“Republicans Against Retirement”: Republicans Who Would Be President Seem To Be Lining Up For Another Round Of Punishment
Something strange is happening in the Republican primary — something strange, that is, besides the Trump phenomenon. For some reason, just about all the leading candidates other than The Donald have taken a deeply unpopular position, a known political loser, on a major domestic policy issue. And it’s interesting to ask why.
The issue in question is the future of Social Security, which turned 80 last week. The retirement program is, of course, both extremely popular and a long-term target of conservatives, who want to kill it precisely because its popularity helps legitimize government action in general. As the right-wing activist Stephen Moore (now chief economist of the Heritage Foundation) once declared, Social Security is “the soft underbelly of the welfare state”; “jab your spear through that” and you can undermine the whole thing.
But that was a decade ago, during former President George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize the program — and what Mr. Bush learned was that the underbelly wasn’t that soft after all. Despite the political momentum coming from the G.O.P.’s victory in the 2004 election, despite support from much of the media establishment, the assault on Social Security quickly crashed and burned. Voters, it turns out, like Social Security as it is, and don’t want it cut.
It’s remarkable, then, that most of the Republicans who would be president seem to be lining up for another round of punishment. In particular, they’ve been declaring that the retirement age — which has already been pushed up from 65 to 66, and is scheduled to rise to 67 — should go up even further.
Thus, Jeb Bush says that the retirement age should be pushed back to “68 or 70”. Scott Walker has echoed that position. Marco Rubio wants both to raise the retirement age and to cut benefits for higher-income seniors. Rand Paul wants to raise the retirement age to 70 and means-test benefits. Ted Cruz wants to revive the Bush privatization plan.
For the record, these proposals would be really bad public policy — a harsh blow to Americans in the bottom half of the income distribution, who depend on Social Security, often have jobs that involve manual labor, and have not, in fact, seen a big rise in life expectancy. Meanwhile, the decline of private pensions has left working Americans more reliant on Social Security than ever.
And no, Social Security does not face a financial crisis; its long-term funding shortfall could easily be closed with modest increases in revenue.
Still, nobody should be surprised at the spectacle of politicians enthusiastically endorsing destructive policies. What’s puzzling about the renewed Republican assault on Social Security is that it looks like bad politics as well as bad policy. Americans love Social Security, so why aren’t the candidates at least pretending to share that sentiment?
The answer, I’d suggest, is that it’s all about the big money.
Wealthy individuals have long played a disproportionate role in politics, but we’ve never seen anything like what’s happening now: domination of campaign finance, especially on the Republican side, by a tiny group of immensely wealthy donors. Indeed, more than half the funds raised by Republican candidates through June came from just 130 families.
And while most Americans love Social Security, the wealthy don’t. Two years ago a pioneering study of the policy preferences of the very wealthy found many contrasts with the views of the general public; as you might expect, the rich are politically different from you and me. But nowhere are they as different as they are on the matter of Social Security. By a very wide margin, ordinary Americans want to see Social Security expanded. But by an even wider margin, Americans in the top 1 percent want to see it cut. And guess whose preferences are prevailing among Republican candidates.
You often see political analyses pointing out, rightly, that voting in actual primaries is preceded by an “invisible primary” in which candidates compete for the support of crucial elites. But who are these elites? In the past, it might have been members of the political establishment and other opinion leaders. But what the new attack on Social Security tells us is that the rules have changed. Nowadays, at least on the Republican side, the invisible primary has been reduced to a stark competition for the affections and, of course, the money of a few dozen plutocrats.
What this means, in turn, is that the eventual Republican nominee — assuming that it’s not Mr. Trump —will be committed not just to a renewed attack on Social Security but to a broader plutocratic agenda. Whatever the rhetoric, the GOP is on track to nominate someone who has won over the big money by promising government by the 1 percent, for the 1 percent.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, August 17, 2015
“Presidential Candidates, Each Sold Separately”: The Donor Class Will Shape The Choice Of Candidates Long Before A Single Ballot Is Cast
Mark Hanna used to say, “there are two things important in politics.The first is money and I forget the second.” The next president will take the oath of office in 2017, but between now and then expect a lot of money to be spent buying the ear of the next president. The large amount of spending will be driven in part because there are presently 22 candidates vying for the two major party nominations. If Prof. Lawrence Lessig makes it official, there will be 23.
Our campaign finance laws maintain the legal fiction that there is a difference between money given directly to a candidate’s campaign and money spent on ads in support of the candidate that benefit them. Your local billionaire can still only give $5400 (or $2700 per election per candidate) to a candidate for federal office. But at the very same time the wealthy can spend an unlimited amount on ads touting their favorite candidate or trashing the object of their ire.
I don’t know about you, but I’d be mighty grateful if someone spent a million in support of me. And I’d probably be more grateful for the million spent than the $5400 given directly.
