I Didn’t Watch

I didn’t watch the presidential debate last night. There is only so much my psyche can take. I have read a few of the after action reports, and it sounds as if I didn’t miss much.

Apparently Mitt Romney “won” on style, which is mostly what these things are about. He wore out his teeth from behind by lying through them continuously. Obama was professorial and languid. Yawn.

One commentator pointed out that the debates are aimed at the undecided, which means the low-information, low motivation voters who haven’t been paying attention in class, ever. I guess this means the people who are more concerned with the latest celebrity breakup than the future of the nation. It sounds as if the proceeding delivered for them. The outcome of the election may hinge on their casual judgment.

The contest of personalities between Romney and Obama interests me not at all. Their political differences are akin to the differences between a medieval surgeon who wants to bleed you before cutting your leg off and a 19^th century surgeon who knows better than to bleed you but wipes his saw on his pants by way of sanitary practice. Obama is a few centuries more advanced than Romney, but neither offering us a sure path to survival. Neither is operating on the basis of state of the art medicine or offering to save the leg.

This makes sense. Both men were chosen through the accumulation of large campaign donations from multi-millionaires. These wealthy donors, in turn, are remoras sucked on to the inhuman corporate sharks that run our society. These corporate sharks have all the foresight and compassion of…sharks. It should not shock us that the candidates have no policies that truly address the realities we face.

In a recent interview, writer and political activist Noam Chomsky was asked how progressives should view the present electoral contest.

Chomsky said “I think they should spend five or ten minutes on it. Seeing if there’s a point in taking part in the carefully orchestrated electoral extravaganza.  And my own judgment, for what it’s worth, is, yes, there’s a point to taking a part.”  The long and short: Vote against Romney/Ryan (for Obama) in a swing state. Vote third party in a non-swing state. Then get on with more important things.

What are those more important things? Primarily, fixing the machine. We don’t like the products, but most people are caught up with hating the present malfunctioning unit. They hope, against all rationality, that the same machine will suddenly produce a perfect model after an endless string of defectives. It’s a factory, not a slot machine. It’s not designed to produce what we need. Quite deliberately the opposite.

The first step in fixing the machine is doing what I am doing right now: Pointing directly at the machine and noting that it is what needs fixing. Education is the starting point. Most of America is caught up in its tribal hatreds.

A suggestion: The next time someone starts talking to you about how much they like candidate A or dislike candidate B, don’t get caught up in that discussion. Talk about the machine. The money filter. The Saving American Democracy Amendment. Anything other than personality driven horse race politics. The first step towards an answer is getting people to start asking the right questions.

If You Build It

The Anthony Weiner scandal is splattered all over the media like a double handful of swamp muck. We are also being treated to a rerun of the intimate details of John Edwards, his mistress, and the hush money. These scandals are just the latest in a series involving politicians and sex. Infidelity and hypocrisy seem to be the bipartisan standard. We really should be paying attention to the ongoing rental of our government by corporate interests, but I’ll bite the hook.

It seems that our elected representatives are no better than we are, and probably worse. We shouldn’t be surprised. Think about how these people get where they are. Remember the tag line from the movie Field of Dreams? “If you build it, they will come.” If you build a carnival side show, expect freaks to show up and staff it.

First, we have a system that requires candidates to extract large sums of money from wealthy donors. This requires a level of ass-kissing that encourages the natural con artist while it degrades and discourages the honest person. Then we run the candidates through an extended gauntlet of campaign events, rubber-chicken dinners, coffees, press conferences, intense media scrutiny, character assassination (both received and given), repetitive stump speeches, and more groveling for dollars. The candidate is alternately called a savior and a traitor. Candor and natural behavior are discouraged. A successful campaigner controls every detail of every public moment and never utters an unconsidered word. In politics, hypocrisy isn’t a flaw, it’s a technique. You’d have to be kind of nuts to put up with this. And they are. I look at Congress and all the presidents of my lifetime and I see arrogance, egotism, narcissism, and various shades of neuroticism.

I remember talking with a reporter I knew right after he emerged from the National Governor’s Conference in Burlington VT. I asked him what it was like inside the security perimeter. He said, “I’ll quote from Star Wars. ‘You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.’ The governors are polished shiny fake assholes, and their wives are polished and fake and their kids are polished and fake.” Sadly, that’s what sells on a 30-second television ad. It’s all image and money and sound bites. And it selects a certain type of people.

A big part of the problem is the money. Quite simply, it forces politicians to lie for their very survival. There is one story for the rich donor and another for the 1,000 ordinary voters.

