The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (11 page)

Michael Hudson, president of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends, explained the history of the debt ceiling’s connection to war:

It was put in in 1917 during World War I, and the idea was to prevent President Wilson from committing even more American troops and money to war. In every country of Europe—England, France—the parliamentary control over the budget was introduced to stop ambitious kings or rulers from waging wars. So the whole purpose was to limit a government’s ability to run into debt for war, because that was the only reason that governments ran into debt.

The Budget Control Act of 2011 assures drastic cuts to the U.S. social safety net. Congress will appoint a committee of twelve, dubbed the “Super Congress,” evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, to identify $1.2 trillion in cuts by Thanksgiving. If the committee fails to meet that goal, sweeping, mandatory, across-the-board cuts are mandated. Social services would get cut, but so would the Pentagon.

Or would it? The Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Progressive Caucus opposed the bill. Congressional Black Caucus Chair Emanuel Cleaver called it “a sugarcoated Satan sandwich.” For fiscal years 2012 and 2013, the discretionary funding approved is split between “security” and “nonsecurity” categories. “Nonsecurity” categories like food programs, housing, Medicare and Medicaid (the basis of any genuine national security) will most likely be cut. But the “security” budget will get hit equally hard, which Democrats suggest would be an incentive for Republicans to cooperate with the process.

The security category includes “Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Nuclear Security Administration, the intelligence community [and] international affairs.” This sets up a dynamic where hawks will be trying to cut as much as possible from the State Department’s diplomatic corps, and foreign aid, in order to favor their patrons at the Pentagon and in the weapons industry.

Hartung explained that the contractors, in addition to having the support of Speaker of the House John Boehner, “had Buck McKeon, the head of the House Armed Services Committee, whose biggest contributor is Lockheed Martin, who’s got big military facilities in his district, [and] Randy Forbes, whose district is near the Newport News Shipbuilding complex, which builds attack submarines and aircraft carriers. They used their influence to get people on the inside, their allies in the House, to push their agenda.”

President Obama’s debt ceiling deal is widely considered a historic defeat for progressives, a successful attack on the New Deal and Great Society achievements of the past century. Congresswoman Donna Edwards, D-Md., summed up the disappointment, in which half the Democrats in the House voted against their president, tweeting: “Nada from million/billionaires; corp tax loopholes aplenty; only sacrifice from the poor/middle class? Shared sacrifice, balance? Really?”

The Project on Government Oversight says of the “Super Congress” that “the creation of the committee doesn’t come with many requirements for transparency.” Who will be the watchdog? With the 2012 election coming up, promising to be the most expensive ever, expect the committee’s deficit-reduction proposal, due by Thanksgiving and subject to an up-or-down vote, to have very little to give thanks for.

Money in Politics

June 27, 2012

Big Money Clouds the Big Skies of Montana

“I never bought a man who wasn’t for sale,” William A. Clark reportedly said. He was one of Montana’s “Copper Kings,” a man who used his vast wealth to manipulate the state government and literally buy votes to make himself a U.S. senator. That was more than 100 years ago, and the blatant corruption of Clark and the other Copper Kings created a furor that led to the passage, by citizen initiative, of Montana’s Corrupt Practices Act in 1912. The century of transparent campaign-finance restrictions that followed, preventing corporate money from influencing elections, came to an end this week, as the U.S. Supreme Court summarily reversed the Montana law. Five justices of the U.S. Supreme Court reiterated: Their controversial Citizens United ruling remains the law of the land. Clark’s corruption contributed to the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Now, close to 100 years later, it may take a popular movement to amend the Constitution again, this time to overturn Citizens United and confirm, finally and legally, that corporations are not people.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is the case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that corporations can contribute unlimited amounts of funds toward what are deemed “independent expenditures” in our elections. Thus, corporations, or shadowy “super PACs” that they choose to fund, can spend as much as they care to on negative campaign ads, just as long as they don’t coordinate with a candidate’s campaign committee. That 2010 ruling, approved by a narrow 5–4 majority of the court, has profoundly altered the electoral landscape—not only for the presidential election, but also for thousands of races around the country. According to a summary of the ruling’s impact, prepared by the National Conference of State Legislatures, “While the ruling does not directly affect state laws, there are 24 states that currently prohibit or restrict corporate and/or union spending on candidate elections.”

Montana, with its long history of banning corporate contributions, was alone among the states to defy those five U.S. Supreme Court justices. Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia filed a brief in support of Montana, noting that state elections are different. Their supporting brief read, “States—particularly resource-rich States with small populations, like Montana—face the risk that nonresident corporations with discrete and well-defined interests will dominate campaign spending in state and local election contests.”

Montana is not known for bipartisanship these days. Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer says his veto pen has run out of ink from the number of “crazy” Republican bills that he has had to veto since taking office. Lacking ink, he now takes bills from the Republican-controlled legislature onto the capitol steps and emblazons them with a red-hot branding iron that says “Veto.” So it was significant that, after the Supreme Court decision this week, Schweitzer and his lieutenant governor, John Bohlinger, a Republican, stood together before the capitol.

Bohlinger said, “Now, Republicans and Democrats don’t always agree on policy matters, but there’s one thing we do agree on, and that is, corporate money should not influence the outcome of an election.” To which Schweitzer added: “Here in Montana, we have a proud, 100-year history of keeping corporate money out of our elections. Corporations aren’t people, and they should not control our government. Montana stood up for democracy, here at home and on behalf of America, by fighting to keep our ban on corporate campaign spending. The United States Supreme Court blocked our state law, because they said corporations are people. I’ll believe that when Texas executes one.”

