President aims to take the money and run

Here’s what President Obama wants you to believe about his relationship to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling and the toxic torrent of corporate cash polluting our politics: “it’s complicated.”

In their ruling, the justices determined that corporations had a free speech right to anonymously contribute as much as they wanted to third-party political action groups that worked in support of candidates, as long as those PACs had no formal connection to the candidate.

On the one hand, the president blasted the court’s ruling less than a week after it was issued, with the justices seated right in front of him, in his January 2010 State of the Union speech, for opening “the floodgates for special interests – including foreign companies – to spend without limit in our elections.”

On the other hand, his campaign decided two years later to “level the playing field” with Republicans and encourage Super PAC support for the president, by allowing cabinet members and senior White House officials to cooperate with a Super PAC that supports their boss.

On yet another hand, the president insisted he would support a constitutional amendment to undo Citizens United.

And on yet still another hand, when the president had the opportunity to actually do something to shed some sunlight on the secretive stash of corporate donations unleashed by Citizens United, by issuing an executive order requiring government contractors to reveal all their political spending, he balked.

When you follow the president’s actions, rather than listen to his words, it’s not complicated at all.

The president and his Democratic Party colleagues are determined to “take the money and run.”

For nearly a year, President Obama had floated the idea of issuing an executive order requiring government contractors to disclose all their political contributions – including contributions to PACs and organizations like the US Chamber of Commerce – when they submit a bid.

The biggest contractors, for the most part, are defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, which smother the politicians in contributions to keep the weapons contracts flowing. In the 2012 cycle, Lockheed’s PAC has spent more than $2 million in contributions that we know of, 59 percent to Republicans and 41 percent to Democrats.

Its contributions go beyond an attempt to win a single weapons contract. What they and the other contractors have been able to do is to purchase the country’s entire debate over defense spending, so that few of our representatives ever raise a peep about whether the expensive defense systems are necessary.

Republicans howled at the President Obama’s proposal, accusing him of attempting to politicize the bidding process. President Obama wanted to know who had made the contributions, the Republicans charged, so he could award bids to the highest-contributing bidders.

While President Obama stewed, the Republicans passed measures in May 2011 to block[m1]  an executive order if it was issued.

The venerable Public Citizen organization made a suggestion that would sidestep the Republicans’ stated objection.

Why not, Public Citizen said, limit the disclosure requirement to the winning bidder?

But the president backed off – either because he didn’t want a fight with Republicans or because his fundraisers reminded him he had a tough campaign ahead and the little people they dote on with their solicitation emails weren’t going to be able to foot the bill.

On the most critical issue facing our political system, the president of the United States is incapable of leveling with the American people.

President Obama may want to do the right thing, but he is trapped in a system controlled by big money that is bigger than he is.

The first step to fight back against that system won’t come from Washington. It will come from building a grassroots movement to undo Citizens United. Read more about it, and our proposed constitutional amendment, which is easy to understand and will withstand any legal challenge, here.

 

 

Citizens United / Congress / Martin Column - 04/13/2012

Corporations Gone Wild

It’s a magnificent time to be alive – if you’re a giant corporation, that is.

Spring is here, and after a deep chill, the mighty mega-businesses are not merely reborn, but blossoming. “Big U.S. companies have emerged from the recession more productive, more profitable, flush with cash and less burdened by debt,” swoons the Wall Street Journal.  The seductively sweet smell of speculation – in mortgages, derivatives, oil, wheat – once again fills the air. Amidst the giddy exuberance of the stock market, why dwell on the dreary conditions among the human population, where one out of every six Americans lives below the poverty line, one of every ten is out of work, and one of every five homes are worth less than the loans that secure them?

Oh to be young, free and incorporated – preferably in an island like Bermuda.

Being a Big Business wasn’t always so much fun. For a long time, corporations had to obey the same rules as the rest of us. And after Wall Street drove America into a ditch four years ago, Corporate America was hurting, too. True, many of us never really thought of inanimate objects as capable of suffering. And come to think of it, I never did meet a homeless corporation (though I’ve encountered many a crooked one). But with bailouts, special tax breaks, and the ability to borrow taxpayer money from the Fed at .05% interest, that painful period didn't last very long.

