“Corporations Are People, People Are Peasants”: Gun Vote Reveals A Democracy in Decline
The United States faces many grave challenges, such as declining living standards, global warming, rogue nuclear regimes, gun violence and now domestic terrorism. But none are as fundamental as or more pressing than the decline of democracy.
Last week’s vote in the United States Senate to defeat a proposal for more thorough background checks for gun buyers is the new poster child for popular disgust with Congress. It’s been 125 days since the massacre in Newton, Connecticut. 20 kids and six adults lost their lives and Congress hasn’t done a thing to curb gun violence.
The president has certainly done his part and more. A clear majority of Americans favor a ban on assault weapons, but Senators ignored their constituencies. (57 percent favor-41 percent oppose, ABC News/Washington Post). Even worse, nine of ten people favor background checks for gun purchases but Congress couldn’t even get that right. (91 percent, ABC News/Washington Post.)
Even if the Senate had passed the background check proposal it would have almost certainly failed in the House of Representatives, which the National Rifle Association owns gun lock, gun stock and gun barrel. The founders created the House of Representatives as the “peoples’ house,” but that was long ago and far away. Last year, Democratic House candidates won a majority of the vote but Republicans harvested the majority of seats.
Right now fewer than one in five Americans gives Congress a positive job rating. (18 percent, Gallup). The abject failure of Congress to respond to the public’s concern about rampant gun violence means that grade will get even lower. The questions are how low Congressional approval can go and how long democracy can endure when one of the three branches of the federal government is completely unresponsive to the public it should represent.
Gun control isn’t the only area of concern in which Congress is completely clueless. Seven out of ten Americans favor an increase in the minimum wage to $9.25 but that won’t even get a vote in the GOP dominated House (71 percent, Gallup). Less than one out of every five people favor cuts in Medicare and Social Security, but both the president and congressional Republicans want to hack at health care and pensions for seniors (18 percent, CBS News).
Why is Congress able to ignore public opinion? Because it can do anything it wants with the financial backing of corporate America. Forty two of the forty five U.S. Senators who voted against background checks received campaign contributions from the NRA. Data from the Center for Responsive Politics shows that corporate America donated $1.3 billion to party committees and politicians last year.
That figure does not include the money that corporations spend in independent expenditure campaigns. The corporate money in the 2012 campaign dwarfed the contributions from labor unions. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that corporations prosper while the standard of living for working families continues to decline.
An unresponsive Congress isn’t the only challenge to democracy. The right to vote has steadily expanded all through history, except in late 19th century Jim Crow America. In the early days of our republic, only white men with property enjoyed suffrage. By the 1830’s all white men got the right to vote. Women finally received their due in 1920. And except for a few years right after the Civil War, the vote came for many black Americans only 50 years ago.
Now, Republican governors and state legislators want to roll back the clock and the tide of American history by finding ingenious ways to prevent black and Latino voters from fully enjoying their rights as citizens.
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote his famous treatise celebrating our great democracy, “Democracy in America,” in 1824. If he had written the book today, the title would be either “Democracy in America?”, “Democracy in Decline” or even “Democracy at Death’s Door.” I’m optimistic that democracy can revive itself, but it will take a lot of work and a lot of commitment from Americans who take their freedom for granted.
In post-Citizens United America, corporations are people, politicians are bought and people are peasants. The U.S. faced the same problem late in the 19th century when U.S. Senators represented companies rather than their constituents. But democracy survived and the excesses of the gilded age led to a renewal of economic populism during the presidencies of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The sooner that happens, the better off we all will be.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, April 22, 2013
“We Couldn’t Care Less”: The Gun Lobby’s Fanaticism Prevails Over Common Sense
You might have thought that the mangled bodies of 20 dead children would have been enough to overcome the crazed obsessions of the gun lobby.
You might have believed that the courage and exhortations of a former congresswoman — her career cut short and her life forever changed by a would-be assassin’s bullet — would have pushed Congress to do the right thing.
You might have reasoned that polls showing overwhelming public support for a sensible gun control measure would have persuaded politicians to take a modest step toward preventing more massacres.
You would have been wrong. Last week, the U.S. Senate sent a stark message to the citizens it is elected to represent: We couldn’t care less about what you want.
Fifteen years of highly publicized mass murders carried out by madmen with firearms — Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tucson and Aurora, to name just a few — have changed nothing. Newtown, where 26 people, including 20 young children, were mowed down by a man armed with an assault-type weapon and high-capacity magazines for his ammo, provoked little more than a ripple in the corridors of Washington, where the National Rifle Association and its like-minded lobbies carried the day.
