The Super Heroes vs The Super PACs

The Men in Black kicked the Avengers’ butts last weekend at the box office. The Avengers and the Mibsters both kicked the aliens’ butts (or their biological  equivalent). Gigantic movie battles between innocent, minding-their-own-business Americans and evil-doing invaders intent on destroying our cities have become a Memorial Day tradition. And it’s always the grit and chutzpah of a handful of superheroic patriots that saves the country and the planet.

Why do Americans especially embrace these fantastical films of victory against seemingly invincible enemies during a holiday that recognizes those who have given their lives for their country? It’s probably a coincidence. After all, how many Americans celebrating Memorial Day actually know what it stands for, apart from shopping, barbequing and movie-going?

Not many, is my guess. One reason is that only one half of one percent of the U.S. population – that’s 0.5% – has been on active duty in the military at any point during the last ten years, according to the Pew Research center.  Only a quarter of Americans say they “closely follow” news of the wars in Iran and Afghanistan. About half told pollsters the wars “made little difference” in their lives and that neither was worth the cost. This is hardly surprising; in fact, it was a deliberate strategy by the nation’s leaders.

There was never the congressional Declaration of War that our Founders mandated, in the Constitution, to ensure that the decision had the support of a majority of the country. To avoid a national draft, which they believed would be massively unpopular, Bush Administration officials disastrously outsourced a huge chunk of the work of the two conflicts to private corporations like Halliburton and Blackwater (both have since changed their names).  And war itself increasingly became a sterile and distant affair: U.S. soldiers directed drone attacks from buildings on U.S. soil, using high-tech weaponry much like blockbuster video games.

There was nothing like the clarity of purpose or mission that arises when a galactic Hitler seeks to wipe out the species  - the kind of “live free or die” choice that led a united United States to enter World War II. We were threatened – that much we knew – but the rest of the details were shrouded in secrecy and overt lies.  The post 9/11 wars were under the radar for many – maybe most –Americans.

That’s bad news for our democracy.  Countries whose populations were disengaged from the wars conducted in their name have not fared well in history, beginning with the archetypal example: ancient Rome.  As pointed out by Cullen Murphy, that city’s infamous decline and fall bears a distressing similarity to the privatization, coarsened discourse and elite-driven political establishment that characterizes contemporary America. A sense of betrayal and powerlessness – felt most painfully over the last few years as a result of the Wall Street debacle and bailouts – was behind the Tea Party (until it got take over by corporate interests) and Occupy uprisings.

Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, the disenfranchisement of average Americans has only accelerated since the crash while a small class of the warrior elite has been elevated: the political consultants. Their mission: to manipulate the judgment of citizens as they attempt to exercise the right to vote.

Back in the day, political consultants were restrained by whatever boundaries were imposed by the candidates and elected officials they represented. The candidates, in turn, were bound by rules limiting how much money special interests could give them.

No more, reports the New York Times.

Ruling in the outrageous Citizens United case that corporations and their leaders have the same First Amendment rights as people, the Supreme Court has cut the tether between candidate and consultant. Now, practitioners of the dark arts of domestic poly-sci warfare can work directly for corporate funded Super PACs without having to worry about anyone’s sensibilities. “You don’t have kitchen cabinets made up of well-intentioned friends and neighbors who don’t know what they’re doing but eat up a lot of your time,” a Republican consultant told the Times. “Super PACs don’t have spouses.”

The Supreme Court has done away with the middleman – the candidate – and, perhaps inadvertently, torn away the modest cloak of legitimacy that the old campaign finance laws used to provide to a fundamentally corrupt system.  Now the corporations and malefactors of wealth exercise with zeal their First Amendment freedom to blast their political opponents into oblivion.

Looking for the Avengers? If we are going to preserve our democracy against this final assault, citizens are going to have to become the superheroes.

Harvey Column - 05/31/2012

President aims to take the money and run

Here’s what President Obama wants you to believe about his relationship to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling and the toxic torrent of corporate cash polluting our politics: “it’s complicated.”

In their ruling, the justices determined that corporations had a free speech right to anonymously contribute as much as they wanted to third-party political action groups that worked in support of candidates, as long as those PACs had no formal connection to the candidate.

