Americans Elect: Using “Bipartisanship” to Advance the 1%

If you’re not familiar with “Americans Elect,” this post by Dante Atkins at DKos yesterday will help bring you up to speed.  Essentially, AE is an online group that intends to field its own presidential candidate in this year’s election.  Supposedly, its nominee will be selected by successive online votes by everybody who joins AE, culminating with a final “election” in June.  That nominee would then select a running mate who must be from a political party other than the nominee’s own.

The more I find out about this organization, the more it sounds like nothing so much as a front group working to advance the interests of the 1%.

Stephen Colbert Heightening the Contradictions

Satirist Stephen Colbert is doing his level best to point out how unaccountable, completely nontransparent money powerfully shapes our actual political process.  While the Occupy movement may be raising the issue of money in politics generally, Colbert is taking concrete steps to prove how absurd – how absolutely corporatist – modern American elections have become.  The full details are in this this column authored by Colbert himself, but the details are fairly straightforward.

As anybody who has watched his show knows, after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision Colbert decided to take advantage of the Court’s striking down of 60 plus years of campaign finance law by forming the “Colbert Super PAC” – a political action committee that can raise unlimited sums from undisclosed donors to spend on political speech in unlimited quantities.  Since then, Colbert has been looking for ways to spend the money he’s collected so as to underscore just how absurd our political system has gotten.  And with the Republican primary in South Carolina coming up (Colbert is a South Carolina native) on January 21^st, Colbert may just have found it.

It turns out that the South Carolina GOP and local government officials had been in a dispute as to who should pay for the upcoming primary.  The GOP promised to pay a substantial portion of the primary, but wanted the local governments to pick up a good deal of the tab too; in turn, the governments wanted the GOP – as the private party whose primary this is – to pick up the entire tab.  Colbert to the rescue! 

Colbert called the South Carolina GOP and offered them the full $400,000 they needed to pay for their part of the primary in exchange for (i) naming rights over the primary, and (ii) the inclusion on the ballot of a non-binding referendum asking South Carolinians to decide if “corporations are people” or if “only people are people.”  The GOP agreed to both conditions.  The primary would therefore officially be known as “The Colbert Super PAC South Carolina Republican Primary,” which language would appear on all press releases, signage and notices, including the debates.

As Colbert put it, it was his intention to “finally raise democracy to the same level as the Tostitos™ Fiesta Bowl and Kardashian™ weddings.”

However, the S.C. Supreme Court then ruled that the South Carolina counties – not the GOP – were responsible for funding the full cost of the primary.  It also ruled that all non-binding referenda be stricken from the ballots.

So then the South Carolina GOP re-launched negotiations with Colbert.  They agreed to provide Colbert the same naming rights if – instead of paying for the primaries – he just gave his $400,000 to them.  Colbert countered by asking that they petition the Court to get his referendum back on the ballot, but they refused.  He then offered them $200,000 for the naming rights (as he was only getting half of what originally had been agreed upon), but they refused that offer as well.

Colbert then reached out to the state Democrats, who agreed to file a request to reinstate the petition; in a snit, the South Carolina GOP went to the press and announced that they had decided to decline Colbert’s offer to fund the primary (not that, after the S.C. Supreme Court decision, they needed to fund the primary any longer themselves) to “preserve the sanctity of the primary election.”  (As Colbert points out, we now know that this “sanctity” has a street value of somewhere between $200K and $400K).

But now it turns out that – the S.C. Supreme Court having determined that the GOP is under no legal obligation to pay for their own primary election – the South Carolina GOP has announced it will only be paying the legal minimum percentage of candidate filing fees . . . which means South Carolina’s counties are now on the hook for about $500,000.

So Colbert is back!  This time he reaching out to the S.C. counties directly, offering to cover their costs for holding the primaries in exchange for (i) their supporting the Democrats’ petition regarding his non-binding referenda and (ii) the previously agreed upon naming rights.

* * *

Personally, I think it’d be great to tune in on January 21^st to watch the “Colbert Super PAC South Carolina Republican Primary.” 

As has been pointed out many times before – both here and elsewhere – we’ve seen a real push recently to eliminate as many actual voters from our elections as possible.  The new voter ID laws in numerous states, the shortening of the early-voting period in Florida, Scott Walker’s decision in Wisconsin to shut down government offices where the new voter IDs could be obtained, the affirmative decision not to tell people the IDs were free, and – of course – the absolute refusal to even entertain the idea that elections should be held over more than one day, or on the weekend . . . all of these are designed to make it as difficult for people to vote as possible.

