Ferguson, Bill Cosby, and the fantastic lie of your utter powerlessness
"No wonder Americans feel powerless. No surprise we're sick of politics, and many of us aren't even voting.
But if we give up on politics, we're done for. Powerlessness is a self-fulfilling prophesy.
The only way back toward a democracy and economy that work for the majority is for most of us to get politically active once again, becoming organized and mobilized.
The system is designed to perpetuate sexism and rape culture throughout all kinds of American institutions, in fact, from Hollywood to the church, pro sports to the video game industry, the U.S. military to college campuses – particularly those frat-heavy, alcohol-stupid party hubs like UVA .. http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/a-rape-on-campus-20141119 .. and SDSU .. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/11/sdsu-suspends-all-frat-activities-after-members-wave-dildos-throw-eggs-at-rape-protesters/ .. where everyday sexual abuse isn’t the slightest bit new, and where young girls are taught the age-old axiom that wearing skimpy clothes and drinking too much is the equivalent of asking for it, whereas poorly raised, entitled frat boys are taught the exact flipside: that douchebag predation and drunken gang rapes will rarely get you punished.
But wait, there’s more! Recent news reminds us that the system is also designed to shrug off, say, numbly abusive parents who strike their children .. http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2014/09/16/an-all-american-ass-whoopin/ .. to the point of bloodshed and fear, the child eventually repeating the cycle of violence later in life, because, well, this is just how it works.
Nor is the system bothered by, say, 250-pound men knocking their uppity fiancés unconscious in an elevator .. http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2014/09/24/what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-the-nfl/ .. – unless, of course, he’s caught on video, in which case the system quickly steps back and waits for the firestorm of indignation to pass, and then continues on as if nothing much has happened.
The system! It’s not much interested in making us better, healthier, smarter, kinder. That’s far too disruptive. It’s fine with casually endorsing obesity, addiction, trolling, Fox News ignorance, credit card debt, resource abuse, gun fetishism, too much sugar and meat and junk food and alcohol, so long as it doesn’t threaten the nervous males in charge and politicians can keep fellating their corporate overlords. What, too harsh? Hardly.
Did you forget the violence? Hell, no. The system adores it all: any image or scene of torture, bloodshed, cruelty, mutilation, firearm obsession (thanks NRA!), pseudo-cowboy/superhero posturing, hacking up zombies with an ax and calling it fun for the whole family. You cannot show a female nipple on Facebook. You can show a sociopathic serial murderer chopping up women’s bodies with a chainsaw, on prime-time TV, as the hunky hero-cop tenderly strokes his large firearm, trembling for a showdown.
But never mind all that. Because none of the above examples comes close to matching the system’s greatest success, its most glorious and glaring achievement to date. Can you guess?
It’s learned helplessness .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness . It’s convincing millions that the system is just too big, too powerful, too entrenched in its heartless ways and you are far too weak and meaningless, and therefore there is nothing, really, you can do to change it.
Learned helplessness is, as I believe Buddha, Lincoln, Madame Curie, the Dalai Lama and the founding fathers all once put it, “utter bulls–t.” The system isn’t nearly as powerful as it wants you to believe. It is, in fact, far more feeble, fallible, terrified (just ask the GOP). It’s also changing by the minute. It can change again in a single act, law, cultural tipping point. Happens all the time. For better, for worse. It’s happening right now.
This is why the Ferguson protests, or Cosby’s belated takedown, the #YesAllWomen phenom, the onrush of legal gay marriage or even Obama’s China environmental agreement, health care battle or immigration plan, are all so vital. They snap us back to attention. They nudge the disruptive energy awake. And they remind us of the most important takeaway of all:
Want to help keep the system as it is? Believe all is lost. Want to ensure the system’s eventual, perpetual, ongoing annihilation? Believe the exact opposite.
Soros: Big money can’t buy elections – influence is something else
"The Disease of American Democracy"
.. beneath Citizens United skin ..
By Jonathan Soros February 10, 2015
A demonstrator holds a sign as others gather in Foley Square during a national day of action “Occupy the Courts” in New York, January 20, 2012. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton
Five years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, public attention remains focused on the vast sums of money washing around the U.S. political system.
I’ve been an active political donor for almost two decades. In recent years, I’ve directed much of my support to a campaign that aims, ironically, to reduce .. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/03/jonathan-soros-the-pac-to-end-all-pacs-105123.html#.VNjFJ3bF9P4 .. the influence of money in politics. It’s given me an understanding of what is really happening with all that money and what role Citizens United had in unleashing it.
If we’re going to move beyond disgust and start talking seriously about solutions, here are five important lessons to keep in mind:
Money doesn’t buy elections
One common trope in attacking Citizens United is that big-money interests are now buying U.S. elections. It’s a simple and intuitive concept that plays off trigger words like “billionaire” and “corporation.”
