In austerity fight, deceptions have just begun

Only time will tell how much of a boost Republican challenger Mitt Romney will get from his debate win over President Obama.

The president seemed flatfooted and unprepared to respond to Romney’s shift toward the center, even though Romney’s campaign had suggested that’s exactly what they would do  - use the Etch-a-Sketch to pivot away from the extreme right toward a more moderate stance during the general election campaign.

The debate felt like a replay of the scenario that has played out so often over the past four years: aggressive Republicans concealing their real motives and putting passive Democrats on the defensive.

Romney was acting every bit the CEO in charge, telling the customers what he thought they wanted to hear to make the sale; in this case, that his deficit reduction scheme wouldn’t favor the wealthy and damage the middle-class.

The contrast between CEO Romney talking to voters (customers) and CEO Romney talking to his big contributors (his board of directors) at a private fundraiser in Boca Raton, Fla. in May couldn’t have been starker. In what he thought were private remarks that have now blown up, Romney, you recall, dismissed the 47 percent of the country that supports Obama as self-pitying moochers who need to be taken care by the government.

We know that all politicians say one thing in public and another in private.  That’s not a shock. But what’s striking is just how much contempt CEO Romney expressed for nearly half the voters when he was talking to the people who will hold real power in his administration: his board of directors.

Most CEOs wouldn’t let such feelings slip, even in private. But just as Romney told the Denver audience what he thought it wanted to hear at the debate, so too he was telling his contributors what he thought would please them.

Because make no mistake, plenty of the big money is preparing to work with whoever gets elected in November to launch a major offensive against Social Security and Medicare as well as to end tax breaks that favor the middle class, such as the mortgage interest tax break, under the guise of backing a new grand bargain to balance the budget.

For example, billionaire hedge fund executive Pete Peterson, who has also spent $458 million of his own money to push an austerity agenda, is now backing a bipartisan group known as Campaign to Fix the Debt. Ryan Grim at Huffington Post reports that the initiative has raised $30 million so far, including $5 million from a single unnamed donor.

The operation has hired 25 to 30 staffers, with plans to double, Grim reports. Along with a paid-media campaign, aims to influence press coverage in 40 states with locally focused teams.

This “bipartisan” initiative is just the latest attempt by Wall Street and its allies to pass the costs of the government deficits created by the financial crisis on to the middle class and those who can least afford it.  Though President Obama has said he won’t let these programs be cut in a way that hurts the most vulnerable, to keep that promise he’ll have to grow backbone that was missing Monday night – and through much of his first term.

 

Lobbying / Martin Column / Mitt Romney / President Barack Obama / Social Security - 10/05/2012

Paul Ryan's battle for billionaires

Thanks to the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, we’re going to be saved from a negative campaign. Now we’ll be elevated by a campaign about Big Ideas.

At least that’s the latest tripe being peddled by the Big Media, which has spent a lot of time drooling over the insane Ryan budget plan House Republicans passed before it died, only to be joyfully revived by Democrats who sought to pin in to the chests of their Republican opponents in Congressional races, then revived again by a befuddled Mitt Romney, who seems to want to cling to it (for his base) and distance himself from it (for everybody else).

According to the media, Ryan is a cheerful wonk who is the only one brave and bold enough to propose a plan to reduce the federal deficit. Never mind that the numbers don’t add up, or that his budget scheme involves a massive future reductions not only of Medicare but all government services except defense spending.

Ryan has become a top expert at capitalizing on legitimate skepticism about government and economic anxiety in the wake of the 2008 bailout and grafting those feelings on to the austerity agenda of the 1 percent – crushing all government regulation, reducing popular government services like parks and health care for the elderly, and privatizing Social Security while placing the burden of the nation’s fiscal problems on those least able to afford it and keeping tax rates low for the wealthiest Americans.

For our media elite, these are what pass for serious ideas. There’s little scrutiny beyond reporting Ryan’s rhetoric, in which he insists he’s out to save Medicare and merely facing a fiscal reality that others are afraid to confront.

You don’t have to dig very deep to find Ryan’s real motives, and who the winners will be if he wins his fight.

As usual in contemporary politics, the reality can be found in the money that has fueled Ryan’s rise. Among his top campaign contributors: Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, UBS bank and Wells-Fargo, along with corporate powerhouses like AT&T, Blue Cross-Blue Shield and Northwestern Mutual. He’s been closely associated with the billionaire Koch Brothers’ Americans For Prosperity.

