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The Dangerous Neocon Role in Ukraine |
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Saturday, 19 April 2014 15:00 |
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Parry writes: "The American mainstream news media has rarely bought in so thoroughly to a U.S. government propaganda campaign as it has in taking sides in support of the post-coup government in Ukraine and against Russia and pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine."
Sen. John McCain at a rally with right wing leaders in the Ukraine. (photo: Al Jazeera)
The Dangerous Neocon Role in Ukraine
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
19 April 14
 he American mainstream news media has rarely bought in so thoroughly to a U.S. government propaganda campaign as it has in taking sides in support of the post-coup government in Ukraine and against Russia and pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Part of this is explained by the longstanding animus toward Russian President Vladimir Putin for his autocratic style, his shirtless photographs and his government’s opposition to gay rights. Another part is a hangover from the Cold War when the Russkies were the enemy. In Official Washington, there is palpable nostalgia for the days of Ronald Reagan’s anticommunist swagger and “Red Dawn” fantasies.
But another reason for the biased coverage from the U.S. press corps is the recent fusion of the still-influential neoconservatives with more liberal “responsibility to protect” (R2P) activists who believe in “humanitarian” military interventions. The modern mainstream U.S. news media is dominated by these two groups: neocons on the right and R2Pers on the center-left.
As one longtime Washington observer told me recently the neocons are motivated by two things, love of Israel and hatred of Russia. Meanwhile, the R2Pers are easily enamored of idealistic young people in street protests.
The two elements of this alliance – the neocons and the R2Pers – also now represent the dominant foreign policy establishment in Official Washington, with the few remaining “realists” largely shoved to the side, including to some degree President Barack Obama who has “realist” tendencies in seeking to limit use of U.S. military power but continues to cede control over his administration’s actions abroad to aggressive neocon-R2P operatives.
During Obama’s first term, he made the fateful decision to create a “team of rivals” of powerful political and bureaucratic figures – the likes of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and General David Petraeus. They skillfully funneled the President into hawkish decisions that they wanted, such as a “surge” of 30,000 troops into Afghanistan and a major confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program. (Both positions were pushed by the neocons.)
In 2011, the neocons and the R2Pers teamed up for the war against Libya, which was sold to the United Nations Security Council as simply a limited intervention to protect civilians in the east whom Muammar Gaddafi had labeled “terrorists.” However, once the U.S.-orchestrated military operation got going, it quickly turned into a “regime change” war, eliminating longtime neocon nemesis, Gaddafi, to Hillary Clinton’s hawkish delight.
In Obama’s second term, the original “team of rivals” is gone, but foreign policy is being defined by the likes of Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, a neocon, and Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, a leading R2Per, with a substantial supporting role by neocon Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona. Obama defeated McCain in 2008, but McCain now is pulling the strings of Secretary of State John Kerry, who also appears enamored of the hawkish stances demanded by Nuland and Power.
Power was a passionate advocate for bombing Syria to degrade the military capabilities of President Bashar al-Assad who is in the midst of a bloody civil war. For her part, Nuland threw the weight of the U.S. government behind Ukrainian protesters who – with crucial help from neo-Nazi militias – ousted elected (but corrupt) President Viktor Yanukovych in February.
To the surprise of many people who knew Kerry in his early days – as a Vietnam veteran against the war and as an aggressive Senate investigator in the 1980s – Kerry has consistently taken the side of the neocons and the R2Pers. As Secretary of State since February 2013, he also has built a dubious reputation for himself as someone who rushes to judgments and disregards evidence when the facts are inconvenient. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “What’s the Matter with John Kerry?”]
Sarin Attack
After a sarin gas attack last Aug. 21 outside Damascus, Kerry jumped to the conclusion that Assad’s government was at fault despite serious doubts within the U.S. intelligence community and among independent analysts. Then, without presenting a shred of verifiable evidence, he gave a bellicose speech on Aug. 30 claiming repeatedly that “we know” that the regime did it.
Though it still has not been ascertained whether regime forces or the rebels were responsible, it is now clear that Kerry was wrong in asserting U.S. government certainty, especially after a team of rocket scientists determined that the one rocket found to carry sarin had a maximum range of about two kilometers, much less than was needed to fit with Kerry’s claims.
One of those scientists, MIT’s Theodore Postol, told MintPress News that “According to our analysis, I would not … claim that I know who executed the attack, but it’s very clear that John Kerry had very bad intelligence at best or, at worst, lied about the intelligence he had.”
Postol compared Kerry’s presentation to the Bush-43 administration’s assertions about Iraq possessing WMD in 2002-03 and the Johnson administration citing the Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify escalation of the Vietnam War in 1964. Postol also noted the failure of the U.S. press to question the U.S. government’s accusations against Syria.
“To me, the fact that people are not focused on how the administration lied is very disturbing and shows how far the community of journalists and the community of so-called security experts has strayed from their responsibility,” Postol said. “The government so specifically distorted the evidence that it presented a very real danger to the country and the world. I am concerned about the collapse of traditional journalism and the future of the country.”
Just this week, Kerry further augmented his new reputation as a person who doesn’t check his facts and simply spouts propaganda. On Thursday, after a Geneva conference called to tamp down tensions in Ukraine, Kerry rhetorically poured fuel on the fire by citing a claim about pro-Russian demonstrators in eastern Ukraine threatening local Jews.
“Just in the last couple of days, notices were sent to Jews in one city indicating that they had to identify themselves as Jews. And obviously, the accompanying threat implied is – or threatened – or suffer the consequences, one way or the other,” Kerry said.
“In the year 2014, after all of the miles traveled and all of the journey of history, this is not just intolerable; it’s grotesque. It is beyond unacceptable. And any of the people who engage in these kinds of activities, from whatever party or whatever ideology or whatever place they crawl out of, there is no place for that.”
However, in the days before Kerry spoke, the distribution of the leaflet in Donetsk had been denounced as a black-propaganda hoax designed to discredit the pro-Russian protesters.
A Reported Hoax
As JTA, “the Global Jewish News Source,” reported on Wednesday, “Pro-Russian separatists from Donetsk in eastern Ukraine denied any involvement in the circulation of fliers calling on Jews to register with separatists and pay special taxes.” Among those denying the legitimacy of the fliers was Denis Pushilin, the person whose name was signed at the bottom. He termed the fliers a “provocation” designed to discredit the resistance in eastern Ukraine against the post-coup regime in Kiev.
The issue of anti-Semitism has been a sensitive one for the Kiev regime because neo-Nazi militias played a key role in overthrowing President Yanukovych on Feb. 22, and now – renamed as Ukraine’s “National Guard” – these militias have joined in the repression of the protests in eastern Ukraine, including the killing of three protesters this week.
