Slamming the Door on Democracy

Revolving door just no longer cuts it to describe how large corporate interests have swallowed up the government officials that are supposed to be working in our interest.

First Street, a D.C. insiders’ guide to people, policy and influence peddling, recently published a guide to lobbyists. The highest paid lobbyists were former elected officials, with an average take of $178,000 a year, the next highest paid group was former staffers, with an average take of more than $144,000 a year. Both left the professional lobbyists far behind in their value to their clients.

In public, our corporate leaders use polite language describing themselves in glowing terms like “job creators.”  Republicans wring their hands over regulations; Democrats weep crocodile tears over the plight of the middle class. Meanwhile the politicians feast at the public trough and prepare for lucrative payoffs, I mean careers, in the private sector.

Revolving door implies that these officials are somehow going back and forth between serving the public interest and the corporate interests that lobby them, pay for their campaigns if they’re elected, and then hire them when they’re ready to cash out.

But that’s not what’s happening.

The door doesn’t revolve, it only swings one way. And what’s happening to our government deserves much stronger language than the description of a door.

We have to face up to the fact that under our present system, election to public office, or appointment to key regulatory posts, is for the vast majority is the entryway into a world of legalized prostitution, where major corporations wield nearly absolute power over our government.

At WheresOurMoney.org we’ve proposed a constitutional amendment, 28A, to undo Citizens United, the awful U.S. Supreme Court ruling that unleashes even more unrestricted and unreported corporate money into our political system. That won’t curb lobbying. But rallying around the reversal of Citizens United will focus attention on the culture of legalized corruption that has overtaken our government.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Citizens United / Congress / Martin Column - 12/20/2011

Confessions of a Conflicted Occupier

When the LAPD stormed into Los Angeles City Hall Park after midnight my first reaction was fear.

They flooded into the park without warning through the doors of City Hall, a massive masked army in riot gear, batons raised.

Where was our order to disperse?

The raid was just the latest deterioration in the city government’s relationship with Occupy. First they welcomed us with open arms, the City Council invited us to stay, the police stood by with commendable restraint. Then, six weeks in, City officials launched a propaganda campaign stressing the problems of the encampment. The campaign was designed to erode public support, making it imperative that they move in.

I was in the park that night in solidarity with a movement for which I have great hopes, and somesgivings. Partly, it’s me. I’m not by nature a joiner. I spent years as a newspaper reporter and editor, doing my best to conceal my biases and not take sides.  By temperament as well as training, it’s natural for me to see both sides of an issue and poke holes in arguments, rather than come up with solutions. I’m better at asking questions than having to come up with answers.

But after eight years of disastrous policies during the Bush era, and severe disappointment with President Obama and the Democrats’ embrace of Wall Street, weak financial reform and tepid leadership in focusing on the main problems facing the economy – unemployment, foreclosure, widening income disparity and attacks on the middle class – I was more than ready for a movement that wanted to focus on those problems.

My wife and I visited Zucotti Square a week into Occupy Wall Street and were buoyed by people of all ages who had showed up from all over the country to figure out how to work together to deal with the issues. When I first head the human mic, in which the crowd repeats everything that a speaker says, phrase by phrase, I thought I had stumbled into a street theater performance. It took me a few minutes to realize that this was a meeting, the general assembly.

The next night, back home in downtown Los Angeles, we walked our dog Billie through the park at City Hall. Occupy needs to be happening here, I said, and it should be at City Hall.

A bunch of activists I didn’t know at the time was way ahead of me: they had been organizing for a couple of weeks. That very night, when we got home from our walk, the announcement that Occupy LA would begin the following day appeared on my Facebook page.

The next morning a thousand people marched from Pershing Square to City Hall, and a hundred of them set up tents.

I have a schizophrenic relationship to Occupy. The charms of the General Assembly have eluded me. All the crazy talk—like proposals to get money from the City to build a giant flower pot, complete with giant flower, on the grounds of City Hall, in which people would live. This scheme was met by an objection— a hard block. But the objector never questioned the sanity or practicality of the proposal; rather they had ideological issues with taking money from the Man aka the City. When the talk wasn’t bonkers, it was endless. I could also see conditions at the camp were deteriorating, with more and more people camped out to party and smoke pot, not to build a new social and political movement. Sometimes the wild mess of people was bracing and inspiring, but sometimes it was just heartbreaking.