Once you look into Ryan’s actual record, he looks a lot more like your garden-variety congressional hypocrite: preaching the free-market gospel while he votes for the 2008 no-questions-asked bank bailout, trashing the Obama administration stimulus package while making sure that his congressional district got its share of the spoils.

If the media were doing its job, Ryan would be dismissed for the craven con artist that he is, not lionized. Mitt Romney claims that he chose Ryan to balance out his own inexperience in Washington. But Ryan’s efforts to push through his budget scheme have failed miserably – except at making him a media darling.

If the media were doing its job, the headlines would be describing Ryan’s real, and embarrassingly modest, legislative record since he was elected to Congress in 1998. His first successful piece of legislation renamed his local post office in Janesville, Wisconsin for longtime Wisconsin Democratic congressman and former defense secretary Les Aspin in 2000. His other legislative achievement has been a bill to amend the IRS code to modify the taxation of arrow components. (Ryan uses bows and arrows for sport.)

Along with other fellow Republicans, he signed on to the Bush tax cuts, a partial-birth abortion ban and several efforts to increase sanctions against Iran.

Aside from that, he’s co-sponsored eight pieces of legislation issuing commemorative coins and five resolutions honoring Ronald Reagan.

There must have been some tough choices involved. Just who exactly should get a commemorative coin in their honor? Not just anybody, and you’re bound to make somebody mad. But it’s not exactly a profile of courage. How much courage does it take to do the bidding of the CEOs who keep you in office, against the retirees and the poor who can’t afford fat contributions and lobbyists?

 

 

 

 

 

Congress / Martin Column / Mitt Romney / Social Security - 08/16/2012

Blame game won't help distressed homeowners

There’s a big pile-on, calling for President Obama to fire the housing bureaucrat who’s blocking the latest administration housing initiative to reduce principal for underwater homeowners.

Ed DeMarco, who heads the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is a Republican holdover appointed by President Bush.

Though DeMarco is supposed to be only acting head of the agency, President Obama has never replaced him.

Now DeMarco is refusing to allow Fannie and Freddie to implement a recent initiative that would offer principal reduction to homeowners who owe more or their mortgages than their homes are worth since the housing bubble burst.

DeMarco’s position is full of holes: he’s worried that if the government doles out principal reductions to some homeowners, homeowners who don’t qualify will lower their incomes and get behind on the their mortgages just to get in line for a principal reductions.  And DeMarco claims that principal reduction would be bad for taxpayers, even though his own agency’s research proves him wrong.

Lots of smart folks, including the New York Times’ Paul Krugman, are calling on the president to fire DeMarco. For Krugman and the Democrats, it’s just the latest example of Republicans blocking the President and the Democrats at every step from fixing the economy.

It’s certainly true that Republicans have done nothing themselves to get the economy going and focused solely on demonizing the president and the Democrats.

But do you remember that fiery speech the president gave blasting the presumed Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, for his do-nothing approach to the foreclosure crisis?

Do you remember the president’s strong speeches blasting Republicans’ efforts to blame the foreclosure crisis on borrowers rather than the big banks?

Neither do I.

Is it the Republicans’ fault that the president and his administration have pursued one failed strategy after another that propped up too big to fail banks while not substantially helping homeowners?

Is it Republicans’ fault that the president abandoned one of his campaign promises and failed to push for what could have been one of the most effective strategies to force intransigent banks to renegotiate with strapped borrowers – so-called judicial cram-downs of mortgage debt in bankruptcy court.

That would have allowed bankruptcy judges to reduced mortgage debt as they can other kinds of debt. But it would have accomplished the larger purpose of encouraging bankers to renegotiate with borrowers before they ever got to bankruptcy court.

Only now, after more than three years, when there is a real, live Republican to blame, has Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner come out swinging – not with aggressive new policies, but against DeMarco.

Two astute observers of government response to the foreclosure crisis, David Dayen at Firedoglake and Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism have pointed out that the Obama administration has been slow to embrace principal reduction in the first place or to convince the public that it’s needed.

In addition, the administration needs to do more to overcome another huge hurdle: under the tax law, the amount of principal reduction will be taxable when a temporary exemption expires at the end of the year.

By all means, the president should fire DeMarco. He should embrace a fight with Republicans when they try to block a permanent appointment to the post. But that should only be the beginning. He should also fire Tim Geithner, who has directly overseen so many of the administration’s previous attempts to deal with housing, which range from the merely feeble to incompetent and downright disastrous. As Neil Barofsky points out, it’s Geithner himself who has stood in the way of principal reductions previously.