The right-wing Svoboda party and the Right Sektor, which spearheaded the decisive attacks that forced Yanukovych to flee for his life, trace their political lineage back to Stepan Bandera, a World War II Nazi collaborator whose paramilitary force took part in the extermination and expulsion of Jews and Poles to ethnically purify Ukraine.
So, the distribution of anti-Semitic fliers would have served an important political purpose for the Kiev regime by allowing it and its American backers to deflect questions about neo-Nazis in the west by fingering pro-Russians in the east for anti-Semitism. The men who passed out the leaflets were dressed up as pro-Russian paramilitaries but their identities are unknown.
On Friday, the New York Times sought to dispute the possibility that the men might have been pro-Kiev provocateurs by arguing that “there is no evidence” that pro-Kiev operatives are functioning in Donetsk.
But the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy has on its payroll a number of activists and “journalists” operating in Donetsk and elsewhere in the east, according to NED’s list of 65 projects in Ukraine. Founded in 1983, NED took over – in a quasi-public fashion – many of the covert operations formerly run by the CIA.
Last September, NED’s neocon president Carl Gershman wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post that called Ukraine “the biggest prize,” the capture of which could ultimately lead to the ouster of Putin, who “may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”
By citing the suspect flier without noting that its supposed author had already denied its authenticity, Kerry reinforced the growing impression that he is an erratic and biased if not dishonest diplomat.
Obama’s Equivocation
Obama’s role in his administration’s foreign policy fiascos has mostly been to be caught off guard by mischief that his independent-minded underlings have stirred up. Then, once a crisis is touched off – and the propaganda machinery starts churning out hyperbolic alarms – Obama joins in the rhetorical exaggerations before he tries, quietly, to work out some compromise.
In other words, rather than driving the agenda, Obama goes with the neocon-R2P flow before searching for a last-second off-ramp to avert catastrophe. That creates what looks like a disorganized foreign policy consisting of much tough talk but little actual hard power. The cumulative effect has been to make Obama appear weak and indecisive.
One example was Syria, where Obama drew a “red line” suggesting a U.S. military strike if Assad’s regime used chemical weapons. When sarin was used on Aug. 21 resulting in hundreds of deaths, Official Washington’s neocons and R2Pers quickly fingered Assad, firmed up that “group think,” and ridiculed anyone who doubted this conventional wisdom.
With Kerry running near the front of the stampede, Obama tagged along repeating what all the important people thought they knew – that Assad was guilty– but Obama steered away from the war cliff at the last minute. He referred the issue to Congress and then accepted a compromise devised by Putin to have Assad surrender all his chemical weapons, even as Assad continued denying a role in the Aug. 21 attack.
After that Syrian deal was struck, the neocons and R2Pers pummeled Obama for weakness in deciding not to launch major military strikes against Syrian targets. Obama managed to avert another Mideast war but he faced accusations of vacillation.
The Ukraine crisis is following a similar pattern. The neocons and R2Pers immediately took the side of the western Ukrainian protesters in the Maidan as they challenged elected President Yanukovych who hails from eastern Ukraine.
Assistant Secretary Nuland openly supported the rebellion, reminding Ukrainian business leaders that the United States had invested $5 billion in their “European aspirations,” literally passing out cookies to the protesters and secretly plotting who should replace Yanukovych. Her choice, “Yats” or Arseniy Yatsenyuk, not surprisingly ended up as prime minister after the Feb. 22 coup, and he quickly pushed through the parliament a harsh austerity plan demanded by the International Monetary Fund.
R2Pers also rallied to the cause of the Maidan protesters, citing a principled responsibility to protect civilians resisting government repression. However, the R2Pers have taken a remarkably different stance toward the Ukrainians in the east who have risen up against the unelected post-coup regime in Kiev. Those protesters are simply dismissed as pawns of the Russians, deserving whatever they get.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, a prominent R2Per, even wants the U.S. government to arm the Kiev regime so it can put down the pro-Russian protesters violently. On Thursday, Kristof wrote from Kiev: “For decades, Ukrainians have been starved, oppressed and bullied by Russians, and with Russia now inciting instability that could lead to an invasion and dismemberment of eastern Ukraine, plenty of brave Ukrainians here say they’ve had it and are ready to go bear-hunting.”
So, while virtually no one in the mainstream U.S. media will acknowledge the well-documented role played by American neocons and other operatives in inciting instability in Kiev, leading to the violent overthrow of the elected president, almost everyone in the MSM accepts as indisputable fact that the eastern Ukrainian protests against the post-coup regime in Kiev are simply Russian provocations deserving of a violent response.
Economic Pressures
But an oddly discordant note was sounded in the Washington Post of all places. On Thursday, correspondent Anthony Faiola reported from Donetsk that many of the eastern Ukrainians whom he interviewed said the unrest was driven by fear over “economic hardship” and the IMF austerity plan that will make their lives even harder.
“At a most dangerous and delicate time, just as it battles Moscow for hearts and minds across the east, the pro-Western government is set to initiate a shock therapy of economic measures to meet the demands of an emergency bailout from the International Monetary Fund,” Faiola reported.
In other words, even as Kerry, the neocons and the R2Pers blame only the Russians for the unrest in the east, a rare case of actual reporting from the scene finds a more realistic explanation, that many people in eastern Ukraine feel disenfranchised by the violent overthrow of their candidate Yanukovych and are frightened at the prospects of soaring heating bills and other cuts in their already austere lifestyles.
As for President Obama — as a timid “realist” — he has played his typical double game. He responded to the pro-Kiev bias of Official Washington by piling on with angry denunciations of Putin, but – recognizing the painful consequences that would come from a full-blown confrontation with Russia – Obama authorized negotiations to reduce tensions, an agreement that was announced on Thursday in Geneva.
Yet, even if the Ukrainian crisis is gradually walked back from the edge, I’m told that lasting damage has been done to the working relationship that had developed, behind the scenes, between Obama and Putin, collaboration that helped avert a U.S. war on Syria and hammered out a compromise to constrain Iran’s nuclear program.
Putin had hoped that Russian cooperation on those two dangerous issues would open the door to other collaboration with Obama. But the Ukraine crisis brought those prospects to a halt. The Russians are particularly sensitive to the harsh rhetoric emanating from Kerry but also from Obama.
One adviser to the Russian government told me that the people around Putin feel that they are being treated shabbily even as Obama has benefited from their help.
The adviser summed up the Russian attitude: “How can you expect me to work with you during the day when you sleep with my wife at night? How can you whisper in my ear that we are friends and then go out in public and say terrible things about me? It doesn’t work that way.”
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FOCUS | Elizabeth Warren's Non-Campaign Is Underway |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=30270"><span class="small">Jill Lepore, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Saturday, 19 April 2014 12:49 |
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Lepore writes: "In her new book, Elizabeth Warren tells the story of her life in order to make an argument about America (the middle class is trapped in a vise of debt), which is the sort of thing politicians do when they're running for office."