Another big problem is the fractured and confused electorate bumping up against a two-party system. Two parties aren’t enough to cover all the factions, so each party sets up a fake “big tent” and then triangulates a path that panders to the power base, ignores the truly faithful, and waffles just enough to scoop up people who aren’t paying attention. It’s cynical and dishonest and its goal is the preservation of power.

Twenty-four hour profit driven news coverage doesn’t help. Politicians trade extremism for face time. They have to deliver those pointed sound bites whether they mean anything or not. Editors and reporters follow the political extremes, maudlin human interest stories, and, yes, sex scandals. Anthony Weiner’s tacky emails are the least important thing on the entire national political spectrum, but they are inescapable on the news.

(I have to say this: Weiner should answer the calls for his resignation by saying that he’ll resign over emails after David Vitter resigns over having actual sex with actual prostitutes.)

The general population is a big problem, too. The American public has been lied to long and vigorously, jollied, flattered, and pandered to, enough that a childish delusional state has set in. We’ve reached a state of personality politics where the electorate is forever looking for the perfect Daddy to kiss the booboo on our collective knee and make it all better. Of course, there is no perfect Daddy out there, and there is no magic kiss, so people are forever dissatisfied. Despite the perfect record of failure, most people keep looking instead of focusing on policy. (Borrrring!) Specifically, most people don’t pay attention to our policies on selecting politicians. They just waste time loving them or hating them.

We couldn’t design a better attractant for dysfunctional personalities if we tried. Anthony Weiner, David Vitter, and John Edwards (and the dozen others we know about) are just symptoms of the situation.

Letting it Hang Out

I have just witnessed a few things that have struck me as hubris. In this case, it’s the hubris of the moneyed class that enjoys a parasitic relationship with the corporate species.

Here’s an article (There Goes the Fig Leaf) by Carl Pope of the Sierra Club, noting that the VP of the American Petroleum Institute has announced a new initiative of direct campaign donations to candidates. The key line: "At the end of the day, our mission is trying to influence the policy debate." The fig leaf in question was the near-transparent fiction that campaign contributions were designed to influence voters, not the decisions of members of congress. It was supposed to be about promoting a particular candidate, not particular results. So much for that. The executives of API are now willing to advertise that they are engaged in deliberate, continual, strategic bribery.

The attack on unions in Wisconsin is another lost fig leaf. Governor Walker has been justifying his anti-union bill on the grounds that there is a 130 million dollar state budget deficit. This, directly after promoting and passing legislation giving corporations various tax breaks totaling 140 million dollars. Wisconsin municipalities also lose $700 million a year in special-interest property tax exemptions, money that has to be made up out of state funds. You do the math. Done?

Add to that the not-quite-secret surprise in the bill: A provision would allow the state to sell off its heating plants to private companies without competitive bidding or any of the usual oversight. The probable beneficiaries would be the Koch brothers, billionaire supporters of far-right causes and major donors to Governor Walker’s reelection campaign. Did Walker and his crew think that nobody would read through the bill? Or was it just that they didn’t care if somebody read that part?

Look back at my last post, which was a brief about ditching that 100 billion dollar spending cut in favor of actually enforcing tax laws on millionaires. Enforcing the law to get $100 billion, as opposed to cutting heating assistance and the like, is a no-brainer. The problem is that it would force those big campaign donors to obey the law.

The final straw is a petulant little act by House Republicans – the return of plastic tableware in the House cafeteria. When the Democrats were in control of the House they switched the disposable cups, plates, and other utensils to biodegradeable materials. Not a huge deal, but a nice gesture. The GOP, under Boehner, has changed the rules and gone back to Styrofoam and other plastics. Really? It is a miniature version of Reagan stripping a perfectly functional solar hot water system off the White House back in 1980 – a petty mix of spite and symbolism.

The key to success for the corporate conservatives is to distract the voting public from the structural changes they are making while selling them a bucketful of irrelevant emotional narrative. They also get a lot of mileage out of personal attacks. It works because humans are naturally focused on personalities, tribal membership, and emotional stories.

Now imagine a magician so contemptuous of his audience and so convinced of his own powers that he stops trying to distract them from his semi-hidden moves. Imagine that he goes so far as to narrate the truth of his tricks: “Now I’ll slide the coin down my sleeve, and presto, it seems as if it appeared out of nowhere. Now you applaud.” That is roughly where we are right now. The corporate conservatives are walking around with the fronts of their trousers open, saying “What are ya gonna do about it?”