If the president and the Democrats are just interested in politics, using DeMarco as a scapegoat will probably help them score some points. But if they’re serious about using principal reductions, the president needs to tackle the opposition directly and convince the public that principal reduction can be a useful tool. And President Obama needs to confront the arguments against them forcefully, whether those arguments come from foot-dragging bankers and investors or dug-in Republicans.

 

Foreclosures / Martin Column - 08/06/2012

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.

 

 

 

Congress / Martin Column / Mitt Romney / Outrage / President Barack Obama / Uncategorized - 07/28/2012

Doing the minimum for the 99 percent

From both left and right, commentators have been heating up the Internet with proposals to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour.

It’s not just Ralph Nader beating the drum for the Occupy movement to spearhead a movement to raise the wage, which hasn’t been increased since 2009.

Ron Unz, commentator at the American Conservative, has proposed an increase as part of a new Republican immigration strategy, and he’s has been pleading for Mitt Romney to adopt an increase in the minimum wage as part of his campaign.

Romney has yet to heed Unz’s plea, which force the candidate to fight some ingrained Republican dogma that preaches against the minimum wage, let alone increasing it. According to this old dogma, the minimum wage discourages small business from hiring.

It was President Obama’s chairman of his council advisers, Alan Kreuger, wrote a study, back when he was a Princeton economics professor, who debunked that notion.

In the past, Romney has shown some willingness to discard the customary Republican disdain for the minimum wage, speaking in favor of increases pegged to increases in the consumer price index.

Then last month, after the Wall Street Journal and others beat up on Romney’s minimum wage position, the leading Republican contender backed down. “There’s probably not a need to raise the minimum wage,” Romney told CNBC.

On this issue, the Wall Street Journal and the Republican base is way out of step with voters across the country, who consistently support an increase. According to one recent poll, 67 percent of voters favor an increase.

Which brings us to the other candidate: the president. He’s always said he favors an increase.

Back in 2007, when he was just a contender in Bettendorf, Iowa, Barack Obama gave a speech on “Reclaiming the American Dream,” in which he promised:  “I won’t wait 10 years to raise the minimum wage, I’ll raise it every single year. That’s the change we need.”

After Obama was elected, during his transition to the presidency, Obama’s team promised to raise the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2011, with future raises pegged to inflation “to make sure that full-time workers can earn a living wage.”

But the only increase during Obama’s administration was the one in 2009 from $6.55 to $7.25, which was mandated by a law passed during a previous administration.

The president had nothing to do with it.

Last year, when his labor secretary, Hilda Solis, was asked about the need for a minimum wage hike, Huffington Post reported that she “largely ducked the questions.”

Maybe keeping his campaign promise and improving the economy are not good enough reasons to recharge the president’s enthusiasm for launching a campaign to boost wages for the lowest paid workers.

Fortunately, there are plenty of other reasons that should convince him to do what he said he would.

For one, it’s simply the right thing to do.

As the president himself pointed out just four months ago in a speech with a broad populist message in Osawatomie, Kansas, income inequality is the “defining issue of our time.”

In 1968, the federal minimum wage was $1.60 an hour. Gasoline was 34 cents a gallon and an average new car cost $2,800 dollars.

So the worker on minimum wage could buy nearly 5 gallons of gas for an hour’s wage.  Now that minimum wage worker can buy less than 2 gallons of gas for an hour’s wage.

If you adjust that 1968 wage for inflation, it would be $10 an hour – far more than today’s $7.25 minimum wage.

As the New York Times pointed out Sunday, the average corporate CEO made $14.4 million last year, compared to the average annual U.S. salary of $45,230. A fulltime worker paid the minimum wage makes far less – $15,080 a year.

Correcting for inflation, those with the least income have seen their incomes reduced over the past decade.

Another good reason for Obama to get with it– his base, which has been frustrated with his compromises with Republicans and cave-ins to bailed-out bankers, strongly supports an increase. And so do independent voters. Obama needs both of those groups to win re-election. So doing the right thing is also smart politics.

Income inequality / Martin Column / Mitt Romney / President Barack Obama - 04/11/2012

How Mitt Could Win

Why doesn’t Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney’s free-market gospel include a ringing call to break up the too big to fail banks?

Over at the conservative American Enterprise Institute blog, James Pethokoukis suggests Romney could benefit if he did just that.

After all, this is no longer a position favored only by Occupy Wall Street.