And then, in 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court decreed in the infamous Citizens United case that under the U.S. Constitution, corporations are the same as people and spending money is a form of free speech. So when corporations write checks, it’s the same as you and me speaking. And corporations have the right, under the First Amendment, to use money to buy public officials and purchase elections.

Corporate America’s been partying like its in Ft. Lauderdale on Spring Break ever since.

As you might expect from a climate of unrestrained corporate debauchery, there’ve been some ill-fated hook-ups, like AT&T and T-Mobile (the annulment cost $4 billion). But don’t worry about a newly rejuvenated Ma Bell not having any BFFs. Its 100 million customers literally cannot dump the company, at least not without paying a massive “early termination fee.” AT&T’s allies on the Supreme Court ruled last year that the company can strip you of your right to take it to court, leaving you no way to sever the relationship if your service fails, your “unlimited” data plan gets throttled, or you get overcharged.

Big businesses were screwing people way before Citizens United and Concepcion v. AT&T, of course. But those decisions fundamentally altered the balance of power between citizens and corporations in the courts, Congress and the executive branch.

Philosophers, scientists and science fiction writers have long predicted that the moment would come when artificial creatures, created by humans, would become more intelligent than humans – a technological "singularity" projected to arrive later this century. But no one would have guessed that 2010 would become the date of the political singularity – the year in which a legal construct – a corporation – would become more politically powerful than humans.

That corporations don’t yet have all the benefits of personhood misses the point. Justice Stevens’ dissent in Citizens United  warned: “Under the majority's view, I suppose it may be a First Amendment problem that corporations are not permitted to vote, given that voting is, among other things, a form of speech.” But corporations don’t need to vote. Corporations decide who gets elected simply by dumping vast quantities of cash into elections on behalf of candidates who will do their bidding.

As a student of American civic life named Tony Montana once explained, “In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power.”

Citizens United / Harvey Column / Uncategorized - 04/12/2012

Doing the minimum for the 99 percent

From both left and right, commentators have been heating up the Internet with proposals to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour.

It’s not just Ralph Nader beating the drum for the Occupy movement to spearhead a movement to raise the wage, which hasn’t been increased since 2009.

Ron Unz, commentator at the American Conservative, has proposed an increase as part of a new Republican immigration strategy, and he’s has been pleading for Mitt Romney to adopt an increase in the minimum wage as part of his campaign.

Romney has yet to heed Unz’s plea, which force the candidate to fight some ingrained Republican dogma that preaches against the minimum wage, let alone increasing it. According to this old dogma, the minimum wage discourages small business from hiring.

It was President Obama’s chairman of his council advisers, Alan Kreuger, wrote a study, back when he was a Princeton economics professor, who debunked that notion.

In the past, Romney has shown some willingness to discard the customary Republican disdain for the minimum wage, speaking in favor of increases pegged to increases in the consumer price index.

Then last month, after the Wall Street Journal and others beat up on Romney’s minimum wage position, the leading Republican contender backed down. “There’s probably not a need to raise the minimum wage,” Romney told CNBC.

On this issue, the Wall Street Journal and the Republican base is way out of step with voters across the country, who consistently support an increase. According to one recent poll, 67 percent of voters favor an increase.

Which brings us to the other candidate: the president. He’s always said he favors an increase.

Back in 2007, when he was just a contender in Bettendorf, Iowa, Barack Obama gave a speech on “Reclaiming the American Dream,” in which he promised:  “I won’t wait 10 years to raise the minimum wage, I’ll raise it every single year. That’s the change we need.”

After Obama was elected, during his transition to the presidency, Obama’s team promised to raise the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2011, with future raises pegged to inflation “to make sure that full-time workers can earn a living wage.”

But the only increase during Obama’s administration was the one in 2009 from $6.55 to $7.25, which was mandated by a law passed during a previous administration.

The president had nothing to do with it.