She says she is not running, but... (photo: Getty Images)
Elizabeth Warren's Non-Campaign Is Underway
By Jill Lepore, The New Yorker
19 April 14
 n her new book, Elizabeth Warren tells the story of her life in order to make an argument about America (the middle class is trapped in a vise of debt), which is the sort of thing politicians do when they’re running for office. Warren, who spent most of her career as a law-school professor, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012; she’s not up for reëlection until 2018. “I am not running for President,” she insisted at a press conference in Boston in December, pledging that she will finish her term. But the publication, this month, of her autobiography, “A Fighting Chance” (Metropolitan), ahead of a memoir by Hillary Clinton that is due out this summer, only adds to the speculation that Warren is considering challenging Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2016. And, even if Warren doesn’t run, this book is part of that race.
Warren’s book was originally called “Rigged,” a reference to her contention that the American political system places power in the hands of plutocrats and bankers at the expense of ordinary, middle-class Americans. “Big corporations hire armies of lobbyists to get billion-dollar loopholes into the tax system and persuade their friends in Congress to support laws that keep the playing field tilted in their favor,” Warren writes. “Meanwhile, hardworking families are told that they’ll just have to live with smaller dreams for their children.”
“A Fighting Chance” is in many ways heir to a book published a century ago. “Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It,” by Louis Brandeis, appeared in the spring of 1914. Brandeis believed that the country was being run by plutocrats and, especially, by investment bankers, who, by combining, consolidating, and aggregating the functions of banks, trusts, and corporations, controlled both the nation’s credit and the majority of its resources—including the railroads—and yet had not the least accountability to the public or any sense that the functions they had adopted were essentially those of a public utility. “The power and the growth of power of our financial oligarchs comes from wielding the savings and quick capital of others,” Brandeis wrote. “The fetters which bind the people are forged from the people’s own gold.”
Brandeis was concerned with Gilded Age plutocrats’ use of people’s bank savings to build giant, monopolistic conglomerates answerable not to the people but to shareholders. “Other People’s Money,” which originally appeared as a series of essays in Harper’s, is a polemic, but it’s also a huge compilation of facts and figures. Brandeis pointed out, for instance, that J. P. Morgan and the First National and the National City Bank together held “341 directorships in 112 corporations having aggregate resources or capitalization of $22,245,000,000,” a sum that is “nearly three times the assessed value of all the real estate in the City of New York” and “more than the assessed value of all the property in the twenty-two states, north and south, lying west of the Mississippi River.” (Brandeis’s ability to enlist data in the service of a legal argument, a statement known as a “Brandeis brief,” is among his many legacies.) In 1933, Brandeis arranged to have “Other People’s Money” republished—in an edition that cost only fifteen cents—so that it could exert the same influence on F.D.R.’s Administration that it had exerted on Woodrow Wilson’s. In the first decades of the twentieth century, arguments made by writers like Brandeis led to a series of antitrust reforms and financial-industry regulations that, in the middle decades of the century, made possible the growth of the middle class.
Warren is concerned not with saving but with borrowing, not with monopoly but with debt. Since the nineteen-eighties, many Progressive-era and New Deal reforms have been repealed, including a cap on interest rates and a wall, erected in 1933, separating commercial and savings banking from investment banking. In the second gilded age, the fetters that bind the people were forged first from the people’s own credit cards and then from their mortgages. Credit-card companies lured borrowers in with “teaser rates.” Rates of consumer bankruptcy skyrocketed. Eying the profits made by credit-card companies, mortgage companies began selling an entirely new inventory of “mortgage products,” with low down payments, ballooning rates, and prepayment penalties. Home prices shot up, and then they collapsed. “When the housing market sank,” Warren writes, “so did America’s middle class.”
Warren speaks Brandeis’s language. “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own,” Warren said at a campaign stop in 2011, in remarks that defined her candidacy. “Nobody. You built a factory out there, good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate.” You used other people’s money. “You built a factory, and it turned into something terrific or a great idea—God bless! Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.” It’s the Brandeis in Warren that got her elected. What she does next will have to do with the many ways in which 2014 is not 1914.
“A Fighting Chance” begins this way: “I’m Elizabeth Warren. I’m a wife, a mother, and a grandmother.” Nowhere in “Other People’s Money” did Brandeis mention his life or his family; no doubt, these matters did not strike him as relevant to his discussion of financial oligarchy. Also, Brandeis wasn’t running for office. He was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1916, but, even if he had run for office, and had been required to write the necessary campaign autobiography, its first words would not have been “I’m Louis Brandeis. I’m a husband and a father.”
Warren, like Brandeis, is a lawyer and a scholar. She was born in Oklahoma in 1949, the youngest of four children. When she was twelve years old, her father, a salesman for Montgomery Ward, had a heart attack and lost his job. The family lost a car and might have lost their house if Warren’s mother hadn’t managed to get a job at Sears. Warren went to college on a debating-society scholarship but dropped out when she was nineteen to marry an old high-school boyfriend, Jim Warren. She later finished college and moved with her husband to New Jersey; he’d been transferred there by his employer, I.B.M. Warren started work as a schoolteacher; by the end of her first year teaching, when she was twenty-one, she was pregnant. “Somewhere in between diapers and breast-feeding, I hatched the idea of going to school,” she writes. Her husband didn’t want her to work full time, but agreed that it would be O.K. if she took classes. She decided on law school, because she liked the lawyers on TV. Every day, she brought her daughter, Amelia, to a woman who took care of half a dozen kids, and went to class at Rutgers Law School. By the end of her third year, she was pregnant again; she had a boy named Alex. Much of Warren’s book is about her children and grandchildren. She writes about a moment in 1978: “It was early evening, the cranky time of day. I was jostling Alex on my hip and frying pork chops. Amelia was on the floor with crayons scattered all around. I kept an eye on the clock, knowing Jim would come through the door in about twenty minutes.” The phone rang. It was a professor at the University of Houston Law Center, asking her about a job inquiry she’d sent because her husband might be transferred to Houston. Warren writes, “I tried to sound smooth and relaxed, even as I jiggled Alex furiously in the hope that he wouldn’t start crying. And I kept looking at those damn pork chops.”
Warren got a teaching position at the law school (where she was routinely mistaken for a secretary), and the family moved to Houston. One day in 1979 when she picked up Alex from a day-care center in a strip mall, he held on to her and cried and cried and cried. She took him out of the day-care center. “I was so tired that my bones hurt,” Warren writes. She was about to quit. Then her aunt Bee volunteered to move to Houston from Oklahoma, to help take care of the children. “Nearly eighty years old and so needed,” Bee said. Not long afterward, when Warren’s marriage fell apart, her parents moved to Houston to help out, too. In 1980, Warren remarried.
