Inside Planned Parenthood's $30 Million Ground War to Stop Trump-Pence

By Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone

06 October 16

 

How an army of thousands could tip the balance in as many as half-a-dozen swing states

lanned Parenthood is mounting one of the largest door-to-door field campaigns of the 2016 election, working to persuade millions of voters to defeat the extremist, anti-abortion ticket of Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Its army of hundreds of paid staff and thousands of volunteers could tip the balance in as many as half-a-dozen swing states, where the Trump campaign barely counts field offices, much less a sophisticated ground game.

Aiming to reach three million voters across six states, the $30 million campaign has twice the budget of Planned Parenthood's largest previous field effort, in 2012. "Access to safe and legal abortion and access to reproductive health care is on the ballot this year like never before," Deirdre Schifeling, executive director of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, tells Rolling Stone.

"Donald Trump wants to overturn Roe, and appoint Supreme Court justices who will do that. He has said that he would like to punish women who have abortions. And he's picked, as vice presidential candidate, Mike Pence – a man who has made it his life's mission to do exactly those things," she says. "We are taking that very seriously."

The Republican ticket's extreme anti-abortion ideology was showcased at the vice presidential debate Tuesday evening. Pence, the governor of Indiana, said that his approach to public policy on abortion is faith-based and "proceeds out of that ancient principle that God says, Before you were formed in the womb, I knew you."

On the campaign trail, Pence has (accurately) framed the presidential election as a fight that could determine control of the Supreme Court for the next 40 years. He promises voters that the landmark 1973 decision guaranteeing women the right to choose will be overturned under a Trump presidency, insisting, "We'll see Roe v. Wade consigned to the ash heap of history where it belongs."

Pence himself has a track record as one of the most anti-choice politicians in America. As governor, Pence signed perhaps the most draconian abortion law in the country – later blocked by a federal judge – which outlawed abortions for even devastating genetic defects and mandated that miscarried fetuses be buried or cremated by a funeral home. Pence, who helped launch the Republican war on Planned Parenthood during his career in the House, has also succeeded in shutting down several Planned Parenthood clinics in rural Indiana, precipitating an HIV epidemic.

At Tuesday's debate, Pence – in a performance marked by bald lies – distorted Trump's disturbing statements on abortion. "Donald Trump and I would never support legislation that punished women who made the heartbreaking choice to end a pregnancy," he claimed. Clinton running mate Tim Kaine turned on him, asking, "Then why did Donald Trump say that?" Pence responded that Trump had threatened women with criminal sanction for abortion because "he's not a polished politician."

Kaine pressed further: "Why don't you trust women? Why doesn't Donald Trump trust women to make this choice for themselves?" Pence did not answer directly, saying only that society is judged by its treatment of the "unborn" and adding, "I couldn't be more proud to be standing with a pro-life candidate in Donald Trump."

The Planned Parenthood ground war is jointly run by the group's political arms, which don't receive taxpayer money: Planned Parenthood Action Fund is a "social welfare" organization, structured as a 501(c)(4) under the tax code – like the NRA, for example – and does not disclose its donors. Planned Parenthood Votes is a super PAC that does reveal its funders, including (in a twist sure to make social conservatives howl) billionaire George Soros and his extended family, who have contributed at least $3.5 million.

The Planned Parenthood campaign is active now in six swing states – Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Planned Parenthood tells Rolling Stone that the ground campaign is ramping up to 800 paid staff and 3,500 volunteers, focused on door-to-door outreach to targeted swing voters. These are prominently middle-aged suburban women, but also include many men for whom a candidate's opposition to basic reproductive health care access is a dealbreaker.

The size of the Planned Parenthood door-to-door army is extraordinary. Though not an apples-to-apples comparison – because hundreds of Clinton-supporting field staff are paid by the Democratic Party – consider that the Clinton campaign itself counted fewer than 800 people on payroll in its September FEC filing. "We are running the largest persuasion canvas in the country on the independent side, to give you a sense of scale," says Schifeling.

The wall-to-wall spectacle of the 2016 campaign has left many swing voters in the dark on crucial policy differences between the candidates. "They don't actually know that Donald Trump has pledged to make abortion illegal," Schifeling says. "They don't know that Hillary Clinton faced down all of Congress as a senator to make sure emergency contraception was available to victims of sexual assault."

Despite high-profile Republican efforts to demonize Planned Parenthood, the group remains an effective messenger – and remarkably popular among actual voters. A recent PPP poll of swing state voters finds that between 59 and 66 percent view the group positively. Schifeling says that resonance makes it easier, in many cases, for Planned Parenthood representatives to strike up a conversation with swingable voters than it would be for the Clinton campaign to do so directly. (Despite Clinton's lead in many swing state polls, her personal favorability rating remains mired in the low 40s.)

The persuasion campaign is already producing results. "At the doors, what we're finding is that 30 percent of the voters are undecided before we have a conversation with them," Schifeling says. "And when we talk to them, they move."

The Planned Parenthood ground war is designed to dovetail with the Democratic campaign to take back the Senate, which will hinge on tight races in many of the same swing states. "These elections are so close. These Senate races are within one point. The presidential campaign in many of these states is within the margin of error," Schifeling says. "We think these three million voters are going to make the difference. In a lot of these states, they are going to be the margin of victory."

Apple, Brussels, and Ireland's Bruised Sovereignty

By Yanis Varoufakis, Project Syndicate

06 October 16

 

espite their unequivocal Europeanism, the Irish have been serially mistreated by the European Union.

