“Where’s The Outrage”: This Election Might Not Just Be Won Or Lost, It Could Be Bought Or Stolen
Are too many Democratic voters sleepwalking away from our democracy this election cycle, not nearly outraged enough about Big Money’s undue influence and Republican state legislatures changing the voting rules?
It seems so.
A Gallup poll released this week found that: “Democrats are significantly less likely now (39 percent) than they were in the summers of 2004 and 2008 to say they are ‘more enthusiastic about voting than usual’ in the coming presidential election.” Republicans are more enthusiastic than they were before the last election.
Some of that may be the effect of having a Democratic president in office; it’s sometimes easier to marshal anger against an incumbent than excitement for him. Whatever the reason, this lack of enthusiasm at this critical juncture in the election is disturbing for Democrats.
First, there’s the specter of the oligarchy lingering over this election, which disproportionately benefits Republicans. According to a report by Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont, “So far this year, 26 billionaires have donated more than $61 million to super PACs, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And that’s only what has been publicly disclosed.” That didn’t include “about $100 million that Sheldon Adelson has said that he is willing to spend to defeat President Obama; or the $400 million that the Koch brothers have pledged to spend during the 2012 election season.”
During a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Tuesday, Sanders put it this way: “What the Supreme Court did in Citizens United is to say to these same billionaires and the corporations they control: ‘You own and control the economy; you own Wall Street; you own the coal companies; you own the oil companies. Now, for a very small percentage of your wealth, we’re going to give you the opportunity to own the United States government.’ ”
Then, of course, there’s the widespread voter suppression mostly enacted by Republican-led legislatures.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, at least 180 restrictive voting bills were introduced since the beginning of 2011 in 41 states, and “16 states have passed restrictive voting laws that have the potential to impact the 2012 election” because they “account for 214 electoral votes, or nearly 79 percent of the total needed to win the presidency.”
A provision most likely to disenfranchise voters is a requirement that people show photo identification to vote. Millions of Americans don’t have these forms of ID, and many can’t easily obtain them, even when states say they’ll offer them free, because getting the documentation to obtain the “free” ID takes time and money.
This is a solution in search of a problem. The in-person voter ID requirements only prevent someone from impersonating another voter at the polls, an occurrence that the Brennan Center points out is “more rare than being struck by lightning.”
The voting rights advocates I’ve talked to don’t resist all ID requirements (though they don’t say they are all necessary, either). They simply say that multiple forms of identification like student ID and Social Security cards should also be accepted, and that alternate ways for people without IDs to vote should be included. Many of these laws don’t allow for such flexibility.
Make no mistake about it, these requirements are not about the integrity of the vote but rather the disenfranchisement of voters. This is about tilting the table so that more of the marbles roll to the Republican corner.
Look at it this way: We have been moving toward wider voter participation for a century. States began to issue driver’s licenses more than a century ago and began to include photos on those licenses decades ago. Yet, as the Brennan Center points out, “prior to the 2006 election, no state required its voters to show government-issued photo ID at the polls (or elsewhere) in order to vote.”
Furthermore, most voter laws have emerged in the last two years. What is the difference between previous decades and today? The election of Barack Obama. It is no coincidence that some of the people least likely to have proper IDs to vote are the ones that generally vote Democratic and were strong supporters of Obama last election: young people, the poor and minorities.
Republicans are leveraging the deep pockets of anti-Obama billionaires and sinister voter suppression tactics that harken back to Jim Crow to wrest power from the hands of docile Democrats.
There is little likely to be done about the Big Money before the election, and, although some of the voter suppression laws are being challenged in court, the outcome of those cases is uncertain.
These elements are not within voters’ control, but two things are: energy and alertness.
If Democrats don’t wake up soon, this election might not just be won or lost, it could be bought or stolen.
By: Charles M. Blow, )p-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, July 27, 2012
“A Wall Street Democrat”: Michael Bloomberg’s True Colors
After last week’s Aurora massacre, Michael Bloomberg emerged as something of a liberal hero by almost single-handedly forcing gun control into the national debate.
Within hours of the tragedy, the New York mayor said in a radio appearance that “soothing words are nice, but maybe it’s time that the two people who want to be president of the United States stand up and tell us what they are going to do about it, because this is obviously a problem across the country.” He made the same call in a national television appearance over the weekend, leading a crusade on an issue that the Democratic Party once championed but essentially abandoned a decade ago. President Obama’s call last night for “violence reduction,” hesitant and non-specific though it was, is testament to the traction Bloomberg’s shaming campaign gained this past week.
And now, to follow this all up, Bloomberg is going to host a fundraiser for … a Republican senator who expressed his opposition just this week to reinstating the federal ban on assault weapons.