The wealthy have had the right to spend lavishly on independent ad buys since Buckley v. Valeo in 1976. But the real spending spiked after Citizens United and a case called SpeechNow with the advent of the Super PAC. According to www.opensecrets.org, in 2010 Super PACs raised $828 million and spent $609 million in the federal election.
Spending through a Super PAC, even if there is one funder ponying up 95 percent or more of the money, gives the illusion that there are groups involved—often with an appropriately Orwellian name—instead of just one random rich guy. Using Super PACs as a vehicle, in 2012 Sheldon Adelson and his wife spent $93 million, William “Bill” Koch of the Koch Brothers spent $4.8 million and Foster Friess spent $2.6 million.
And already we see billionaires lining up behind 2016 candidates in the “money primary” like they were buying so many action figures in a toy store with matching podiums, blue suits, and karate grip. Of course, like so many toys, each candidate is sold separately. And the spending has already started. As Mother Jones recently put it, “These 8 Republican Sugar Daddies Are Already Placing Their Bets on 2016.”
The other phenomenon that has happened is some are backing more than one candidate. With 5 Dems and 17 Republicans, the Center for Public Integrity, argues that “[i]t’s speed dating season for presidential campaign contributors.”
There is no rule that says a donor must only back one candidate. If they want, they can hedge their bets and back two or three. Hell, if they want, they can try to collect them all. At least ten donors are backing two or more of the Republican candidates.
Donors don’t have to be loyal to a single political party either. Seventeen mega spenders are already backing Republican Bush and Democrat Clinton, who may end up as respectively the most popular GI Joe and American Girl doll of 2016. For example, John Tyson, chairman of Tyson Foods, has supported both Bush and Clinton. The same is true of Richard Parsons, the former head of Time Warner, and David Stevens, the CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Association. For a full list of the seventeen Clinton/Bush supporters see here.
Now it’s not necessarily a bad thing for there to be over 20 candidates for president over a year out. It’s a big country with diverse views. But because the presidential public financing system was allowed to atrophy, each of these candidates must run in privately funded races. And this has led to the unseemly spectacles of multiple candidates flying to California for the “Koch” primary or to Las Vegas for the “Adelson” primary. The only primaries that should matter are the ones with actual voters. But the reality is the donor class is likely to shape the choice of candidates long before any Iowans caucus or a New Hampshirite cast a single ballot.
By: Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, Brennan Center for Justice, New York University School of Law, August 14, 2015
“In GOP Debates, The Wrong People Are On The Stage”: Super-Rich Donors Turn Our Democracy Into Their Plutocracy
Once upon a time in our Good Ol’ US-of-A, presidential contenders and their political parties had to raise the funds needed to make the race. How quaint.
But for the 2016 run, this quaint way of selecting our candidates is no longer the case, thanks to the Supreme Court’s malicious meddling in the democratic process in its reckless Citizens United decision. In that decision, the five members of the Corporate Cabal decreed that “non-candidate” campaigns can take unlimited sums of money directly from corporations. Therefore a very few wealthy powers can pour money into these murky political operations and gain unwarranted plutocratic power over the election process.
And looking at the fundraising numbers, those wealthy powers have definitely taken charge of the electoral game. These very special interests, who have their own presidential agendas, now put up the vast majority of funds and run their own private campaigns to elect someone who will do their bidding.
So far, of over $400 million raised to back candidates of either party in next year’s race, half of the money has come from a pool of only about 400 people — and two-thirds of their cash went not to candidates directly but to corporate-run SuperPACs. To get a grasp at what this looks like, take a peek at the SuperPACs supporting Ted Cruz. Of the $37 million they have raised, $36 million was pumped in by only three interests — a New York hedge fund manager, a corporate plunderer living in Puerto Rico, and the owners of a franking operation who’ve pocketed billions from the explosive use of this destructive drilling technology.
So while Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Scott Walker, and gang are the candidates, the driving forces in this election have names like Robert Mercer, Norman Braman, Diane Hendricks, Dan and Farris Wilks, Toby Neugebauer, and Miguel Fernandez.
Who are these people? They are part of a small but powerful coterie of multimillionaire corporate executives and billionaires who fund secretive presidential SuperPACs that can determine who gets nominated. These elephantine funders play politics like some super-rich, heavy-betting gamblers play roulette — putting enormous piles of chips on a name in hopes of getting lucky, then cashing in for governmental favors.
Let’s take a look at the funders:
- Robert Mercer, chief of the Renaissance Technologies hedge fund, has already put more than $11 million into Ted Cruz’s SuperPAC.
- Norman Braman, former owner of the Philadelphia Eagles football team, has $5 million down on Marco Rubio
- Diane Hendricks, the billionaire owner of a roofing outfit and a staunch anti-worker activist, is betting $5 million on Scott Walker, as are the Koch brothers.