When Irish voters rejected the Treaty of Lisbon in 2008, the EU forced them to vote again until they delivered the "right" outcome. A year later, when private Irish banks imploded, threatening their (mainly) German private creditors with severe losses, Jean-Claude Trichet, the European Central Bank's then-president, immediately "informed" the Irish government that the ECB would shut down ATMs across the Emerald Isle unless Ireland's unsuspecting taxpayers made the German banks whole.

Ireland acquiesced, its public debt ballooned, emigration returned, and the country remains bruised and despondent. With the EU still refusing meaningful reduction of a debt burden unfairly borne by the younger generation, the Irish remain convinced, correctly, that the EU violated their sovereignty on behalf of foreign bankers.

Ireland's greatest weapon against the ensuing debt deflation was its ability to attract US-based tech giants, by offering them a combination of EU law, a well-trained English-speaking workforce, and a 12.5% corporate-tax rate. Though the shell-like subsidiaries of global tech conglomerates have little positive impact on most households' income, Ireland's establishment is proud of its links with the likes of Apple. Now, the European Commission is jeopardizing the government's special relationship with Apple by demanding that it claw back €13 billion ($14.6 billion) in taxes from the company.

Is the Commission's latest intervention another example of EU bullying, in violation of Ireland's sovereignty? Comparing Trichet's 2009 intervention and the current standoff over Apple holds important lessons beyond Ireland and, indeed, Europe.

In the eurozone's early years, German financial institutions channeled a torrent of capital into Ireland's commercial banks, which then lent it to real-estate developers. The ensuing property bubble resulted in white elephants in Dublin's financial district, row upon row of new blocks of flats in the middle of nowhere, and a mountain of mortgage debt. When the bubble burst after 2008, land prices collapsed, debts went bad, and Ireland's private banks failed.

The ECB, in an affront comparable to British behavior during the 1845-52 Potato Famine, instructed the government to invoke "financial stability" to force Ireland's weakest citizens to repay every euro the defunct private banks owed to German creditors. Financial stability was obviously a smokescreen: taxpayers were forced to repay even the debts of a bank that had already been closed (and thus systemically irrelevant).

The roots of the Apple deal are older than the ECB. In 1980, a young Steve Jobs visited an Ireland eager to escape underdevelopment. Apple eventually created 6,000 jobs in the country, in exchange for a sweetheart tax deal allowing it to shield its European revenues from taxation by recording them there. To this day, the proceeds of every iPhone sold in Paris or in Stockholm (net of its Chinese assemblers' production costs) go to Apple's Irish subsidiary Apple Sales International. As a result of the original Apple-Ireland deal, ASI pays a miniscule tax on these earnings, effectively exempt from the ultra-low 12.5% corporate-tax rate.

This arrangement also required the usually vigilant US Internal Revenue Service to play along. ASI's profits stem from Apple's intellectual property (IP) rights, which are based on research and development conducted exclusively in the US (most of it underpinned by federal government funding). These profits should, therefore, be taxed in the US.

Curiously, the IRS is choosing not to enforce Apple's obligation to pay tax on its profits from US-sourced IP returns. Instead, Apple charges ASI a symbolic fee for allowing it to profit from Apple's IP rights, for which it pays a tiny tax to the IRS. Meanwhile, ASI is allowed to keep, in Ireland, profits representing close to two-thirds of the revenue from the sale of every Apple product sold outside the US. As a result, Apple has amassed untaxed cash reserves of up to $230 billion.

Unlike in 2009, the Irish government is protesting the EU authorities' recent Apple ruling, pointing out that tax policy is in the purview of national governments, not the Union. And, in a recent joint letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the EU's other 27 national governments, 185 American CEOs alleged that the EU had over-reached yet again, resulting in a "self-inflicted wound" for Ireland's and Europe's economy.

But they are wrong: Ireland's sovereignty is not an issue here. Apple would not have based itself in Ireland were it not for the EU's single market, a commons that requires common rules. One of these rules is that governments cannot offer aid to some companies that is not available to others.

Suppose, for example, that the Greek government, seeking to attract 6,000 jobs to its ravaged economy, offered Apple a subsidy of €110,000 per job per year, or €660 million. Over two decades, the total subsidy would come to slightly more than €13 billion. Were the EU to permit Greece to offer Apple such a deal, the other EU member states, including Ireland, would revolt.

Suppose further that the Greek government proposed waiving corporate tax for 20 years on all revenue Apple earned in the rest of the EU but booked in Athens – say, €13 billion. The European Commission would then have a duty of care to the European commons to demand that Greece immediately recoup that €13 billion – exactly as it is telling Ireland to do today.

Every time the EU acts as a colonial usurper, as it did in 2009, it undermines the legitimacy of its good and proper actions and strengthens the xenophobic, anti-European "Nationalist International." Europe's only beneficiaries, much to the delight of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, are isolationist Brexiteers, the far-right Alternative for Germany, France's National Front, and illiberal governments in Poland, Hungary, Croatia, and elsewhere.

The lesson to be learned from comparing Trichet's 2009 intervention with the European Commission's current stance on Apple is simple: Europeans' real enemy is free riding by the few on the backs of the many. Without common institutions, Europeans cannot be defended from the exploitation and anti-social practices that big business and its political agents portray as economic common sense.

Trichet compromised Ireland's sovereignty to facilitate German bankers' free ride on the shoulders of Ireland's taxpayers. As restitution, the ECB should take on its books part of Ireland's public debt. But the EU must not allow Ireland to abuse the European commons by offering Apple a deal that no other member state could. The right response to past injustices is to recover sovereignty in a Europe where the powerful – whether German bankers or American smartphone makers – are prevented from preying on the weak.