Granted, Scott Brown, the beneficiary of the Aug. 15 New York City fundraiser Bloomberg is planning, is unusually flexible on Second Amendment issues, at least by the standards of today’s Republican Party. As a state legislator in Massachusetts, he voted in 2004 to extend the state’s assault weapons ban (though he sided against banning the sale of weapons purchased before the ban went into effect). And as a U.S. senator, he broke with the NRA to oppose a bill that would require states to recognize concealed carry permits from other states.
Brown has been leaning on states’ rights to balance his home state’s liberalism on gun issues with the anti-gun control fervor that grips the national GOP, arguing that the federal government has no business passing new laws but that states should be free to do so. This is how he justifies his opposition to reinstating the federal assault weapon ban, which expired eight years ago.
The non-cynical reading of Bloomberg’s decision to raise money for Brown is that the mayor wants to reward what amounts to a modest break with GOP gun control orthodoxy, and to deliver a message to other Republicans that he’s willing to help them if they do the same. At some level, it’s surely a factor here.
But it’s hard to ignore the other major issue that might attract Bloomberg to Brown’s side: Wall Street. This has a little to do with Brown, who voted for the Dodd-Frank reform law but also worked to make it much weaker than it could have been, and a lot to do with his opponent, Elizabeth Warren, whom the Wall Street crowd is treating as its biggest enemy running for office this year.
When the Occupy Wall Street movement emerged last fall, Warren boasted that she’d created “much of the intellectual foundation” for the movement’s top 1 percent/bottom 99 percent messaging. Bloomberg, meanwhile, called the protests “not productive” and said that “what they’re trying to do is take the jobs away from people working in this city.” More recently, Bloomberg argued that President Obama, who is calling for the end of the Bush tax cuts for incomes over $250,000, has “not only embraced the frustration expressed by Occupy Wall Street protesters—which was real—but he adopted their economic populism.”
Bloomberg’s decision to raise money for Brown tells us a lot about his ideology, which is commonly portrayed in the media as centrist and independent. But that’s not really where he’s coming from. On most issues – guns, abortion, gay rights, the environment — Bloomberg is a standard-issue liberal Democrat. On economic issues, he’s a Wall Street Democrat, not averse to raising taxes (he’s even said the Bush rates should expire for everyone) but mindful of and often deferential to the sensitivities of the financial services sector. This puts him on the same page as Bill Clinton, Cory Booker and the many, many other Democrats who’ve cultivated mutually beneficial relationships with Wall Street over the past two decades. Obama himself benefited from Wall Street’s help in 2008, although that won’t really be the case this year.
In this sense, Bloomberg’s support for Brown isn’t really a sign of how independent he is as much as it is an indicator of how far removed Warren is from where most elite Democrats are on Wall Street issues.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, July 26, 2012
“The Man Without a Past”: Mitt Romney, A Barbarian At The Gate?
Mitt Romney has an identity problem. He is running for president by making promises about America’s future, but as a man who is largely without a past. Not only has Romney renounced many of his previous positions — on abortion, immigration, gun control, climate change, and the individual mandate he once championed as Massachusetts governor. He also refuses to divulge many details about what even he has said is his main qualification for the White House in a faltering economy: his successful career in “private equity” from 1984 to 1999 (or thereabouts).
What is it about the private equity world that Romney doesn’t appear eager to bring up? As I explain in an article in the current issue of National Journal, “Mystery Man,” Romney was basically what used to be known as a “barbarian at the gate.” The term “private equity” sounds respectable, but it is a euphemism for the old leveraged buyout deals we remember from the 1980s, the era of corporate raiders like T. Boone Pickens and Henry Kravis. After junk-bond king Michael Milken, who funded a lot of those takeovers, went to jail, the industry decided to rename itself in order to remove the taint.
This is Mitt Romney’s true world. As the founder of Bain Capital, Romney became a brilliant LBO buccaneer who specialized in buying up firms by taking on a lot of debt, using the target firm as collateral, and then trying to make the firm profitable — often by breaking it up or slashing jobs — to the point where Bain and its investors could load up the firm with even more debt, which Bain would then use to pay itself off. That would ensure a profit for Bain investors whether or not the companies themselves succeeded in the long run. Often, burdened by all that debt, these bought-out companies did not succeed, costing thousands of jobs as they were downsized, sold off and shuttered. Other times they did phenomenally well, as in the case of Sports Authority and Domino’s Pizza.
But job creation is irrelevant to Bain’s business model, which is all about paying back investors. Nor does the long-term fate of the companies that private-equity firms buy up matter crucially to Bain’s bottom line (though of course success is better). The only real risk for Bain is that these companies fail to make enough initial profit in order to permit Bain to pile on more debt and extract a payout, so that it can make back its investment quickly.