One of the first nights I was there a guy pulled up with a card table and a pot of chili and started ladling it out. It was some of the most delicious chili I ever tasted. I got inspired and started making pots of vegan lentils and black beans to take to the camp. But then I would get another whiff of the increasingly squalid conditions in the camp and want it gone. Can’t the movement just evolve to the next step in which camping out would no longer be its most visible image and most important product?

I refused to make them soup, but then my wife, Stacie Chaiken, who helped organize an interfaith clergy group at Occupy, would give me a hard time and I would go back to making soup.

I saw what the Occupy meant to her, how she understood it in a way that went beyond the encampment and the endless meetings. I saw what it meant to my friend, a special-ed teacher, who has been in despair watching the corporatization of public education. I made new friends at Occupy who had a much higher tolerance for the mess and the meetings, who found at Occupy connections to other people and pieces of themselves that had been for such a long time missing.

I fell in with a group that was meeting with City officials, initially about logistics, and then about an attempt to conclude the encampment at City Hall, with the possibility that the City might turn over a patch of land and some office space to a nonprofit created by Occupy. The discussions eventually came to naught, in part because neither the City nor our group could deliver. Controversy erupted because a faction of Occupiers who have not been involved in the talks with City officials objected to our engaging in “secret” discussions because that went against the Occupy principle of complete transparency. If the Mayor and Police Chief wanted to talk to us, they should come to the General Assembly and get on stack, meaning they should wait in line like everyone else for their turn to speak.

Maybe those who objected were right. But I strongly doubt that City and police officials would have showed up at the General Assembly to discuss issues with—and submit to the verbal slings and arrows of the Occupiers, as many of them wished. And I found the discussions with the Police and Mayor’s office a fascinating experiment, very much in keeping with the open-ended spirit of Occupy. The conversations also served to prolong the Occupation at City Hall Park long after it would have doubtless have been shut down.

The night of the raid, there were about 100 people who had decided to get arrested in acts of civil disobedience. They were all people who had been trained in non-violence. I was not one of them. When the police arrived in their shock and awe attack, I was right in the middle of the park. I scampered through the maze of tents, out of the park onto to First Street. I encountered a police line, and asked the officers—wearing helmets, carrying weapons of non-lethal destruction—how I might safely exit the perimeter. They stared at me, stone-faced.

I told the police that if there were orders being given, we couldn’t hear them. Rumors swept through the street that everyone within the perimeter were about to be arrested.

Finally I made my way up Main Street to Temple, across the Triforium and down onto Los Angeles Street. I was able to walk west on Second Street, where I found my way to the Redwood for a stiff drink before last call at 2am, where I watched the rest of the proceedings broadcast live on KTLA.

I didn’t like the way it went down that night. It was inconsistent with the LAPD’s previous restraint and with the respect the City had expressed for this important free speech movement. After I got over my initial fear, I understood why the police—in their fear of potential violence from antisocial people in the encampment— reacted in the way they did.

None of this qualifies me for the Occupy Hall of Fame. Unlike some of those I’ve met in this movement, I don’t claim to have all the answers.

I do have more questions:

Has the Occupy movement really changed the national debate, as some occupiers have claimed, or has it taken a first baby step onto the national stage? Yes, I hear the president’s populist-sounding speeches, but I have yet to hear him propose a massive jobs program or even an adequate program to address foreclosures, let alone withdraw his support from the disastrous focus on austerity instead of getting the economy going.

Is this really a movement of the 99 percent, or is it a movement of the self-selected few—activists, anarchists, bohos, hippies and others who can camp on the lawn for weeks at a time, and stand through a General Assembly?

Should the heart and soul of a movement really be that endless meeting? The General Assembly seems more like a necessary evil than a true solidarity-building exercise. How about some dancing, or singing or poetry, or praying?

Can this movement evolve beyond the symbolic taking of public space and public debate into a forum we so badly need, to including a broader spectrum of people, that can take on the bread-and-butter issues of the distressed majority?

Where is the path out of City Hall Park into the heart of the City?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Martin Column / Occupy - 12/13/2011

An Enforcer For the 99 Percent?

 California’s attorney general, Kamala Harris, has staked out the high ground in promising to hold bankers accountable and protect borrowers in the continuing foreclosure crisis.

So far she’s formed a mortgage fraud task force and walked away from the weak settlement with the banks over mortgage servicing fraud that the Obama administration and the majority of state attorney generals have been trying to foist on the public.

Then earlier this week she told the executive who oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the federally bailed out quasi-public agencies, he should quit if he won’t consider principal reduction as a tool to help underwater homeowners.

Here’s hoping that Harris can build on the foundation she’s laid.