- Mike Fernandez, a billionaire investor in health-care corporations, has backed Jeb Bush with $3 million.
- Ronald Cameron, an Arkansas poultry baron, is into Mike Huckabee for $3 million.
These shadowy SuperPACs amount to exclusive political casinos, with only a handful of million-dollar-plus players dominating each one (including the one behind Hillary Clinton’s campaign). These few people are not merely “big donors” — they are owners, with full access to their candidate and an owner’s prerogative to shape the candidate’s policies and messages.
But one of these new players assures us that they’re not buying candidates for corporate and personal gain, but “primarily (for) a love of economic freedom.”
Sure, sweetheart — all you want is the “economic freedom” to pollute, defraud, exploit, rob, and otherwise harm anything and anyone standing between you and another dollar in profit. The problem with the GOP presidential debates is that the wrong people are on stage. These treacherous few donors are using their bags of cash to pervert American democracy into rank plutocracy. Why not put them on stage and make each one answer pointed questions about what special favors they’re trying to buy?
By: Jim Hightower, Featured Post, The National Memo, August 12, 2015
“Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King … Charles Koch?”: Why the Koch Brothers Are Heroes In Their Own Minds
When Charles E. Wilson appeared before a Senate committee in January 1953 as President Eisenhower’s nominee to become Secretary of Defense, he was asked whether his large holdings of stock in General Motors, where he had been president and chief executive, might cause some conflict of interest. “I cannot conceive of one,” he replied, “because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country.” While Wilson is often misquoted as saying that what’s good for GM is good for America, a quote often used as a symbol of corporate arrogance, his intent seemed at least somewhat more benign. But however you interpret it, Wilson was almost certainly sincere in believing that when you get right down to it, the country and its largest corporation, as GM was then, rise and fall together.
Koch Industries is not quite as big as General Motors was then, at least not relative to the rest of the economy. But the two men who control it, Charles and David Koch, seem just as sure that what’s good for them is good for America. They probably wouldn’t put it that way, and maybe they don’t even think about it that way. All they know is that the things they believe are right and true, which in at least one way makes them no different from you or me.
This weekend, the Kochs, who plan to spend nearly a billion dollars of their money and their friends’ money to elect a Republican president in 2016, held a confab where they could gather to discuss their plans to move America in a direction they find more amenable. When Charles addressed the plutocrats, he told them to give themselves a hearty pat on the back:
Charles Koch on Sunday compared the efforts of his political network to the fight for civil rights and other ‘freedom movements,’ urging his fellow conservative donors to follow the lead of figures such as Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King Jr.
‘History demonstrates that when the American people get motivated by an issue of justice that they believe is just, extraordinary things can be accomplished,’ Koch told 450 wealthy conservatives assembled in the ballroom of a lavish oceanfront resort [in Dana Point, California].
‘Look at the American revolution, the anti-slavery movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the civil rights movement,’ he said. “All of these struck a moral chord with the American people. They all sought to overcome an injustice. And we, too, are seeking to right injustices that are holding our country back.”
Other reports note that Charles talked a good bit about the disadvantaged and downtrodden, and how they will be the true beneficiaries of the expansion of liberty that is the Kochs’ fondest dream.
You can call that ridiculous, and you wouldn’t be wrong. But while Democrats see the Kochs as cartoon villains, twirling their moustaches as they contemplate a future with low top-end marginal tax rates, I assure you that they believe themselves to have only the purest motives for their political action.
Ask any liberal activist why it’s a threat to democracy when the Kochs spend millions to elect their favored candidates, but less so when liberal billionaires do the same thing, and you’ll get two answers. The first is that “We can’t unilaterally disarm,” which is also what you hear from candidates who support campaign finance reforms but would like to get money from super PACs. It’s reasonable enough, if not particularly high-minded. The second answer, and perhaps the more common one, is that when the Kochs advocate for things like low taxes for the wealthy and loose regulation on corporations, they’re being self-interested, while a liberal billionaire who takes the opposite position is acting altruistically.
It’s an answer that is simultaneously true, at least to a degree, and unsatisfying. First of all, there are times when the Kochs advocate on issues that don’t have anything to do with their bottom line. And if they succeed in helping a Republican get elected president, only a portion of what that president does will affect them directly, even if they wind up being pleased with almost all of it.
Secondly, it runs the risk of devolving into a caricature that doesn’t help us understand the Kochs. Right now, Charles is probably asking himself why anyone would make a fuss about his speech. After all, he believes that the liberty embodied in unfettered capitalism is a source of prosperity and human flourishing. How could anyone think otherwise?
