 30, 2011
The Real Voter Fraud Scandal: Conservatives Are Trying To Restrict And Distort The Will Of The Voters
Well over a year before the 2012 presidential election, there’s a battle going on over next year’s ballots—how they’ll count and who will get to cast them. At stake is an attempt to distort the voters’ will by twisting the rule of law.
Most recently, Pennsylvania has been the focus of this battle. Dominic Pileggi, the state Senate majority leader, wants to change the way the Keystone State distributes its electoral votes, divvying them up according to how each presidential candidate performed in each congressional district, with the remaining two electoral votes going to the candidate who won the popular vote.
So while Barack Obama’s 55 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania in 2008 netted him all 21 of its electoral votes, the Pileggi plan would have shaved that figure to 11 electors. (Nationwide, Obama won 242 congressional districts while John McCain got 193.) The change would be even sharper as Pennsylvania’s new congressional map is expected to have 12 of the state’s 18 seats drawn to favor the GOP. Obama could win a majority of the Keystone vote again but only score eight of the state’s 20 electors. Do we really want to bring gerrymandering into presidential elections?
The politics here aren’t obscure: Every Democrat since Bill Clinton in 1992 has won Pennsylvania. This is a naked attempt to undercut Democratic nominees. (And while Pennsylvania would join Nebraska and Maine with such a law, Nebraska Republicans are trying to return to the unit rule after Obama won a single elector there in 2008.) But the Pennsylvania gerrymander gambit is only one aspect of a broader push to rig the game.
The 2010 elections marked a huge shift in control of state legislatures from Democrats to Republicans. The result, according to Tova Wang, a Senior Democracy Fellow at the progressive think tank Demos, has been “an attack on voting rights in this country like we haven’t seen in years and years.”
So far this year, bills have been introduced in at least 38 state legislatures designed to make it harder for Americans to exercise their right to vote. Fourteen have actually enacted such laws, according to a report released this week by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, which found that the new rules could make it “significantly harder for more than five million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012.” As Rolling Stone reported recently, Kansas and Alabama, for example, now require proof of citizenship to register to vote; Florida and Texas have raised barriers to groups like the League of Women Voters conducting voter registration drives; Florida and Iowa barred ex-felons from voting, instantly removing nearly 200,000 voters from their states’ rolls; Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee, and West Virginia have cut back on early voting; and Maine repealed its law allowing citizens to register and vote on Election Day or on the two business days immediately preceding it (even though GOP Gov. Paul LePage had himself used that law to register the day before the 1982 election).
Perhaps the GOP’s most popular vote suppression tool is a set of new laws requiring voters to present photo identification before they cast ballots. Seven states—Alabama, Kansas, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin—have enacted such measures this year. At first glance this may seem reasonable. Who doesn’t have a valid photo ID? The answer may surprise you. A 2006 study by the Brennan Center found that 11 percent of U.S. citizens lack one, a figure in line with a 2005 report by an election reform federal commission which suggested 12 percent of U.S. citizens lack driver’s licenses. Drilling down, the Brennan Center found that the groups worst off in this regard tend to be core Democratic constituencies: 25 percent of voting age African-Americans and 15 percent of voting age citizens who make less than $35,000 annually lack valid photo IDs.
In Ohio, where such a law is pending, roughly 940,000 citizens lack valid IDs, according to a study by a nonpartisan voters group. Or take Wisconsin: Less than half of Milwaukee County African-Americans and Hispanics have driver’s licenses, according to a study from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the figures are worse for younger voters. Indeed, the Wisconsin law is especially pernicious, specifically not accepting student IDs, even from state institutions. Texas’s voter ID law is even more blatant in who it’s aimed at. State gun permits are acceptable, but student IDs and government employment cards are not.
And these laws are a solution searching for a problem. Conservatives have long bemoaned the menace of voter impersonation, but the evidence for this threat is nonexistent. George W. Bush’s Justice Department spent years ferreting out voter fraud and managed to prosecute not one voter for impersonating another. “Out of the 300 million votes cast [between 2002 and 2007] federal prosecutors convicted only 86 people for voter fraud,” Rolling Stone reported. A 2007 study by the Brennan Center found the instances of voter fraud to be literally infinitesimal. “You’re more likely to get killed by lightning than commit in-person voter fraud,” says the Brennan Center’s Michael Waldman. Which only makes sense: That thousands of people are casting illegal votes in others’ names while evading determined detection (always managing to choose people who weren’t going to vote anyway) doesn’t pass the smell test.
Knock away the spurious reasons for the push to restrict voting and you’re left with bare-knuckled partisanship. “There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today,” former President Bill Clinton told a group of young political activists over the summer. He’s right, and it must be fought at every level.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, October 6, 2011
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