On the one hand, the president blasted the court’s ruling less than a week after it was issued, with the justices seated right in front of him, in his January 2010 State of the Union speech, for opening “the floodgates for special interests – including foreign companies – to spend without limit in our elections.”

On the other hand, his campaign decided two years later to “level the playing field” with Republicans and encourage Super PAC support for the president, by allowing cabinet members and senior White House officials to cooperate with a Super PAC that supports their boss.

On yet another hand, the president insisted he would support a constitutional amendment to undo Citizens United.

And on yet still another hand, when the president had the opportunity to actually do something to shed some sunlight on the secretive stash of corporate donations unleashed by Citizens United, by issuing an executive order requiring government contractors to reveal all their political spending, he balked.

When you follow the president’s actions, rather than listen to his words, it’s not complicated at all.

The president and his Democratic Party colleagues are determined to “take the money and run.”

For nearly a year, President Obama had floated the idea of issuing an executive order requiring government contractors to disclose all their political contributions – including contributions to PACs and organizations like the US Chamber of Commerce – when they submit a bid.

The biggest contractors, for the most part, are defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, which smother the politicians in contributions to keep the weapons contracts flowing. In the 2012 cycle, Lockheed’s PAC has spent more than $2 million in contributions that we know of, 59 percent to Republicans and 41 percent to Democrats.

Its contributions go beyond an attempt to win a single weapons contract. What they and the other contractors have been able to do is to purchase the country’s entire debate over defense spending, so that few of our representatives ever raise a peep about whether the expensive defense systems are necessary.

Republicans howled at the President Obama’s proposal, accusing him of attempting to politicize the bidding process. President Obama wanted to know who had made the contributions, the Republicans charged, so he could award bids to the highest-contributing bidders.

While President Obama stewed, the Republicans passed measures in May 2011 to block[m1]  an executive order if it was issued.

The venerable Public Citizen organization made a suggestion that would sidestep the Republicans’ stated objection.

Why not, Public Citizen said, limit the disclosure requirement to the winning bidder?

But the president backed off – either because he didn’t want a fight with Republicans or because his fundraisers reminded him he had a tough campaign ahead and the little people they dote on with their solicitation emails weren’t going to be able to foot the bill.

On the most critical issue facing our political system, the president of the United States is incapable of leveling with the American people.

President Obama may want to do the right thing, but he is trapped in a system controlled by big money that is bigger than he is.

The first step to fight back against that system won’t come from Washington. It will come from building a grassroots movement to undo Citizens United. Read more about it, and our proposed constitutional amendment, which is easy to understand and will withstand any legal challenge, here.

 

 

Citizens United / Congress / Martin Column - 04/13/2012

“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.

 

Citizens United / Congress / Harvey Column / Supreme Court / Uncategorized - 02/13/2012

Second-Half Score Depends on Who Calls the Plays

Clint Eastwood’s Chrysler ad during the Super Bowl knocked me out.

It was stunningly effective piece of work. It resonated deeply with me as a skillfully crafted message – even as I knew it wasn’t telling the whole truth about the comeback of Detroit, my hometown.

Still, I wanted to believe, if only for a few minutes, that we could work together to confront our national problems, and millions of other Super Bowl watchers joined me in that yearning.

It reminded me of another inspired piece of highly distilled corn-pone football-inspired poetry: what Coach told his players on `Friday Night Lights,’ “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.”

With its irresistibly simple pep-talk pitch, the ad stirred up strong feelings, both for what it said and what it left unsaid about what’s actually going on in Detroit and the U.S.

It showed once again the power of plain language, delivered in Eastwood’s classic growl.

It reminded me how ineffective those of us who oppose corporate power have often been in claiming for our cause our deeply rooted patriotism and our pride in how every-day Americans have fought again and again, against terrible obstacles, to build a democracy that would work for everyone.

It also provoked deep feelings about Clint Eastwood, the ever-evolving artist.

He's been a great champion of Detroit. He made one of his finest films, “Gran Torino,” in the city. Released in 2008 in the wake of the financial collapse, it tells the story of the redemption of a retired autoworker, recently widowed and deeply racist.