Of course, there’s a difference between telling yourself, “We’re advocating for the right things,” and telling yourself, “This thing we’re doing is as noble as anything anyone in our nation’s history has done.” But perhaps grandiosity isn’t surprising in a man whose fortune is estimated to be over $40 billion.
We all justify our actions and rationalize our decisions, and no one thinks they’re the villain of their own story. We all believe we’re good people, that we have a strong moral sense, and that the world would be a better place if it were ordered in the way we’d like. If would be shocking if the Kochs thought differently about themselves.
My point isn’t that we should automatically forgive people for their outrageous claims of moral rightness, any more than we ought to excuse outlandish claims of suffering and oppression (see War on Christmas, The). But it’s useful to appreciate that when someone like Charles Koch looks in the mirror and says, “You know, I really am a lot like Martin Luther King,” he may be utterly wrong in a hundred ways, but it isn’t a surprise that he feels that way. It’s human nature.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, August 2, 2015
“Why Liberals Have To Be Radicals”: Going After The Grotesquely Concentrated Wealth And Power At The Top
Just about nothing being proposed in mainstream politics is radical enough to fix what ails the economy. Consider everything that is destroying the life chances of ordinary people:
- Young adults are staggered by $1.3 trillion in student debt. Yet even those with college degrees are losing ground in terms of incomes.
- The economy of regular payroll jobs and career paths has given way to a gig economy of short-term employment that will soon hit four workers in 10.
- The income distribution has become so extreme, with the one percent capturing such a large share of the pie, that even a $15/hour national minimum wage would not be sufficient to restore anything like the more equal economy of three decades ago. Even the mainstream press acknowledges these gaps.
The New York Times’s Noam Scheiber, using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, calculated that raising the minimum wage to $15 for the period 2009 to 2014 would have increased the total income for the 44 million Americans who earn less than $15 an hour by a total of $300 billion to $400 billion. But during the same period, Scheiber reported, the top 10 percent increased its income by almost twice that amount.
Scheiber concludes:
So even if we’d raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour, the top 10 percent would still have emerged from the 2009-2014 period with a substantially larger share of the increase in the nation’s income than the bottom 90 percent. Inequality would still have increased, just not by as much.
Restoring a more equal economy simply can’t be done by raising incomes at the bottom, even with a minimum wage high that seemed inconceivable just months ago. It requires going after the grotesquely concentrated wealth and power at the top.
Last week, another writer in the Times, Eduardo Porter, assessed Hillary Clinton’s eagerly anticipated speech on how to rescue the middle class.
Porter’s conclusion? Far from sufficient. He writes:
Mrs. Clinton’s collection of proposals is mostly sensible. The older ones — raising the minimum wage, guaranteeing child care to encourage women into the labor force, paying for early childhood education — have a solid track record of research on their side. The newer propositions, like encouraging profit-sharing, also push in the right direction.
But here’s the rub: This isn’t enough.
Nothing in mainstream politics takes seriously the catastrophe of global climate change. Few mainstream politicians have the nerve to call for a carbon tax.
The budget deadlock and the sequester mechanism, in which both major parties have conspired, makes it impossible to invest the kind of money needed both to modernize outmoded public infrastructure (with a shortfall now estimated at $3.4 trillion) or to finance a green transition.
The economy is so captive to financial engineers that even interest rates close to zero do not help mainstream businesses recover. There is still a vicious circle of inadequate purchasing power and insufficient domestic investment.
The rules of globalization and tax favoritism make it more attractive for companies to assemble products, export jobs and book profits overseas.
To remedy the problem of income inequality would require radical reform both of the rules of finance and of our tax code, as well as drastic changes in labor market regulation so that employees of hybrids such as Uber and TaskRabbit would have both decent earnings and the protections of regular payroll employees.
Congress would have to blow up the sequester deal that makes it impossible to invest money on the scale necessary to repair broken infrastructure and deal with the challenge of climate change.
Politicians would have to reform the debt-for-diploma system, not only going forward, as leaders like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have proposed, but also to give a great deal of debt relief to those saddled with existing loans.
Unions would need to regain the effective right to organize and bargain collectively.
This is all as radical as, well, … Dwight Eisenhower. Somehow, in the postwar era, ordinary people enjoyed economic security and opportunity; and despite the economy of broad prosperity, there were plenty of incentives for business to make decent profits. There just weren’t today’s chasms of inequality.
But the reforms needed to restore that degree of shared prosperity are somewhere to the left of Bernie Sanders.
This is one of those moments when there is broad popular frustration, a moment when liberal goals require measures that seem radical by today’s standards. If progressives don’t articulate those frustrations and propose real solutions, rightwing populists will propose crackpot ones. Muddle-through and token gestures won’t fool anybody.
By: Robert Kuttner, Co-Founder and Co- Editor, The American Prospect, July 22, 2015
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