All kinds of establishment figures now acknowledge that breaking up the big banks is needed to heal our financial system, and that as long as we don’t, taxpayers could be on the hook for another bailout.

The most recent public official to reach this conclusion is none other than Richard Fisher, the president of the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve, who last week issued a report in which he concluded: “The too big to fail institutions that amplified and prolonged the recent financial crisis remain a hindrance to full economic recovery and to the very ideal of American capitalism.”

This should be catnip for Romney, who professes to be all about ending government interference in the free market.

What the Dallas Fed’s report makes clear is that the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation and the policies of the Obama administration haven’t lessened the power of the too big to fail banks, or made them healthier – it’s helped them gain market share while doing little to force them to reduce the same risky business practices that led to the 2008 financial collapse.

While Dodd-Frank theoretically sets up a process to deal with too big to fail institutions when they get in trouble, our politicians and regulators by their actions have signaled to the big banks that they don’t have the guts to break them up or get them to change how they do business.

For a politician in Romney’s position, staking out a position against the big banks would give him the high ground against the president, who claims to be reining in the banks’ bad behavior but isn’t.

It would help him with the Tea Party activists, who rail against the bank bailouts and crony capitalism. Promising tough action on the banks would also help him with independents who understandably don’t trust all the political double-talk they hear.

But Romney doesn’t have the  guts to do it. His free market rhetoric stops right at the bankers’ door, where he must appear meekly with hat in hand, asking for donations, just like the president of the United States, from bankers who continue to prosper only because of the trillions of dollars worth of favors done for them by politicians using taxpayers’ money.

The top 5 donors to Romney’s campaign are people associated with bailed out banks, according to the Center For Responsive Politics. The president raised an unprecedented $15.8 million from the financial sector in 2008, while his administration was in the midst of bailing them out. Though Romney has the edge in Wall Street fundraising now, the president has vowed to fight back ­– including a pledge not to demonize Wall Street.

The big media and the politicians all talk about these policies as though they’re great intellectual debates about clashing views of the role of government. But when it comes to the too big to fail banks, all Romney’s free market preaching is just so much hot air.

This is the dishonest heart of our politics. What neither Romney nor the president, nor apparently the American Enterprise Institute, can acknowledge is that it’s all about the money.

 

Martin Column / Mitt Romney / President Barack Obama / Too Big To Fail - 03/30/2012

The Health Care Games

Like the Hunger Games, in which leaders of the 1% connive to rig a contest so that a charismatic representative of the 99% is defeated, there’s lots of intrigue behind the US Supreme Court hearings on the federal health care law that begin today.

The ostensible issue before the high court is whether the universal health care system established by Congress in 2010 is constitutional. Like the systems in most other developed nations, that law requires all Americans to be covered – whether through their employer or by purchasing it directly. Now this is just plain arithmetic: you can’t have a solvent universal care program if participation is voluntary, because the young and healthy won’t bother to pitch in until they get sick, leaving the older and less healthy to cover most of the cost. Universal means everyone has to be part of it – both getting the medical benefits and paying for its cost.  Today, taxpayers end up bailing out people who don’t buy insurance and then get sick or in an accident.

But the corporate funded US Chamber of Commerce and other right wing entities, plus anti-government foes (including most of the Republicans candidates who want to run the government), argue it was unconstitutional for Congress to order everyone to pay for health insurance. My problem with that part of the law – known as the "individual mandate" – is that you have to buy the insurance from private insurance companies, and there is no limit on what they can charge you. That’s gotta be fixed, and a campaign is underway to do that in California. As everyone knows, however, Obama lifted his health care proposal from the law that Mitt Romney, then Governor of Massachusetts, enacted there in 2006. So its obvious that a big part of why the corporate Republican establishment opposes the law is that it was backed by a Democrat – Obama – and they don’t want him or any other elected Democrat to be able to claim any political victories.

There’s much more to the Supreme Court case than crass party politics, in any case. Many on the corporate right are hoping the US Supreme Court will issue a sweeping decision like they did in Citizens United, this time ratcheting back Congress’s regulatory authority across the board and therefore bolstering the power of big corporations – just as Citizens United did, in the guise of granting corporations a new right to corrupt elections under the First Amendment.

A decision limiting Congress’s power to regulate pollution would be a huge win for chemical manufacturers; drug and tobacco companies want to escape the Food and Drug Administration’s safety requirements; Wall Street wants taxpayer bailouts with no strings attached.  As I wrote a few weeks ago, the powerful elites in this nation think that the health care case is the Supreme Court’s best opportunity in decades to roll back constitutional rights to the deregulated era of excess that led to the First Great Depression eighty years ago. This will be done in the name of protecting Americans against the intrusion of government in their lives.

