“The RNC Can Thank John Roberts For A Job Well Done”: GOP Super PACs Dominate Early Ads With Lies
The five Republican stooges on the Supreme Court must be very happy. They clearly hoped to give Republicans an advantage in future elections when they took the extreme judicial activist measure in the Citizens United v. FEC decision of overturning a major chunk of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance–reform law. By opening the floodgates to unlimited secret corporate contributions, they figured that they would help the party of corporate cronyism outspend Democrats. So far, they are being proven right.
The most recent financial disclosure reports released by the Federal Elections Commission over the weekend show conservative Super PACs heavily out raising and outspending liberal ones. And while President Obama will be able to compete financially because his campaign will raise plenty of money on its own, Democrats may be at a serious disadvantage in down ballot races where candidate fundraising is considerably lower and a national Super PAC can deluge a small media market with misleading negative advertisements and mailings.
“Conservative interest groups have dumped well over $20 million into congressional races so far this year, outspending their liberal opponents 4 to 1 and setting off a growing panic among Democrats struggling to regain the House and hold on to their slim majority in the Senate,” reports the Washington Post. “The money could be particularly crucial in races below the national radar that can be easily influenced by infusions of outside spending.”
So far this money is being used to drive the future Republican caucuses in the House and Senate further to the right. From the Post:
One example came this week in Nebraska, where a dark-horse Republican Senate candidate upset two better-funded rivals in the GOP primary thanks in part to a last-minute, $250,000 ad buy by a billionaire-backed super PAC. And in Indiana this month, veteran Sen. Richard G. Lugar was ousted in the GOP primary by challenger Richard Mourdock with the help of millions of dollars in spending by conservative groups. The Club for Growth, which backed a losing candidate in Nebraska, spent more than $2 million to help Mourdock in Indiana.”
Up until now there were other theoretical explanations—besides the obvious one, which is that it pays to be a tool of the rich and powerful—for why Republicans had so much more Super PAC money than Democrats. Initially Republicans supported the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that created Super PACs and Democrats, especially President Obama, did not. So Republicans jumped out to an early lead in Super PAC fundraising, which allowed them to vastly outspend Democrats in close congressional races in 2010. Then in 2011 and early 2012, Republicans were engaged in a competitive presidential primary while Democrats were not, and Super PAC spending was heavy on behalf of candidates such as Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich but not President Obama. Obama gave Democratic donors the green light to pour money into the Priorities USA Super PAC, but it has not kept pace with its Republican counterparts. The Huffington Post reports, “The group has raised $10.57 million since being founded in 2011, far behind the $50-plus million raised by Restore Our Future and the $28 million raised by American Crossroads.”
But they aren’t anywhere near parity yet and they may never reach it. The reason is obvious. Republicans represent the narrow economic interests of entrenched wealth and privilege, while Democrats advocate for a stronger social safety net and reduced inequality. This has always given Republicans some advantage in fundraising, since the wealthy will obviously give more than the poor or middle class. But the wealthy are also fewer, and their donations were limited to reasonable maximums by campaign finance law, while corporations were banned from giving to candidates. Now that corporations and billionaires have a vehicle for unlimited donations, just one of them can give more than if millions of Americans each donated their entire savings. Giving to Republicans can turn a profit when they are elected and fulfill their promises to crush collective bargaining, quash environmental and workplace safety regulations, and cut taxes. So corporations and their wealthy owners have an incentive beyond mere ideology to give heavily.
And so the partisan disparity in Super PAC spending on congressional races from 2010 is being recreated in 2012. During the Republican presidential primaries in some states, Super PAC spending on advertising outstripped spending by the campaigns themselves. As the New York Times notes, “Through the middle of May, Restore Our Future had spent more than $44.5 million on advertising, direct mail and other advertising, roughly double what Mr. Romney’s campaign had spent during the same period.” If that holds true in the general election, it will favor Republicans, especially in down ballot races, immensely.
These advertisements that conservative Super PACs buy, which are nominally about educating the public rather than electing candidates, are in no way educational. In fact, much like Fox News coverage, which often repeats the claims these ads make verbatim and without fact-checking, they are primarily focused on spreading lies.
