This is Not What Real Democracy Looks Like

Why is the work of the so-called Super Congress deficit panel going to be conducted in secret as if its members were planning a covert military operation?

Do you buy the idea that these decisions its members have to make, which are supposed to cut $1.5 trillion from the federal budget over the next 10 years, are just so tough that if they do it in public they’ll just never get it done?

Do you think that secrecy is designed to protect your interests?

I don’t. The Super-Congress is just the latest example of the fear on steroids politics that our leaders have come to rely on when they shove something nasty down our throats. By now the formula is familiar: create a crisis, warn of dire consequences, limit information and debate.

Meanwhile behind the curtain the politicians can wheel and deal with the lobbyists and bankers who fund their careers. According to them, all theses issues are just too complicated for us common folk to contemplate.

The only thing this secrecy protects is the interests of the lobbyists and the politicians who want to cut their deals without the glare of publicity or the inconvenience of accountability when they sell out the interests of their constituents in favor of their corporate contributors.

The Super-Congress is a microcosm of all the issues raised by the infusion of massive corporate cash and influence into our politics, as well as the poisonous impact of the revolving door between Congress and the businesses that lobby it.

While the president has been railing about the influence of money in politics, his own party has made sure that their top fund-raisers have seats at the Super-Congress table, like Sen. Max Baucus (whose top fundraiser Jim Messina was so good Obama hired him away for his presidential campaign, and Sen. Patty Murray, who also happens to chair the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, which means it up to her to lead the party’s fundraising efforts to maintain its Senate majority.

The Republicans have also deployed top money-getters like Rep. Jeb Hensarling, who’s vice-chair of the House financial services committees, a traditional money magnet, which has worked well for Hensarling, who since 2009 has snagged at least $35,000 from the giant auditing firm KPMG, another $35,000 from UBS bank and $32,500 from Bank of America.

Who do you think will have access to Baucus, Murray and Hensarling while the Super-Congress deliberates behind closed doors? Ordinary Americans, or those who can make significant contributions to Baucus and Murray’s fundraising efforts?

In response to these potential conflicts, the Project on Government Oversight and other open government groups wrote to congressional leaders urging maximum transparency.

As Bill Buzenberg summed it up in the Guardian, “Over the years, Washington has evolved into a highly oiled special-interest machine, plying candidates with money, on one hand, and grooming insiders to help close the deal, on the other. So far, this ethically corrupt system has proven extraordinarily resistant to reform.”

In response to these potential conflicts, the Project on Government Oversight and other open government groups wrote to congressional leaders urging maximum transparency so that the rest of us can see and read exactly what’s going on. Contact your representative and demand that the Super-Congress conduct our business in public view, the way democracy is supposed to work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Congress / Martin Column / Outrage - 08/24/2011

While Country Suffers, Politicians Rake it in

While our politicians tell us the country is broke, they themselves are doing fine.

In the midst of debt ceiling hysteria, President Obama and the Democrats bragged they’d raised an eye-popping $86 million so far for his presidential campaign.

The various Republican candidates who have reported their cash have raised about $35 million so far, but it’s early yet.

Meanwhile the Republicans oppose any revenue-raising or loophole-closing that would be favored by a majority of Americans. Republicans continue to insist that increased taxes on the wealthiest would be job-killers, even though there’s no evidence to support their position.

For his part, President Obama, in an effort to appease Republicans, offered up a variety of cuts to Social Security and Medicaid that would be opposed by a majority of Americans.

Cutting services for those that need it most is what Obama calls “shared sacrifice,” though no one who could actually afford it is actually being asked to make any sacrifices.

As to the major challenges facing the nonrich – joblessness and foreclosure – those are beyong the skill and imagination of our leaders to grapple with.

The Republican strategy seems to be standing pat in the belief that the president will eventually cave in.

The president’s strategy appears to be to tie the aged, poor and vulnerable to the train tracks and then blame the Republicans when the train runs them over.

President Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, was proud that most of the $86 million was coming from small donors. I don’t doubt that a big chunk of that money comes from people who are justifiably scared stiff of turning the country back over to the Republicans, who never complained about the deficits when the previous occupant of the White House when he was running them up.

I understand the big donors. They get access and influence. But do the small donors have any influence? Do these small donors really believe that having the aged and infirm give up a chunk of their security amounts to sharing sacrifice? Can they make their voices heard along with their $5 donations? Or do they just have to go along with the president and the Democrats and whatever deal they make?

On Saturday morning we got news that the president would not appoint the stalwart consumer advocate to head the agency she dreamed up to protect financial consumers, and which she has been working to set up.

I wonder whose interests the president was thinking about when he made that decision – his Wall Street and corporate donors or those small donors his campaign manager was bragging about?

 

 

 

 

 

Congress / Consumer Financial Protection Agency / Martin Column / President Barack Obama - 07/16/2011

Billion-Dollar Campaign Bus Leaves Unemployed Behind

Congress and the president threw the long-term unemployed under the bus last year in the deal to extend the Bush era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

As the president and his fellow politicos revv up his re-election campaign bus, are they now poised to run over the 99ers, as the long-term unemployed are known?

The head of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver, appears ready to concede without a fight that the cost of extending unemployment benefits to the 99ers is “prohibitive.”

Two members of Cleaver’s caucus, Reps. Barbara Lee and Bobby Scott have proposed H.R. 589 to fund some benefits for the long-term unemployed.

Once again, Congress appears to be unwilling to find the $14 billion to extend unemployment compensation for the more than 1 million Americans out of work for at least 99 weeks.

President Obama seems more preoccupied with fighting for the $1 billion he says he will need for his reelection campaign.

How much could one of those 99ers contribute to the president, or anybody’s political campaign, for that matter?

That’s what occurred to me when I read who Obama – the man who at one time was supposed to transform American politics – had chosen to run his campaign to keep his job.

That would be Jim Messina, one of the undisputed experts at raising massive corporate campaign cash, a former staffer for Sen. Max Baucus, one-time head of the one Senate’s Finance Committee and one of the top vacuums of special interest contributions ever, according to Public Citizen.

So much for the grass roots that got the president where he is today. He’s dancing with Wall Street, big pharm and the insurance industry now. Messina apparently takes a dim view of the grass roots activists and their issues, which tend to clog up his vacuum cleaner.

For the corporate titans Obama will be relying on, it’s been a very, very good recovery.

For a lot of the grass roots folks who walked precincts and made phone calls in 2008, not so much. They’ve lost jobs, health insurance, homes, savings, pensions, and security.

Minorities have been especially hard hit, USA Today reports, by a “dual system” of finance. More than 20 percent of African-Americans and Hispanics will lose their homes in the present housing crisis, the Center for Responsible Lending contends.

Meanwhile the long-term unemployed, many of them older workers, face high hurdles reentering the workforce. Younger people face their own challenges, often taking lower paying jobs when they can find employment.

The politicians may be giving up on those of us who are unemployed but we shouldn’t. Call your congressperson and demand that they find the money for H.R 589.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Martin Column / President Barack Obama / Uncategorized - 04/05/2011