Analysis: Filibuster adds to cynicism about Senate

Analysis: Filibuster adds to cynicism about Senate
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That's why filibuster tactics, once rare, have become so regular that the crucial number in getting anything enacted is not a 51-vote Senate majority. It is 60, the votes it takes to end debate and force action.

Long delays are the rule, not the exception. So are the kind of deals Sen. Harry Reid, the majority leader, made to line up the votes he needed to get the health care overhaul passed. He said the dealmaking was no more than the legislative process at work, calling it compromise and suggesting that most senators probably had some provision tucked into the measure to serve state interests back home.
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In 1975, the rules were changed to make it easier to end filibusters, with 60 votes instead of 67.

Enter the rule of unintended consequences. Making it easier to stop filibusters also made it easier to conduct them, or threaten to. That's almost automatic. One Republican or another has done it more than 100 times this year. Democratic leaders have filed 67 cloture motions, and there have been 39 votes to end debate, 35 successful.

In the last Congress there were 112 Senate cloture votes, far and away the record as the Democratic majority tried to fend off Republican delaying tactics. Democrats know the system; they used it themselves when they were outnumbered. But Republicans have made more of it since they lost control in 2007.

There will be more filibuster ploys on health care and, once that is settled, on issues such as climate control and finance industry regulation.

Where will it end? Probably, it won't.

Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa has suggested a system in which the 60-vote cloture requirement be reduced gradually to a 51-vote simple majority after successive votes on ending debate. But the complexity of getting anything like that done is evident in the name of his co-sponsor when he first proposed it 15 years ago - Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who said then that filibusters were a symbol of what ailed Washington. ...

Who's running the TSA? No one, thanks to Sen. Jim DeMint | McClatchy

Who's running the TSA? No one, thanks to Sen. Jim DeMint | McClatchy: "By Margaret Talev | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — An attempt to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day would be all-consuming for the administrator of the Transportation Security Administration — if there were one.

The post remains vacant because Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., has held up President Barack Obama's nominee in opposition to the prospect of TSA workers joining a labor union.

As al Qaida claimed responsibility Monday for the thwarted attack and President Barack Obama made a public statement about it, Democrats urged DeMint to drop his objection and allow quick confirmation of nominee Erroll Southers, a counterterrorism expert, when the Senate reconvenes in three weeks."

Scholars and Rogues � $45 billion: a sour-tasting decade of out-of-control political spending

Scholars and Rogues � $45 billion: a sour-tasting decade of out-of-control political spending

Add up every nickel and dime recorded by the Federal Election Commission and state election commissions in this decade now ending. Result: Americans have given more than $24.2 billion in campaign contributions to federal and state incumbents and challengers.

Contributions to all federal candidates for House and Senate seats and the presidency from the 2000 through 2010 election cycles totaled $9.7 billion, according to an S&R analysis of records aggregated by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Contributions to candidates and committees in all 50 states, from 2000 through 2009, totaled about$14.5 billion, according to records aggregated by the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

In this decade, thanks to computerization of records and a few top-notch, non-partisan organizations, we’ve learned how to follow the money. Well, so what? Has vastly increased public visibility of political money changed the way politics operates?

The $24.2 billion spent on campaign contributions is only part of the story. Over the past decade, $23 billion has been spent by corporations, labor unions, and other special-interest entities to lobby Congress and federal agencies, according to records aggregated by the center.

More than $45 billion has been spent in the decade now ending to influence legislation and regulation at state and federal levels of government. It’s only conjecture, of course, but it’s hardly likely that the bulk of those billions of dollars was intended to improve the lot of the 99 percent of adult Americans who did not make campaign contributions or made gifts of less than $200.

Where did the $24.2 billion in campaign donations come from? Only a tiny fraction, generally in the tenths of 1 percent, of Americans over age 18 make campaign contributions of more than $200. Those who give more than $1,000 are even fewer — but the amounts given by those latter donors total significantly higher.

The bulk of the decade’s nearly $10 billion in donations to federal candidates came from special interests and individuals associated with specific special interests who gave $200 or more. According to the center, the top special-interest givers in the election cycles in this decade, generally in this order, were

the finance, insurance and real-estate industries; lawyers and lobbyists; miscellaneous business; ideological and single-issue donors; the health industries; communications and electronics; labor; agribusiness; energy and natural-resource interests; transportation; and the defense industry.

Corporations and individuals associated with these special interests donated more than $8 billion this decade to federal candidates. And the leader in campaign largesse for the decade and in each election cycle, at $1.62 billion, or more than 16 percent of all campaign contributions to federal candidates? The winner, by a wide margin, are the finance, insurance and real-estate industries.

The number of lobbyists has increased from 10,641 in 2000 to 13,426 this year. Now, that’s the number of people who have legally registered as lobbyists. There are plenty of revolving-door people (those who have left the Hill or the executive branch to become lobbyists and vice versa) who are not registered as lobbyists but are as influential. Consider the example of former Sen. Tom Daschle, who claims he’s a “resource” for his health-care industry clients and not a lobbyist.

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Over the decade, corrupt politicians have been imprisoned for a variety of crimes. Convicted of crimes such as fraud and bribery, they were selfish and for sale. What they did was illegal.

But what remains unabated in the American political system is legalized corruption. The heightened ability to track political money does nothing to prevent the dramatic increase in legal campaign giving and the host of ethical and moral conflicts that so much money places in front of incumbents, challengers, and regulators.

We’ve seen the amounts of money spent to legally attain and maintain political power grow to such amounts that billionaires now spend tens of millions of dollars to finance their own campaigns. Modern elections trivialize issues and maximize dependence on name recognition. That costs money, which forecloses the possibility that better-qualified candidates who are not as wealthy can prosper at the ballot box.

We’ve seen how those with money to spend and an agenda to enact gain access to the levers of power, as did players in the health-care reform debate behind closed doors in the Obama White House.

Consider the consolidation of media, its threat to competitiveness, its anti-trust implications, and its potential to maintain unreasonably high consumer prices for news and entertainment. When Comcast announced its intended $30 billion purchase of NBC Universal from General Electric, its lobbyists flooded the Hill. Through September of this year, Comcast has spent $9.1 million on lobbying. The Federal Communications Commission must approve the sale.

Comcast’s 20-member D.C. lobbying team, reports Politico’s Kenneth P. Vogel, includes “former aides to Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), former Senate Majority Leader and Obama confidant Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and Democratic Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps.” (Oh, look: There’s “confidant” Daschle acting as a “resource” again, “aides” notwithstanding …)

Continual increases in media consolidation by conglomerates reduce the likelihood that Americans’ monthly bills for cable, Internet, satellite, and telephone services will decrease. ...