Alas, it’s not true.
U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, May 20, 2009. REUTERS/Molly Riley
Yes, money is an absolute necessity for running a campaign, and it’s hard to win without a sufficient supply of it. Candidates like David Brat, a virtual unknown who spent less than $200,000 to defeat the wellfunded House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in 2014, are anomalies. But once you have enough money to communicate with voters and be competitive, more is not all that valuable.
Even doubling campaign spending, according to a study .. http://freakonomics.com/2012/01/12/does-money-really-buy-elections-a-new-marketplace-podcast/ .. cited by the conventional-wisdom debunkers at Freakonomics, translates into only a 1 percent change in voting results. In close elections, other factors such as candidate quality, campaign tactics or even the weather on Election Day are just as likely to be determinative.
It’s easy to be misled by statistics showing that the candidate who spends more wins in the vast majority of elections. But when approximately 90 percent of congressional elections are not competitive, the causality tends to run the other direction. It’s nearly impossible for a noncompetitive candidate to raise as much money as a sure winner.
This relationship, or more precisely nonrelationship, between outspending and winning has long been true. In the Super PAC era, competitive elections are well past the saturation point at which incremental dollars can make a meaningful difference .. http://www.acrreform.org/research/does-money-buy-elections/ .
In 2012, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his supporters outspent team Obama in the aggregate — $1.2 billion versus $1.1 billion. Yet Obama could probably have spent several hundred million dollars less and still won.
This false paradigm inevitably leads to stories about how big money didn’t, in fact, buy elections. In 2012, Sheldon Adelson, the Republican casino magnate, was the biggest loser. In 2014, it was pin the tail on Democrat Tom Steyer. That, in turn, leads the likes of New York Times columnist David Brooks to write that all this money isn’t such a big deal after all .. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/10/opinion/david-brooks-money-matters-less.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0 .. and ignore a second basic reality of campaign money.
Money always wins
While money doesn’t buy elections, it does buy politicians .. http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/02/25/when-excessive-wealth-meets-politics/ , whether they intend to be bought or not. Anyone who has tried to sell a product, or otherwise asked someone for something, understands the subtle pull these interactions have. If politicians were immune to that pull, former Representative Barney Frank noted .. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/461/transcript , they “would be the only people in the history of the world who, on a regular basis, took money from perfect strangers and made sure it had no effect on them.”
The quest for campaign cash suffuses political life. Candidates in competitive elections can spend more than 60 percent of their time raising money.
Credit: MATT MAHURIN
Chairpersons of congressional committees pay tithing to party committees based on how valuable the seat is for fundraising. And leadership and fundraising are deeply intertwined. It’s no accident that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) are the largest donors.
Though Adelson didn’t get the results he sought in 2012, he was still a winner. Just as Steyer was in 2014. Each got virtually unfettered access to party leadership, and their concerns received special consideration.
In noncompetitive elections, the “winners” are far less public and the impact more insidious. These candidates get most of their funding from PACs, lobbyists and other institutional purveyors of influence. When the pull of salesmanship is institutionalized at that scale, any subtlety is lost.
The real losers in all this are ordinary voters — the 99.6 percent who don’t make reportable contributions to candidates. They understand that their government is not working for them and want more from their democracy than an argument among rich people.
Las Vegas Sands Corp Chairman and Chief Executive Sheldon Adelson at a news conference in Tokyo, February 24, 2014. REUTERS/Yuya Shino
In 2012, Adelson spent an estimated $153 million .. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/03/sheldon-adelson-2012-election_n_2223589.html .. trying to unseat Obama — almost $100 million more than disclosed to the Federal Election Commission. How do we know? Two political operatives who worked on the effort leaked information to a reporter nearly a month after the election.
Had Romney won, we may never have learned how much Adelson spent. But you can be assured that a Romney administration and every consultant running a Republican campaign would have known.
Citizens United changed the world, but not the way you think
Almost anything contributors can do with money in elections after Citizens United was possible before the ruling.
Citizens United and the decisions that followed it have made it easier to spend money; transaction costs have dropped and some legal uncertainties have been removed. But the decision wasn’t the sea change it is made out to be.
In 2004, for example, a group called America Coming Together (with which I was affiliated) spent more than $100 million in support of then-Senator John Kerry’s bid for president. That same year Bob Perry and a group of Republican donors spent tens of millions on the Swift Boat Veterans ad .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phqOuEhg9yE .. campaign to torpedo him.
Even for corporate and union spending, the issue specifically addressed in Citizens United, the legal effect was not that dramatic. The week before the ruling, in fact, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, largely funded by corporate interests, spent more than $1 million to support Scott Brown in a special U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts.
