Behind Romney's battleship plan, an ill wind blows

If Mitt Romney’s high-finance cronies had more money invested in horses and bayonets, would  the Republican presidential candidate be insisting that our national security depended on them?

As it is, Romney is championing a vast and costly expansion in the number of the Navy’s big battleships, from which one of his top foreign policy advisers could make a healthy profit.

That would be John Lehman, CEO of J.F. Lehman & Company, an investment firm that specializes in acquiring “middle market companies in the defense, aerospace and maritime industries and the technologies that originate from them.”

He’s also a former secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration, a member of the 9/11  Commission and a stalwart Republican who also advised John McCain’s losing presidential bid.  Lehman has been advocating for more big ships since his days in the Reagan administration – and as Wired magazine reported, he’s put himself in a good spot to profit from an increase in military shipbuilding. “He has profited hugely from the Navy’s slow growth in recent years — raising the prospect that he could make even more if Romney takes his advice on expanding the fleet."

And now he’s being mentioned as a possible secretary of defense in a Romney administration.

But Lehman’s history makes him a particularly dubious character to place anywhere near taxpayers’ money, especially as Romney insists he will preside over a huge increase in spending on defense – including Lehman’s pet project to increase the number of battleships. (Under Obama, the Navy plans to build an additional 15 warships by 2019, bringing the fleet to 300, at a cost of between $17 and $22 billion a year. Under the more ambitious Romney/Lehman plan, the fleet would grow to more than 350 ships by 2022.)

During the Reagan administration, Lehman was an acknowledged master of the Washington insider political game. But his management style at Navy was blamed for a massive corruption scandal involving military officials and big defense contractors.

Prosecutors dubbed their investigation, which began after Lehman returned to private life in 1987, “Operation Ill Wind.”  More than 50 government officials, corporate heads, consultants and military contractors were convicted.

But Knight-Ridder, citing a congressman and a former defense official, reported in 1988, “The autocratic management of former Navy secretary John F. Lehman Jr. created an environment ripe for the type of abuses uncovered by the Justice Department's probe into Pentagon contract bribery.”

Lawrence Korb, an assistant secretary for defense at the beginning of the Reagan administration, said: "The Navy, when I was in the Defense Department looking at it from the inside, and when I was outside, was a bureaucracy run amok. It was making its own procurement rules in many cases which were different from the Defense Department."

One of those who went to prison was a close associate of Lehman’s, Melvyn Paisley, who Lehman brought in as a top Navy Department official. Paisley pleaded guilty to accepting hundreds of thousands in bribes and served four years in prison and paid a $500,000 fine. Lehman was never charged with any wrongdoing, but according to media reports, he was suspected of improperly tipping off Paisley to the investigation.

Ill Wind investigators also discovered that when Lehman joined the administration, he had sold a lucrative defense consulting business from which he was earning $180,000 a year – but not before securing a guarantee from Boeing Corp., a major defense contractor, that it would use the consulting business. Knight Ridder reported that while Justice Department officials said Lehman’s actions violated no law, they constituted an ethical breach that would have required his dismissal had they been discovered while he was still Navy secretary.

The latest escapade in which Lehman surfaced was his company’s investment in the   government-backed construction of a superferry to carry passengers between several Hawaiian islands.

As detailed in Wired and the New York Times, the superferry ultimately was a failure for civilian travel, even with the encouragement of  $136 million in government loans. But it boosted the fortunes of a shipyard Lehman owns, along with the prospects that the Superferry would catch the eye of another very wealthy customer – the Defense Department.

Ryan Sibley, of the government watchdog group Sunlight Foundation told Wired that “Lehman’s involvement with the Superferry shows that he is no stranger to using personal connections to influence costly decisions.”

 

Release the Kraken

 

I filled out my California ballot today, choosing candidates and wading through the propositions trying to figure out who’s behind what and why. I don’t blame people who feel like bystanders in democracy these days – that some ethereal dispute is underway that most of us aren’t meant to understand. It's like in the movie “Clash of the Titans,” in which the gods are fighting each other while mere mortals are mostly just trying to avoid becoming collateral damage, dodging the Kraken and other nightmares hurled down upon them from Mount Olympus.

The various official and Super PAC campaigns for the presidential candidates are expected to break the $2 billion barrier by Election Day, a dubious record made possible by several men in black on the United States Supreme Court, whose decision in Citizens United authorized corporations to take control of American politics under the guise of freedom of speech.