After health care, we need Senate reform - washingtonpost.com

After health care, we need Senate reform - washingtonpost.com

On Dec. 8, 1964, Mike Manatos wrote a letter that explains what's wrong with the Senate in 2009. This wasn't, of course, the subject of his letter. Manatos was no futurist; he was Lyndon Johnson's liaison to the Senate, and he was writing to update his bosses on Medicare's chances in the aftermath of the 1964 election. Surveying the incoming crop of senators, Manatos counted a solid majority in favor of the president's effort. "If all our supporters are present and voting we would win by a vote of 55 to 45," he predicted.

That letter would never be written now. In today's Senate, 55 votes isn't enough to "win," or anything close to it; it's enough to get you five votes away from the 60 votes you need to shut down a filibuster. Only then, in most cases, can a law be passed. The modern Senate is a radically different institution than the Senate of the 1960s, and the dysfunction exhibited in its debate over health care -- the absence of bipartisanship, the use of the filibuster to obstruct progress rather than protect debate, the ability of any given senator to hold the bill hostage to his or her demands -- has convinced many, both inside and outside the chamber, that it needs to be fixed.

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To understand why the modern legislative process is so bad, why every Senator seems able to demand a king's ransom in return for his or her vote and no bill ever seems to be truly bipartisan, you need to understand one basic fact: ...

... in the 1990s, Newt Gingrich, then the minority whip of the House, and Bob Dole, then the minority leader of the Senate, realized they did have both. A strategy of relentless obstruction brought then-president Bill Clinton to his knees, as the minority party discovered it had the tools to make the majority party fail.

Unfortunately, both parties have followed Gingrich's playbook ever since. According to UCLA political scientist Barbara Sinclair, about 8 percent of major bills faced a filibuster in the 1960s. This decade, that jumped to 70 percent. The problem with the minority party continually making the majority party fail, of course, is that it means neither party can ever successfully govern the country.

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But members of both parties have become attached to this idea that they can block objectionable legislation even when they're relatively powerless. This is evidence, perhaps, that both parties are so used to the victories of obstruction that they have forgotten their purpose is to amass victories through governance. Either way, a world in which the majority can pass its agenda is a better one, a place where the majority party is held accountable for its ideas and not for the gridlock and inaction furnished by the Senate's rules.

Law professor Lawrence Lessig often compares the dysfunctions of the Congress to the woes of an alcoholic. An alcoholic, he says, might be facing cirrhosis of the liver, the loss of his family and terrible debt. Amidst all that, the fact that he drinks before bed at night might not seem his worst problem. But it is the first problem, the one that must be solved before he can solve any of the others. America, too, is facing more dramatic problems than the Senate rules: A coming budget crisis, catastrophic climate change and an archaic and inefficient tax system, to name a few. But none will be solved until we fix the dysfunctions of the Senate.

Daily Kos: "Corporatism"

Daily Kos: "Corporatism"
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Without sounding too dramatic, I believe that the survival of the Democratic Party depends largely on whether or not the base agrees or disagrees with the following statement:

Whether you call it "a government takeover of the private sector" or a "private sector takeover of government," it's the same thing: a merger of government power and corporate interests which benefits both of the merged entities (the party in power and the corporations) at everyone else's expense. Growing anger over that is rooted far more in an insider/outsider dichotomy over who controls Washington than it is in the standard conservative/liberal ideological splits from the 1990s.

This quote is from a recent post by Glen Greenwald, and it makes the case, in so many words, that concern for "corporatism" has fundamentally changed the political landscape in this country--forever.

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There is no left vs. right. There is only inside vs. outside.

Alliance Based on a Moment of Consciousness
Now, buried within Greenwald's argument are a series of other claims that are difficult to present for the simple reason that they offer judgment about key aspects of the Democratic Party, including the netroots.

So before I present them, I just want to make clear that unless these claims are understood and evaluated, it is impossible to avoid the total collapse of the Democratic Party--that may seem dramatic, but I believe it's true. Therefore: Try not to feel judged by these claims--instead focus on evaluating whether they are true or false.

Implicit Claim 1: Most Supporters of the Democratic Party are living in a state of false consciousness
Because most supporters of the Democratic Party see the political landscape in terms of left vs. right, which is the model produced by and for the benefit of corporations and the ruling party, ergo, most supporters ofthe Democratic Party are currently living in a state of false consciousness. This means that most supporters are arguing, campaigning, donating, and otherwise working for a party that directly runs counter to their personal and collective interests.

Implicit Claim 2: The Only People With Consciousness are those who See the Battle Against "Corporatism" as the True Political Landscape
According to Greenwald's logic, those who no longer see the political landscape in terms of left vs. right, but not see it in terms of insider vs. outsider--they are the only people who are truly awake or conscious, meaning: they see reality for what it is, not for what the corporations and the ruling party want them to see. Right now, these people include so-called "right-wing" (obsolete term) Tea Bag Party adherents who fought against the bailouts and are now fighting against the current health care bill, and so-called "left-wing" (obsolete term) bloggers and activists who fought against the bailouts and lobbyists and are now fighting against the Senate health care bill. These groups are conscious, whereas other groups are not, because they reject the left vs. right political fighting as a distraction, and focus instead on the inside vs. outside fight.

Implicit Claim 3:Those Fighting Against "Corporatists" are Fighting against Fundamental Negative Change, Those Fighting To Uphold the Parties are Fighting to Put in Place Fundamental Negative Change
This is a difficult claim to summarize neatly, but the logic is this: given the split between those who are awake and those who are not, it follows that those who are not awake are advancing--with their advocacy, blogging, donations, volunteering, etc.--the "corporatist" agenda. In other words, the "corporatist" agenda is being advanced by those who are doing it consciously (larger corporations, ruling party elites) and by those who are doing it unwittingly through their support for what they believe to be the correct side in the left vs. right split. Those who unwittingly support "corporatism" will continue to do so until they wake up or gain consciousness about the true nature of the political landscape.

Implicit Claim 4: Political Activism No Longer About Support for Party, Is Now About Raising Consciousness RE: "Corporatism:
This last claim follows on from the first three, is also implicit, and is the most sweeping of all. In essence, if we follow Greenwald's argument to it's logical conclusion, our political orientation extends beyond critique of the Senate health care bill--beyond critique of the TARP bailout or the Fannie Mae funds or the Afghanistan Policy--to a unifying critique of "corporatism." By seeing the truth in the corporatist argument we are pushing towards a broad recalibration of political understanding of the world--a geological shift away from seeing the surface of things, towards seeing what is really real underneath the surface. In that new fight, the battle over party candidates, media pundits, cabinet positions--all of that is trivial, compared to the truth that lies beneath it all: that if corporatism is allowed to entrench itself, the fundamental nature of American society will change, citizenship as we understand it will be a farce, and democracy will be little more than a fiction produced by the ruling party marketing arm and private corporations.
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The reality of the world we live in is extremely messy. That means that we must chart a path that banks short-term gains and long term gains.

Millions gaining access to community care via the Sanders amendment--is a short term gain. It will directly improve millions of lives right away.