She has a real opportunity to set herself apart from other Democratic Party politicians, from the president to the congressional leadership and others who have opted for strong PR rather than real enforcement.

But she has her challenges ahead of her.

An ambitious politician who chaired the president’s campaign in California in 2008, Harris will have to go against the political grain if she really wants to hold bankers accountable and fight for homeowners.

Prosecuting bankers is never easy. Her agency, the state attorney general’s office, has had a woeful record on consumer protection. It’s been a long time since John Van de Kamp, when he was attorney general, launched his aggressive antitrust campaign.

As we know, bankers have been lubricating the political system to protect themselves against the consequences of the excesses. They spare no expense in hiring legal talent and defend themselves with a self-righteous fury. The legal system has had an unfortunate tendency to show great deference when the lords of the universe show up.

But as William Black, the former bank regulator turned law professor, has pointed out, it can be done. Bankers can be held accountable. It was done after the savings and loan debacle in the 1980s.

If prosecutors have the tenacity, the resources and the chops, they can go after bankers like they do gang members. First you go after the less powerful, more vulnerable players, squeezing them to gain information, and find documents to gradually build cases against the higher-ups.

Harris will be at a disadvantage without federal help – when prosecutors decide to take out a gang, they form a multiagency task forces, using all the agencies of federal, state and local officials.

We’ve seen just how disinterested the feds are in going after bankers. Local prosecutors around the country haven’t shown much stomach for the job either.

But if she is pursues her task in a determined and savvy way she will find wide and enthusiastic support among a crucial group that have become disenchanted with other politicians – the 99 percent.

If you’re in the Los Angeles and you want to hear more about this from William Black himself, he’s scheduled to participate in a stellar panel at Occupy LA at City Hall moderated by Truthdig’s Robert Scheer. Black, a law professor at University of Missouri-Kansas City, will be joined by Michael Hudson, Joel Rogers, a professor of law, political science and economics at the University of Wisconsin, and via live stream, Michael Hudson, a financial analyst who also teaches economics at UM-KC.

 

California Attorney General Kamala Harris / Martin Column / Occupy - 11/05/2011

Occupy the Supercommittee

Well they can’t ignore income inequality anymore.

Thank you Occupy Wall Street.

But despite the faux populist tone and understanding emanating from the White House, I’m not convinced President Obama or the rest of our politicians are getting the message.

If they were getting it, they wouldn’t be continuing to pursue policies that place the costs of our continuing economic crisis squarely on the backs of the 99 percent, while the 1 percent uses their political clout to avoid any inconvenience.

For example, the Obama administration has allowed California to cut hundreds of millions of dollars to Medi-Cal, which provides health care to the state’s poorest residents.

If the president’s party was getting it, the Democrats on the so-called Super Committee wouldn’t be pursuing a host of draconian cuts including $3 trillion in cuts to federal health care programs as part of a so-called “grand bargain,” along with some modest tax increases for the country’s wealthiest, you know “job creators,” who are just chomping at the bit to stop outsourcing jobs as soon as they cut yet another tax cut.

As for the Republicans, they’re maintaining the position that their corporate and Wall Street benefactors should have to pay fewer taxes, while the rest of us should get along with less.

I don’t know who these politicians think this bargaining is so grand for, certainly not the 99 percent.

They talk gamely about having “skin in the game” as though they’d be doing the suffering as a result of their proposed cuts. Meanwhile, the House members of the supercommittee did exceptionally well in their service during the third quarter, raking in nearly $372,000 in fundraising from the nation’s financial sector.

This disreputable bunch have turned what is supposed to be a serious democratic process into a demonstration of what our legislature has become – an auction where the government is for sale to the highest bidder, behind closed doors.

As the weather gets frostier in the nation’s capital, the Occupy movement might want to consider the supercommittee’s digs as someplace to get in out from out of the cold.

Martin Column / Occupy / Supercommittee - 10/31/2011

The Right to Remain Silenced

Here’s another stark inequality that has come to characterize our nation: for every 99 Occupy Wall Street protestors who’ve been arrested, about one millionth of one fat cat has been arrested. Okay, I realize you can’t arrest a tiny slice of a fat cat, no matter how fat, so let me put it this way: Over a thousand Americans have been arrested around the country for protesting Wall Street in recent weeks, according to estimates. But after a half hour scouring the web, I can only find a handful of  instances of financiers or speculators being arrested for causing the collapse of our economy back in 2008 – that’s out of the hundreds of thousands who work for the Money Industry. Not one of the titans of Wall Street – the hundred-million-dollar-a-year wizards who were manipulating our economy for their personal pleasure – have been perp-walked into a paddy wagon, much less prosecuted.