Last year, when his labor secretary, Hilda Solis, was asked about the need for a minimum wage hike, Huffington Post reported that she “largely ducked the questions.”

Maybe keeping his campaign promise and improving the economy are not good enough reasons to recharge the president’s enthusiasm for launching a campaign to boost wages for the lowest paid workers.

Fortunately, there are plenty of other reasons that should convince him to do what he said he would.

For one, it’s simply the right thing to do.

As the president himself pointed out just four months ago in a speech with a broad populist message in Osawatomie, Kansas, income inequality is the “defining issue of our time.”

In 1968, the federal minimum wage was $1.60 an hour. Gasoline was 34 cents a gallon and an average new car cost $2,800 dollars.

So the worker on minimum wage could buy nearly 5 gallons of gas for an hour’s wage.  Now that minimum wage worker can buy less than 2 gallons of gas for an hour’s wage.

If you adjust that 1968 wage for inflation, it would be $10 an hour – far more than today’s $7.25 minimum wage.

As the New York Times pointed out Sunday, the average corporate CEO made $14.4 million last year, compared to the average annual U.S. salary of $45,230. A fulltime worker paid the minimum wage makes far less – $15,080 a year.

Correcting for inflation, those with the least income have seen their incomes reduced over the past decade.

Another good reason for Obama to get with it– his base, which has been frustrated with his compromises with Republicans and cave-ins to bailed-out bankers, strongly supports an increase. And so do independent voters. Obama needs both of those groups to win re-election. So doing the right thing is also smart politics.

Income inequality / Martin Column / Mitt Romney / President Barack Obama - 04/11/2012

Why the Supreme Court Wants to Kill Universal Health Care

Name the most popular federal program of all time, and you’ll understand why the Republican Supreme Court wants to kill health care reform before it gets going in 2014.

It’s Social Security, of course. Part of FDR’s New Deal, Congress enacted it in 1935 to provide insurance against the vicissitudes of old age, poverty and unemployment, all of which were made more horrific by the Great Depression.

Social Security retirement benefits are based on an individual mandate, just like the new health care law is. Workers and employers are required to pay taxes into the system now, to cover them later. You can’t have a solvent health or retirement insurance program if participation is voluntary, because no one will contribute until they need the benefits – and then they can’t pay for them, as I’ve noted. Social Security, like the health care law, is a universal system - everyone has to be part of it – both getting the benefits and paying for its cost.

Due to a limited grasp of their own history, most Americans don’t realize how similar today's campaign against universal health care is to the one waged against Social Security.

Republican lawmakers bitterly opposed (PDF) FDR’s measure – and still do, though these days they cloak their hostility behind the hysterical and unfounded argument that Social Security is about to go bankrupt. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan claimed in 2004 that retirement benefits had to be cut and the system “privatized” or the nation would face an economic disaster (it did four years later, thanks not to Social Security but to Greenspan’s policies).  The Bush Administration concocted a plan to turn over Social Security proceeds to Wall Street, which it claimed would do a better job of investing people’s retirement savings.  Had it succeeded, most of that money would have been lost in the financial crash of 2008.

But the conservatives’ attempts to demolish Social Security have consistently failed. Why? Because Social Security works. Americans support it by huge margins – even Republicans.

Hence the vehemence of the attack on the health care law now. The anti-government forces realize that once Americans begin to receive the benefits of universal health care – no denials for pre-existing conditions, no medical underwriting, no caps on benefits – they won’t want to give them up.

That’s not all.  Under the law passed by Congress, the insurance industry stands to gain the most from the mandate that all Americans buy health insurance. But the experts understand that the program will end up being too expensive – in most states, private insurance companies are going to be able to raise their rates at will.  If this doesn’t kill universal care, it will eventually lead to a single public system just like Social Security.