Millions being able to cut health care costs due to access to health insurance---however bad those policies may be objectively--is better than millions not being able to cut those costs in half without any health insurance. That will improve lives right away.

Millions being forced to purchase health insurance from the very companies that have terrorized them for decades with a sinister system of coverage denial bureaucracies--that is a terrible step to take that will effectively force middle class people down the economic ladder like people trapped in an elevator that suddenly drops ten floors. The cruelty of telling people who are already being abused by the system that they are now required by law to be abused by the system--is unethical.

The difficulty is that neither the current political organization nor the current economic concepts in the debate are anywhere close to developed enough to offer a viable alternative. Even with the existence of the elegantly effective "single payer" idea, there is no equivalently effective model of political organization to achieve it. And so we are stuck with messy. ...

Arianna Huffington: The Senate Health Care Bill: Leave No Special Interest Behind

Arianna Huffington: The Senate Health Care Bill: Leave No Special Interest Behind
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This typifies the current thinking of the "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" crowd. Unfortunately, there are three faulty premises at work in this line of reasoning. First, that those who oppose the bill do so because it's not perfect (as opposed to because it's a hot health care mess). Second, that the bill is, well, good (as opposed to a total victory for Pharma and the insurance industry -- witness the spectacular spike in health care stocks following Monday's vote).

Third is the premise that this is as good a bill as we can get right now, and we can always go back and improve it later.

It doesn't work that way. We heard the same kinds of sentiments about No Child Left Behind when it passed in 2001. Backers on both sides of the aisle had problems with it, but both sides celebrated it as a major step forward -- and promised to make it better in the future.

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If the miserable Senate health care bill becomes the law of the land, it's only going to encourage the preservation of a hideously broken system. Just how broken the system is is summed up in the fate of Byron Dorgan's drug re-importation amendment.

This is an idea that Obama co-sponsored when he was in the Senate and unequivocally championed on the campaign trail: "We'll allow the safe re-importation of low-cost drugs from countries like Canada."

But when Dorgan introduced an amendment that would do just that, the White House, sticking to the deal it made with the pharmaceutical industry, lobbied against it -- and the commissioner of the supposedly non-political FDA just happened to release a letter citing "significant safety concerns" about all those dangerous drugs from Canada. Big Pharma's many congressional lackeys trumpeted the letter and the amendment was killed.

But that didn't stop David Axelrod from insisting in an interview with John King this weekend that "the president supports safe re-importation of drugs into this country. There's no reason why Americans should pay a premium for the pharmaceuticals that people in other countries pay less for."

No reason other than our broken system surrendering to the special interests.

From start to finish, the insurance and drug industries -- and their army of lobbyists -- had control over the process that resulted in a bill that is reform in name only. The postmortems of how they pulled it off have already begun. On Sunday, the Chicago Tribune published an exhaustive front-page analysis by Northwestern University's Medill News Service and the Center for Responsive Politics of how it was done. The main culprit: "a revolving door between Capitol Hill staffers and lobbying jobs for companies with a stake in health care legislation."

The study found that 13 former congressmen and 166 Congressional staffers were actively engaged in lobbying their former colleagues on the bill. The companies they were working for -- some 338 of them -- spent $635 million on lobbying. It was money extremely well spent -- delivering a bill that, by forcing people to buy a shoddy product in a market with no real competition, enshrines into law the public subsidy of private profit.

As we approach the end of Obama's first year in office, this public subsidizing of private profit is becoming something of a habit. It is, after all, exactly what the White House did with the banks. Just as he did with insurance companies, Obama talked tough to the bankers in public but, when push came to shove, he ended up shoving public money onto their privately-held balance sheets.

This is not just bad policy, it's bad politics.

Sharp-eyed opponents are already seizing on the opportunity to rebrand Obama and the Democrats as the party beholden to special interests. ...

Op-Ed Columnist - A Dangerous Dysfunction - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Columnist - A Dangerous Dysfunction - NYTimes.com

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It was, however, a close-run thing. And the fact that it was such a close thing shows that the Senate — and, therefore, the U.S. government as a whole — has become ominously dysfunctional.

After all, Democrats won big last year, running on a platform that put health reform front and center. In any other advanced democracy this would have given them the mandate and the ability to make major changes. But the need for 60 votes to cut off Senate debate and end a filibuster — a requirement that appears nowhere in the Constitution, but is simply a self-imposed rule — turned what should have been a straightforward piece of legislating into a nail-biter. And it gave a handful of wavering senators extraordinary power to shape the bill.

Now consider what lies ahead. We need fundamental financial reform. We need to deal with climate change. We need to deal with our long-run budget deficit. What are the chances that we can do all that — or, I’m tempted to say, any of it — if doing anything requires 60 votes in a deeply polarized Senate?

Some people will say that it has always been this way, and that we’ve managed so far. But it wasn’t always like this. Yes, there were filibusters in the past — most notably by segregationists trying to block civil rights legislation. But the modern system, in which the minority party uses the threat of a filibuster to block every bill it doesn’t like, is a recent creation.

The political scientist Barbara Sinclair has done the math. In the 1960s, she finds, “extended-debate-related problems” — threatened or actual filibusters — affected only 8 percent of major legislation. By the 1980s, that had risen to 27 percent. But after Democrats retook control of Congress in 2006 and Republicans found themselves in the minority, it soared to 70 percent.

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So now that hard choices must be made, how can we reform the Senate to make such choices possible?

Back in the mid-1990s two senators — Tom Harkin and, believe it or not, Joe Lieberman — introduced a bill to reform Senate procedures. (Management wants me to make it clear that in my last column I wasn’t endorsing inappropriate threats against Mr. Lieberman.) Sixty votes would still be needed to end a filibuster at the beginning of debate, but if that vote failed, another vote could be held a couple of days later requiring only 57 senators, then another, and eventually a simple majority could end debate. Mr. Harkin says that he’s considering reintroducing that proposal, and he should.

But if such legislation is itself blocked by a filibuster — which it almost surely would be — reformers should turn to other options. Remember, the Constitution sets up the Senate as a body with majority — not supermajority — rule. So the rule of 60 can be changed. A Congressional Research Service report from 2005, when a Republican majority was threatening to abolish the filibuster so it could push through Bush judicial nominees, suggests several ways this could happen — for example, through a majority vote changing Senate rules on the first day of a new session.

Nobody should meddle lightly with long-established parliamentary procedure. But our current situation is unprecedented: America is caught between severe problems that must be addressed and a minority party determined to block action on every front. Doing nothing is not an option — not unless you want the nation to sit motionless, with an effectively paralyzed government, waiting for financial, environmental and fiscal crises to strike.

Poll: U.S. too politically divided - Andy Barr - POLITICO.com

Poll: U.S. too politically divided - Andy Barr - POLITICO.com

Three out of four Americans fear that their country has become too politically divided, according to a new poll released Tuesday by Hart Research and Public Opinion Strategies.