Consider the recent ad buys, including one of $25 million, by Crossroads. In April Crossroads released an ad attacking Obama for being an unserious “celebrity” who appears on late night television while the country goes to Hell. Its statistic to burnish this dark view: “Survey: 85% of New College Grads Move Back in with Mom and Dad.” What survey? It turns out, according to Politifact, that the survey in question was the product of an obscure and now defunct firm that will not divulge any information about its methodology. But the firm’s director did say the survey was done “years ago” and is therefore not appropriate for use in an ad on the current president’s record in office. A March 2012 report from the Pew Center found 42 percent of college graduates 18 to 29 years-old living at home. The ad earned a “false” rating from Politifact.
And the ad that is getting $25 million worth of airtime? Factcheck.org finds its central claim to be “almost entirely false.” They write:
The latest multimillion-dollar attack ad from Crossroads GPS claims President Obama broke a promise to not increase taxes for families making less than $250,000 a year. That’s almost entirely false.
The truth is that Obama repeatedly cut taxes for such families, first through a tax credit in effect for 2009 and 2010, and beginning in 2011, through a reduction in the payroll tax that is worth $1,000 this year to workers earning $50,000 a year. And while it’s true that some tax increases contained in the new health care law would fall on individuals, they have mostly not taken effect yet and are small compared with the cuts the president already enacted. And this ad exaggerates them greatly.
The other claims in the ad are judged by Factcheck.org to be “misleading,” and you can read their full debunking here.
Of course, Super PACs are legally barred from coordinating with campaigns and there is the possibility, remote as it may be, that some Super PAC spending can do more harm than good. Last week Romney condemned a plan by billionaire investor Joe Ricketts to run a $10 million ad campaign tying President Obama to the inflammatory statements of his former pastor Jeremiah Wright. As Politico notes:
The risk from rogue third-party groups is a potential menace to both Republicans and Democrats. The GOP has seen more super PACs and 501(c)(4) groups form to support its candidates, but there’s nothing to stop an individual liberal gazillionaire from commissioning ads on a subject the Obama campaign doesn’t want to talk about — say, Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith. And rogue ads could create friendly fire as much as score points against the opposition, as the official GOP’s repudiation of the Ending Spending plan showed.
But that too can be a blessing as much as a curse. Draft dodger George W. Bush disassociated himself with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smearing of war hero John Kerry’s record of service in Vietnam. But Bush benefited enormously from the widely repeated claims in the ads. Even news stories debunking the falsehoods peddled by the Swift Boat group may have reinforced negative images of Kerry. Certainly it put him on the defensive. Indeed, this outsourcing of attacks—with a wink and a nudge—has been around almost as long as television commercials for candidates. The most famously effective attack ad in recent presidential politics, the 1988 commercial blaming Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis for a murder committed by a convict named Willie Horton who was out of prison in a furlough program, was not actually paid for by Dukakis’ opponent, George H.W. Bush, but by an outside group. Romney may have ultimately benefited from the opportunity to remind voters of Obama’s inflammatory pastor without having to do so himself.
However the specifics of each ad play, it is clear that overall the flood of money from billionaires and corporations into campaigns is helping one party more than the other. The RNC can thank John Roberts for a job well done.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, May 22, 2012
“How John Roberts Sold The American People Out”: There Is No Public Benefit From The “Moneyed Interests”
Jeffrey Toobin’s New Yorker masterpiece “Money Unlimited: How Chief Justice John Roberts Orchestrated the Citizens United Decision” is required reading for anyone concerned with one of the central problems plaguing the functioning of American democracy: the influence of corporate spending on the political process.
If you’re impatient, you can skip ahead to the last, chilling line: “The Roberts Court, it appears, will guarantee moneyed interests the freedom to raise and spend any amount, from any source, at any time, in order to win elections.” And from there, you can make your own decision about whom to vote for this November, based on the direction that the Supreme Court is currently headed.
But a full reading of Toobin’s article is essential for understanding the larger context. The fight over whether and how to limit corporate spending on elections in the United States goes back more than a century. The battle lines are well-drawn, the sides well-established: “progressives (or liberals) vs. conservatives, Democrats vs. Republicans, regulators vs. libertarians.” The libertarian/Republican/moneyed interest side is currently in ascendence, but this is a long, long struggle, and the pendulum must one day swing back.
What’s so amazing, however, coming at this particular point in American history, right after Wall Street blew up the global economy, is the justification given by Justice Anthony Kennedy in his opinion announcing the decision.
“The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach,” Kennedy wrote. “The Government has muffled the voices that best represent the most significant segments of the economy. And the electorate has been deprived of information, knowledge and opinion vital to its function. By suppressing the speech of manifold corporations, both for-profit and nonprofit, the Government prevents their voices and viewpoints from reaching the public and advising voters on which persons or entities are hostile to their interests.