In California, meanwhile, well-heeled politicians and special interest partisans in the proposition battles are spending hundreds of millions more flooding the airwaves and mailboxes.

Interesting, isn’t it, that the electoral marketplace is prosperous – like the stock market. Meanwhile, back on the planet, those Americans not employed by the Money Industry (unemployment rate: 4.6%), or its dependent relative the Political Industry, are desperately trying to hang on to a job, or more likely a part-time job. And yet, as my colleague Marty Berg and Ralph Nader have pointed out, neither Obama nor Romney have had anything to say about raising the minimum wage. It’s $7.25 an hour for federal workers; a whopping $8 an hour in California.

We could probably increase the minimum wage significantly just by taxing political advertising in the United States. Doubt that would get past the Supreme Court, though.

It’s not only the amount of money, but how it’s being unleashed: in an extraordinary assault of distortions and lies, raining down on the heads of voters from incomprehensible, sometimes secret sources. Take the California elections, for example. Proponents of Proposition 32 on the ballot insist that by limiting the political activities of unions, it will increase government “transparency.” But the Proposition 32 campaign is being funded by out of state money of unknown origin. The lobbyists hired by Proposition 33, which is 99.4% funded by the long-time CEO of Mercury Insurance Company, sued several of us who are opposed to the measure in court last August. They lost; but last week they claimed that we sued them and we lost. Huh? Then there’s Proposition 37, which would accomplish the unarguable goal of requiring food that is genetically engineered to disclose it on the packaging. You couldn’t possibly understand that from the TV ad against Prop 37, which features doctors and farmers riffing on how Prop 37 will inspire frivolous lawsuits, raise your grocery bills by zillions of dollars and favor dogs over people. It's the Kraken, beamed into our living rooms to terrorize us.

Figuring out the truth about this proposition is hard enough; figuring out who's paying for the TV commercials is impossible. No, really: try it for yourself. Watch this YouTube video and see if you can read the 75 words that appear for exactly three seconds in block micro-print at around 27 seconds in. If you pause it and squint, you might catch the names DuPont, Monsanto and ConAgra. Kind of alters your view of Prop. 37, doesn't it?

The nation’s electoral discourse is so polluted by money-driven deceit these days that it has its own sociological description: “post-truth” politics.

Honesty in campaigns used to be policed by journalists, particularly newspaper reporters, who had the expertise and experience to weigh in on complex issues and call out the liars. But their numbers have dwindled, leaving the combatants (or in the case of the special interests, their highly paid surrogates)  to slug it out. The Golden Rule often determines who prevails: he who has the gold, rules.

Or maybe it makes no difference at all. According to a story in this week’s New Yorker, the Obama campaign has concluded, after an exhaustive study of the 2008 race, that the most effective way to reach a voter is “not TV ads or glossy mail but contact from an enthusiastic human being.” Is it possible Americans have finally figured out that when “the TV tells you” how to vote, as one voter said to me back in a 1998, night after night without surcease, you can probably safely assume the sponsor of that ad is not on your side, and vote the other way? Maybe if someone you trust calls or shows up at your doorstep – but that costs a lot of money, too.

The average American cannot compete against the monied and powerful in the political or legislative arena. That's the betrayal of America's Constitution rotting at the core of the Citizens United decision. By equating money to speech, and decreeing that corporations have the same free speech rights as human beings, the high court rendered most Americans mute. We are now spectators, hoping we will somehow see the truth. Or at least not get hurt.

Illustration (c) Charles Lynn Bragg

D.C. Disconnect: The New Normal, Election Edition

Nothing epitomizes just how detached our political culture is from the concerns of most Americans than the coverage of the latest dip in the unemployment rate.

For big media and the punditocracy, the major takeaway was that the latest slight decline, from 8.1 to 7.8 percent, constituted a positive for the president and his stewardship of an economy still struggling for traction after the greatest slump since the Great Depression.

So exactly what constitutes such good news for President Obama?

Dig a little deeper into the unemployment report, and you find an economy in which more people are forced to take lower paying part-time work with no benefits because the good jobs with benefits, pensions and security have disappeared.

While this is not exactly news, what is news is how blithely the two candidates have ignored this reality in their campaigns.