The poll, conducted for USA Network, shows that Americans are very concerned that the country is growing too divided along political, economic and racial lines.

Seventy-five percent of those polled said the country is too divided by politics, while 73 percent said economic lines separate too many Americans. Additionally, 53 percent said the country is too divided along “racial and ethnic lines” and 52 percent said the same about religion.

The numbers were especially dramatic among African-Americans, 82 percent of which said the country is too divided economically and 65 percent who believe the same about race and ethnicity.

Concerns about a divided country may be reflected in the high percentage who said they were worried by levels of prejudice and discrimination.

Fifty-one percent of those surveyed said they believe “the amount of prejudice, discrimination and intolerance” is either a “very” or “somewhat” serious problem.

Only 5 percent of respondents said that race relations are “no longer a problem in the United States,” while 30 percent said they still remain a problem and that “we have a long way to go.” Sixty-five percent believe race relations are still a problem, but that the country has “come a long way.” ...

Matthew Filipowicz: Obama Quits, Cedes Presidency to Lieberman

Matthew Filipowicz: Obama Quits, Cedes Presidency to Lieberman

You might think that Joe Lieberman is happy. And he is.

With his threats of a filibuster, he successfully got Harry Reid and Barack Obama to remove the public option and Medicare buy-in from the Senate health care bill.

But, as you will see in this exclusive video, those are not the only capitulations that Joe is happy about. Take a look. ...

Time for change's Journal - Extravagant CEO Salaries and Ballooning Income Inequality in the U.S.

Time for change's Journal - Extravagant CEO Salaries and Ballooning Income Inequality in the U.S.
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Inside of Gabriel Thompson’s article is a graph titled “Plutocracy Reborn – Re-creating the Gap that Gave us the Great Depression”. Here it is:



This chart plots income inequality, measured as the ratio between the average income of the top 0.01% of U.S. families, compared to the bottom 90% (that would be most of us at DU). Note that preceding the great stock market crash of 1929, which plunged us into depression, the ratio rose from about 250 at the start of the 1920s to a peak of about 900 by 1929. The ratio then plunged, and by the start of WW II it had declined to about 200, where it remained with some relatively minor ups and downs until the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s Presidency. It then began another precipitous climb, with a sharp decline beginning during the last year of Clinton’s Presidency, but then another sharp increase beginning at about the time that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy first went into effect, so that by the end of 2006 we’ve exceeded even the peak ratio of 1929 that preceded the Great Depression. The three green bars in the chart represent the stock market crash of 1929, the last pre-Reagan year, and two years preceding our current recession/depression.


Poverty

Consider the graph on page 11 of the U.S. Census Bureau publication, “Income Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2006”. That graph shows that beginning with President Lyndon Johnson’s much maligned “War on Poverty” in the early ‘60s, poverty in the United States declined precipitously, from about 22% to 12%, before leveling off beginning around 1970. Then, with the onset of the “Reagan Revolution” starting in 1981, poverty began to rise again, reaching a maximum of about 15% twelve years later, just prior to the Clinton Presidency. The poverty rate then began a slow steady decline, to about 11% by the end of Clinton’s presidency, followed by another rise with the onset of the Bush II administration, to 12.3% by mid-year 2006. It then climbed to 12.5% in 2007 and 13.2% in 2008. However, that is not the end of the story, by any means. The current recession/depression will in all likelihood (and it’s probably already started) send another 5-10 million Americans into poverty, thus raising the poverty rate in our country another 1-4%.

These statistics are no accident. They are the result of federal legislation and policies meant either to help the poor or to help the wealthy. President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” reduced poverty substantially in our country. The only rises in poverty rate we’ve seen in our country since FDR’s New Deal (which decreased poverty) began with the Reagan and Bush II administrations, which are the only two presidential administrations since that time to substantially lower the top marginal tax rate, along with other fiscal policies that favor the wealthy at the expense of the poor and the working and middle class. ...

Poll: U.S. too politically divided - Andy Barr - POLITICO.com

Poll: U.S. too politically divided - Andy Barr - POLITICO.com
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Three out of four Americans fear that their country has become too politically divided, according to a new poll released Tuesday by Hart Research and Public Opinion Strategies.

The poll, conducted for USA Network, shows that Americans are very concerned that the country is growing too divided along political, economic and racial lines.

Seventy-five percent of those polled said the country is too divided by politics, while 73 percent said economic lines separate too many Americans. Additionally, 53 percent said the country is too divided along “racial and ethnic lines” and 52 percent said the same about religion.

The numbers were especially dramatic among African-Americans, 82 percent of which said the country is too divided economically and 65 percent who believe the same about race and ethnicity.

Concerns about a divided country may be reflected in the high percentage who said they were worried by levels of prejudice and discrimination.

Fifty-one percent of those surveyed said they believe “the amount of prejudice, discrimination and intolerance” is either a “very” or “somewhat” serious problem. ...

[Phony democracy. ed.] GOP erupts over Reid slavery, segregation remarks - Glenn Thrush - POLITICO.com

GOP erupts over Reid slavery, segregation remarks - Glenn Thrush - POLITICO.com
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Speaking on the floor of the Senate, Reid blasted GOP leaders who have urged Democrats opt for a slower, incremental approach to reform instead of the mega-bill the majority hopes to push through the Senate by Christmas

Reid started by mimicking Republicans whom he claims have said: "'Slow down, stop everything, let's start over."

"You think you've heard these same excuses before? You're right," he continued. "In this country...there were those who dug in their heels and said, 'Slow down, it's too early. Let's wait. Things aren't bad enough' " - about slavery.

When women wanted to vote, he went on, opponents said, " 'Slow down, there will be a better day to do that -- the day isn't quite right.' "

He finished with: "When this body was on the verge of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone, regardless of the color of their skin, some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats that we hear today."

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Reaction was swift. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, who is black, questioned Reid's state of mind -- and demanded an apology.

“Harry Reid is under immense pressure to pass this 2,000 page experiment on our nation’s health – an experiment that creates a new $1 trillion dollar federal entitlement program by cutting $500 billion from Medicare, all at a time when our country is in miserable debt and facing an extreme job crisis. The pressure has apparently led Senator Reid not only to make offensive and absurd statements, but also to lose his ability to reason... Having made this disgraceful statement on the floor of the United States Senate, Mr. Reid should immediately apologize on the Senate floor to his colleagues, to his constituents, and to the American people. If he is going to stand by these statements, the Democrats must immediately reconsider his fitness to lead them.”

Senate Republicans were also furious, reported POLITICO's Meredith Shiner, who went to their Q-and-A Monday.

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Reid's aides weren't apologizing -- referring to the GOP's "feigned outrage" and a "ploy" to distract voters from the lack of Republican alternative.

"It is hard to believe Senate Republicans are making these charges with a straight face," said Reid spokesman Jim Manley. "For the past eight days they¹ve done nothing but obstruct health care on the Senate floor and throughout this year have played politics with this and virtually every other issue of importance to the American people.