The real dramatic impact came from the Supreme Court’s blessing of this type of engagement. Since the ruling, spending millions on elections has increasingly come to be seen as an acceptable form of political activity, at least among those wealthy enough to do so.
In 2012, it was Adelson and Jeff Katzenberg, chief executive of DreamWorks, who joined the Kochs and my father George Soros as boldface names in political spending .. https://www.opensecrets.org/overview/topindivs.php . In addition to Steyer in 2014, there were former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Joe Ricketts and Paul Singer, among others. By 2016, a million-dollar political contribution may be no more notable than a second home.
It was all possible before Citizens United. It just wasn’t done.
You can’t get money out
There is no idyllic pre-Citizens United era to return to. Many advocates who understand this seek to overturn the court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, which protected political spending under the First Amendment. They would do so, however, at our collective peril.
The First Amendment protects every citizen’s right to criticize the government and U.S. officials, especially during political campaigns. To overturn Buckley would be to allow Congress the right to regulate political spending.
A demonstrator during a protest at the Capitol, on the anniversary of the Citizens United decision, in Washington, January 20, 2012. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
Even if one disregards the possibility of the truly nefarious — Congress passing a law to criminalize unwelcome criticism - the possibility of politicians crossing party lines to protect their collective incumbency has too much precedent to ignore. Most gerrymandering does just that.
Regulating political spending always requires drawing a line between what counts as political and what does not. Wherever lines are drawn, clever lawyers and political operatives will find ways to be effective working on the “right” side of them. To eliminate private spending in elections would require setting limits that no American should be comfortable with. Do away with contributions and cap candidate spending, for example, and outside groups would form. Restrict what outside groups can say and do, and you might also talk about monitoring the editorial power of the press.
Solutions
Fortunately, confronting these realities leads to a much clearer path than railing against Citizens United. The solutions are simple, proven and entirely consistent with even the current Supreme Court’s reading of the First Amendment.
Private money always wins because there is no other game in town. To change that requires creating a viable alternative path to victory that does not leave candidates beholden to their campaign funders. Even better would be to make them beholden to their constituents.
One way forward is the Government by the People Act .. http://www.demos.org/publication/government-people-act , recently reintroduced in the House of Representatives with more than 140 cosponsors. It would provide candidates with funds that match small contributions from constituents.
A version of this worked for 40 years in presidential elections. It supported the winning candidacies of three Republicans (Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush) and two Democrats (Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton).
It’s still effective in states and municipalities that have invested in similar systems. It works as long as there is enough funding so that one candidate doesn’t have so much more money that it creates a decisive advantage.
When the presidential campaign-funding system failed to meet that test in 2008, Obama opted out. Unless it is updated to provide enough funds to run a modern campaign, the system, which is still on the books, will never be used again.
To make citizen-funding work, rules must be implemented and enforced effectively enough to keep up with the lawyers and political operatives who will inevitably seek to skirt them. At the federal level, that means redesigning the Federal Election Commission.
The commission is now composed of three Democrats and three Republicans, with the consent of four members required to take any action. Experts offer a laundry list of reforms, but just changing it to a seven-member panel with no more than two of them affiliated with a political party, would dramatically alter its function.
The selective secrecy in election spending also must end. This could be easily accomplished under existing statutory authority by either the Federal Election Commission or the Internal Revenue Service. They could ensure that the sources of all political funds were disclosed to the public — not just to the politicians who benefit. Obviously, congressional legislation could help.
The result of these changes would be a political environment in which the role of private money is resolved by creating a meaningful alternative to big contributors and big-spending Super PACs.
Because the real problem with money in politics is not that there is too much of it — it’s that there is only one source. This gives that incredibly small fraction of us who provide the vast majority of funding enormous influence and access.
Eliminate that monopoly, and you have dramatically changed U.S. politics in ways that overturning Citizens United never would.
How Our Campaign Finance System Compares to Other Countries
Paul Waldman April 4, 2014
We may well be heading toward the removal of all contribution limits. How do other advanced democracies regulate their campaign contributions and spending?
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With the Supreme Court's decision in the McCutcheon case, some people think we're heading for the complete removal of contribution limits from campaigns. Jeffrey Toobin, for instance, argues .. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2014/04/the-john-roberts-project-beyond-mccutcheon.html .. that the way Justice Roberts defines corruption—basically, nothing short of outright bribery qualifies—means that he could well be teeing things up to eliminate contribution limits entirely in some future case. Which got me thinking: if we really are headed for that eventual outcome, how would that place us compared to other countries? For instance, if you're a Monsieur Koch in France, can you write a candidate a million-euro check?
Fortunately, the good folks at the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance .. http://www.idea.int/index.cfm .. (International IDEA), an inter-governmental agency, have gathered this kind of information together .. http://www.idea.int/political-finance/ . Of course, a large database of laws from all over the world is going to miss many of the subtleties and loopholes that characterize each individual country's system. But if you were thinking that other similarly advanced democracies must all have tighter laws than ours, you wouldn't be exactly right.