My hope is that, as in ancient Greek drama, hubris is followed by nemesis. I have some small amount of hope, because deception is the conservative movement’s only real armor. Back in the time of the old Soviet Union, Soviet citizens all knew that the official line was a lie, but they kept quiet to avoid a train ride to Siberia. Our present system is much more sophisticated. We are allowed to debate vigorously in public – within corporate-defined boundaries, or else on subjects that don’t concern the economic powers. We have all the window dressing and symbolism appropriate to a functional democracy. However, if the general public gets corporate naughty bits waved in their faces too often they might actually notice that they’ve been distracted. Witness the uprising in Wisconsin. And hope that it spreads. And help it spread. 

A Theory of Injustice

My title inverts the title of the magnum opus of the philosopher John Rawls. His book, A Theory of Justice, laid out a method by which we might find rules to govern a nation fairly.

The central technique Rawls proposes is to make policy decisions as a P.O.P., or Person in the Original Position. That is, from behind a veil of ignorance, as if one were waiting to be born. If you had no idea who you were going to be, in terms of gender, ethnicity, wealth, health, intellectual capacity, or social group, what rules would you make? This is a difficult assignment, given both our knowledge of our positions and our lack of knowledge of our prejudices, but it is something to strive for.

I’d like to propose a new technique to estimate the chances of a candidate or a piece of legislation. If you are wondering whether a candidate or a bill has a chance of succeeding, look at it as a P.I.M.P. That is, a Person In a Millionaire’s Position. Imagine that you have a net worth of at least a million dollars and an annual income to match. Does the bill or candidate in question appeal to you? Will the taxes on your millions be lower? Will the employees of your business interests be more cowed and less well paid? Will the regulations that presently classify your preferred business practices as crimes be repealed? Well then, said candidate or bill has a good chance. It’s a sucker bet.

I’ve written about it before, but the two most important facts in American politics bear repeating. Whoever spends the most money in a congressional primary wins, nine times out of ten. Over three-quarters of this money comes in large chunks, $500 and up, from millionaires, multi-millionaires, and billionaires.

These happy few, perhaps one out of a thousand of us, determine by donation who gets to be the candidates in the general election. The difference between Iran and the U.S. is this: In Iran a small group of mullahs decides who gets to run for political office. In the U.S. a small group of millionaires performs that task. They are not going to pick people who oppose them. These like-minded legislators are not generally going to write or pass bills that dismay them.

Hence the effectiveness of the P.I.M.P. method of political analysis.

It’s all about campaign money, sure, but behind that is a warped perspective on justice and fairness. In the democracy-ending 1976 Buckley vs. Valeo decision, the Supreme Court proposed that because donating money to a campaign allowed it to better spread its message, donating money was therefore equivalent to political speech. The Court determined that the 1^st Amendment protected political fundraising from any significant restrictions. Present donation limits for individuals are as follows:

$2,400 per election (primary or general) per candidate

$30,400 per national political party annually

$10,000 per local or state political party annually

$5,000 to each political action committee (PAC)

All of this up to an aggregate limit of $115,500 per two-year election cycle.

An important point that Rawls makes about liberty and equality is that a particular liberty has to be judged in terms of its real worth to various individuals. To Bill Gates, that $115,500 limit is worth $115,500. To 99.9% of Americans it is worth a small percentage of that. It brings to mind the statement of the writer and Nobel laureate Anatole France: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” Here, it allows both the bank CEO and the minimum wage retail clerk to donate the price of a Lamborghini. That isn’t true political equality.

I look at it as the moral equivalent of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires handicapped accessibility to public accommodations such as polling places. A cruel person might look at a paraplegic in front of city hall and say, “Hey, if that guy really wanted to vote he’d drop out of that wheelchair and drag himself up the stairs with his arms.” Likewise, if the other 99.9% of us wanted something like political financial parity we could sell our houses and/or belongings, live in discarded boxes, eat mac and cheese, and donate 90% of our earnings to political campaigns. We are the financially handicapped, sitting at the bottom of a long flight of stairs, looking up at the receding backsides of Lloyd Blankfein and the Koch brothers.

Over and over again we hear on the news: “This bill is running into opposition from the (X) industry.” Insert banking, health insurance, pharmaceutical, oil, auto, mining, or whatever behemoth fits. We should be able to say “So what?” “Hey, this new drug law is running into opposition from heroin dealers.” Good. Fuck them, and the (X) industry likewise. Sadly, we can’t ignore them or tell them to back off. They choose our politicians for us.