Reviewing the film, Manohla Dargis wrote in the New York Times: “Melancholy is etched in every long shot of Detroit’s decimated, emptied streets and in the faces of those who remain to still walk in them. Made in the 1960s and `70s, the Gran Torino was never a great symbol of American automotive might, which makes Walt [Eastwood’s character’s] love for the car more poignant. It was made by an industry that now barely makes cars, in a city that hardly works, in a country that too often has felt recently as if it can’t do anything right anymore except, every so often, make a movie like this one.”

Eastwood made `Gran Torino’ under the generous tax breaks of a program designed to encourage filmmaking in Detroit, a program that has since been limited by the state’s current Republican governor, eroding the promise of the nascent film industry.

For the Chrysler ad, the auto company enlisted not only Eastwood, but hired a top ad agency, Wieden-Kennedy; the director of several terrific films, David Gordon Green; and two top-notch writers: Oregon-based poet Matthew Dickman and Texas-based fiction writer, Smith Henderson.

Even so, it’s an ad, meant to sell cars by inspiring hope and pride in Americans’ ability to get up and come back after a hard punch.

So the ad doesn’t quite tell you the real score at the end of the first half, nor does it come entirely clean on who's been playing on which team.

If the 99 percent were writing the script, not Chrysler, Eastwood might have something very different to say about our game plan as the second half gets underway.

It doesn’t mention that the majority owner of Chrysler is now Fiat, an Italian auto firm, or that Chrysler, newly profitable after it $12.5 billion taxpayer bailout, now pays new employees $14-$16 an hour, about half of what Chrysler employees used to be paid.

“The gratitude that many Detroit workers felt just after the bailout,” Reuters reported last October, “has given way to a frustrated sense that blue-collar workers have not shared equally in the industry's comeback.”

I wonder what Clint Eastwood’s characters might say about our current predicament.

Something tells me Eastwood’s iconic Dirty Harry character wouldn’t think much of our state attorneys general’s settlement with the big banks, which lets the bankers off the hook for fraud in the foreclosure process in exchange for ineffective and inadequate assistance for homeowners.

Describing the $26 billion settlement, the Times acknowledges it would “help

a relatively small portion of the millions of borrowers who are delinquent and facing foreclosure.”

Meanwhile, while it will be good for the banks to get the foreclosure fraud charges behind them, it remains unclear how much the settlement will help the “moribund” housing market, the Times reports.

The $26 million will be distributed to states according to a complex formula. Actual victims of foreclosure fraud are supposed to get about $1,500 apiece. An undetermined number of underwater homeowners will get their principals written down by about $20,000. Some funding will also go to further investigation into banker fraud and consumer education.

Unfortunately neither the Obama Administration nor the AGs’ credibility is very good in living up to previous promises to help homeowners. Previous administration efforts, as well as previous AG settlements, have delivered much less than they initially promised, plagued by inadequate oversight and relying on voluntary bank participation. For more details, check Naked Capitalism; for more critique, Firedoglake.

What would Eastwood’s Dirty Harry think?

Just another day at the office, with the thugs getting away with their crimes in a world gone awry.

I couldn’t help wondering: would Dirty Harry negotiate with an intruder who robbed your house? Would he suggest to the intruder, “OK, just give back 30 percent of what you took and clean out the rain gutters and we’ll call it even?”

Unlikely. Dirty Harry would track down the crooks, scowl and start blasting away with his trademark .44 Magnum.

One of our previous presidents, Ronald Reagan, understood the visceral power of Dirty Harry and evoked him in a fight with Congress, when it was threatening to raise taxes. Reagan said he would veto any tax increase. “Go ahead,” the former president said, quoting the Dirty Harry character, “make my day.”

You’ll find very little of that spirit among the Obama administration officials and lawmen and law women assigned to the big bank beat.

Walt, the character in  `Gran Torino,’ and Dirty Harry are very different characters, separated by age and experience. They both live in broken worlds, filled with violence and cynicism. But confronted with today’s bankers, they would recognize them for what they are: shameless bullies, terrifying our neighborhood. And they would recognize the Obama administration and the state AGS who negotiated with them rather than investigated them for what they have become: cowards.

 

 

California Attorney General Kamala Harris / Foreclosure / Martin Column / President Barack Obama - 02/10/2012

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