Warren’s interest in debt, she says, is partly personal. “My daddy and I were both afraid of being poor, really poor. His response was never to talk about money or what might happen if it ran out—never ever ever. My response was to study contracts, finance, and, most of all, economic failure, to learn everything I could.” Her research led her to conclude that the bankruptcy rate is a canary in the economy’s coal mine and that, sometime during the Reagan Administration, the canary died.
The argument Warren offers in “A Fighting Chance” is one that she began to make in “As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America,” a monograph written with Teresa A. Sullivan and Jay Lawrence Westbrook and published by Oxford in 1989. Sullivan, a sociologist, is now president of the University of Virginia; Westbrook teaches bankruptcy law at the University of Texas School of Law, where Warren taught from 1981 to 1987. (In 1986, Warren and Westbrook wrote a textbook, “The Law of Debtors and Creditors,” currently in its seventh edition.) In “As We Forgive Our Debtors,” Sullivan, Warren, and Westbrook reported the results of a study they made of twenty-four hundred bankruptcy petitions filed in 1981. Bankruptcy rates had risen because of the 1978 Bankruptcy Reform Act, which made filing for bankruptcy easier, but also because, by the nineteen-seventies, consumer spending had become the engine of the American economy. Sullivan, Warren, and Westbrook found that most filers weren’t cheats or frauds and they also weren’t poor; they were members of the middle class, undone by the volatility of the economy and by a six-hundred-billion-dollar consumer-credit industry. More than half were homeowners, and many were women rearing children.
In 1987, Warren began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. In 1995, she moved to Harvard. In “The Fragile Middle Class: Americans in Debt,” published by Yale in 2000, Sullivan, Warren, and Westbrook reported the results of a follow-up study of another twenty-four hundred bankruptcy filings, these from 1991. Even more Americans were drowning in debt. Between 1979 and 1997, the number of personal-bankruptcy filings rose by four hundred per cent.
In an age of debt, an unexpected loss can drive almost anyone to ruin. “Divorce, an unhappy second marriage, a serious illness, no job,” Warren writes. “A turn here, a turn there, and my life might have been very different, too.”
Louis Brandeis had a knack for making himself an expert on just about anything, but the original “Brandeis brief” was a hundred-and-thirteen-page document that he submitted to the Supreme Court in 1908, in Muller v. Oregon, a case concerning a law limiting the workday for women in laundries and factories to ten hours. “The decision in this case will, in effect, determine the constitutionality of nearly all the statutes in force in the United States, limiting the hours of labor of adult women,” Brandeis explained in his brief. He proceeded to cite and summarize the findings of hundreds of reports and studies by physicians, municipal health boards, public-health departments, medical societies, factory inspectors, and bureaus of labor, demonstrating the harm done to women who worked long hours, an argument that relied on ideas about women’s weakness relative to men. The Oregon law was upheld.
The efforts of a generation of Progressive reformers, including Brandeis, lies behind the abolition of child labor and the establishment of maximum-hour and minimum-wage laws for both men and women. A century later, Warren’s brief, too, has to do with the long hours that women work. She’s interested in the unintended economic consequences that arise when women rearing children enter the paid labor force. Warren’s counterintuitive argument is that, for all the public and private good that has come from gains made by women in education and employment, earning money has made women who are mothers more economically vulnerable, not less.
Warren believes that the two-income family has contributed to the bankruptcy rate. “For middle-class families, the most important part of the safety net for generations has been the stay-at-home mother,” Warren and her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, wrote in “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke” (2003), a book aimed at a wider audience than Warren’s earlier, academic work. (“Mom, you are boring,” Tyagi told Warren. “Collaborating with my daughter is not for sissies,” Warren says.) It used to be that when a middle-class family was faced with a financial crisis the woman in the house could get a job, to tide things over, which is what happened when Warren’s father had a heart attack and her mother got a job at Sears. This cushion doesn’t exist in the two-income family, which, in its short history—it has its origins, as a middle-class phenomenon, in the nineteen-seventies—has also taken on a great deal more housing debt. The 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act required lenders to count a wife’s income when evaluating borrowers; the deregulation of the mortgage lending industry began in 1980. With two wage earners and low down payments, middle-class families took on bigger mortgages and contributed to an increase in the cost of housing, especially when families with children paid a premium for property in school districts with high test scores. Financial crisis, for a two-income family, usually means having to live, quite suddenly, on one income. In these straits, families with children tend to totter on the edge of ruin. “Having a child is now the single best predictor that a woman will end up in financial collapse,” Warren and Tyagi reported. Between 1981 and 2001, the number of women filing for bankruptcy rose more than six hundred per cent.
Warren entered the world of policymaking when, in 1995, she was appointed to serve on the National Bankruptcy Review Commission, during the Clinton Administration. She found the work thrilling and the results maddening. She describes a report, sponsored by the banking industry, alleging that bankruptcy protection amounted to a five-hundred-and-fifty-dollar “hidden tax” levied on every hardworking American family: “I’d spent nearly twenty years sweating over every detail in a string of serious academic studies, agonizing over sample sizes and statistical significance to make certain that whatever I reported was exactly right. Now the banks just wrote a check, commissioned a friendly study, and purchased their own facts.” Warren’s frustration was part of what led her to seek a broader audience for her research by writing “The Two-Income Trap,” which led to appearances on the “Today” show and “Dr. Phil,” where she spoke with a family struggling with debt. “Year in and year out, I’d been fighting as hard as I could,” Warren writes. “But by spending a few minutes talking to that family on Dr. Phil’s show—and to about six million other people who were looking on—I might have done more good than in an entire year as a professor.”
Nevertheless, the solutions that Warren has proposed often fail to convince. To counter both the crisis in public education and the high cost of housing, Warren and Tyagi recommend a universal public-school voucher system in which parents could send their kids to any public school: “An all-voucher system would be a shock to the educational system, but the shakeout might be just what the system needs.” Yes, that would be a shock. It would also be reckless.
In 2008, Warren joined a five-person congressional-oversight panel whose creation was mandated by the seven-hundred-billion-dollar bailout. She found that thrilling and maddening, too. In the spring of 2009, after the panel issued its third report, critical of the bailout, Larry Summers took Warren out to dinner in Washington and, she recalls, told her that she had a choice to make. She could be an insider or an outsider, but if she was going to be an insider she needed to understand one unbreakable rule about insiders: “They don’t criticize other insiders.” That’s about when Warren went on the Jon Stewart show, and you get the sense that, over that dinner, she decided to run for office.
Elizabeth Warren has a case to make about what bankers do with other people’s money; she’s been making it for twenty-five years. It’s hardly uncontested, but it rests on collaborative, peer-reviewed, empirical research. Getting that argument across to voters in 2012 required a great deal of compression and simplification, even more than was required to write “The Two-Income Trap,” but Warren’s expertise—her authority as an intellectual—also helped get her elected. Running against Scott Brown, she had to tell a stump-size story about her life, a story that includes this fact: for a time, she was a single mother. That story helped get her elected.