Did Reid go too far?

It's an old debate - 40 years old, to be precise.

Martin Luther King drew similar criticism - equating social reform with racial justice - when he tried to expand the civil rights movement into a broader call for economic justice during his Poor Peoples Campaign and his final trip to Memphis in support of the sanitation strike.

Reid, of course, doesn't have a monopoly on harsh pronouncements.

On Sunday, NRSC Chairman John Cornyn (R-Texas) invoked Stalin-era Soviet prison to describe Reid's reform plan on Fox News. "It will limit people's choices to, in many cases, to a government-run program like Medicaid which is essentially a health care gulag, because people will not have any choices but to take that poorly performing government plan," he said. ...

The only thing worse than the tyranny of the majority is a tyranny of the minority.

Mark Green: Filibuster Illogic: Why Allow 10% to Veto 90%? - Politics - Air America
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As the Senate begins its historic floor debate on health care this week, let's glance at history.

To reach unanimity at the Constitutional Convention, the 1787 “Connecticut Compromise” created a House of Representatives allocating seats by population (favoring big states) and a Senate allocating seats by state (favoring small states). That was one thing when states were somewhat similar in populations, not now when California is 68 times the size of Wyoming. So today each California senator represents 68 times the number of people as a Wyoming senator. Or 10 times that of each Connecticut senator.

At the same time, the filibuster is nowhere in the Constitution and is merely a rule of the Senate. To end debate and allow a majority vote on a bill used to require 67 votes, which changed to 60 votes in 1975. But this rule violates at least the spirit of the Constitution which specifies those very few instances – treaties, impeachment, among others – that alone require a two-thirds super-majority vote. And it used to be invoked sparingly in less partisan times – an average of once a year in the 1950s but 139 times by Republicans in 2008.

The result? Only 10% of Americans living in 20 small states have nearly the votes needed to continue a filibuster and kill any essential health care reform – or any policy reform for that matter. 10% can in effect veto 90%, something the Founders never desired or expected.

It gets worse than that.

The campaign finance system (notwithstanding 1974 post-Watergate reforms and the McCain-Feingold soft money restrictions) still allows special interest money to flow to special friends in the Congress– like the insurance industry’s affection for Lieberman – to make sure that such members throw monkey wrenches into the legislative process on big ticket items as health care.

...

The problem is not the hollowness of his arguments but the political fact that he has the power to sink the Public Option or other popular reforms because of an Achilles heel in our system – two of them really. The only thing worse than the tyranny of the majority is a tyranny of the minority.

...

Since there's no possibility that small states will ever agree to a constitutional amendment to weaken their power in the U.S. Senate, what options exist for Majority Leader Harry Reid on the health care bill in particular or in the Senate generally?

• *Campaign Finance Reform? One is radical campaign finance reform so that big corporate interests don’t compound the problem of the filibuster. Unfortunately it appears that, if anything, America is headed in the opposite direction given the imminent Supreme Court decision in Citizen’s United, which I will discuss in a separate blog post next week.
• *Reconciliation? Second, if health care fails this go-around with “only” 58 or 59 votes, Reid should consider using the so-called Reconciliation route next year which allows budget bills to be enacted by simply majority vote. This would eventually require the Senate Parlimentarian to rule on what parts of the current health care bill qualify as in effect budget bills. That would be legislatively problematic but still possible.
• *55 not 60? Third, by agreement between the Senate leader and the vice president sitting as presiding officer, the Senate at the start of the next session in January, 2011 could reduce the number required to cut off debate (“vote cloture”) from 60 to 55, which would be the difference between minority rule and minority rights.

Republican critics will loudly complain that Reconciliation would violate Senate tradition and reforming the filibuster would be a “nuclear option” risking a breakdown in Senate business. But isn't their recent incessant use of the filibuster an undemocratic violation of tradition and a slow-motion nuclear option that, in effect, vetoes the results of the '06 and '08 two elections? If 67 votes for cloture could shrink to 60, why not to 55? And speaking of tradition, what was wrong with an era that, when Senators say they want to keep debating, they would have to keep debating, like the filibuster of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington?

sharp decline in enforcement of a section of the Voting Rights Act that prohibits electoral rules with discriminatory effects

Report Examines Civil Rights Enforcement During Bush Years - NYTimes.com
...

The 180-page report, obtained by The New York Times, is densely packed with statistics about civil rights enforcement by the division’s sections. The accountability office also examined a sampling of matters that were closed without further action, finding several cases — including the curtailed voter intimidation inquiry — in which supervisors rejected the recommendations of career lawyers to go forward.

The report represents a comprehensive review of the division’s litigation activity in the Bush administration. When compared with the Clinton administration, its findings show a significant drop in the enforcement of several major antidiscrimination and voting rights laws. For example, lawsuits brought by the division to enforce laws prohibiting race or sex discrimination in employment fell from about 11 per year under President Bill Clinton to about 6 per year under President George W. Bush.

The study also found a sharp decline in enforcement of a section of the Voting Rights Act that prohibits electoral rules with discriminatory effects, from more than four cases a year under Mr. Clinton to fewer than two cases a year under Mr. Bush.

Joseph Rich, a civil rights lawyer who has been invited by Democrats to testify and was among those given an early copy of the report, said it provided hard data that the division was politicized in the Bush years.

...

Democrats and civil rights groups said the Republicans were seeking to distract from the new evidence. During the Bush years, such criticism was based on anecdotes and incomplete data. But a report released in January by the department’s inspector general, citing internal e-mail and personnel files, confirmed that political appointees sought to hire conservatives and block liberals for career positions, contrary to civil service laws.

Similarly, the new Government Accountability Office report presents comprehensive data that demonstrates a fall-off in certain kinds of civil rights enforcement during the Bush years.

The office also found that case files often had no information explaining why supervisors had decided to close cases, sometimes against the recommendation of career officials. In a companion report, it also found that six years of internal audits about the division’s case-tracking system were missing.

In a prepared opening statement, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, Thomas E. Perez, said the reports about hiring and enforcement activity “underscore the point that the division, in recent years, was not doing all that it could to fulfill our responsibility to enforce all the civil rights laws fairly and aggressively.” ...

Report Examines Civil Rights Enforcement During Bush Years - NYTimes.com

Report Examines Civil Rights Enforcement During Bush Years - NYTimes.com
...

The 180-page report, obtained by The New York Times, is densely packed with statistics about civil rights enforcement by the division’s sections. The accountability office also examined a sampling of matters that were closed without further action, finding several cases — including the curtailed voter intimidation inquiry — in which supervisors rejected the recommendations of career lawyers to go forward.

The report represents a comprehensive review of the division’s litigation activity in the Bush administration. When compared with the Clinton administration, its findings show a significant drop in the enforcement of several major antidiscrimination and voting rights laws. For example, lawsuits brought by the division to enforce laws prohibiting race or sex discrimination in employment fell from about 11 per year under President Bill Clinton to about 6 per year under President George W. Bush.