During their first debate, obsessed with tax rates and the deficit, neither the president nor Mitt Romney offered any substance about how they planned to offer leadership to stem this deterioration. Those good-paying jobs aren’t coming back under the policies supported by either the president or Romney, no matter how they try to sugarcoat their promises with soothing rhetoric and homilies about the free market and hard-working Americans.

The challenger stakes our future to a worn-out dogma of deregulation, tax cuts for the rich and promised cuts to education and other essential government services – except when he doesn’t.

The president asks for another four years in which he will presumably figure out how to get intransigent Republicans to work with him while offering his own modest vision for “getting the economy going again.”

In their first debate, there was barely a peep about the crucial issue of trade agreements– because both candidates support free trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, now being negotiated in secret, which protect corporate rights and fat profits, but fail to protect American workers’ jobs.

The media has not exactly ignored the story of economic decline, but it hasn’t put it front and center, either, though it’s eating away at the lives of so many American families.

For example, late this summer the National Employment Law Project published a study on the low-wage recovery and growing economic inequality in the U.S. Among its findings: job gains in the recovery have been focused in lower-wage occupations, while mid-wage occupations, which accounted for 60 percent of job losses in the recession, have made up just 22 percent of the recovery through the first quarter of 2012.

You might have read about the report in the New York Times – if you were reading the B section Labor Day weekend.

You may also have missed this story that fleshes out the economic realities we’re facing: even when high-wage industries are hiring, they’re hiring at lower wages.

But you didn’t hear Jim Lehrer pressing the president or Romney to get specific on the crucial issue. Income inequality may have become a buzzword but our leaders and media have yet to absorb its full importance.

 

 

 

 

 

Left, right and left out

On so many issues related to the state of our economic recovery, current notions of liberal and conservative don’t seem to apply.

For example, should we allow a real free market to work in our financial system?

Should we crack down hard on those Wall Street bankers who broke the law?

Should companies that want to foreclose on property have to follow the law?

If you’re in favor of real financial free market, tough law enforcement and following the law, are you conservative or liberal, left or right?

What you are is in the majority, and the most important political designation in the U.S. in 2012 – left out.

Your views are reflected only rarely in the political debate at all and never in the presidential debate. Sure, President Obama has repeatedly promised to get tough on Wall Street, most recently in the state of the union in January, but based on the results, those promises have little credibility. President Obama preaches for an activist role for government with the occasional populist flourish, but that impulse wilts if Republicans or campaign funders show the least resistance.

His opponent, Mitt Romney, considers any crackdown on Wall Street an affront to the beloved job creators to whom we should all be bowing down – even if they don’t actually use their wealth to create any decent jobs.

What we get instead of a real debate on how to get an economy that works for ordinary folks is a faux argument over the role of venture capitalist tycoons, between the candidate who used to be one and our president, who has relied on them a key source of campaign funding as much as Romney has.

What we get is the fiscal cliff drama about whether or not to shut down the government.

What we get is each side offering scary versions of what the other will do.

What we get are Mitt Romney’s assurances that if we just get the regulators out of the way, the wealthy job creators will get to work, regardless of whether anybody can afford to buy their products.

What we get is the president’s half-measures and handwringing. But it’s all political theater that doesn’t replace real jobs, real plans to revive housing and keep people in their homes and real accountability for bankers. It doesn’t replace a real debate about the role of big money in overshadowing those issues in our elections. Right now, both sides have left those out of their campaigns.

Politics is a team activity and our natural tendency is to root for our guy, downplay his flaws, and point out how much worse the other guy would be. But this election should not just be rooting for our team and beating the other guy. It should not be about rooting for our guy we’re so hyped up about how scary the other guy is.

It should be about who is willing to confront the big money, not bend to it.

It should be about who can really get people back to work, keep us in our homes, guide an economic recovery that’s not just for the wealthiest.

We should demand that we’re more than just a rooting section for our team, that our bread and butter concerns are not left out.

 

 

 

King of the Hill

Though we need to wait until November to find out who the next president will be, we already know who the king is.

That would be JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who got the regal treatment from the Senate Finance Committee this week when he was called to testify about the disastrous trades that has cost his firm more than $3 billion so far and reduced the firm's market value by $27 billion.

You know, the trades that Dimon originally dismissed as a “tempest in a teapot.”