Though he started off dabbling in less profitable “venture capital,” Romney quickly saw the high-return, low-risk potential of LBOs in the mid-1980s and ultimately was involved in about 100 such deals, which made him a true Wall Street tycoon. He then maximized his take further by socking away his gains in offshore shelters from Bermuda to the Caymans and using capital gains tax breaks and loopholes to reduce the rate of his 2010 tax return (the only one he’s released) to 13.9 percent, a far lower rate than the one paid by middle-class Americans. Many of Wall Street’s big dealmakers do the same with their profits, employing whole teams of international tax accountants.
But none of these dealmakers has ever run for president. This is perhaps the main reason for Romney’s reticence: It’s not just that being honest about Bain’s real business pulls back the veil from the ugly heart of financial capitalism. It’s also that this may be the hardest year since 1932 for a Wall Street big-shot to make a bid for the White House: The former Masters of the Universe remain unpopular because of the historic recession they did so much to create. So it’s hardly a surprise that Romney won’t dwell on practices that his onetime GOP primary opponent, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, labeled “vulture” capitalism.
None of this is necessarily disqualifying for a presidential candidate; on the contrary. Americans have always admired business success, no matter what package it comes in. It is part of the nation’s lore going back to the rags-to-riches tales of Horatio Alger and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the storied careers of Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan. Romney is undoubtedly one of the most successful capitalists ever to run for president. Based on his record at Bain, as governor, and at the Olympics, there is little doubt that he is a numbers whiz who is handy with a budget, and America has serious budget problems. “At the end of the day, people are going to know Mitt Romney was a super-successful businessman, and they’re going to factor that in,” says Vin Weber, a senior Romney adviser. “And most people will find that attractive and not negative.”
Maybe so. But as the Obama attacks persist, even some in the Romney camp fret that they are watching a Democratic version of the attacks that permanently defined Michael Dukakis as weak in 1988 and “Swift-boated” an unresponsive John Kerry in 2004. “That worries me a little bit,” Weber admits.
The Obama attacks also may be resonating because they compound an image of aloofness, of detachment from the lives of ordinary Americans, which has dogged Romney for many years. He is hardly the first rich man to run for president, yet he lacks the populist touch of previous successful candidates. Franklin Delano Roosevelt also came from a wealthy patrician family, but by the time he ran for president as a polio victim who had suffered among the people in Warm Springs, Ga., FDR had reputation for transcending that background. So did John F. Kennedy, whose father’s vast but somewhat shady Wall Street fortune financed a rich-kid bid for Congress, the Senate, and then the presidency. But JFK’s charisma and war-hero reputation, and his ability to connect with people — for example, by famously telling a hushed crowd of mothers who had lost sons in World War II that “I think I know how you mothers feel, because my mother is a Gold Star mother too” — made him a popular figure.
Not so Romney. His record contains few such man-of-the-people moments (ironically, his best argument may be his successful health-care law in Massachusetts, another thing he doesn’t want to talk about). And his uncommon Mormon religion, about which he is also reticent, further contributes to the image of a Man Hard to Know. This is the same Romney who declared during the hard-knocking primaries that the $350,000 he earned in speaking fees wasn’t a lot of money, who said that his wife drives a “couple of Cadillacs,” who grinningly bet Rick Perry $10,000 on a whim, and who boasted that even wealthy Ted Kennedy had to “take a mortgage out” to beat him. And those are moments when Romney was trying to be one of the guys. What has become clear is that he is part of a world of super-elites who live in a universe apart from most Americans.
Romney may well make a very good president. But we should know who we’re getting.
BY: Michael Hirsh, The Atlantic, July 21, 2012
“The Prevailing Order”: The Rich Really Are Different
In the last couple of years, we’ve occasionally seen stories where Wall Street types justify their enormous compensation packages by saying they work really, really hard. They stay late, they work weekends, they just keep their noses to the grindstone, and that’s why they get paid what they do. Sure, $30 million a year is a lot of money. But the hedge fund manager who made it probably worked 1,000 times harder than the electrician who made $30,000. Right?
I thought of those Wall Streeters and their rhetoric about hard work when considering the question of Mitt Romney’s tax returns. One of the things we’ve found out in the whole when-did-Romney-leave-Bain controversy is that even after he retired/went on a leave of absence, he was being paid at least $100,000 a year for doing what he swears was absolutely nothing. That’s a lot of money for doing nothing, at least to people like you and me, but remember that to Mitt Romney, it’s peanuts. According to the information he has released, he made over $42 million in 2010 and 2011 without doing any actual work. He hasn’t held a job in five and a half years, since he left the Massachusetts governor’s office. Tens of millions of dollars just keep pouring into his many bank accounts, without him lifting a finger. And of course, he pays a far lower tax rate on all that income than people who work for a living.