My life explains my fight has been the argument of every American political biography for a long time. When you’re grafting a life story onto a political argument, there will always be places where the grain runs in different directions. (An argument that the system is rigged tends to be somewhat undermined, for instance, by the success of the person pointing that out.) And, particularly for women with children, campaign biography can be a snare. When Wendy Davis decided to run for governor of Texas, her consultants advised her to tell the story of how she started out as a single mother before becoming a lawyer; conservatives accused her of having abandoned her children. This snare exists because political biography as a genre follows conventions whose origins lie with Andrew Jackson, in the early nineteenth century, long before women gained the right to vote or to hold office. Discrimination is the afterlife of discredited ideas. By the standards applied to Davis, who left her two young daughters with their father so that she could go to law school, most candidates elected to office in the United States in the past two centuries abandoned their children.
But there’s another snare here: the danger of adopting, in place of the conventions of the Andrew Jackson’s-bootstraps political biography, the newer conventions of diaper-pin Girl Jacksonianism. Political consultants appear to be eager to advise their female candidates to include, when telling the story of their lives, gauzy intimacies, silly-little-me confessions of domestic ineptitude, stagy performances of maternal devotion, and the shameless trotting out of twinkle-eyed tots. In “A Fighting Chance,” Warren argues that the federal government has allowed an unregulated financial industry to prey on the middle class; she also writes no small amount about peach cobbler and burned frying pans. Still, she is not adorable; instead, she’s fierce in her affections. “Sometimes, late at night, when the house was quiet, I’d scoop Lavinia out of her crib and hold her,” she writes, referring to one of her grandchildren. “Not because she needed it but because I did.”
Warren is also smart enough to use the conventions of political biography, old and new, to insist on the existence of a relationship between caring for other people and caring about politics. Her brief is really about the abandonment of children, not by women who go to school or to work but by legislatures and courts that have allowed the nation’s social and economic policies to be made by corporations and bankers. Writing about her children and grandchildren—rocking that baby—is more than the place where Warren leaves Brandeis behind. It’s an argument about where our real debts lie.
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FOCUS | Paul Krugman: What the 1% Don't Want You to Know |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=15946"><span class="small">Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company</span></a>
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Saturday, 19 April 2014 11:35 |
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Excerpt: "Krugman adds: 'We're seeing inequalities that will be transferred across generations. We are becoming very much the kind of society we imagined we're nothing like.'"
Paul Krugman being interviewed by Bill Moyers. (photo: Moyers & Co.)
Paul Krugman: What the 1% Don't Want You to Know
By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company
19 April 14
he median pay for the top 100 highest-paid CEOs at America’s publicly traded companies was a handsome $13.9 million in 2013. That’s a 9 percent increase from the previous year, according to a new Equilar pay study for The New York Times.
These types of jumps in executive compensation may have more of an effect on our widening income inequality than previously thought. A new book that’s the talk of academia and the media, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, a 42-year-old who teaches at the Paris School of Economics, shows that two-thirds of America’s increase in income inequality over the past four decades is the result of steep raises given to the country’s highest earners.
This week, Bill talks with Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, about Piketty’s “magnificent” new book.
BILL MOYERS: Welcome. Even in this age of hyperlinks and cyberspace, nearly six centuries after Gutenberg devised his printing press, it’s still possible for a single book to shake the foundations, rattle clichés, upend dogma, unnerve ideologues, and arm everyday people with the knowledge they need to fight back against the predatory powers that have robbed them of their birthright as citizens.
This is such a book: “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” by the French economist Thomas Piketty. The book of the season to many. To others, the book of the decade. Reviewers have called it “a bulldozer of a book,” “magisterial,” “seminal,” “definitive,” “a watershed.”
At 700 pages it’s already a best seller. And there isn’t a single scene of seduction, not one celebrity interview, not one picture -- just graph after graph, fact on fact, drawn from two centuries of data and imbedded in prose that can suddenly explode like a supernova in the brain.
Here’s one of its extraordinary insights: we are heading into a future dominated by inherited wealth as capital concentrates in fewer and fewer hands, giving the very rich ever greater power over politics, government, and society. “Patrimonial capitalism” is the name for it, and it has potentially terrifying consequences for democracy. For those who work for a living, the level of inequality in the US, writes Piketty, is “probably higher than in any other society, at any time in the past, anywhere in the world.” Over three decades, between 1977 and 2007, 60 percent of our national income went to the richest 1 percent of Americans. No wonder this is the one book the 1 percent doesn't want the other 99 percent to read.
Paul Krugman has been writing extensively and generously about Piketty’s book. The Nobel prize-winning economist and “New York Times” columnist calls it “a tour de force…a magnificent sweeping meditation on inequality…that will change both the way we think about society and the way we do economics.”
As scholar, author of many books, and widely read columnist and blogger, Paul Krugman has himself changed a lot of thinking on politics and economics. Welcome back.
PAUL KRUGMAN: Hi.
BILL MOYERS: Inequality's been on the table for a long time. You’ve written extensively, others have, too. I mean, it’s a familiar issue, but what explains that this book has now become a phenomenon?
PAUL KRUGMAN: Actually, a lot of what we know about inequality actually comes from him, because he's been an invisible presence behind a lot. So when you talk about the 1 percent, you're actually to a larger extent reflecting his prior work. But what he's really done now is he said, "Even those of you who talk about the 1 percent, you don't really get what's going on. You're living in the past. You're living in the '80s. You think that Gordon Gekko is the future."
And Gordon Gekko is a bad guy, he's a predator. But he's a self-made predator. And right now, what we're really talking about is we're talking about Gordon Gekko's son or daughter. We're talking about inherited wealth playing an ever-growing role. So he's telling us that we are on the road not just to a highly unequal society, but to a society of an oligarchy. A society of inherited wealth, “patrimonial capitalism.” And he does it with an enormous amount of documentation and it's a revelation. I mean, even for someone like me, it's a revelation.
BILL MOYERS: I was going to ask, what could-- what has Paul Krugman had to learn from this book?
PAUL KRUGMAN: Even the title, the first word in the title, "capital." We stopped talking about capital. Even people like me stopped talking about capital because we thought it was all about human capital. We thought it was all about earnings. We thought that the wealthy were people who one way or another found a way to make a lot of money.
And we knew that that wasn't always true. We knew that in the Gilded Age or in the Belle Époque in Europe, which he prefers to talk about. That high incomes were mostly a result of having lots and lots of assets. But we sort of said, "Well, that's not the way things work anymore." And he says, "Oh yeah? It turns out that you're wrong." That’s true, that right now, a lot of high incomes in America are people who didn't start out all that rich. But we're rapidly moving towards a state where inherited wealth dominates. I didn't know that. I really was-- I should've known it. I should've thought about it, but I didn't. And so then here comes this book with-- I mean, it's beautiful-- absolutely analytically beautiful, if that makes any sense at all.