Which gives you some idea of the teapots that President Obama’s favorite banker can afford. President Obama has particularly close ties to the bank: JPMorgan’s PAC was one of the top donors to his 2008 campaign, offering more than $800,000, and the president’s former chief of staff, William Daley, was a top executive there.

Dimon is equally popular on Capitol Hill. Instead of a grilling him about his failure to take action for months after questions were raised about the strategy surrounding the failed trades, most of the senators treaded lightly.

Instead of scrutinizing the foreclosure fraud and failure that led to JPMorgan’s $5.3 billion share of a $26 billion settlement with state attorneys generals, several senators took the opportunity to offer Dimon a platform to continue his campaign against regulation of Wall Street, including modest reforms like the Volcker rule which many say could have prevented the JPMorgan loss – had it been in place.

For his part, Dimon denied that he knew anything, took some vague responsibility and minimized the losses as an isolated event.

The route to traditional royalty is through birth or marriage. Dimon won his political crown through another time-honored path – he bought it. Most of the senators he faced had benefited from the generosity of his bank’s campaign contributions. As the Nation’s George Zornick reported, the senators had received more than $522,000 from JPMorgan, about evenly split between Republicans and Democrats.

The staff of the Finance Committee and JPMorgan are connected through a web of revolving door contacts. The banking committee’s staff director is a former JPMorgan lobbyist, Dwight Fettig. One of the banks’ top lobbyists is a former staffer for banking committee member Sen. Chuck Schumer, while three of its outside lobbyists used to work for the committee or one of its members.

J.P. Morgan has pummeled Congress and regulators with more than $7.6 million worth of lobbying in an effort to get banking rules written to favor the bank.

The king’s appearance before his subjects on the Senate Finance Committee was a powerful demonstration, for those who still need it, of just how little of the spirit and the practice of real democracy remains in an institution that is supposed to embody it.

If our representatives were truly beholden to us, rather than to Dimon and others with large supplies of cash to dole out, his testimony would have had a starkly different tone.

He has a lot to answer for. So do those who let him off so easy.

And it’s not just Dimon that the senators have failed to oversee. While bankers’ profits are back, the banking system is still broke.

If those senators were serving us, rather than serving as lapdogs to bankers, Dimon and other Wall Street monarchs might be looking at prison cells, not red carpets.

 

Corporations Gone Wild

It’s a magnificent time to be alive – if you’re a giant corporation, that is.

Spring is here, and after a deep chill, the mighty mega-businesses are not merely reborn, but blossoming. “Big U.S. companies have emerged from the recession more productive, more profitable, flush with cash and less burdened by debt,” swoons the Wall Street Journal.  The seductively sweet smell of speculation – in mortgages, derivatives, oil, wheat – once again fills the air. Amidst the giddy exuberance of the stock market, why dwell on the dreary conditions among the human population, where one out of every six Americans lives below the poverty line, one of every ten is out of work, and one of every five homes are worth less than the loans that secure them?

Oh to be young, free and incorporated – preferably in an island like Bermuda.

Being a Big Business wasn’t always so much fun. For a long time, corporations had to obey the same rules as the rest of us. And after Wall Street drove America into a ditch four years ago, Corporate America was hurting, too. True, many of us never really thought of inanimate objects as capable of suffering. And come to think of it, I never did meet a homeless corporation (though I’ve encountered many a crooked one). But with bailouts, special tax breaks, and the ability to borrow taxpayer money from the Fed at .05% interest, that painful period didn't last very long.

And then, in 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court decreed in the infamous Citizens United case that under the U.S. Constitution, corporations are the same as people and spending money is a form of free speech. So when corporations write checks, it’s the same as you and me speaking. And corporations have the right, under the First Amendment, to use money to buy public officials and purchase elections.

Corporate America’s been partying like its in Ft. Lauderdale on Spring Break ever since.

As you might expect from a climate of unrestrained corporate debauchery, there’ve been some ill-fated hook-ups, like AT&T and T-Mobile (the annulment cost $4 billion). But don’t worry about a newly rejuvenated Ma Bell not having any BFFs. Its 100 million customers literally cannot dump the company, at least not without paying a massive “early termination fee.” AT&T’s allies on the Supreme Court ruled last year that the company can strip you of your right to take it to court, leaving you no way to sever the relationship if your service fails, your “unlimited” data plan gets throttled, or you get overcharged.

Big businesses were screwing people way before Citizens United and Concepcion v. AT&T, of course. But those decisions fundamentally altered the balance of power between citizens and corporations in the courts, Congress and the executive branch.