While International IDEA's database contains information on 43 variables for 172 countries, for the moment I decided to focus on two questions: Are there limits on contributions to parliamentary candidates, and are there limits on spending? I also decided to focus on the 34 member nations of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, since the OECD is how we often define "countries like us." And I eliminated Mexico and Portugal, where all contributions go through parties and individual candidates don't take contributions. So, what does the picture look like?
The no-limits nations: Australia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey.
In these places, there are no limits on contributions, and no limits on what candidates can spend. But that doesn't mean that these countries' wealthy are writing million-euro checks to parliamentary candidates. It's important to keep in mind that the role money is able to play in politics is determined by multiple factors, many of which serve to hold down both contributions and spending, even when the law doesn't impose limits. For instance, most of the countries in the OECD have traditions of stricter party discipline than we do,
--- Check insert: Overall, party discipline in in the industrialized democracies is quite robust, even in relatively non-cohesive parties. Looking at the last ten years, discipline in voting by party in the U.S. has rarely fallen below 85 percent- only when the Democrats were at their weakest position in 2003-2004. In the last five years of the European Parliament, the trend has been for more variability in voting, but a still high overall average of between 83 and 90 percent. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/party-discipline-in-us-senate-and/ ---
and that makes members of the legislature somewhat interchangeable, which in turn can reduce the utility of buying yourself a few of them. Even more importantly, TV advertising is the single largest expense for most American congressional candidates, while in many other countries candidates are either forbidden from advertising on television or given free TV time. In most places there's substantial public funding of campaigns, and candidates are often forbidden from campaigning until a relatively short period before election day. Put all that together, and you have elections where, even if it would technically be legal to rain huge amounts of money down on candidates, nobody considers it worth their while (for instance, here's a nice description .. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/09/why-germany-s-politics-are-much-saner-cheaper-and-nicer-than-ours/280081/ .. of the relative quiet of a German campaign). So the idea of someone spending two or three million dollars to get a seat in the national legislature, the way American House candidates routinely do, would seem absurd.
The all-limit nations: Belgium, Canada, Chile, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Poland, Slovenia.
In these countries, there are limits on both contributions and on spending. The contribution limits tend to be in the same rough ballpark as ours (the current limit for U.S. federal campaigns is $2,600 in the primary and $2,600 in the general). So in Canada, you can give $1,100 to a parliamentary candidate; in Greece it's $3,000 euros, in Iceland it's a little under $2,500 euros, and so on. There are a couple of outliers—in Japan, you can contribute 1.5 million yen, or $14,439 in today's exchange rate, to each candidate per year. Another is Israel, where a complicated formula will allow you to contribute a couple of hundred thousand dollars to some candidates.
But spending limits, which are quite low in most places (often in the five figures), make all the difference. Which brings us to:
The nations with limits on spending but not on donations: Austria, Hungary, Italy, New Zealand, Slovakia, the United Kingdom.
It does seem a little odd that you would have limits on what a parliamentary candidate can spend, but no limits on what someone can donate to her. But if you have the former, you don't really need the latter. If a candidate is only allowed to spend $20,000, she doesn't really have to worry about seeking out donations (a raffle or two down at the pub might do the trick), and there's no point in writing her a big check to try to win her favor. And finally…
The nations with contribution limits but no spending limits: Finland, the United States.
Not knowing much about Finnish elections, I'm not going to speak to what goes on there (though if I had to guess I'd say they're polite, thoughtful affairs). But for American candidates, it's the worst of both worlds. The lack of spending limits means they're always at risk of being outspent, which means they can never stop raising money. But the lack of contribution limits means they have to get that money in $2,600 increments, meaning they have to keep asking and asking and asking.
If we removed the contribution limits, it would certainly make candidates' lives easier; if you can convince one billionaire to write you a check for $2.6 million, that's the equivalent of persuading a thousand ordinarily reach people to give you $2,600, and that would free you up to spend a lot more time calling your opponent a low-down cur who wants to bring the republic to ruin. But would it make the system more corrupt? You bet it would.
As you look over the different regulations various countries have come up with, it does seem that the thing that makes all the difference in how campaigns are conducted is the spending limits, which are often combined with time limits on electioneering. Everyone has to weigh two competing considerations. The first is the desire for elections that retain a reasonable amount of integrity, and are conducted in a manner that is, for lack of a better term, civilized. And the second is the principle of free speech, that a candidate for office should be able to say what he wants, as often as he wants, and spend as much as he wants doing it, even at the risk of corruption. In most other countries, they've decided that the first consideration is more important. In the U.S., we've decided that the second consideration is the only one that matters.
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