Last week’s spectacle at the Supreme Court – three days of “hearings,” with some lawyers appointed by the Court itself to argue positions no party had taken – looked more like a political ambush by a legislative body than the supposedly chaste pursuit of constitutional principles.  It’s important to remember that an unelected majority of the U.S. Supreme Court almost nipped Social Security in the bud 75 years ago. Pro-industry conservatives on the Court consistently rejected FDR’s proposals to provide Americans relief from the New Deal, as I explained recently.  The Social Security law was considered in danger by FDR’s advisors. Criticism of the Supreme Court became widespread, and FDR began to prepare a plan to add more justices to the nine serving on the high court. Unwilling to provoke a constitutional confrontation that would sully the independence of the judicial branch, the Supreme Court backed down, and upheld the law.

It’s difficult to discern any similar hesitation by the current majority of the Supreme Court, with five of its nine members increasingly unabashed ideologues willing to rewrite the Constitution. Think about the Court’s decision to interfere with the Florida vote count and award the 2000 election to George Bush. Consider its 2011 decision in Concepcion v. AT&T, where five Republican appointees determined that “arbitration clauses” inserted in the fine print of virtually every contract between a giant corporation and consumers can rob people of their right to their day in court.  And then there’s the infamous 2010 Citizens United case, in which the five ruled that spending money to influence elections is a form of free speech, protected by the First Amendment. In one fell swoop, the Court disenfranchised the vast majority of Americans who cannot hire their own lobbyist or fund the election of a friendly politician.

On the other hand, yesterday President Obama sent the politicians on the high court a powerfully worded message. Briefly channeling FDR, he said: “I’d just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is, the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint — that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law. Well, this is a good example. And I’m pretty confident that this court will recognize that and not take that step.”

Much is at stake here – more than health care reform itself. Public confidence in government is at record lows. As the financial crash of 2008 confirmed, money has corrupted the electoral process; the wealthy and powerful dictate public policy. The judiciary used to be the only branch of government in which a citizen could take on any person or corporation and be accorded equal stature. When Americans loses their confidence in the integrity of the courts, what is left?

Citizens United / Harvey Column / Supreme Court - 04/03/2012

How Mitt Could Win

Why doesn’t Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney’s free-market gospel include a ringing call to break up the too big to fail banks?

Over at the conservative American Enterprise Institute blog, James Pethokoukis suggests Romney could benefit if he did just that.

After all, this is no longer a position favored only by Occupy Wall Street.

All kinds of establishment figures now acknowledge that breaking up the big banks is needed to heal our financial system, and that as long as we don’t, taxpayers could be on the hook for another bailout.

The most recent public official to reach this conclusion is none other than Richard Fisher, the president of the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve, who last week issued a report in which he concluded: “The too big to fail institutions that amplified and prolonged the recent financial crisis remain a hindrance to full economic recovery and to the very ideal of American capitalism.”

This should be catnip for Romney, who professes to be all about ending government interference in the free market.

What the Dallas Fed’s report makes clear is that the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation and the policies of the Obama administration haven’t lessened the power of the too big to fail banks, or made them healthier – it’s helped them gain market share while doing little to force them to reduce the same risky business practices that led to the 2008 financial collapse.

While Dodd-Frank theoretically sets up a process to deal with too big to fail institutions when they get in trouble, our politicians and regulators by their actions have signaled to the big banks that they don’t have the guts to break them up or get them to change how they do business.

For a politician in Romney’s position, staking out a position against the big banks would give him the high ground against the president, who claims to be reining in the banks’ bad behavior but isn’t.

It would help him with the Tea Party activists, who rail against the bank bailouts and crony capitalism. Promising tough action on the banks would also help him with independents who understandably don’t trust all the political double-talk they hear.

But Romney doesn’t have the  guts to do it. His free market rhetoric stops right at the bankers’ door, where he must appear meekly with hat in hand, asking for donations, just like the president of the United States, from bankers who continue to prosper only because of the trillions of dollars worth of favors done for them by politicians using taxpayers’ money.

The top 5 donors to Romney’s campaign are people associated with bailed out banks, according to the Center For Responsive Politics. The president raised an unprecedented $15.8 million from the financial sector in 2008, while his administration was in the midst of bailing them out. Though Romney has the edge in Wall Street fundraising now, the president has vowed to fight back ­– including a pledge not to demonize Wall Street.