The grip that the gun lobby maintains on Congress is hard to explain. The National Rifle Association has persuaded spineless politicians that it is an omnipotent election god, able to strike down those who don’t cower before it. That’s simply not true, but even if it were, aren’t some principles worth losing elections over?
The proposal that appeared to have the best chance of passage last week was modest enough. It would simply have expanded criminal background checks to include guns sold at gun shows and via the Internet, a step supported by 90 percent of Americans, according to polls.
As its proponents conceded, it would not have stopped the Newtown atrocity. Adam Lanza took his mother’s legally purchased weapons to kill her, to carry out a massacre and to then commit suicide.
But expanded background checks would certainly save other lives, since violent husbands and other criminals have been able to saunter through huge holes in the system to purchase guns. Speaking with justifiable anger after the background-check measure went down to defeat, President Obama noted, “… if action by Congress could have saved one person, one child, a few hundred, a few thousand … we had an obligation to try.”
In an exhaustive report last week about online purchases of firearms, The New York Times showed clearly why expanded background checks are needed. As the newspaper noted, websites for firearms function as “unregulated bazaars” where sellers offer prospective buyers the following assurance: “no questions asked.” Reporters found persons with criminal records buying and selling guns.
It is infuriating that the gun lobby defeated a proposal to rein in that dangerous commerce. And, as usual, it defended its opposition with a lie: The amendment would have led to a national registry of guns, just a slippery slope away from confiscation.
While many discussions of the gun lobby’s fanaticism include a nod to the country’s frontier origins, it’s a mistake to believe this craziness is rooted in history. The lunacy from Wayne LaPierre, head of the National Rifle Association, has a more recent provenance.
When I was a child in Alabama — the daughter and niece of hunting enthusiasts — gun owners didn’t demand the right to take their weapons into church or bars or onto college campuses.
But as hunting has become less popular and as the number of households owning guns has declined, the ranks of gun owners have become over-represented by conspiracy theorists and assorted crazies and kooks. They can be easily persuaded that the government is on a mission to confiscate their firearms.
There is little doubt that paranoia is amplified by the presence of a black president, who represents the deepest fears of right-wing survivalist types. So it was probably naive to expect that he could drum up support for more reasonable gun safety measures.
But if 20 dead children can’t persuade Congress to tighten gun laws, what will?
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, April 20, 2013
“Not Even In The Game”: Lawmakers Who Set A Poor Example
It’s been a difficult week for so many Americans. As recently as last weekend — which seems like months ago — many were concerned about a missile test from nuclear-armed North Korea. Since then, we’ve seen the bloodshed in Boston, the deadly explosion in Texas, the ricin letters, Midwestern flooding, and a Senate minority ignoring the will of 90% of Americans.
It can be a bit much, and when people are feeling on edge, they need to see their elected officials operating at their very best. The vast majority of officials, known and unknown, have been exemplary.
Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), however, appears to be falling far short of this standard.
It didn’t take long for a lawmaker to pick up the latest right-wing conspiracy theory about the Boston Marathon bombings. Just hours after controversial terrorism expert Steve Emerson reported [Wednesday] night on Sean Hannity’s show that unnamed “sources” told him the government was quietly deporting the Saudi national who was initially suspected in the bombing, South Carolina GOP Rep. Jeff Duncan grilled Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on the rumor at a hearing [Thursday] morning.
Duncan, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee and chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Management Efficiency, presented the conspiracy theory as fact, chastising Napolitano for deporting a terror suspect (who, in reality, isn’t being deported and isn’t a suspect). Napolitano, annoyed, replied, “I don’t know where that rumor came from.”
As it turns out, it came from Hannity’s show, and was pushed very aggressively by Glenn Beck. Drudge and Erick Erickson talked it up, too. All of them were completely wrong.
And while that’s unfortunate, right-wing media personalities aren’t on the House Homeland Security Committee. Duncan is, and he used his official platform to pester the Secretary of Homeland Security, in a public congressional hearing, with bogus information he presented as fact, all because he couldn’t tell the difference between reality and silly conspiracy theories.
Worse, when Napolitano tried to set the record straight, Duncan pressed forward, saying, “He is being deported.” Except, of course, the person in question is not. When the far-right congressman continued to spout nonsense, Napolitano effectively gave up, saying Duncan’s inquiries are “full of misstatements and misapprehensions,” and “not worthy of an answer.”