Philosophers, scientists and science fiction writers have long predicted that the moment would come when artificial creatures, created by humans, would become more intelligent than humans – a technological "singularity" projected to arrive later this century. But no one would have guessed that 2010 would become the date of the political singularity – the year in which a legal construct – a corporation – would become more politically powerful than humans.

That corporations don’t yet have all the benefits of personhood misses the point. Justice Stevens’ dissent in Citizens United  warned: “Under the majority's view, I suppose it may be a First Amendment problem that corporations are not permitted to vote, given that voting is, among other things, a form of speech.” But corporations don’t need to vote. Corporations decide who gets elected simply by dumping vast quantities of cash into elections on behalf of candidates who will do their bidding.

As a student of American civic life named Tony Montana once explained, “In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power.”

The Supreme Court Shot the Sheriff

"Corporations are people." Two years ago, that's what five justices of the United States Supreme Court gaveled into our Constitution, ruling in the now-infamous Citizens United case that spending money is a form of "freedom of speech" and that when corporations put up money to elect people, they are just exercising their First Amendment rights.

Two months ago, the Montana Supreme Court said wait a minute. It upheld a state law, enacted by Montana voters through the initiative process in 1912, that bars corporations from trying to influence elections. The justices of the Montana Supreme Court argued that the Montana law is different than the federal law that the US Supreme Court threw out, relying on what they described as an especially disturbing history of corporate corruption in Montana government.

When it comes to constitutional law, you can't get closer to the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral than this, as I recently explained.

That's a better analogy than you think.

The campaign finance laws, designed over decades to slow down the accretion of political power by special interests, were like a lazy sheriff in a western gold rush town - barely able to keep up with the legal and illegal maneuverings of outlaw corporateers, while average citizens became increasingly like bystanders in their own democracy.

Then the Supreme Court rode into town and shot the sheriff.

Now we are back to the Wild West, with corporate gunslingers targeting anyone - officials and civilians – who are in the way of their profits and prerogatives. Corporate money, often disguised and hidden behind a fortress of deception, has charged through the Republican presidential primaries, not to mention an untold number of state elections throughout the country. The full fury of this greed-driven onslaught will become apparent in the fall, as Wall Street and the .01 percenters weigh in not just to defeat President Obama (who has not cooperated enough) but any number of other candidates on ballots nationwide, not to mention initiatives put on the ballot by real, live citizens detouring corrupt legislators by taking matters into their own hands.

You can already sense defeat among government officials trying to figure out what defenses, if any, are left against the corporate hordes - the CEOs in their sky-high boardrooms quietly counting dollars and deciding which politicians have earned their financial support (or can be bought); the lobbyists with unlimited expense accounts to wine, dine and drive the quid pro quo; the vast underground of consulting firms and PR flacks that follow corporate orders.

No one could have imagined that Montana, with a population barely larger than a big city, would rise to challenge the United States Supreme Court. The Montana court ruling is an inspiring attempt to evade the deathly embrace of Citizens United and, at the same time, inescapably a courageous challenge to the ideologues now re-writing the nation's laws. It can be found here (PDF).

"Western Tradition Partnership" – the shadowy entity that was caught violating Montana's anti-corrupt practices act – immediately challenged the Montana decision, and last Friday, United States Supreme Court Justice William Kennedy (chief author of the Citizens United decision) issued an order blocking the Montana court ruling from taking effect until the court decides what to do with the appeal.

At least two of the Supreme Court justices who disagreed with their colleagues in Citizens United are hoping the Court will reconsider that ruling. In Friday's order, Justices Ginsberg and Breyer stated:

Montana’s experience, and experience elsewhere since this Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Comm’n, 558 U. S. ___ (2010), make it exceedingly difficult to maintain that independent expenditures by corporations “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” .... [The appeal] will give the Court an opportunity to consider whether, in light of the huge sums currently deployed to buy candidates’ allegiance, Citizens United should continue to hold sway.

Observers of the Court think that's a lost cause. Renowned constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky believes that the U.S. Supreme Court will reverse the Montana Supreme Court by the same five to four majority in Citizens United. Still, Citizens United's impact on America's democracy has already been catastrophic, and support for proposals like ours to amend the Constitution has spread across the United States and transcends partisan labels. At the same time, Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito are under fire for their close ties to conservative pro-business organizations, further undermining confidence in the impartiality of the nation's highest court. I would not underestimate the power of public opinion to affect the outcome of this showdown – if not now, then in the not too distant future of our country.