The study also found a sharp decline in enforcement of a section of the Voting Rights Act that prohibits electoral rules with discriminatory effects, from more than four cases a year under Mr. Clinton to fewer than two cases a year under Mr. Bush.

Joseph Rich, a civil rights lawyer who has been invited by Democrats to testify and was among those given an early copy of the report, said it provided hard data that the division was politicized in the Bush years. ....

...

Democrats and civil rights groups said the Republicans were seeking to distract from the new evidence. During the Bush years, such criticism was based on anecdotes and incomplete data. But a report released in January by the department’s inspector general, citing internal e-mail and personnel files, confirmed that political appointees sought to hire conservatives and block liberals for career positions, contrary to civil service laws.

Similarly, the new Government Accountability Office report presents comprehensive data that demonstrates a fall-off in certain kinds of civil rights enforcement during the Bush years.

The office also found that case files often had no information explaining why supervisors had decided to close cases, sometimes against the recommendation of career officials. In a companion report, it also found that six years of internal audits about the division’s case-tracking system were missing.

In a prepared opening statement, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, Thomas E. Perez, said the reports about hiring and enforcement activity “underscore the point that the division, in recent years, was not doing all that it could to fulfill our responsibility to enforce all the civil rights laws fairly and aggressively.” ...

t r u t h o u t | Understanding Our Hollow "Centrists"

t r u t h o u t | Understanding Our Hollow "Centrists"

The puzzling thing about politicians of either party who claim to be "centrist" or "moderate" is how much they sometimes sound like party-line right-wing Republicans. Distinguishing among these species of politicians can be almost impossible during the current struggle over health care reform, especially when a senator like Blanche Lambert Lincoln of Arkansas tries to explain herself.

Like so many of the Republicans they try to emulate, the conservative Democrats claim to worry about spending and deficits -- except with respect to programs that benefit them, their favorite constituents or the lobbyists who pay their campaign expenses.

Facing re-election and plummeting poll numbers, Lincoln voted to commence debate last weekend. But then she turned around and warned that she would probably join a Republican filibuster against the Democratic health reform bill. Why? Because the Democratic legislation, favored by a clear majority, is likely to include a public option.

Last July, Lincoln published an essay on the op-ed page of the largest daily paper in Arkansas that stated clearly why a public option should be part of a broader reform plan: "Individuals should be able to choose from a range of quality health insurance plans. Options should include private plans as well as a quality, affordable public plan or non-profit plan that can accomplish the same goals as those of a public plan."

That makes perfect sense in her state, where Blue Cross-Blue Shield controls 75 percent of the insurance market, and throughout much of the South, where similar monopoly conditions prevail.

But over the summer, Lincoln and certain other members of her party were simultaneously spooked by low poll numbers and persuaded by big insurance and pharmaceutical donations. So more recently, she has learned to parrot the Republican talking points about the public option and the general topic of health care. The fact that those talking points are largely untrue doesn't seem to trouble her or the other nominally Democratic senators who have likewise threatened to join the filibuster.

"For some in my caucus, when they talk about a public option, they're talking about another entitlement program, and we can't afford that right now as a nation. ... I would not support a solely government-funded public option. We can't afford that," she has said.

Yet if Lincoln has actually read the Democratic health care bill -- and the analysis provided by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office -- then she knows that none of those complaints are valid. The public option is not an entitlement program, although the health care bill will provide subsidies to help families that cannot afford health insurance to buy either public or private plans.

Second, the public option proposed in either the Senate or House versions of the bill would not be funded solely by the government, because both bills require the plan to be supported fully through premiums paid by the insured.

Third, the proposed bill is not only deficit-neutral but is estimated to reduce the federal deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next two decades.
Now, of course, Lincoln -- just like her fellow self-proclaimed moderates -- is well aware of all those basic aspects of the bill because she insists that she has read every word. Still, she tells the world that we cannot afford real reform.

What can we afford? According to these worthy senators, we can afford to spend a million dollars per soldier to send another 40,000 troops to Afghanistan -- an amount that would add up over the coming decade to approximately $400 billion, with no obvious benefit. And according to Lincoln, who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee, we can afford to spend $14 billion a year or more on subsidies that mainly enrich corporate farms and wealthy growers. Back home in Phillips County, Ark., for example, where her family owns considerable acreage in rice and soybeans, big farmers have cashed U.S. government checks totaling more than $300 million over the past 10 years. ...

The Associated Press: NYC mayor spent a record $102M to win a 3rd term

The Associated Press: NYC mayor spent a record $102M to win a 3rd term
...

Bloomberg, the wealthiest man in New York, has a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine to be $17.5 billion. He did not take donations and was allowed by law to spend whatever he wanted as long as he filed expense reports.

By contrast, his challenger William Thompson Jr. will probably have spent $9 million on his first mayoral bid when all the bills have been paid. Thompson relied on donations and matching funds. His filing is expected Monday.

...

Bloomberg was first elected in 2001 by just a three-point margin, and he spent a record $74 million. In his re-election bid in 2005, he stomped his Democratic opponent by nearly 20 points and outspent himself by about $11 million, shelling out a whopping $85.1 million.

t r u t h o u t | Joseph L. Galloway | It's Hard to Get Into the Holiday Spirit

t r u t h o u t | Joseph L. Galloway | It's Hard to Get Into the Holiday Spirit

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Our new president is either snake-bit or vampire-bit, and he hasn't managed to keep even a token number of his campaign promises. But that's about to change with next week's Decider act on Afghanistan, when he's expected to up the ante by another 34,000 or so U.S. troops, bringing our total investment in a losing situation to more than 100,000 if they all get there next year.

He did promise to do something about that eight-year-old war, but he didn't promise that it would be the right something.

Health care reform — which was supposed to be passed and signed into law by last August — isn't even halfway done yet and will likely be pushed off to next year.

Our president left this badly needed fix to our broken-down health care system to the tender mercies of a Congress that's largely bought and paid for by the big health care and pharmaceutical and insurance corporations who are what's wrong with our health care system in the first place.

Predictably, they've neutered the bills of any real possibility of reform, turning even the thought of a public option alternative to the robber barons into an exercise in socialism, communism and Nazism.

As if nobody in America ever heard of Medicare or the Veterans Administration medical system — both very popular programs run by and paid for by the big bad Government.

What's the point in having a Democrat in the White House and Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress if they all act like Republicans?

...

Now we approach end-of-the-year bonus time on Wall Street, and you can believe the bankers and brokers are already salivating as they wait for their millions in reward money to arrive.

Nothing has been reformed. Nothing has been done to keep the thieves from doing it all over again ...

...