The internet’s aflame with this irony, so there’s no point in belaboring it.

More important, but far less noticed, is the nature of the crime for which most of the 99% protestors have been arrested:  exercising what many Americans consider basic First Amendment rights – the freedom of speech and assembly. As we’ve witnessed over the last few weeks, in many places in this country you have no First Amendment right to walk down a street, sleep in a park, enter a public building. This isn’t anything new: under many court rulings interpreting the US Constitution, government can place “reasonable” restrictions on your rights, so as to protect the rights of others not to be disturbed.

That made sense back when “rights” belonged only to human beings.

But we now live in a new day, under a different view of the Constitution, courtesy of five members of the United States Supreme Court. According to their infamous decision in the Citizens United case, corporations have the same First Amendment rights as human beings when it comes to the freedom to express themselves by spending money to buy elections or influence votes.

There’s just one hitch to the Supreme Court’s equation of humans with corporations: when corporations exercise their First Amendment right to spend money, they completely overwhelm the First Amendment rights of humans. Sure, you can exercise your First Amendment right to donate a few bucks to a candidate for public office, or to a ballot initiative. But once a corporation opens its bank vault, your freedom of speech right is obliterated.

It used to be that the Supreme Court upheld laws that put “reasonable” restrictions on corporate spending in politics, under the theory that one person’s exercise of their rights should not disturb another’s. But Citizens United stripped that quaint notion from the law books. Until we amend the Constitution, the fat cats get to make the laws and break the laws. The rest of us have the right to remain silenced.

This travesty of democracy is now laid bare in cities and towns throughout the United States. There’s been plenty of fun poked at the strange hand gestures developed by the Occupy Wall Street supporters to substitute for applause or boos – so as not to disturb the peace of the nearby corporations. Protestors who dare to up the decibel level by using more advanced technology – a megaphone – in a public park in New York City, in the hope they can make themselves heard merely across the street, face arrest. Meanwhile, up in the executive suites, a small number of stupendously wealthy and powerful individuals order billions of dollars worth of lobbyists, lawyers and propaganda pumped into our democracy every year. It’s a deafening and unstoppable inundation… intended to make sure no one can hear what the rest of us have to say.

Citizens United / Harvey Column / Occupy / Outrage / Supreme Court - 10/24/2011

9 For the 99 – Restoring the Real Economy

Remember how aggressively our leaders have talked about tackling unemployment and the housing crisis?

Remember all the strong action to make good on their promises?

Me neither.

Remember how all our leaders criticized each other for taking money from Wall Street and other powerful corporate interests?

Remember all the potent steps they took to rid our democracy of corporate money?

Me neither.

You’ve probably heard of Herman Cain’s 9-9-9-tax plan, the scheme he says will get the economy going. Do you think it will work?

Here’s our proposal to restore the real economy. Unlike the solutions proposed by our leaders, these proposals focus on the problems faced every day by most people, not bankers.

We’ll be offering it at OccupyLA in the next couple of days to complement their work.

  1. Support 28A, constitutional amendment overturning U.S. Supreme Court “Citizens United” ruling to stop the flood of toxic corporate cash poisoning our democracy
  2. Prosecute Wall Street crime, not Wall Street protestors
  3. Give citizens same right to borrow taxpayer money from the Fed at the same low interest rates that Wall Street got in the bailout
  4. Cap bank fees and interest rates
  5. Offer real foreclosure relief:  Require banks to provide principal reduction for underwater mortgages, including allowing judges to reduce home mortgage principal in bankruptcy court to encourage mortgage modifications
  6. Repeal unnecessary tax loopholes and other corporate subsidies (overseas tax breaks, local & state tax bribes for moving jobs from one community to another, make corporations pay taxes) and transfer savings to taxpayers and small businesses in the form of tax cuts.
  7. Repeal corporate-backed NAFTA-style trade deals, which export U.S. jobs overseas, reduce wages of American workers to that of laborers in foreign countries and weaken environmental regulation.
  8. Restore traditional separations between federally guaranteed consumer banking from other, riskier, financial business.
  9. Reform student debt, stop predatory practices.

 

 

For more information, check out http://www.wheresourmoney.org

On Facebook https://www.facebook.com/wheresourmoney

Twitter http://twitter.com/ - !/WheresOurMoney

Support 28A http://www.wheresourmoney.org/campaign-2011/

 

 

 

 

 

Action / Citizens United / Congress / Foreclosure / Martin Column / Supreme Court - 10/20/2011

What's Plan B For Jobs?