The implications of this passage are breathtaking. In his rush to protect free speech, on the grounds that there is a public benefit in protecting the right of corporations to spend freely to advise voters “on which persons or entities are hostile to their interests,” Kennedy and four other justices ensured that “moneyed interests” would essentially be able to buy government support for an agenda defined by corporate priorities. How any intelligent person could believe that skewing political messaging toward the sector of American society with the most cash to spend could be in line what the founders of the United States would have believed prudent is simply mind-boggling. We’ll end up paying the price for this sellout for generations to come, but unlike Wall Street, we can’t afford it.
By: Andrew Leonard, Salon, May 21, 2012
“Preying On The Poor”: How Government And Corporations Use The Poor As Piggy Banks
Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene. But as Business Week helpfully pointed out in 2007, the poor in aggregate provide a juicy target for anyone depraved enough to make a business of stealing from them.
The trick is to rob them in ways that are systematic, impersonal, and almost impossible to trace to individual perpetrators. Employers, for example, can simply program their computers to shave a few dollars off each paycheck, or they can require workers to show up 30 minutes or more before the time clock starts ticking.
Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest. When supplemented with late fees (themselves subject to interest), the resulting effective interest rate can be as high as 600% a year, which is perfectly legal in many states.
It’s not just the private sector that’s preying on the poor. Local governments are discovering that they can partially make up for declining tax revenues through fines, fees, and other costs imposed on indigent defendants, often for crimes no more dastardly than driving with a suspended license. And if that seems like an inefficient way to make money, given the high cost of locking people up, a growing number of jurisdictions have taken to charging defendants for their court costs and even the price of occupying a jail cell.
The poster case for government persecution of the down-and-out would have to be Edwina Nowlin, a homeless Michigan woman who was jailed in 2009 for failing to pay $104 a month to cover the room-and-board charges for her 16-year-old son’s incarceration. When she received a back paycheck, she thought it would allow her to pay for her son’s jail stay. Instead, it was confiscated and applied to the cost of her own incarceration.
Government Joins the Looters of the Poor
You might think that policymakers would take a keen interest in the amounts that are stolen, coerced, or extorted from the poor, but there are no official efforts to track such figures. Instead, we have to turn to independent investigators, like Kim Bobo, author of Wage Theft in America, who estimates that wage theft nets employers at least $100 billion a year and possibly twice that. As for the profits extracted by the lending industry, Gary Rivlin, who wrote Broke USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. — How the Working Poor Became Big Business, says the poor pay an effective surcharge of about $30 billion a year for the financial products they consume and more than twice that if you include subprime credit cards, subprime auto loans, and subprime mortgages.
These are not, of course, trivial amounts. They are on the same order of magnitude as major public programs for the poor. The government distributesabout $55 billion a year, for example, through the largest single cash-transfer program for the poor, the Earned Income Tax Credit; at the same time, employers are siphoning off twice that amount, if not more, through wage theft.
And while government generally turns a blind eye to the tens of billions of dollars in exorbitant interest that businesses charge the poor, it is notably chary with public benefits for the poor. Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, for example, our sole remaining nationwide welfare program, gets only $26 billion a year in state and federal funds. The impression is left of a public sector that’s gone totally schizoid: on the one hand, offering safety-net programs for the poor; on the other, enabling large-scale private sector theft from the very people it is supposedly trying to help.
At the local level though, government is increasingly opting to join in the looting. In 2009, a year into the Great Recession, I first started hearing complaints from community organizers about ever more aggressive levels of law enforcement in low-income areas. Flick a cigarette butt and get arrested for littering; empty your pockets for an officer conducting a stop-and-frisk operation and get cuffed for a few flakes of marijuana. Each of these offenses can result, at a minimum, in a three-figure fine.
And the number of possible criminal offenses leading to jail and/or fines has been multiplying recklessly. All across the country — from California and Texas to Pennsylvania — counties and municipalities have been toughening laws against truancy and ratcheting up enforcement, sometimes going so far as to handcuff children found on the streets during school hours. In New York City, it’s now a crime to put your feet up on a subway seat, even if the rest of the car is empty, and a South Carolina woman spent six days in jail when she was unable to pay a $480 fine for the crime of having a “messy yard.” Some cities — most recently, Houston and Philadelphia — have made it a crime to share foodwith indigent people in public places.