Wait, it gets even worse.
Aviva Shen noted a separate exchange from the same hearing.
In a House hearing Thursday morning, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano was sidetracked from her testimony on the DHS budget when Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) asked her to respond to an online conspiracy theory about the DHS supposedly stockpiling ammo for an attack on Americans. Duncan argued this was more credible than mere “Internet rumors” because the Drudge Report, a popular conservative aggregator, said it was true.
It’s a difficult time, and Americans need sensible policymakers to keep their heads on straight, serving at the top of their game. In other words, the country needs officials who aren’t acting like Jeff Duncan.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 19, 2013
“Impervious To Logic”: Congress Betrays Our Dwindling Faith
The way to stay sane in this city is never to expect too much.
So the soothing mantras of the capital involve admonitions about the art of the possible, the perfect and the good, the zen of baby steps.
Incremental, incremental, incremental.
Still, it is hard to remain calm in the face of the Senate’s failure — its failure as the parents of children murdered in Newtown, Conn., looked on from the gallery — to pass the most modest of measures to curb gun violence.
We tend to speak easily here of how Washington is broken and gridlocked.
But those of us whose day jobs sit at the intersection of politics and public policy don’t completely buy it. We retain ragged shreds of faith that Washington, despite its maddening imperfections, remains capable of rising to at least some occasions.
Except on Wednesday, it didn’t, as the Senate fell six votes short of the 60 required to expand background checks for gun buyers. It is an indication of the perennially warped politics of guns that politicians can more safely support same-sex marriage than background checks. Indeed, what passed Congress in 1994 — an assault weapons ban and strict limits on magazine sizes — is now unthinkable.
The background-check measure proposed by West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin and Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey is — I’ll refrain from the past tense, because Wednesday’s loss was not the final chapter — so sensible, so pared-down, that the stronger argument against it is that it failed to go far enough, not that it ran roughshod over the Second Amendment.
To review: Under current law, individuals who want to buy guns from licensed dealers must pass background checks. Manchin-Toomey would expand that requirement to in-state gun sales over the Internet (interstate sales are already covered, because the guns can be sent only to licensed dealers for transfer to the buyer), to gun shows and to other commercial transactions.
It would not apply to sales or transfers between family members and friends — notwithstanding the National Rifle Association’s claim that it would “criminalize the private transfer of firearms by honest citizens, requiring lifelong friends, neighbors and some family members to get federal government permission to exercise a fundamental right or face prosecution.”
As Manchin said on the Senate floor, “That is simply a lie. . . . You can loan your hunting rifle to your buddy without any new restrictions. . . .You can give or sell a gun to your brother or your sister, your cousin, your uncle, your co-worker without a background check. You can post a gun for sale on the cork bulletin board at your workplace or on your church bulletin board without a background check.”
Another criticism of the measure — that it “would put us inexorably on the path to a national gun registry,” as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) put it — is even less moored to reality. A national registry is banned under existing law; Manchin-Toomey would layer on a 15-year felony sentence for anyone who tries to implement one.
That leaves an array of other arguments against the measure that fail the simplest tests of logic.
Felons and others ineligible to buy weapons aren’t being prosecuted under the current system. Also, the existing system fails to list numerous individuals already prohibited from having guns. Okay, prosecute the ineligible would-be buyers and fix the list.
Expanded background checks wouldn’t have prevented the Newtown shootings. Okay, but expanded checks might prevent another killer. No single change is going to prevent every episode of gun violence.
Expanded checks would impose a burden on law-abiding citizens without preventing criminals from obtaining guns. Under the existing system, more than 2 million people have been barred from buying guns. Did some of them go on to obtain weapons illegally? Of course. But others were deterred — and in any event the expanded checks would narrow the currently huge loophole that lets felons buy guns without background checks. That some criminals will always break some laws is not an argument against having those laws in the first place.
The depressing aspect of Wednesday’s vote is that the change was so small and the senators so seemingly impervious to logic.
Wednesday’s vote will not end the gun debate. After nearly two decades in which Democrats barely dared whisper about gun violence, the notion of new restrictions has become safe again — to broach, if not to enact. In the aftermath of Newtown, this time was different.
It just wasn’t different enough.