That’s the big question after the Republicans, true to their word, killed President Obama’s $447 billion jobs proposal.

In response, the president has pledged to break up his plan, which is already too small to significantly reduce unemployment, into even smaller chunks that the Republicans might swallow. It’s hard to find anybody who believes that’s a serious plan to put a dent in unemployment.

The only job the president seems to have a clue about preserving is his own, continuing to raise campaign cash at a record-breaking pace, raising $70 million for his own and Democrats’ reelection.

Meanwhile Republicans pursue their own single-minded agenda to enhance corporate power and their own – destroy President Obama, reduce taxes and cripple government regulation.

Unfortunately for Republicans, when you look at the facts, regulations don’t turn out to be much of a threat to jobs after all

The only legislation the two parties agree on are a handful of NAFTA-style trade agreements that most Americans fear will only lead to more outsourcing.

Where does that leave the 99 percent?

Out in the street.

That’s where they’ll be across the country and the globe today, to register their frustration with a political and financial elite whose actions created persistently high unemployment, plummeting home values, social service cutbacks and a world of growing economic uncertainty.

As OccupyLA states on its web site, “We have been giving away our representation to people who do not deserve it …”

Check here for a list of demonstrations around the world.

 

 

Congress / D.C. Disconnect / Martin Column / Outrage / President Barack Obama - 10/15/2011

The Real "Entitlements"

For most of us, the Wall Street housing bubble popped in 2008, with painful consequences.

But for those at the top of the nation’s too big to fail banks, the party keeps rocking, even though their institutions are still in trouble and wouldn’t even exist without taxpayers’ generosity.

Take for example that wild and crazy region known as Bank of Americaland, where dwells one of the country’s biggest and sickest banks.

It’s basically never recovered from the financial collapse, which, in Bank of America’s case included a nasty hangover induced by swallowing up the king of sleazy subprime lending, Countrywide, as well as fallen investment banking titan Merrill Lynch (labeled in 2009 by the Wall Street Journal the “$50 billion deal from Hell – no link).

Here’s how Bank of America has squandered its share of the bailout: engaging in a pattern of improper foreclosures on military families and spending millions in campaign contributions and lobbying to fight regulation of its business. Most recently, the bank imposed a new $60 annual debit card on its customers.

After all, the bank’s president, Brian Moynihan, insisted, Bank of America “has a right make a profit,” which occasionally will have to be guaranteed by U.S. taxpayers.

The company is doing so poorly that it’s going to have lay off 30,000 of its employees, some of whom will spend their waning days training their lower paid, outsourced replacements. But the company isn't doing so poorly that it didn’t manage to tuck away $11 million to the ease of parting for two of its top executives.

After all, they’re executives of a floundering bank that’s made a series of poor business decisions. So they’re “entitled” to get even more money on top of their fat salaries.

Across the political spectrum, it’s become fashionable to belittle programs like Social Security and Medicaid as “entitlements,” turning that into a dirty word. But like so much about our current, out of touch with reality political debate, it’s completely upside down.

The way the debate has been framed by our political leaders and media, they’re only “entitlements” if they’re claimed by the 99 percent of Americans who have suffered in the collapse of the middle-class and economic meltdown.

We need a crackdown on “entitlements” all right, but on the real  entitlements, the ones claimed by the top 1 percent, like those Bank of America lays claim to, scooping up millions for its executives while gouging its customers and buying our political system through lobbying and campaign contributions.

But Bank of America won’t give up these entitlements without a fight, because the bankers believe that these are the benefits they’ have a right to, along with their profits.

Bank of America (BoA) / Martin Column - 10/13/2011

Rise of the Machines

In the Terminator movies, a massive computer network created by the U.S. military known as Skynet suddenly becomes sentient and launches a catastrophic attack on humankind that reduces the planet to rubble. Most of the action in the films takes place before that holocaust, as desperate humans travel back in time hoping to prevent Skynet from being invented in the first place. Technology in that bleak future was no gleaming iPad. It was a mortal enemy.

Unfortunately, there's no unwinding the myriad events of the 1980s and 90s that led to the Wall Street financial implosion in 2008. What's left now is the economic rubble left by the collapse of a massive speculation machine built by Wall Street firms with the connivance of elected officials and regulators.