Being poor itself is not yet a crime, but in at least a third of the states, being in debt can now land you in jail. If a creditor like a landlord or credit card company has a court summons issued for you and you fail to show up on your appointed court date, a warrant will be issued for your arrest. And it is easy enough to miss a court summons, which may have been delivered to the wrong address or, in the case of some bottom-feeding bill collectors, simply tossed in the garbage — a practice so common that the industry even has a term for it: “sewer service.” In a sequence that National Public Radio reports is “increasingly common,” a person is stopped for some minor traffic offense — having a noisy muffler, say, or broken brake light — at which point the officer discovers the warrant and the unwitting offender is whisked off to jail.
Local Governments as Predators
Each of these crimes, neo-crimes, and pseudo-crimes carries financial penalties as well as the threat of jail time, but the amount of money thus extracted from the poor is fiendishly hard to pin down. No central agency tracks law enforcement at the local level, and local records can be almost willfully sketchy.
According to one of the few recent nationwide estimates, from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, 10.5 million misdemeanors were committed in 2006. No one would risk estimating the average financial penalty for a misdemeanor, although the experts I interviewed all affirmed that the amount is typically in the “hundreds of dollars.” If we take an extremely lowball $200 per misdemeanor, and bear in mind that 80%-90% of criminal offenses are committed by people who are officially indigent, then local governments are using law enforcement to extract, or attempt to extract, at least $2 billion a year from the poor.
And that is only a small fraction of what governments would like to collect from the poor. Katherine Beckett, a sociologist at the University of Washington, estimates that “deadbeat dads” (and moms) owe $105 billion in back child-support payments, about half of which is owed to state governments as reimbursement for prior welfare payments made to the children. Yes, parents have a moral obligation to their children, but the great majority of child-support debtors are indigent.
Attempts to collect from the already-poor can be vicious and often, one would think, self-defeating. Most states confiscate the drivers’ licenses of people owing child support, virtually guaranteeing that they will not be able to work. Michigan just started suspending the drivers’ licenses of people who owe money for parking tickets. Las Cruces, New Mexico, just passed a law that punishes people who owe overdue traffic fines by cutting off their water, gas, and sewage.
Once a person falls into the clutches of the criminal justice system, we encounter the kind of slapstick sadism familiar to viewers of Wipeout. Many courts impose fees without any determination of whether the offender is able to pay, and the privilege of having a payment plan will itself cost money.
In a study of 15 states, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University found 14 of them contained jurisdictions that charge a lump-sum “poverty penalty” of up to $300 for those who cannot pay their fees and fines, plus late fees and “collection fees” for those who need to pay over time. If any jail time is imposed, that too may cost money, as the hapless Edwina Nowlin discovered, and the costs of parole and probation are increasingly being passed along to the offender.
The predatory activities of local governments give new meaning to that tired phrase “the cycle of poverty.” Poor people are more far more likely than the affluent to get into trouble with the law, either by failing to pay parking fines or by incurring the wrath of a private-sector creditor like a landlord or a hospital.
Once you have been deemed a criminal, you can pretty much kiss your remaining assets goodbye. Not only will you face the aforementioned court costs, but you’ll have a hard time ever finding a job again once you’ve acquired a criminal record. And then of course, the poorer you become, the more likely you are to get in fresh trouble with the law, making this less like a “cycle” and more like the waterslide to hell. The further you descend, the faster you fall — until you eventually end up on the streets and get busted for an offense like urinating in public or sleeping on a sidewalk.
I could propose all kinds of policies to curb the ongoing predation on the poor. Limits on usury should be reinstated. Theft should be taken seriously even when it’s committed by millionaire employers. No one should be incarcerated for debt or squeezed for money they have no chance of getting their hands on. These are no-brainers, and should take precedence over any long term talk about generating jobs or strengthening the safety net. Before we can “do something” for the poor, there are some things we need to stop doing to them.
By: Barbara Ehrenreich, Mother Jones, Originally Published on the TomDispatch website, May 18, 2012
“Masquerading As A Charity”: ALEC Exposed In Wisconsin, The Hijacking Of A State
Today, the Madison-based Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) released a new report that details the exclusive network of corporate lobbyists and special interest groups that influence the Wisconsin legislature through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
“This report reveals details of the extraordinary influence of ALEC and its agenda on the Wisconsin legislature and our laws over the past 16 months,” said Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy. “This corporate-backed agenda undermines the rights of Wisconsin families while advancing the agenda of huge corporations and special interest groups.”