In the Hunger Games, the hundred thousand wealthiest people in “Panem” gather in their Capitol to watch as twenty-four randomly selected citizens fight each other to death. This is a yearly penance, we are told, imposed by the wealthy in response to an earlier, unsuccessful revolt by the 99%. The Games provide an excuse for a non-stop party for the powerful – like Mardi Gras only with unimaginable excess.  The citizens – known as “Tributes” – come two each from all twelve “Districts” in the country. Those Districts looked a lot like many parts of the United States. People trudge to poor-paying jobs and live in flimsy structures one step up from homelessness. They shop at flea markets where barter is common. They catch their own food. They help each other out because the Capitol has long since abandoned them.

There are other eerie similarities and ironies. In the Hunger Games, the entire game area is wired with cameras and the contest is continuously broadcast to the nation on enormous screens. This quickly turns to the disadvantage of the 1% in the Capitol, because the 99% become inspired by watching the heroine’s courage and humanity and start to rebel anew.  This is a lesson our Supreme Court has already learned: you can forget about seeing any of its hearings on the health care law on a screen of any size. Watching the Justices and corporate lawyers rework the Constitution into a weapon of the mighty might anger some Americans. So the Supreme Court has banned any video… but says it will release audio at the end of each day’s hearing.

It’s clear from the movie that the elites have powerful medicines that can instantly eliminate infections and heal wounds, but residents of the Districts have never seen that kind of health care. I guess the Panem Chamber of Commerce would argue that these citizens are fortunate to be “free from government interference in their lives.”

Citizens United / Congress / Harvey Column / Supreme Court - 03/25/2012

Etch-a-Sketch Politicians in a PAC Man world

Every once in a while a jaded political operative utters a profound truth, cutting through all the baloney and phony punditry.

That’s what Mitt Romney’s adviser did when he suggested that his boss could just hit “reset” and adopt more moderate positions once he locked up the Republican nomination and didn’t have to cater to the far right of his party. “It’s almost like an Etch-a-Sketch,” the aide, Eric Fehrnstrom, said. “You can kind of shake it up, and we start all over again.”

Sure, all of Romney’s foes will now clobber him with his aide’s comments and try to score political points off the “gaffe.”

But Fehrnstrom was offering a truth that rarely gets told in big media about how our politicians operate.

Romney and his fellow candidates count on voters not to pay attention, to leave them plenty of room to gloss over earlier statements.

Politicians count on the media’s cynicism and its craven need for access to power to blunt any remaining watchdog instincts. The media ignore commitments the candidates make and contradictions between what they do and what they said, shrugging it off because “everybody does it.”

Romney has had to shake the Etch-a-Sketch hard to erase the image of himself as the moderate Republican governor of Massachusetts whose own health care plan provided the template for President Obama’s health care plan, while candidate Romney now falls over himself to oppose the plan.

But the president has his own image shifts to answer for.

For example, candidate Obama portrayed himself as a strong advocate for the 99 percent, promising to change bankruptcy laws to help homeowners facing foreclosure keep their homes.

That shift, known as “judicial cram-downs,” would have provided a powerful incentive for banks to work out loan modifications with homeowners.

But when bankers fought cram-downs, President Obama quietly folded and judicial cram-downs died in Congress. Since then, the president and his administration have offered a series of limp anti-foreclosure measures that rely on voluntary bank cooperation, with paltry results.

But the Etch-a-Sketch is a pretty old toy. The current political season reminds me more of a slightly less retro game that gripped the public imagination – Pacman. In this wildly popular video game, a pizza-shaped icon gobbles up everything else on the screen.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling unleashes unlimited, anonymous contributions to political action committees, or PACs, aligned, but not formally tied, to specific candidates.

Unfortunately, when it comes to using the PACs to bolster their campaigns, the Republicans and Democrats are on the same page.

Both are eager to gobble up the gazillions of dollars available through the PACs, thoroughly undermining the spirit and practice of democracy, in which the majority, not the super-rich minority, are supposed to win.

The best way for us to shake up the political establishment, and the billionaires and big corporations who control it, is to fight for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.

Here’s our version of such an amendment, written in language that’s easy to understand and will withstand any legal challenge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Citizens United / Martin Column / President Barack Obama - 03/23/2012

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