Couple that with our corporations’ new and unlimited ability flood elections with entirely anonymous campaign money and it seems fairly clear that the ultimate goal of the nation’s plutocracy is to obtain the best elections money can buy; they’d be fine if election results were determined by nothing more than who had the most money to spend on a candidate.

So Colbert is trying to “heighten the contradictions” (as they used to say in the 60s) by actually sponsoring an entire primary election.  Good for him.  I hope the South Carolina counties are so strapped for cash they actually take him up on his offer.  Maybe, if the republican primary is raised to the level of next week’s Little Caesar™ Bowl, people will start paying attention to the fact we are quickly destroying the very democrat structures that make it possible for us to have a say in our country’s affairs.

The 99%: We’re Not Even Livestock

So Rush Limbaugh is pulling another stupid human trick, this time assaulting the very idea that schools might want to feed poor children.  What I find revealing is his stated rationale for challenging the notion that it might be a good idea to give poor children food:  “If you feed them, if you feed the children, three square meals a day during the school year, how can you expect them to feed themselves in the summer?”  It’s as though he were describing baby black bears in Yosemite National Park who might not learn to forage properly if tourists keep giving away their pic-a-nic baskets.

The thing is . . . I have become more and more convinced that this attitude isn’t too far off from how the political and economic elite really do see the rest of us.  I used to think they view the millions of Americans who are the 99% as akin to crops or livestock, something to be harvested or culled for money when the need arose.  But I no longer believe that analogy holds.  After all, ranchers actually do have to spend money and tend to their cattle, farmers actually do have to water and care for their crops.  But the 1% and the public servants who toil on their behalf no longer bother to ensure we have minimal care.

Instead, I think it is more accurate to say that the 1% now conceive of the hundreds of millions of Americans who together make up the largest economy in the world as a kind of natural wildlife that should be left free to forage on its own, but which they are at perfect liberty to trap, skin, slaughter and eat as they please, their exploitation restrained only by the dimmest of understandings that enough of us must be allowed to survive so that our next generation can be trapped, skinned, slaughtered and eaten in turn.

And, indeed, it’s fairly easy to understand why they’d see us that way.

How About We Don’t Have a “Fair Fight”?

I may already have mentioned this, but Dean Baker has an excellent book titled The End of Loser Liberalism:  Making Markets Progressive that you can read for free here (although donations are welcomed).  It is filled chock-a-block with all kinds of economic data, analysis, and all the other number-crunching goodness one expects to find when reading Baker.

But it is the premise of the book that I think is particularly worthwhile.  Baker argues that Liberals need to start reframing, on a very basic level, the terms of the economic debate.  Right now, the conventional frame is that “Conservatives like the free market” and “Liberals like government control,” but as Baker points out this frame is a fairy story. 

By and large Conservatives don’t like the free market, what they like is monopolies and monopsonies (with themselves filling those roles), unfair information advantages over their competitors, government subsidies, and the “freedom” to defraud their customers.  (As to that last point, just think of Wall Street and the Republicans’ recent filibuster of Richard Cordray’s nomination to the CFPB; the GOP admits that Cordray is qualified for the position, they are just refusing to do anything that will empower an agency whose sole purpose is to protect the American people from being abused and defrauded by the big banks.)

Baker argues that Liberals need to do a better job of hammering this home:  that when Conservatives whine about “government intervention in the free market” what they really are whining about is anything that might prevent them from taking unfair advantage of their customers and competitors in an arena that – after all – was created and shaped by the government and all the rest of us to begin with.  What they are whining about is anything that might interfere with their efforts to cheat.

I was reminded of Baker’s book this morning whilst walking my dogs and thinking about how I’d like to see First Amendment jurisprudence change to better accommodate 21^st-century society, technology and media.  Contrary to what a lot of lay people believe, the law is not a static thing.  It is organic, constantly growing and evolving as its fundamental principles are necessarily re-interpreted to better fit the constantly growing and evolving human experience.  That is why legal scholars refer to the Constitution as “a living document.”  And it is the most fundamental reason why the law – at any given time – is never perfect:  because it is always playing catch up.

The latest big step in First Amendment jurisprudence, of course, was the Citizens United decision, which proclaimed that the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting political broadcasts sponsored by unions or corporations.  I remember that only a day or two after the decision was handed down I was listening to a discussion about it on NPR that included either current Republican frontrunner Newt Gingrich, or Karl Rove, or Grover Norquist (all three are easily confused in my long-term memory; I think it’s the Hitchcockian profile they share).  Whichever GOP flack it was, he defended the decision, arguing that it “leveled the playing field” by making more political speech available to everyone, and harped on the fact that unions had just as much unfettered right to run political ads as do corporations (e.g., management).