Six weeks ago, corporate members of ALEC started jumping ship when it became known that Florida’s “Stand Your Ground Law” — linked to the Trayvon Martin shooting — spread to over two dozen states via ALEC. So far, 14 corporate members and 45 legislators from other states have quit the organization.
“We document how global corporations are buying influence with Wisconsin legislators through potentially illegal gifts called ALEC ‘scholarships,'” said CMD Law Fellow Brendan Fischer, the report’s author. “ALEC’s corporate members are not only giving Wisconsin legislators thousands of dollars of campaign contributions, they are also buying flights and hotel rooms. These gifts undermine Wisconsin’s reputation for clean government and the strict ethics rules designed to protect the voices of Wisconsin residents in our state’s democracy.”
CMD asked the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board in March to determine whether ALEC member legislators receiving gifts of flights and hotel rooms from ALEC’s corporate members violates state ethics and lobbying laws. Now, CMD and Common Cause in Wisconsin are asking Wisconsin’s Attorney General to look into ALEC’s lobbying activities.
“It is time for the Attorney General to determine that ALEC is primarily a corporate lobbying group masquerading as a charity,” said Common Cause in Wisconsin Executive Director Jay Heck. “ALEC’s corporate members fund the organization to access and influence state legislators, and it is unacceptable to get a tax deduction for doing so.”
Here are some of the key findings from the new report:
- 32 bills or budget provisions reflecting ALEC model legislation were introduced in Wisconsin’s 2011-2012 legislative session;
- 21 of these bills or budget provisions have passed, and two were vetoed;
- More than $276,000 in campaign contributions were made to ALEC legislators in Wisconsin from ALEC corporations since 2008;
- More than $406,000 in campaign contributions were made to ALEC alumnus Governor Walker from ALEC corporations over the same time period for his state campaign account;
- At least 49 current Wisconsin legislators are known ALEC members, including the leaders of both the House and Senate as well as other legislators holding key posts in the state. Additionally, the Governor, the Secretary of the Department of Administration, and the Chairman of the Public Service Commission are ALEC alumni; and
- At least 17 current legislators have received thousands of dollars of gifts cumulatively from ALEC corporations in the past few years, in the form of flights and hotel rooms filtered through the ALEC “scholarship fund” (complete “scholarship” information is not available).
ALEC describes itself as the largest “independent member association of state legislators” in the country, but over 98 percent of its nearly $7 million in annual revenue comes from corporations and sources other than legislative dues, which are $50 a year. Representatives from America’s largest corporations, including Koch Industries, Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, Reynolds, and Altria/Phillip Morris fund ALEC and sit on its private sector governing board.
By: Sara Jerving, PR Watch, Center For Media and Democracy, May 17, 2012
“Eric’s Zombie Lie”: Cantor Says It’s Time To Tax The Poor
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor justifies his latest big tax break for millionaires by dragging out an old, big lie.
CANTOR: We also know that over 45 percent of the people in this country don’t pay income taxes at all, and we have to question whether that’s fair. And should we broaden the base in a way that we can lower the rates for everybody that pays taxes. […]
KARL: Just wondering, what do you do about that? Are you saying we need to have a tax increase on the 45 percent who right now pay no federal income tax?
CANTOR: I’m saying that, just in a macro way of looking at it, you’ve got to discuss that issue. […] I’ve never believed that you go raise taxes on those that have been successful that are paying in, taking away from them, so that you just hand out and give to someone else.
Let’s just do this again, debunk that zombie lie. The more than 45 percent of people who “don’t pay income taxes” don’t pay federal income tax because they’re too poor!They pay federal payroll taxes. They pay sales taxes in most states. They pay a larger share of their income in taxes than rich people do. And they are students, and disabled people, and the elderly who don’t have income.
And you know who doesn’t pay income tax? Two dozen Fortune 500 companies that avoided corporate income taxes altogether in 2011.
And Eric Cantor says that we need to take even more money away from poor Americans and give it directly to “those that have been successful.” That’s the Republican version of redistribution of wealth.
10:57 AM PT: The Cantor NASCAR/NFL owners tax break just passed, 235-173. Ten Republicans voted no, one voted present, and 10 Democrats voted for it.
By: Joan McCarter, Daily Kos, April 19, 2012
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