The high priests and priestesses of the Money Industry were those who could program the computers to predict the market and trade at light speed.  Algorithms were the bible code of Wall Street. Billions were made by these middlemen as finance went viral, growing to a third of the U.S. economy, drawing the best and the brightest into the processing of paper and the manipulation of stocks, commodities, insurance contracts, and later packages of bundles of financial assets including mortgages, and then insurance contracts on those derivatives, as they are known.

Finally even the high priests and priestesses – never mind the regulators – no longer understood that the machinery was not doing, nor what any of the newly invented virtual assets were worth. Trading moved from the noisy floors of exchanges where traders frenetically bought and sold to super-fast processors operating silently on proprietary networks.

In retrospect, May 10, 2010 may come to be remembered as the day we had inkling that the machines were taking over. Suddenly stocks started falling in value and no one could figure out why. Within a matter of minutes on that afternoon, the Dow dropped 700 points. Then it miraculously recovered. No one really knows for sure, but most observers suspect that the so called "flash crash" was the result of high speed computers programmed to automatically react to unspecified market indicators. Today's New York Times reports that the regulators are fearful of more computer-driven crashes - and so are investors.

Another date to remember is June 1, 2009. That day, Air France flight 447, a highly computerized fly by wire Airbus A330 airplane, fell 35,000 feet into the Atlantic Ocean off South America. All 228 on board died.

The cause remained a mystery until the black box flight recorder was recovered from the deeps earlier this year. Investigators determined that the pilots did exactly the opposite of what they were trained to do, and based on faulty information from the airplane's computer system literally flew the plane into the water.

Science fiction has become fact:  we are gradually, almost invisibly, forfeiting our judgment and our human attributes to technologies we do not fully understand and as yet do not fully control. This surrender pervades the culture: Corporations are persons for purposes of permitting them to exercise and ultimately swamp our First Amendment rights, the US Supreme Court has decreed. Restoring the primacy of human beings in the political process is imperative.

Like the Constitution, technology should serve us, not the other way around. An astounding outpouring of grief and affection for Steve Jobs this week has been followed by well-deserved odes to his creativity and acumen.  Jobs democratized computers, putting them in the hands of the masses. The operative distinction is that apple products gave consumers more control over their assets – music, video, photos. Every one of Jobs' creations came with an on-off switch. One wonders what the man had to say about technology run amok, used to gild the lives of a few at the expense of many more.

Citizens United / Financial Crisis / Harvey Column - 10/10/2011

Tweet Charlie: Pop the Corporate Personhood Question

Now that Mitt Romney has taken a stand on corporate personhood, shouldn’t the rest of the Republican field?

Luckily, they have the perfect opportunity to all go on the record this Tuesday at their debate in New Hampshire.

They may need a little help. That’s why we’re tweeting the debate moderator, Charlie Rose, to remind him about this key issue and suggest he should pin the candidates down on their stance.

In case you missed it, Romney made his position clear at the Iowa State Fair in August, when he said, in response to an angry heckler, “Corporations are people, my friend.”

The only other Republican candidate who I found has taken a stand is Ron Paul, who came out strongly against the notion that corporations are people.

Rose also might want to follow up with Romney: if corporations are people for purposes of political contributions, why aren’t they people for the purposes of paying taxes, where they have an entirely separate set of laws that enable corporations to take advantage of all kinds of arcane loopholes, so that many of the largest companies, like General Electric, pay absolutely no taxes?

If Charlie wants to get beyond the rhetoric to the heart of the uneasy feeling most people are having about our political system, he should follow up with these questions:

Is it good for our country for corporate lobbyists to have unlimited access to our politicians to engineer trillions in no strings attached bailouts and other special treatment for their clients, while Americans without that access get screwed?

Is it OK for corporations to buy our politicians with lavish anonymous contributions, making a mockery of our democracy? 

Nothing shows the disconnect between Washington and the rest of the country better than the U.S. Supreme Court’s terrible Citizen United decision last year, which defined corporations as people under the First Amendment for purposes of influencing elections and unleashed a tsunami of anonymous corporate donations to politicians and their PACs.

Isn’t the best way to fix the corporate dominance over our politics to pass a constitutional amendment, like the one we have proposed here, to undo Citizens United?

I’m sure I’m not the only American who’d like to hear the Republican candidates’ answers to these questions. I’m sure plenty of other Americans would like to hear the answers as well.

Tweet Charlie @charlieroseshow. Ask him in your own words or feel free to send him this post.

Go ahead, Charlie, pop the questions.

Citizens United / Martin Column - 10/07/2011