But it really seems that Romney has a hard time understanding why that would rankle people. The entire system is set up to allow people like him to play by a set of rules that was established by the wealthy, for the wealthy; but when you’re the beneficiary, it seems like the prevailing order is a just order. And what Romney wants is to make income from investments and inheritances taxed at an even lower rate. You probably haven’t heard, since there hasn’t been much discussion about it, but Barack Obama’s official position (even if he’s not going to do much about it) is that investment income should be taxed at the same rate as wage income; in other words, money you work for shouldn’t be taxed more (as it is now) than money you make when your money makes you more money. I’m sure that if somebody asked Mitt Romney about taxing all income at the same rate, he’d think the idea was nothing short of insane.
It’s not impossible for someone to benefit greatly from that system and still manage to wrap their heads around the fact that it’s unfair. There are plenty of rich people who do (Warren Buffett is the most visible example). I keep returning to Mitt’s repeated comments that of course he took advantage of every tax loophole he could find to make sure he paid as little as possible. We could argue about whether that’s unpatriotic, but the thing is that for most people who do a job and get paid a salary, there just aren’t those kinds of loopholes available. Not only can’t they afford to hire a team of accountants and tax lawyers; even if they could, there wouldn’t be much those people could do for them.
There is obviously something in Mitt Romney’s pre-2010 tax returns that he really, really doesn’t want people to see. Just how awful it is, we have no way of knowing; it could be something truly shocking, or just more of the offshore accounts and low tax rates we already know about from his 2010 return. But whatever it is, revealing it would no doubt have the effect of reminding people just how different the rules people like Mitt Romney play by really are. And if he’s afraid of that, maybe he’s more self-aware than I’m giving him credit for.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 19, 2012
“The Courage Of Convictions”: Dear Mr. Romney, I Want More Free Stuff From The Government
Dear Mr. Romney, I was hoping you could tell me how to get more free stuff from the government, and I see that you took up that question after your speech to the NAACP last week. You were speaking to a group of white people in Hamilton, Montana, and you told them that, at the NAACP, you had said that you were “going to get rid of Obamacare.” You said that they “weren’t happy” about that. And you said that if people want “more free stuff” from “the government,” they should “go vote for the other guy.”
Well, I want more free stuff from the government, but, actually, if you want free stuff from Obama, you’d be better off as a banker than as a black person.
Maybe you heard that Obama’s TARP and stimulus programs already gave $4.5 trillion in bailout money to the big banks and investment houses on Wall Street. There’s a lot more if you count loan guarantees and emergency lending from the Federal Reserve.
If I had gotten any of that free stuff, like your friends on Wall Street did, I could have done what they did—use those public funds to pay myself really well.
Some of your friends are praising you for your “straight talk” to the NAACP, for having the courage of your convictions and letting the chips fall where they may. But actually you didn’t tell the black people they should vote for the other guy because they want free stuff. Instead, you told a white audience afterwards that’s what black people should do.
Some people, like Matt Taibbi at RollingStone.com, thought your post-NAACP remarks were “shockingly offensive” and “cynically furthering dangerous and irresponsible stereotypes in order to advance some harebrained electoral ploy involving white conservative voters.” I can see his point.
But at the Center for the Study of Mitt Romney, they found that this isn’t the first time you said that people who want “free stuff” from the government should “vote for the other guy.” (Actually it was Rachel Maddow who found this.)
A few months ago, Rachel reported, you responded to questions about contraception access by saying, “If you’re looking for free stuff you don’t have to pay for, vote for the other guy.” You also complained that Obama was trying to buy students’ political support by offering them “free stuff.”
Rachel thought she could see a pattern here: “If you’re a woman who wants access to preventive care you might not otherwise be able to afford, Romney sees you as wanting ‘free stuff.’ If you’re a young student who can’t afford higher-ed tuition, Romney assumes you expect ‘free stuff.’ And if you’re a black person who wants your family to have access to affordable healthcare, Romney thinks you too are just looking for “free stuff.”
Of course, there’s another way to look at all this. You could say we are taking on the responsibility to see that everyone gets decent medical care, whether or not they can afford it. We want our friends and family and neighbors and co-workers who are uninsured or underinsured to be able to go to the doctor when they’re sick. We want the same thing even for people we don’t know. That’s the way minister Leslie Watson Malachi of People for the American Way explained it.
One other thing—it’s not just black people who will benefit from Obamacare. Most of the beneficiaries will be white—just in case the white people in Hamiltion, Montana got the wrong impression from your speech.
By: Joe Wiener, The Nation, July 14, 2012
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