And this morning I suddenly realized something that is so obvious I should have picked up on it immediately the decision came down:  the Roberts Court would never have handed down Citizens United before now.  Why not?  Because it has taken this long to destroy unionized labor.

Union membership – public and private – in the United States is now at a 70-year low.  Back in the mid-50s, fully 35% of the American workforce was unionized.  Thirty years ago, 20% of all American workers still belonged to a union.  Today it’s only 11.9%, but that’s only because of public unions (which is why they have been targeted for destruction by the likes of Govs. Walker and Kasich).  Today, only 6.9% of America’s private workforce is unionized.

Do you really think the Roberts Court would have issued Citizens United back in the ‘50s, when labor unions actually had the muscle to stand up to corporate management?  Do you think the Roberts Court would have done so even thirty years ago, when labor unions might at least still have put up a decent fight?  Of course not.  But today?  Now that thirty plus years of successively gutting the labor movement has shrunk the unions until they can be kicked around with impunity?  Oh, sure, now it’s no problem for the increasingly conservative Supreme Court to issue a ruling that “levels the playing field” by letting unions and management “compete in the arena of ideas.”

Now that management is Hulk Hogan and labor is Woody Allen, now it’s okay to get government out of the way, level the playing field, and “have a fair fight.”  And may the best man win.  (Wink wink, nudge nudge.)

Because that’s always the tell, you know.  Whenever you hear someone argue against government intervention because they want “a level playing field,” “a chance to succeed on the merits,” “a fair fight,” etc. . . . pay attention to who’s making that argument.  I’ll bet you that 9 times out of 10 it’s gonna be the guy who’s the biggest, richest and meanest prick on the block, which means that he knows he can take everything for himself and screw over everybody else if only he can convince the rest of us to throw out the rules.

He doesn’t want a fair fight.  He doesn’t want to compete on the merits.  He just wants the opportunity to pillage at will.

Time for a Butlerian Jihad

A central part of the back-story to Frank Herbert’s science-fiction masterpiece Dune is the “Butlerian Jihad,” which occurred 10,000 years before the Dune story.  As Herbert explained, the Butlerian Jihad  had been a “crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots . . . .  Its chief commandment [was] ‘Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.’”

I flashed on that early this morning whilst reading about the constitutional amendment recently introduced by six senators (all Dems, naturally) to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.  Essentially, the amendment would allow the federal government and the states to regulate the amount of money that may be poured into campaign donations made directly to candidates for office.

Which is great and all, but does not go nearly far enough.  What would really be helpful would be a constitutional amendment making it clear:  No, Corporations Are Not People.

Of course, no one thinks the actual, limited amendment proposed by these six senators will go really ever even get close to being adopted, in large part because of the vast power corporations themselves can bring to bear to prevent its adoption.  So it is even more unlikely that an amendment could ever be adopted that would strip away from these legal fictions the rights and protections – but not the liabilities, never the liabilities – that are accorded to them as “people.”  Under our political system, corporations are now de facto “super people” whose political clout renders the ability of “people people” to in any way restrain corporations vanishingly small.

I then had a brief, happy, science-fictiony thought of a point sometime in the not-too-distant future when – our corporate overlords having taken things too far – the actual “people people” rose up and had a jihad much like the one imagined by Frank Herbert.  Except this time the chief commandment would be:  “Thou shalt not create a legal fiction in the likeness of a person.”

Well, as always . . . I can dream.

About Last Night's Republican Presidential Debate

Just a quick note, because this is something that has bugged me for some time, because there is just enough of the hint of truth in it to turn it into a Zombie Conservative Lie such that it never dies, and because I haven't seen anybody else mention it yet. In fact, I have yet to see anybody remark on this statement at all, even though it is easily the most radical thing to have been said last night.

During the debate, Gary Johnson announced that he was in favor of ending - completely - all corporate income taxes. He justified this by arguing that corporate income is money that is "taxed twice." We all own the corporations, he said, so when a corporation makes money that money is taxed, and then when it is distributed to "us" it is taxed again and that isn't right. (Let's just skip over the fact that most Americans do not, in fact, own corporations, or even any stock in a corporation other than what might be held by our mutual funds.)

Goddammit.