BILL MOYERS: As you know, I'm no economist, but I found this book, as I said in the opening, just very readable and suddenly there would be this moment of epiphany.
PAUL KRUGMAN: Yeah, it's a real "eureka" book. You suddenly say, "Oh, this is not-- the world is not the way I saw it." The world in fact has moved on a long way in the last 25 years and not in a direction you're going to like because we are seeing not only great disparities in income and wealth, but we're seeing them get entrenched. We're seeing them become inequalities that will be transferred across generations. We are becoming very much the kind of society we imagine we're nothing like.
BILL MOYERS: Here’s Piketty’s main point: capital tends to produce real returns of 4 to 5 percent, and economic growth is much slower. What's the practical result of that?
PAUL KRUGMAN: What that means is that if you have a large fortune, or a family has a large fortune, they can -- the inheritors of that large fortune -- can live very, very well. They can live an extraordinary standard of living and still put a large fraction of the income from that fortune aside and the fortune will grow faster than the economy.
So the big dynastic fortunes tend to take an ever-growing share of total, national wealth. So once you-- when you have a situation where the returns on capital are pretty high and the growth rate of the economy is not that high, you have a situation in which not only can people live well off inherited wealth, but they can actually pass on to the next generation even more, an even a higher share.
And so it's all, in his terms, "r" the rate of return on capital, and "g” the rate of growth of the economy. And when you have a high r, low g economy, which is what we now have, then you're talking not-- you're talking about a situation in which dynasties come increasingly to increasingly to dominate the top of the economic spectrum and a tiny fraction of the population ends up very dominant.
BILL MOYERS: What's the realistic impact of this on working people?
PAUL KRUGMAN: There's a direct impact, which is that part of income is always going to go to labor, although that seems to be a diminishing fraction. But the part that comes from capital is going to be in the hands of a very few people. The other thing, which I think is critically important, that he talks about more towards the end of the book is political economy.
That when you have -- Teddy Roosevelt could’ve told you and did -- that when you have a few people who are so wealthy that they can effectively buy the political system, the political system is going to tend to serve their interests. And that is going to reinforce this shift of income and wealth towards the top.
BILL MOYERS: Do you agree with him that we are drifting toward oligarchy?
PAUL KRUGMAN: Oh yeah. Oh, I don't think that’s even -- I don't see that there's any question of it. If you look at the-- certainly if you look at what we know already, and we're learning more, but what we know already about the concentration of income, of wealth, you can see that it is growing. You can see that-- and you can actually see-- I've spent a little while just sort of going through the “Forbes 400” list.
And what you find is already there’s an awful lot of inherited wealth in there. It’s no longer a list of self-made men. And of the self-made men, a lot of them are pretty elderly. And their-- those fortunes are going to be passed on to next generations. So the drift towards oligarchy is very visible, both casual observation and in the numbers.
BILL MOYERS: I was taken with something you wrote the other day. You said that in your opinion, the real problem is not capital accumulation per se as much as it is, quote, "remarkably high compensation and incomes." Now how is that different from what you were just saying about wealth that passes to the next generation?
PAUL KRUGMAN: So right now, high incomes are still primarily coming from people who've made a lot of money typically as corporate executives. That has been the story, so the big expansion of inequality in the United States since the 1970s has so far been driven by high salaries, high bonuses and all, so on.
That's where we are now. But our image of the top is really a quarter century old. It is about the way things were when these great fortunes were just getting started, when we were just seeing the explosion of inequality. But we're well along the way towards one in which it is, in fact, an older thing, where people accumulate capital, pass it on to their heirs, and you get this dynastic wealth.
So right now, and this is where Piketty has interesting things to say, but not this compelling vision about why America is so unequal right now. But looking forward, he's telling us that the story is already changing. And it's going to change more. So we are going probably, unless something gets better, we're going to look back nostalgically on the early 21st century when you could still at least have the pretense that the wealthy actually earned their wealth. And, you know, by the year 2030, it'll all be inherited.
BILL MOYERS: And at the same time, we can't even manage to pay workers a minimum wage of $10.10.
PAUL KRUGMAN: Yeah. And what's amazing, I thought actually one of the most depressing things, although enlightening in his book, is he talks about France in the Belle Époque, the years before World War I, which was ideologically as much a society committed to equality in principle as we are today. But in practice, was totally dominated by very wealthy families, where it was impossible to even raise the possibility of seriously taxing great wealth.
Where it was very hard to do anything to improve the conditions of ordinary workers. And it shows you how that can happen. How you can have a society where the-- even though the ideology is democratic, even though we claim that all men are equal, in practice, not a chance.
BILL MOYERS: Isn't that what's happening now in this country?
PAUL KRUGMAN: Exactly, exactly. That's the point. And what's funny is at the time, Americans used to say, "Oh-- we should never allow ourselves to become like old Europe." And in fact, we have.
BILL MOYERS: But we have had the Rockefellers, we've had the Carnegies, we've had the Pews. We've had big dynasties that transferred their wealth from one generation to another.
PAUL KRUGMAN: Yes. Before World War I, we had our dynastic families, but they were not nearly as dominant as they were in Europe. Largely-- not because we didn't have high returns on capital, but because we were growing so fast. We were an immigrant nation, a fast-growing nation.
So they hadn't been able to establish a lock. And then after that, we had a long period of high taxation of large estates, high taxation of capital income. But now we're on our way back. Now we're on our way back towards something that looks much more like that kind of hierarchical society.
BILL MOYERS: Piketty makes the point, that the very size of inherited fortunes today is so great that it practically makes them invisible. Quote "Wealth is so concentrated that a large segment of society is virtually unaware of its existence."
PAUL KRUGMAN: Sure. If you have conversations with people who are not in this business, who are not economists, they have no idea what real wealth means in America. They think that having a million dollars makes you wealthy. They think that-- or having a salary of several hundred thousand dollars makes you wealthy. And while it's certainly true, that's a vastly privileged condition compared with most people, the sheer size of those big fortunes is so far outside our normal experience that it does become invisible. You're never going to meet these people. You're never going to have any sense of what it is that they control. And most people I think have no idea just how far the commanding heights are from you and me.
BILL MOYERS: You remind us often, and you did so just the other day, that the United States has a much more unequal distribution of income than other advanced countries. And that much of this difference comes from government actions, such as?
PAUL KRUGMAN: If you look at, oh, look at European countries, just about all of them. They don't actually necessarily have higher taxes on very high incomes. That's not so much the factor. And they have higher taxes overall, which are used to pay for a lot of programs of aid.
So you have universal healthcare, and we have-- sort of are stumbling our way towards something like that now but they have a lot of income support for people with low incomes. They have lots of support for young parents, they have lots of basically, a lot of redistribution. Which is a dirty word in US politics, but in fact is essential for having a decent society. So that to be the average American is richer than the average person in France.