By: Ruth Marcus, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 18, 2013
“How Many Is Enough?”: The Gun Report: April 18, 2013
Yesterday was dispiriting for the vast majority of Americans who, according to recent polling, want to see expanded background checks on gun sales. But another story that may have been overlooked, between the disappointing Senate outcome and the updates coming out of Boston, was this investigative piece from the Times’s National desk about Internet arms sales, dubbed “the gun show that never ends.” Reporters scoured online ads on Armslist, a self-described “firearms marketplace,” and found that several people who buy firearms are convicted felons who fail background checks, and many private Internet dealers simply look the other way. It’s an unregulated swath of the market that’s evaded government oversight, and, in the absence of new gun legislation, will continue to do so.
—Jennifer Mascia
Micki Pickren, 52, was shot in the back of the head, the side of the head and the face by her boyfriend in Auburndale, Fla., Tuesday evening. Randall Scott Miller, 44, a former Marine, has been previously arrested for battery domestic violence and child abuse. The bullet in Pickren’s head was not able to be removed but she is expected to survive. Miller is at large and considered armed and dangerous.
Edith Hardy, 82, was sitting on the sofa inside her Chester, Pa., home Wednesday afternoon when she was shot in the neck by a stray bullet during a barrage of gunfire that also critically wounded a young man. Authorities have no motives or suspects. The critically wounded man was believed to be the intended target; he sustained a gunshot wound to the head and is on life support. Hardy is expected to survive.
—The Delaware County Daily Times
A woman sleeping on a couch in a Hayward, Calif., home suffered head and neck wounds early Wednesday when bullets ripped through a front window. A couple was engaged in a heated argument across the street from the home right before gunshots were heard. The victim, a 24-year-old woman, was rushed to the hospital and underwent emergency surgery. Her condition was not known.
—KTVU
A 2-year-old boy is recovering from a gunshot wound after accidentally shooting himself in Gurley, Ala., Tuesday night. Deputies responded to a home on Church Street around 7:20 p.m. and found a child with a gunshot wound to the hand. Deputies said the unsupervised child shot himself. Deputies notified the Department of Human Resources. No charges are expected to be filed.
A crying 5-month old girl was found under a bed at a northwest Houston, Tex., apartment where two people were shot to death Wednesday evening. Police were called at around 6 p.m. after hearing the baby’s cries and found a man dead on the floor and a woman dead from a gunshot wound to the head. Police found a second man inside the bedroom who had also been shot in the head; he is in critical condition.
A student who suffered a self-inflicted gunshot wound Tuesday morning at a Temple, Tex., high school is in very critical condition. Officers found the 15-year-old student near the rear of the gym at Temple High School and recovered a handgun. The boy has not been identified, but the school confirmed that he is a member of the school’s ROTC program.
—KWTX
A 19-year-old man was shot twice in the torso by a fellow student at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Ala. Elgerondo Williams, 22, pulled out a small-caliber handgun and shot his friend after they argued over money owed on a bet over a video game. The victim is in stable condition. Williams surrendered to a police officer on campus after initially fleeing the scene.
A man was shot by his roommate several times and killed after a dispute north of Nixa, Mo., shortly before noon Wednesday. The victim died where he was shot, at the end of the driveway of the home that the two men shared with two other men. Deputies arrested the alleged gunman as he was trying to flee.
A man in his 20s is in critical condition after an argument ended in a shooting in Waveland, Miss., on Wednesday. Four or five men were fighting at a residence when one of them took out a gun and began shooting. Police questioned two of the men, but no arrests have been made.
Three men were shot in the street in front of a home in Bridge City, La., on Tuesday night. At around 7:20 p.m., the unidentified suspects pulled up in a gold-colored vehicle and opened fire. All three are expected to survive. Police have no suspects.
Two people were injured in a shooting at a San Pablo, Calif., bar on Tuesday night. Police responded to reports of a shooting around 9:10 p.m and found two people who had been shot multiple times. They are expected to survive. No suspects have been arrested.
Shootings in the Heart of Chicago and Grand Crossing neighborhoods in Chicago, Ill., left two men injured Tuesday night and early Wednesday. At 8:40 p.m. Tuesday, a 50-year-old man was shot in the shoulder as he left his home to inspect gunfire outside. At around 1:45 a.m. Wednesday, two people approached a 45-year-old man from behind and opened fire, fleeing on foot.
According to Slate’s gun-death tracker, an estimated 3,514 people have died as a result of gun violence in America since the Newtown massacre on December 14, 2012.
By: Joe Nocera, The New York Times, April 18, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 