The big media and the politicians all talk about these policies as though they’re great intellectual debates about clashing views of the role of government. But when it comes to the too big to fail banks, all Romney’s free market preaching is just so much hot air.

This is the dishonest heart of our politics. What neither Romney nor the president, nor apparently the American Enterprise Institute, can acknowledge is that it’s all about the money.

 

Martin Column / Mitt Romney / President Barack Obama / Too Big To Fail - 03/30/2012

Purchasing power, One-Percent style

There’s been a good deal of talk about how the Occupy movement “changed the debate in this country” to focus on income inequality.

But while members of Occupy Wall Street skirmished  with police over a patch of ground in lower Manhattan, the members of the country’s top 1 percent bypassed the political debate and have gone back to work wielding their influence in the corridors of power.

It’s been a particularly wrenching patch for the 99 percent, who are excluded from those corridors.

First, Congress this week, with President Obama’s blessing, passed something Republicans misleadingly labeled a JOBS Act, which basically gives a green light for fraud by removing important investor protections under the guise of promoting startups.

Second, Congress has been pushing financial regulators to weaken even further a mild piece of sensible financial regulation that would prevent banks from making risky gambles with their own accounts – the ones guaranteed by you and me as taxpayers. It’s the final coup de grace marginalizing the views of one-time Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker, for whom the rule is named. Volcker has been a lonely voice among the president’s financial advisers, advocating stronger action to rein in the behavior of the too big to fail banks. Largely ignored by the president, Volcker’s views are getting stomped by Congress and financial regulators.

There is no mystery why we have suffered these setbacks: our political system has been overwhelmed by the power of money. The bankers lobby has swarmed the Capitol to drown any opposition to its views. The bankers have also come with their checkbooks in an election year, and they’re looking to buy whoever is for sale, of whatever party. According to a new report by Public Citizen, politicians who advocated for a weaker Volcker rule got an average of $388,010 in contributions from the financial sector – more than four times as much as politicians advocating to strengthen the rule, who still managed to haul in an average of $96,897 apiece.

Our politicians, insulated by a celebrity-obsessed media and swaddled in Super PAC cash, could care less about the consent of the governed. Republicans have only to wave around their magic wand that makes all problems the fault of government regulation in order to hypnotize their followers, while the Democrats only have to remind their followers how scary the Republicans are to keep them in line.

Meanwhile, the Occupy movement, which started with such promise in galvanizing public support against corporate domination of our politics, has splintered into a thousand pieces, wasting precious energy and time in confrontations with police rather than building a broad-shouldered coalition working on many different social and political fronts.

The challenge for Occupy remains the same: building a force that actually includes the members of the 99 percent who have not yet gotten active, who may be still stuck in apathy, cynicism or hopelessness or who may simply not have a perspective that includes social and political action.

The next opportunity is a series of protests planned nationwide for May 1, which has traditionally been a time of action around the immigration rights issue. This year occupiers, labor allies and a variety of community organizations are planning to join their issues. Can we forge a message strong enough and the numbers large enough to rock the corridors of power?

Congress / Martin Column / Occupy / Paul Volcker - 03/28/2012

The Health Care Games

Like the Hunger Games, in which leaders of the 1% connive to rig a contest so that a charismatic representative of the 99% is defeated, there’s lots of intrigue behind the US Supreme Court hearings on the federal health care law that begin today.

The ostensible issue before the high court is whether the universal health care system established by Congress in 2010 is constitutional. Like the systems in most other developed nations, that law requires all Americans to be covered – whether through their employer or by purchasing it directly. Now this is just plain arithmetic: you can’t have a solvent universal care program if participation is voluntary, because the young and healthy won’t bother to pitch in until they get sick, leaving the older and less healthy to cover most of the cost. Universal means everyone has to be part of it – both getting the medical benefits and paying for its cost.  Today, taxpayers end up bailing out people who don’t buy insurance and then get sick or in an accident.