And it’s getting worse. The Citizens United decision opened up the political money game to corporations in a more direct way than ever before. Anonymous millionaire donors are creating ad hoc political organizations in the last months of this campaign season. A great flood of illicit cash is rolling over our political system.

It’s time, past time, to concentrate, folks. We all have our particular subjects – education, women’s rights, the environment, fiscal responsibility, energy, labor, whatever. We’re dithering away our last years of democratic opportunity. We still can vote, and we still can speak freely, if not with the same expensive loudspeakers available to the CEO class. We need to stop focusing on symptomatic issues and personalities and get to the core of the problem: the way we (?) choose the people who make the decisions. Change the process and change the results. Given the plutocratic majority on the Supreme Court, it may take a constitutional amendment to do the job. Otherwise we’ll be seeing the world through the eyes of a P.I.M.P.

The Important Bill

Occasionally I get the sense that someone in Washington D.C. is actually paying attention. For years I have been pounding a single note on the political keyboard, namely campaign finance reform. There is a bill in play right now that actually addresses the problem.

I have written about how people focus on political personalities while ignoring the system that promoted those personalities. Imagine you have a machine that makes coffee cups. You pull a lever and out comes a cup. You pour coffee in it and find that there is a hole in the bottom. Coffee leaks out on your lap. You discard that cup, pull the lever again, get another cup, pour more coffee, and get another cup in your lap. Repeat, repeat, repeat. You can discard cups forever, but until you fix the machine you are going to keep getting burned.

The most significant two numbers in U.S. politics are 2,400 and 30,400. These are the numbers of dollars that an individual can give to a federal candidate or a national party. The problem with these numbers is that very few people in this country can afford them. Perhaps one out of a thousand Americans can donate anything close to these amounts on a regular basis.

The Public Interest Research Group did an analysis of campaign finance over a number of election cycles and found that, on average:

• Whichever candidate in a congressional primary spent the most money won, 9 times out of 10.
• The high spender outspent the number two spender 3:1 – it generally wasn’t close.
• 75% of the money that these high spending winners raised came in big chunks - $500 up to the $2,400 limit.

 I like to say that the difference between elections in Iran and elections in the U.S. is that in Iran a small group of mullahs decides who gets to run for office and in the U.S. a small group of millionaires makes that decision.

The bill in question is the Fair Elections Now Act. It would beef up the public campaign funding available to candidates who are either unwilling or unable to schmooze millionaires. The vital number here is $100, the limit for contributions to candidates taking advantage of the public funding. Each candidate would have to raise thousands of sub-$100 donations in order to qualify for funding.

Qualified House candidates would get $900,000, split 40/60 between the primary and general elections. Senate candidates would get $1.25 million plus $250,000 per district in their state, again, split 40/60. This is real money for contesting an election.

Even better, if a publicly funded candidate faces a high spender, he or she can raise more $100 donations and have them matched 4:1. This provides the monetary parity that swings elections.

The cherry on top is mandated discounts on media buys and media vouchers of $100,000 per congressional district.

The question must pop into your mind: Where will all this money come from? Oh, it gets better. Government contractors (Halliburton, anyone?) will pay a percentage of their contracts into the campaign finance fund. The fund will also get the proceeds of sales of portions of the broadcast spectrum.

You can read about the legislation in detail at Public Campaign and Fix Congress First!. The Senate bill is S.752 and the House version is H.1826.

This is a complete game changer. Finally, candidates with opinions that might offend the mighty will have funding equal to their less discriminating opponents. This is the fix that the machine has been needing.

Thankfully, all my elected representatives are on board. Senators Leahy and Sanders will cosponsor, as will Representative Welch. There are over a hundred cosponsors in the house right now, but there are many yet unconverted.

I don’t ask for action from my readers very often, but I do now. Forward the news of this legislation to everyone you know. It isn’t a liberal/conservative issue, it’s a 99.9% of Americans who can’t fling $2,400 checks around issue. Ask people to contact their Senators and Representatives and firmly demand their support for this bill. Those legislators that are already supporters should get praise and thanks. Here’s a list of who’s who in terms of demands or thanks.

Examine any government policy that angers or mystifies you and you can almost always trace it back to the undue influence of big money in our electoral system. The big money rewards the spineless, the hacks, the flunkies, the ethically challenged, the shortsighted, and the just plain evil. The Fair Elections Now Act is the most important piece of legislation I have seen since I started paying attention to politics. Let’s get it passed.