 

 

“There Oughta Be A Law” – Want to Play?

I wrote last week that until we change the Constitution to permanently kick corporate money out of politics, we can forget about Congress protecting us from cell phone company contracts that strip consumers of their right to go to court.

I got a lot of interesting email on that post, because most people who read “Where’s Our Money” and other blogs think there “oughta be a law” of some kind. But no matter what you believe in or where you stand on the ideological spectrum, anybody who is trying to make America a better place for human beings is going to have a hard time overcoming the corrupting effect of corporate money on public officials and the democratic process.

Think I’m wrong? Here’s my challenge:

Name a policy issue that involves our power as voters, consumers, workers, taxpayers or even shareholders and I will show you how corporate money has derailed any serious progress on the matter.

If you don’t want to post it publicly, just ask that your comment remain private, or send me an email.

The same day I mused on our new status as second-class citizens courtesy of the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, President Obama’s re-election campaign endorsed a constitutional amendment to reverse that ruling. "The President favors action—by constitutional amendment, if necessary—to place reasonable limits on all such spending," the Obama campaign said. This came in the context of a another controversial move: the President had decided to encourage supporters to donate to one of the Super PACs supporting him. “Super PACs” are the shadowy groups that the Supreme Court freed of restraints on political spending in Citizens United. Tens of millions of dollars, most of it from unidentified corporations and wealthy donors, have poured into the Republican primaries. But that’s just a fraction of what Super PACs are expected to spend to unelect Barack Obama in November.

In a stark example of biting the hand that has fed it, Wall Street has made it clear that it is offended even by the timid financial reforms mustered by the Obama Administration over the last few years. Now that the taxpayers have resuscitated the Money Industry, it wants to go all the way back to the insane deregulatory policies that pushed the nation into a depression in 2008.

There was a lot of critical commentary about the announcement, not just by hypocrite Republicans like John Beohner, but also by commentators on the left who feel Obama betrayed his commitment to campaign finance reform.

I for one can’t see how any candidate from either party can afford not to play by the deregulated rules of legalized bribery blessed by the Supreme Court. Like Obama’s campaign manager said, “unilateral disarmament” in the face of a massive attack of big money makes no sense. Our electoral system now assures the survival only of the financially fattest.

But will Obama really fight for the 28th Amendment? It’s one thing to endorse the concept and quite another to press for a change in the Constitution that would strip the corporate establishment of its power to elect candidates and dictate laws. The President has the bully pulpit and phenomenal power, but like the rest of us, he can't hope to pass any laws if corporations maintain a hammerlock over the legislative branch. No one knows better than he how the powerful insurance lobby turned health care reform into a corporate boondoggle. If President Obama thinks there oughta be a law, any meaningful law, in his second term, he's going to have confront Citizens United.

 

Steve Jobs and the Democratization of Technology

I am old enough to remember when a computer was something owned by a corporation or a university and filled a huge, specially constructed room. I did my college thesis using one of those “mainframes” to tabulate punch cards that contained data, which I inputted through a giant typewriter.

Then came the Apple II, a 1 MHz computer that had 4k of RAM, recorded data onto an audiocassette tape – later replaced by a 51/4 inch floppy disk drive. When it went on sale in 1977, it cost $1298.  With some trepidation about potentially undermining its mainframe sales to big business, IBM hurried to catch up with Apple, introducing its first personal computer in 1981. The Apple II was followed by the Macintosh in 1984. Quickly the personal computer found its way into the homes and offices of hundreds of millions of Americans, and later, through the iPhone, into their pockets.

Much will be said over the next few days about how Steve Jobs revolutionized the entertainment business. And he did, indeed.

But consider the impact his vision of a personal computer has made in placing the power of technology into the hands of the People. I wrote Proposition 103 on a Mac. I printed out campaign leaflets out an Apple LaserWriter, a $4000 printer that let you change the type style and made what I wrote look like it was printed by a professional press.

Today, as Americans assemble to protest our economic plight and the politicians’ fealty to powerful corporate interests, they access unfiltered information and communicate freely with each other through the internet and social networks that could not exist but for the democratization of computer technology pioneered by Steve Jobs.