But the corporate funded US Chamber of Commerce and other right wing entities, plus anti-government foes (including most of the Republicans candidates who want to run the government), argue it was unconstitutional for Congress to order everyone to pay for health insurance. My problem with that part of the law – known as the "individual mandate" – is that you have to buy the insurance from private insurance companies, and there is no limit on what they can charge you. That’s gotta be fixed, and a campaign is underway to do that in California. As everyone knows, however, Obama lifted his health care proposal from the law that Mitt Romney, then Governor of Massachusetts, enacted there in 2006. So its obvious that a big part of why the corporate Republican establishment opposes the law is that it was backed by a Democrat – Obama – and they don’t want him or any other elected Democrat to be able to claim any political victories.

There’s much more to the Supreme Court case than crass party politics, in any case. Many on the corporate right are hoping the US Supreme Court will issue a sweeping decision like they did in Citizens United, this time ratcheting back Congress’s regulatory authority across the board and therefore bolstering the power of big corporations – just as Citizens United did, in the guise of granting corporations a new right to corrupt elections under the First Amendment.

A decision limiting Congress’s power to regulate pollution would be a huge win for chemical manufacturers; drug and tobacco companies want to escape the Food and Drug Administration’s safety requirements; Wall Street wants taxpayer bailouts with no strings attached.  As I wrote a few weeks ago, the powerful elites in this nation think that the health care case is the Supreme Court’s best opportunity in decades to roll back constitutional rights to the deregulated era of excess that led to the First Great Depression eighty years ago. This will be done in the name of protecting Americans against the intrusion of government in their lives.

In the Hunger Games, the hundred thousand wealthiest people in “Panem” gather in their Capitol to watch as twenty-four randomly selected citizens fight each other to death. This is a yearly penance, we are told, imposed by the wealthy in response to an earlier, unsuccessful revolt by the 99%. The Games provide an excuse for a non-stop party for the powerful – like Mardi Gras only with unimaginable excess.  The citizens – known as “Tributes” – come two each from all twelve “Districts” in the country. Those Districts looked a lot like many parts of the United States. People trudge to poor-paying jobs and live in flimsy structures one step up from homelessness. They shop at flea markets where barter is common. They catch their own food. They help each other out because the Capitol has long since abandoned them.

There are other eerie similarities and ironies. In the Hunger Games, the entire game area is wired with cameras and the contest is continuously broadcast to the nation on enormous screens. This quickly turns to the disadvantage of the 1% in the Capitol, because the 99% become inspired by watching the heroine’s courage and humanity and start to rebel anew.  This is a lesson our Supreme Court has already learned: you can forget about seeing any of its hearings on the health care law on a screen of any size. Watching the Justices and corporate lawyers rework the Constitution into a weapon of the mighty might anger some Americans. So the Supreme Court has banned any video… but says it will release audio at the end of each day’s hearing.

It’s clear from the movie that the elites have powerful medicines that can instantly eliminate infections and heal wounds, but residents of the Districts have never seen that kind of health care. I guess the Panem Chamber of Commerce would argue that these citizens are fortunate to be “free from government interference in their lives.”

Citizens United / Congress / Harvey Column / Supreme Court - 03/25/2012

Etch-a-Sketch Politicians in a PAC Man world

Every once in a while a jaded political operative utters a profound truth, cutting through all the baloney and phony punditry.

That’s what Mitt Romney’s adviser did when he suggested that his boss could just hit “reset” and adopt more moderate positions once he locked up the Republican nomination and didn’t have to cater to the far right of his party. “It’s almost like an Etch-a-Sketch,” the aide, Eric Fehrnstrom, said. “You can kind of shake it up, and we start all over again.”

Sure, all of Romney’s foes will now clobber him with his aide’s comments and try to score political points off the “gaffe.”

But Fehrnstrom was offering a truth that rarely gets told in big media about how our politicians operate.

Romney and his fellow candidates count on voters not to pay attention, to leave them plenty of room to gloss over earlier statements.

Politicians count on the media’s cynicism and its craven need for access to power to blunt any remaining watchdog instincts. The media ignore commitments the candidates make and contradictions between what they do and what they said, shrugging it off because “everybody does it.”