Now, let's turn back to Afghanistan. There are several very good reasons why sending 34,000 more U.S. troops there is a very bad decision. The terrorist enemy they are supposedly going there to fight, al Qaida, isn't there at all. ...

...

So billions more of the money we can't afford will be poured down the Afghan rat hole, and hundreds more fine young American men and women will die and thousands more will be injured or wounded in pursuit of an impossible dream.

If this is the best the new president and his Congress can do, then God help us. We might just as well have kept George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for another four years. Those guys wouldn't have dashed anybody's hopes.

Corporations: The Real Reason Obama is not Making Much Progress | CommonDreams.org

Corporations: The Real Reason Obama is not Making Much Progress | CommonDreams.org

Corporations: The Real Reason Obama is not Making Much Progress | CommonDreams.org
Before you can appeal to America's voters you have to appeal to the corporationsby Johann HariAlmost a year after Barack Obama ascended to the White House, many of his supporters are bemused. His healthcare bill is a hefty improvement but it still won't provide coverage for all Americans, and may not provide a public alternative to the over-charging insurance companies - if it passes at all. His environmental team is vandalising the vital Copenhagen conference by saying the US - the single biggest emitter of warming gases - will not sign up to any legally binding restrictions there. He has placed the deregulation-fanatics who caused the New Depression, like Lawrence Summers, in charge of the recovery. Despite the real improvements on Bush - such as the end of torture, the resumption of stem-cell research, and opposition to the coup in Honduras - many people are asking: why he is delivering so little, so slowly?...This policy came, however, with a different price tag. According to her later sworn testimony, Jamie Leigh Jones - a 20-year-old working for the contractor Halliburton/KBR - was hanging out with co-workers one night in Iraq when her drink was spiked. When she woke up, she was haemorraging blood from her vagina and her anus. Her breast implants were ripped. The damage was so severe she later needed reconstructive surgery on her genitalia. She surmised she had been gang-raped by the seven men she had been drinking with. When she approached Halliburton/KBR, she says they locked her in a metal container with no food or water for 24 hours. A doctor came to see her wounds and took DNA evidence, although it was later "lost." A guard took pity on her and loaned her his cell phone. She called her father, who called the American embassy - and only then was she released.In an Iraq that was collapsing all around her, there was no chance of the Iraqi police investigating. Halliburton/KBR insisted that her contract required the alleged gang-rape to be addressed by the company's private arbitration process, forbidding any claim in the American courts. (If this was how they treated blonde English-speaking American girls, what did they do if Iraqis said they had been abused?) After Leigh Jones went public, many other American women came forward to say they had similar experiences working in Iraq. Her legal team argues the refusal to allow rape to be pursued through the courts created a climate where it was more likely to happen.The Democratic Senator Al Franken, when he heard about this, was horrified, and tabled a simple amendment to the law. It demanded that no company that prevents rape victims from having their day in court should receive taxpayers' money any more. Rape is rape. A majority of Republicans in the Senate - including John McCain - voted against the amendment. Why? The private contractors are major donors to the Republican Party, but the Senators claim this didn't affect their judgement. No - they said that Franken's proposal was a "vendetta" against Halliburton/KBR with "political motives". Franken pointed out any company trying to stop rape victims getting justice would be treated exactly the same by this law. The Republicans ignored him. They voted to maintain a system where some rape is not pursuable in a court of law....At the same time, a group of Democratic senators have tried to amend the latest customs bill to ensure that nothing produced by slaves should be sold in the United States. It sounds uncontroversial - as uncontroversial as punishing rapists, in fact. Yet corporate lobbyists are militating behind the scenes to oppose it. As the private subscription-only newsletter "Inside US Trade" reported: "Business groups are worried by the potential effects", and a source tells them there will be, "a push from lobbyists closer to the Finance Committee mark-up of the bill... US industry groups and foreign governments [ie those that use slave labour] could form ad hoc coalitions to help send a united message." They will fight for their right to use slave labour.These examples are extreme, but they reveal a powerful undertow that is at work on all political issues (and both main parties) in the United States. To see how, you have to understand two processes. The first is the nature of corporate power. Corporations are structured to do one thing, and one thing only: to maximise profit for their shareholders. No matter how personally nice or nasty their CEOs are, if they put anything ahead of profit, they will be sacked, and replaced by somebody who doesn't. As part of a tightly regulated market, this can be a useful engine for growth. But if it is not strictly reigned in by the law and by trade unions, this pressure for profit will extend anywhere - from trashing the environment to rape and slavery, as these cases remind us. The second factor is the nature of the American political process today. If you want to run for elected office in the US, you have to raise a fortune from corporations or the super-rich to pay for TV advertising. So before you can appeal to the voters, you have to appeal to the corporations. You do this by assuring them you will serve their interests. Once you are in office, you have to keep pleasing them at every step, or they won't pay for your re-election campaign. This two-step overwhelms the positive instincts the individual politicians may have to do good - and drags the US government further and further from the will of the people.Obama had to climb through this system, and he is currently imprisoned by it. It explains his relative failure so far. Healthcare is proving so hard because the insurance companies are paying both Republicans and right-wing Democrats in Senate to thwart any attempt to provide universal healthcare coverage. ...

Link: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/22-6

Editorial - A National Disgrace - NYTimes.com

Editorial - A National Disgrace - NYTimes.com

Two courts, one in Italy and one in the United States, ruled recently on the Bush administration’s practice of extraordinary rendition, which is the kidnapping of people and sending them to other countries for interrogation — and torture. The Italian court got it right. The American court got it miserably wrong.
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In Italy, a judge ruled that a station chief for the Central Intelligence Agency and 22 other Americans broke the law in the 2003 abduction of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, a Muslim cleric who ended up in Egypt, where he said he was tortured.

Two days earlier, a federal appeals court in Manhattan brushed off a lawsuit by Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was seized in an American airport by federal agents acting on bad information from Canadian officials. He was held incommunicado and harshly interrogated before being sent to Syria, where he was tortured. He spent almost a year in a grave-size underground cell before the Syrians let him go.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decided that none of that entitled Mr. Arar to a day in court.

In Mr. Nasr’s case, authorities said that they had reason to suspect he was involved in recruiting militants to go to Iraq. It has long been established that Mr. Arar was not guilty of anything. Canada admitted that it had supplied false information to American authorities, and in 2007, it apologized and offered Mr. Arar $10 million in damages. Neither the Bush nor Obama administrations followed suit, leaving Mr. Arar to pursue litigation.

In June 2008, a three-judge panel of the same court dismissed Mr. Arar’s civil rights suit on flimsy grounds. The court then took a rare step, scheduling a rehearing before all of the court’s active members before an appeal was filed. Sadly, the full court’s decision is even more insensitive to the violation of his rights and the courts’ duty to hold government accountable for breaches of the law.