John Bonifaz is co-founder and director of Free Speech for People, one of a coalition of groups organizing for a constitutional amendment that specifies that “People, person, or persons as used in this Constitution does not include corporations, limited liability companies or other corporate entities.” He told me:

We’ve seen a growing mobilization across the country of people calling for an amendment to reclaim our democracy. Four states are now on record—Hawaii, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Mexico—calling for an amendment. Other states are likely to join that fight soon. Montana [has a] statewide ballot in November for an amendment. Hundreds of municipalities across the country have called for an amendment. Over a thousand business leaders have joined that call. And now there are some dozen amendment bills pending in the United States Congress calling for an amendment, with hearings to be held before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee this July.

Perhaps the only silver lining in the Supreme Court’s decision to send Montana back to the age of the Copper Kings is that a mass movement is building to assert the rights of people over the power of money in politics.

June 6, 2012

It’s One Person, One Vote, Not One Percent, One Vote

The failed effort to recall Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is widely seen as a crisis for the labor movement, and a pivotal moment in the 2012 U.S. presidential-election season. Walker launched a controversial effort to roll back the power of Wisconsin’s public employee unions, and the unions pushed back, aided by strong, grassroots solidarity from many sectors. This week, the unions lost. Central to Walker’s win was a massive infusion of campaign cash, saturating the Badger State with months of political advertising. His win signals less a loss for the unions than a loss for our democracy in this post–Citizens United era, when elections can be bought with the help of a few billionaires.

In February 2011, the newly elected Walker, a former Milwaukee county executive, rolled out a plan to strip public employees of their collective-bargaining rights, a platform he had not run on. The backlash was historic. Tens of thousands marched on the Wisconsin capitol, eventually occupying it. Walker threatened to call out the National Guard. The numbers grew. Despite Walker’s strategy to “divide and conquer” the unions (a phrase he was overheard saying in a recorded conversation with a billionaire donor), the police and firefighters unions, whose bargaining rights he had strategically left intact, came out in support of the occupation. Across the world, the occupation of Tahrir Square in Egypt was in full swing, with signs in English and Arabic expressing solidarity with the workers of Wisconsin.

The demands for workers’ rights were powerful and sustained. The momentum surged toward a demand to recall Walker, along with a slew of his Republican allies in the Wisconsin Senate. Then laws tempered the movement’s power. The Wisconsin recall statute required that an elected official be in office for one year before a recall. Likewise, a loophole in the law allowed the target of the recall to raise unlimited individual donations, starting when the recall petitions are filed. Thus, Walker’s campaign started raising funds in November 2011. His opponent, Tom Barrett, the mayor of Milwaukee, was limited to individual donations of up to $10,000, and had less than one month to campaign after winning the Democratic Party primary May 8.

Coupled with the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, the Wisconsin loophole set the stage for grossly lopsided fundraising between Walker and Barrett, and an election battle that was the most expensive in Wisconsin’s history. According to the most recent state campaign-finance filings, Walker’s campaign raised over $30.5 million, more than seven times Barrett’s reported $3.9 million. After adding in super PAC spending, estimates put the recall-election spending at more than $63.5 million.

According to
Forbes
magazine, fourteen billionaires made contributions to Walker, only one of whom lives in Wisconsin. Among the thirteen out-of-state billionaires was Christy Walton, the widow of John T. Walton, son of Walmart founder Sam Walton.

Nobel Prize–winning economist Joe Stiglitz writes about the Walton family in his new book,
The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future
. He notes, “The six heirs to the Walmart empire command wealth of $69.7 billion, which is equivalent to the wealth of the entire bottom 30 percent of U.S. society.” That is almost 95 million people. Stiglitz told me: “We’ve moved from a democracy, which is supposed to be based on one person, one vote, to something much more akin to one dollar, one vote. When you have that kind of democracy, it’s not going to address the real needs of the 99 percent.”

The voters of Wisconsin did return control of the state senate to the Democratic Party. The new majority will have the power to block the type of controversial legislation that made Walker famous. Meanwhile, three states over in Montana, the Democratic state attorney general, Steve Bullock, won his party’s nomination for governor to run for the seat held by term-limited Democrat Brian Schweitzer. Bullock, as attorney general, has taken on Citizens United by defending the state’s 100-year-old Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits the type of campaign donations allowed under Citizens United. The case is now before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Wisconsin’s recall is over, but the fight for democracy starts with one person, one vote, not one percent, one vote.

May 2, 2012

The Real Mad Men: Following the Money Behind TV Political Ads

May Day, Murdoch, and the murder of Milly Dowler. What do they have to do with the 2012 U.S. general election? This year’s election will undoubtedly be the most expensive in U.S. history, with some projections topping $5 billion. Not only has the amount of spending increased, but its nature has as well, following the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which allows unlimited spending by corporations, unions, and so-called super PACs, all under the banner of “free speech.” This campaign season will unfold amidst a resurgent Occupy Wall Street movement launched globally on May 1, the same day the British Parliament released a report on Rupert Murdoch’s media empire charging that he is “not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company.” Now more than ever, people should heed the advice of the famous Watergate source, Deep Throat: “Follow the money.”