Romney has had to shake the Etch-a-Sketch hard to erase the image of himself as the moderate Republican governor of Massachusetts whose own health care plan provided the template for President Obama’s health care plan, while candidate Romney now falls over himself to oppose the plan.

But the president has his own image shifts to answer for.

For example, candidate Obama portrayed himself as a strong advocate for the 99 percent, promising to change bankruptcy laws to help homeowners facing foreclosure keep their homes.

That shift, known as “judicial cram-downs,” would have provided a powerful incentive for banks to work out loan modifications with homeowners.

But when bankers fought cram-downs, President Obama quietly folded and judicial cram-downs died in Congress. Since then, the president and his administration have offered a series of limp anti-foreclosure measures that rely on voluntary bank cooperation, with paltry results.

But the Etch-a-Sketch is a pretty old toy. The current political season reminds me more of a slightly less retro game that gripped the public imagination – Pacman. In this wildly popular video game, a pizza-shaped icon gobbles up everything else on the screen.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling unleashes unlimited, anonymous contributions to political action committees, or PACs, aligned, but not formally tied, to specific candidates.

Unfortunately, when it comes to using the PACs to bolster their campaigns, the Republicans and Democrats are on the same page.

Both are eager to gobble up the gazillions of dollars available through the PACs, thoroughly undermining the spirit and practice of democracy, in which the majority, not the super-rich minority, are supposed to win.

The best way for us to shake up the political establishment, and the billionaires and big corporations who control it, is to fight for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.

Here’s our version of such an amendment, written in language that’s easy to understand and will withstand any legal challenge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Citizens United / Martin Column / President Barack Obama - 03/23/2012

Bipartisanship for dummies

Ever notice how all the dysfunctional wrangling in D.C. stops the minute our politicians need to do the 1 percent’s bidding?

When it comes to taking away your rights as an investor, consumer or citizen, politicians who can’t seem to agree on anything else seem to work together fine.

The latest proof that “bipartisanship” is a cynical gimmick is the so-called JOBS act, passed by the House with bipartisan support and now under consideration by the Senate, with the blessing of President Obama.

In this case, the bill’s original Republican sponsors came up with the idea of packaging a collection of measures that would weaken investor and consumer protections by the acronym JOBS, which stands for Jumpstart Our Business Startups.

After all, who could be against JOBS? Most Democrats in the House were happy to sign on – only 23 voted against it. Even Democratic representatives Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters voted for it.

Maybe these politicians thought the JOBS branding and the bipartisan marketing would conceal what the bill really was – the latest of several disastrous bills dismantling sensible financial regulation.

The JOBS act is the ugly stepchild of the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Billey Act repealing the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which kept banks from mingling federally-guaranteed banking activities from riskier activities, and the 2000 Commodities Futures Modernization Act, a Frankenstein bill that kept credit default swaps deregulated and led to the Enron scandal in 2001.

Both pieces of legislation contributed directly to the 2008 financial collapse.

In the case of the JOBS act, it would gut many of the accounting reforms contained in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was passed in the wake of the Enron debacle. The JOBS act would exempt emerging companies worth up to $1 billion from disclosure, reporting and governance rules. It would allow such companies to operate for 5 years without regulatory oversight.

John Coffee, securities law professor at Columbia University Law School, says it could be more accurately described as the “boiler room legalization act” because it would allow companies to raise money from small investors on the Internet, without any regulatory supervision, evoking the small operations that sold dubious investments over the phone using high-pressure tactics.

Arthur Levitt, former head of the SEC, told San Francisco Chronicle columnist Kathleen Pender the bill was “a disgrace.”

In a scathingly sarcastic column in the New York Times, Pro Publica’s Jessie Eisenger wrote: “Nigeria shouldn’t be the only country to benefit from the Web. Right here in America, the elderly are increasingly attractive to a variety of entrepreneurial spirits. If JOBS becomes the law, such innovators could flourish.”

Barbara Roper, the Consumer Federation of America’s director of investment protection suggested that “Republicans cannot believe they have suckered the Democrats into taking up their idea that deregulation is the way to promote job growth.”