Although that's mostly because we work longer hours. But to be in the bottom fifth of France is a far, far better thing than to be in the bottom fifth in the United States because of these government policies. It’s not that wages are especially high at the bottom in France. A little bit higher than in the United States, because we have a high minimum wage. But mostly, you have government programs, which make an enormous difference. The level of inequality of market income what people actually make is not that different among advanced countries. The level of inequality of disposable income, once the government has gotten through taxing and spending, is much, much higher in the US than it is in most other advanced countries. And that's because of the government.
BILL MOYERS: Well why is, as you said, redistribution such a noxious word in our political system?
PAUL KRUGMAN: I think mostly it's just because there's a very effective apparatus of TV and print media and think tanks and so on who hammer against any suggestion of redistribution. It's just, they've managed to convince a lot of people that it is somehow un-American.
Which actually, if you look at American history, that's not all true. But they-- it's just been pushed very hard. I think also the United States, look, we have to admit, race is always lurking under almost everything in American life. And redistribution in the minds of a lot of people means taking money from people like me and giving it to people who don't look like me. And I think that is a big difference between us and Europe.
BILL MOYERS: You do know that conservatives are regularly, consistently saying that inequality doesn't matter, that if the very rich were less rich, it wouldn't really make a difference to people out there working for a living.
PAUL KRUGMAN: But of course, what Europeans do, which is to tax the rich and use it to provide benefits to people lower down the scale. That makes a big difference. That can make an enormous difference. Take--
BILL MOYERS: How so?
PAUL KRUGMAN: Take a few percent of national income, take it away from the top 1 percent and direct it towards the bottom 20 percent, that's a tremendous gain in the quality of life for the bottom 20 percent. So just think about it. Actually, we have a health reform. It’s not the health reform we would've wanted, but it's better than no reform.
It's financed in large part with small surtaxes on high incomes. That's, if you actually ask where the money's coming from, a lot of it is coming from an additional tax on investment income, an additional tax on earned income for very high earners. That is going to give basically everybody in America the guarantee of being able to have essential, basic health insurance at an affordable cost.
That's a huge change in people's lives. Which is being financed in large part by taking a little bit from the top. So a little bit of Robin Hoodism does a lot. You can do a lot more with that. And so no one is talking about just-- let's punish the rich for the sake of punishing them. But the question is, can you do redistribution in a way that makes this a better society, and the answer is yes.
BILL MOYERS: Well at the end of his book, Piketty is talking about the global tax on wealth. Do you think that's feasible?
PAUL KRUGMAN: Well, is it feasible politically? You know, if the United States were behind it. Lots of things would become possible. If the United States were to support this, then I think you could pretty much guarantee that the Europeans would-- enough Europeans would be willing to go along.
And while there would be some countries that would, you know, rogue countries that would want to serve as havens for tax evasion, we would have a lot of leverage over them. So really it's not that the international global system makes this impossible, it's really, it's the US political system that makes it look impossible right now. And that can change.
BILL MOYERS: But given the dysfunction of Congress, given the fact that the Supreme Court has in effect decided to enable corporations and their rich to consolidate their hold on our political system, do you have any hope of the kind of change that both Piketty and you would advocate?
PAUL KRUGMAN: I think you don't give up hope on these things. We have-- look at the American political tradition. Look at the-- one of the interesting things that Piketty says is that serious progressive taxation of high incomes and great wealth is an American invention. We invented it, and we invented it in the early 20th century, right at the peak of our Gilded Age.
And somehow we found it in ourselves to turn-- to find political leaders, people like Teddy Roosevelt, who are willing to say, "This is a bad thing, we do not want the society that is emerging here." So I think things can change. What-- if you ask, you know, are we going to get a wealth tax, a global wealth tax before the 2016 election? Well no, we're not. Might we get one by the 2024 election? Possibly.
BILL MOYERS: You wrote something the other day that's hard to forget. You said, "We live in such an ugliness in America right now."
PAUL KRUGMAN: Yeah. This is one of the things that puzzles me actually about my own country, which is it's one thing to have disparities of income and wealth and to have differing views about what we should be doing about it. But there's a level of harshness in our debates mostly coming from the people who are actually doing very well.
So, you know, we've had a parade of billionaires whining about being-- you know, the incredible injustice that people are actually criticizing them. And then comparing anyone who criticizes them to the Nazis. You know, it's almost a tic that they have. This is-- this is very strange. And it's kind of scary because, you know, it's one thing if someone without a lot of power seems to be going off and into a rage for no good reason. But these are people who have a lot of influence because of the amount of money they control.
BILL MOYERS: Given what you just said and given the fact that there's this ugliness, what do you think it's going to take? A mass uprising? Consistent demonstrations? Insurgent politics? How are we going to stem the tide that he says is taking us into oligarchy?
PAUL KRUGMAN: There's a negative and there’s a positive take. Piketty argues-- seems to argue through much of the book that we only escaped the old oligarchy for a while thanks to really disastrous events. Thanks to wars and depressions, which disrupted the system. That's an argument you can make.
On the other hand, if you read histories of the New Deal, you know that it didn't come-- it didn't spring out of nowhere. That we had a progressive movement and a lot of proto New Deal programs building for quite a long time.
There was, in fact, a move in America. There was an increasing political, philosophical readiness to take on inequality of wealth and power long before FDR moved into the White House. And so, I think there are better angels of our nature. That there is this ugliness which can be frightening. But there is also a redemptive streak in-- here and in other places.
And that-- don't give up hope on this. That given consistent argumentation, given events, and perhaps you know, as people become more aware of what is actually going on then there is a chance of changing things. Do we know that? No. But there's nothing in what we know now that says you should give up hope of being able to change this even without a catastrophe.
BILL MOYERS: Paul Krugman, thank you very much for joining me.
PAUL KRUGMAN: Thank you for having me on.
BILL MOYERS: The evidence keeps mounting. Just this past Tuesday, the 15th of April, Tax Day, the AFL-CIO reported that last year the chief executive officers of 350 top American corporations were paid 331 times more money than the average US worker. Those executives made an average of $11.7 million compared to the average worker who earned $35,239.
As that analysis circulated on Tax Day, the economist Robert Reich reminded us that in addition to getting the largest percent of total national income in nearly a century, many in the one percent are paying a lower federal tax rate than a lot of people in the middle-class. You will, no doubt, remember that an obliging Congress, of both parties, allows high rollers of finance the privilege of carried interest, a tax rate below that of their secretaries and clerks. And at state and local levels, while the poorest 20 percent of Americans pay an average tax rate of over 11 percent, the richest one percent of the country pays half that rate. Now, neither nature nor nature’s God drew up our tax codes. That’s the work of legislators, politicians, and it’s one way they have, as Chief Justice John Roberts might put it, of expressing gratitude to their donors. Oh, Mr. Adelson, we so appreciate your generosity that we cut your estate taxes so you can give $8 billion as a tax-free payment to your heirs, even though down the road the public will have to put up $2.8 billion to compensate for the loss in tax revenues.