I don’t think the Democrats got suckered. I think they know exactly what they’re doing. President Obama has been struggling in his fundraising because Wall Street and the big-money donors have lost their enthusiasm for him this electoral cycle.

But he’s showing signs of bouncing back, after his campaign manager, Jim Messina, issued a pledge that the president would stop demonizing Wall Street. In February, the president went on a fundraising blitz, raising $45 million, up from $29 million the previous month.

But it’s still far less than the $56 million he raised during the same month in 2008, when he was fighting Hilary Clinton in a bruising primary campaign. The president and his party have to deliver for their funders, and the JOBS act is a perfect gift to show the big donors what they can expect for their generosity.

But they all must take us for a bunch of clods if they think we can’t tell the difference between a nasty attack on our rights and real jobs promotion.

Call your senator today and remind them you can’t be fooled by an acronym.  Suggest you know how to spell jobs, and this awful piece of legislation doesn’t.

 

Congress / Derivatives / Jobs crisis / Martin Column / President Barack Obama - 03/20/2012

Muppets v. Goldman

It’s been a rough couple of months for the Muppets. First Fox News anchor Eric Bolling denounces their new movie as dangerous left-wing propaganda because it portrays a villainous oil company executive.

Then Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith quits his job and discloses in a scathing hatchet job of the firm’s culture that his fellow bailed-out bankers refer to their clients in a derogatory way as Muppets.

And what do they mean by that?

Hmmm. Maybe they think Muppets are puppets that are manipulated by their handlers. Maybe Goldman Sachs bankers imagine us to be lifeless sacks of cloth and yarn without spirit and voice, but we’re not.

And no self-respecting Muppet would put up with the shenanigans of Goldman Sachs (though I suppose their corporate owners, the Walt Disney Co., might).

The Muppets have always had a strong populist streak – they articulate sharp critiques of the Greed-is-Good Wall Street culture that Goldman appears proud to embody.

Check out the song “Money,” co-written by comedian Stan Freberg and Ruby Raskin. Performed by Dr. Teeth, it ridicules the rampant desire for more, more, more money at the expense of everything and everyone else.

At the end of the song, Dr. Teeth yanks a slot-machine handle on the side of his piano – which pays off.

If you have any doubt about whether the Muppets would side with the 1 percent or the 99 percent, check out their version of a “A Christmas Carol.”

In his farewell exposé—beyond his Muppet revelation— Smith merely confirms what we’ve already known: Goldman Sachs and the other powerful too-big-fail institutions believe they can get away with screwing their clients by protecting themselves with high-level political clout, bought with political contributions and cemented with interlocking relationships between the government and the firms.

As Robert Scheer points out, it was just a day before Smith unloaded on Goldman that a former top aide to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Jake Siewert, became the managing director and global head of Goldman’s corporate communications. Siewert is just the latest of a long line of public officials to cash in at the big banks.

How perfect that a high-level member of the Obama administration, which has chosen to align itself with the interests of the big banks time and time again, will now be the one to design Goldman’s defense against the bad publicity stemming from Smith’s oped.

Scheer, along with Matt Taibbi—another astute reporter/commentator on the financial collapse and its aftermath—are full of praise for Smith’s stepping out so publicly.

For myself, I wish that Smith had been willing to step up and connect Goldman’s policies to the financial collapse, not to mention the role Goldman has continued to play in rigging our political system to escape the consequences of its devastating greed and fraud.

That may be too much to ask of somebody on his first day out of the protective Goldman bubble. Make no mistake, it’s not just clients the firm has manipulated for its own gain.

Goldman and the other to-big-to-fail banks have turned us all into puppets, holding over our heads the specter of fear, and pulling the strings to secure a hefty back-door bailout for themselves.

As for the Muppets, I’m sure they’ll weather their current troubles with aplomb. Hopefully their creators are busy at work on a scheme for revenge.

I’ve never seen a Muppet either shut up or stand still while someone ties her hands behind her back. It’s the rest of us I’m worried about.

Goldman-Sachs / Martin Column / Too Big To Fail - 03/17/2012