All of which makes truly repugnant the argument, heard so often from courtiers of the rich, that inequality doesn’t matter. Of course it matters. Inequality is what has turned Washington into a protection racket for the one percent. It buys all those goodies from government: tax breaks, tax havens, allowing corporations and the rich to park their money in a no-tax zone, loopholes, favors like carried interest, and on, and on, and on.
Listen, there’s a big study coming out in the fall from Martin Gilens at Princeton and Benjamin Page at Northwestern, based on data collected between 1981 and 2002. Their conclusion, quote, “… America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened … the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
Sad, that it’s come to this. The drift toward oligarchy that Thomas Piketty describes in his formidable book has become a mad dash, and it will overrun us, and overwhelm us, unless we stop it.
At our website BillMoyers.com, you can find out much more about Piketty’s book and the debate it has sparked on both the left and right. That’s at BillMoyers.com. I’ll see you there and I’ll see you here, next time.
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Bernie Sanders Raises Battle Cry Against Citizens United: 'I Vote for Democracy!' |
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Saturday, 19 April 2014 09:47 |
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Nichols writes: "Citizens United is not just the default reference for US Supreme Court decisions - including the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling - that have ushered in a new era of corporate dominance of American elections."
Bernie Sanders would inject liberal passion into a primary. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Bernie Sanders Raises Battle Cry Against Citizens United: 'I Vote for Democracy!'
By John Nichols, The Nation
19 April 14
 itizens United is not just the default reference for US Supreme Court decisions—including the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling—that have ushered in a new era of corporate dominance of American elections. It’s the name of the conservative group that encouraged Chief Justice John Roberts and the most activist Court majority in American history to tear the heart out of what were already weak campaign finance laws.
Citizens United still exists as an activist group that produces documentaries—ACLU: At War with America, Border War: The Battle Over Illegal Immigration, Fire From the Heartland: The Awakening of the Conservative Woman, America at Risk: Hosted by Newt and Callista Gingrich—and organizes gatherings that highlight right-wing policies and politicians. On Saturday, Citizens United hosted something of a kickoff for the Republican presidential race in the first-primary state of New Hampshire.
Organized in collaboration with the Koch brothers–funded Americans for Prosperity Foundation, Citizens United’s “Freedom Summit” attracted a list of peakers that included leading contenders (and wannabes) for the GOP nod. Indeed, Greg Moore, the director of AFP-New Hampshire, described the summit as the first “cattle call” of 2016.
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul made his pitch to the Koch crowd.
So did Texas Senator Ted Cruz.
And former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee.
And perennial (if never quite announced) contender Donald Trump.
The Freedom Summit was not entertaining objections to the latest Supreme Court decision to steer more big money into politics—in the case of McCutcheon v. FEC—or to the political machinations of bottom-line corporations and self-serving “mega-donors.”
But across town, on the same day, the objection was raised.
The New Hampshire Institute of Politics on the campus of Saint Anselm College was packed Saturday for a town-hall meeting with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who roused the crowd with a condemnation of the money power that is corrupting American elections and governance.
“In the United States of America, billionaires should not be able to buy elections,” declared Sanders, to thunderous applause.
“If we do not get our act together, we are moving towards an oligarchic society,” he continued, arguing that, “We have got to fight to defend American democracy.”
Like some of the Republicans who will be in New Hampshire this weekend, Sanders has talked about running for president. And his visit to the first-primary state has stirred speculation about a possible bid.
The independent senator says he is months away from any kind of decision. What he’s doing now is inviting progressives to join in a conversation about how to take on the money power. It’s a conversation he’ll carry forward May 9 and May 10 in Northampton, Massachusetts, with a series of events, including an appearance with the activist group Progressive Democrats of America.
What Sanders has already made his decision about the absolute absurdity of the High Court’s approach to cases like Citizens United and McCutcheon.
“What world are the five conservative Supreme Court justices living in?” Sanders said after the McCutcheon ruling.“To equate the ability of billionaires to buy elections with ‘freedom of speech’ is totally absurd. The Supreme Court is paving the way toward an oligarchic form of society in which a handful of billionaires like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson will control our political process.”
Sanders has also decided that a constitutional amendment is needed to push back against Supreme Court decisions that threaten to make the dollar more consequential than the vote in American elections.
The “Democracy is for the People” amendment, sponsored by Sanders and Congressman Ted Deutch, D-Florida, is one of several proposed by members of Congress in response to the national outcry over the Citizens United decision—an outcry that, so far, has seen sixteen states and close to 600 communities demand that the Constitution be amended to address the crisis created, and now compounded, by the court.
It reads:
Section I. Whereas the right to vote in public elections belongs only to natural persons as citizens of the United States, so shall the ability to make contributions and expenditures to influence the outcomes of public elections belong only to natural persons in accordance with this Article.
Section II. Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to restrict the power of Congress and the States to protect the integrity and fairness of the electoral process, limit the corrupting influence of private wealth in public elections, and guarantee the dependence of elected officials on the people alone by taking actions which may include the establishment of systems of public financing for elections, the imposition of requirements to ensure the disclosure of contributions and expenditures made to influence the outcome of a public election by candidates, individuals, and associations of individuals, and the imposition of content neutral limitations on all such contributions and expenditures.
Section III. Nothing in this Article shall be construed to alter the freedom of the press.
Section IV. Congress and the States shall have the power to enforce this Article through appropriate legislation.
Sanders is blunt with regard to the crisis.
“The disastrous 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United threw out campaign funding laws that limited what wealthy individuals and corporations could spend on elections,” he has argued. “Since that ruling, campaign spending by Adelson, the Koch brothers and a handful of other billionaire families has fundamentally undermined American democracy. If present trends continue, elections will not be decided by one-person, one-vote, but by a small number of very wealthy families who spend huge amounts of money supporting right-wing candidates who protect their interests.”
And Sanders is blunt about the necessary response.
“Clearly, if we are to retain the fundamentals of American democracy, we need to overturn the Supreme Court decision,” explains the senator, who argues that the time has come for “overturning Citizens United.”
It is part of what Sanders sees as a :political revolution” that has as its point the establishment of electoral landscape where the vote matters more than the dollar.
In New Hampshire Saturday, Sanders summed the concept up with a declaration that earned a standing ovation:
“I vote for democracy!”
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very baby step toward guaranteeing American working people a minimum of economic security with new social insurance programs has been greeted with howls of horror and outrage — and predictions that the end of the Republic is near. Every new addition to the safety net has been met with a concerted campaign by conservatives and the business establishment to undermine it. Eighty years after it was signed into law, the Social Security Act, arguably Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s signature piece of legislation, still is under attack from the right.