Written by Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs, the 59-page majority opinion held that no civil damages remedy exists for the horrors visited on Mr. Arar. To “decide how to implement extraordinary rendition,” he wrote, is “for the elected members of Congress — and not for us as judges.” Allowing suits against policy makers for rendition and torture would “affect diplomacy, foreign policy and the security of the nation,” Judge Jacobs said. ...

Italy Convicts 23 Americans In CIA Terrorist Kidnapping Case

Italy Convicts 23 Americans In CIA Terrorist Kidnapping Case

MILAN — An Italian judge found 23 Americans and two Italians guilty Wednesday in the kidnapping of an Egyptian terror suspect, delivering the first legal convictions anywhere in the world against people involved in the CIA's extraordinary renditions program.

Human rights groups hailed the decision and pressed President Barack Obama to repudiate the Bush administration's practice of abducting terror suspects and transferring them to third countries where torture was permitted. The American Civil Liberties Union said the verdicts were the first convictions stemming from the rendition program.

The Obama administration ended the CIA's interrogation program and shuttered its secret overseas jails in January but has opted to continue the practice of extraordinary renditions.

The Americans, who were tried in absentia, now cannot travel to Europe without risking arrest as long as the verdicts remains in place.

One of those convicted, former Milan consular official Sabrina De Sousa, accused Congress of turning a blind eye to the entire matter.

"No one has investigated the fact that the U.S. government allegedly conducted a rendition of an individual who now walks free and the operation of which was so bungled," she said, speaking through her lawyer Mark Zaid. ...

Our votes are worth less than the money for future campaigns. ...

OpEdNews - Article: Healthcare and Campaign Finance Reform

In order to support this political economy, our legislators spend most of their time raising dollars instead of doing their job of passing legislation to help their constituents. They raise funds from individuals and the political action committees (PACs) that feed their re-election campaigns. There are PACs whose ideals I support, but I prefer to give my donation to an individual campaign only during an active election cycle where it will send a bigger message of endorsement. Besides, there are always individuals or larger PACs who can give more than I ever could.

A current example of an issue being derailed is the voters' demand for healthcare reform. We have watched the message massaged by the professional political messengers with millions of dollars being spent daily on air, on paper, and campaign coffers. The reform choice of single-payer healthcare (or Medicare for All) was eliminated at the outset from the range of feasible options thanks to heavy influence by lobbyists' campaign dollars. The weakened economic mainstream media have provided very limited coverage of Medicare for All because they would lose advertising revenues from one of their major sources, the health insurance carriers. We, the voting public, are entitled to have our votes have meaning and not be diminished by those who can spend more on each vote. We must have true campaign finance reform.

Achieving true campaign finance reform is hampered by the fact that those responsible for its enactment are the current beneficiaries of today's campaign finances. Our legislators receive funds for their next election and the people who are available to help shape the message for campaign finance reform would be lobbying to put their industry out of business. Therein lies the problem. Our votes are worth less than the money for future campaigns. ...

Editorial - Gerrymandering, Pure and Corrupt - NYTimes.com

Editorial - Gerrymandering, Pure and Corrupt - NYTimes.com

Of all the tricks that New York’s legislators use to hang on to office, the one that works best — for the politicians, that is — is redistricting. Mapmaking in Albany is a dark art form designed to make absolutely certain that incumbents in the majority party are safe from electoral competition (a k a democracy).
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This process has worked so well for so many politicians that the New York Public Interest Research Group reports that in 2008 more than half of the state’s 212 legislators were re-elected with more than 80 percent of their districts’ votes. In 57 districts, the incumbents ran unopposed. New faces appear rarely, usually when a lawmaker retires, dies or, increasingly, gets convicted of abusing the public trust.

This isn’t the way it is supposed to work.

Every 10 years, legislatures across the country draw new Congressional districts and their own districts — a clear conflict of interest. Under federal and state law, each district is supposed to have about the same number of people and be reasonably compact, but the laws are porous and many of the details are left to the states. Politicians and their experts are masters at finding loopholes — especially in New York, where gerrymandering is still rampant. ...

Sotomayor Issues Challenge to a Century of Corporate Law - WSJ.com

Sotomayor Issues Challenge to a Century of Corporate Law - WSJ.com
...

But Justice Sotomayor suggested the majority might have it all wrong -- and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights flesh-and-blood people have.

Judges "created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons," she said. "There could be an argument made that that was the court's error to start with...[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics."

...

For centuries, corporations have been considered beings apart from their human owners, yet sharing with them some attributes, such as the right to make contracts and own property. Originally, corporations were a relatively rare form of organization. The government granted charters to corporations, delineating their specific functions. Their powers were presumed limited to those their charter spelled out.

"A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible," Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in an 1819 case. "It possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it."

But as the Industrial Revolution took hold, corporations proliferated and views of their functions began to evolve.

In an 1886 tax dispute between the Southern Pacific Railroad and the state of California, the court reporter quoted Chief Justice Morrison Waite telling attorneys to skip arguments over whether the 14th Amendment's equal-protection clause applied to corporations, because "we are all of opinion that it does."

That seemingly off-hand comment reflected an "impulse to shield business activity from certain government regulation," says David Millon, a law professor at Washington and Lee University. ...

Military lawyer says Defense Department ignored calls for war crimes investigation | Raw Story

Military lawyer says Defense Department ignored calls for war crimes investigation | Raw Story

WASHINGTON---The military lawyer that represents an Afghan youth who spent roughly seven years in U.S. custody says the Defense Department has repeatedly ignored his requests for a war crimes investigation into the detainee's treatment.

Air Force Maj. David Frakt, the attorney for former detainee Mohammed Jawad, says over the past 16 months he sent multiple memos to Defense Department and military leaders asking them to account for what a military judge called "abusive conduct and cruel and inhuman treatment” of his client. Jawad, who was arrested when he says he was 12 years old for allegedly tossing a grenade at U.S. military, was moved from cell to cell 112 times during a 14-day period to disrupt his sleep patterns, according to military documents. Frakt said he believes the treatment constituted torture, violated the Geneva Convention, war crime laws and Defense Department regulations.

"Why has no one--no one has been held remotely accountable for this," Frakt said in an interview with Raw Story. "This is a mandatory investigation. It's not optional, you can't just sweep it under the rug...but they did as far as I can tell."

As first reported in The Washington Independent, Frakt wrote in memos to Defense Department officials: “Accordingly, I believe I have an affirmative obligation to report the incident to my chain of command,” listing military rules that mandate reporting possible war crimes to a superior.

...

Frakt wrote his first memo on May 29, 2008, and sent it to the chief defense counsel at the Office of Military Commissions. After four months passed without a response, Frakt sent a similar memo via e-mail to the Commander in charge at the U.S. Southern Command post, Joint Task Force for Guantanamo Bay on October 7, 2008. He also copied four lawyers in the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel on the e-mail.

In January 2009, Frakt again e-mailed the commander in charge at the U.S. Southern Command post, Joint Task Force for Guantanamo Bay, added a captain's name to the list and included the same four lawyers from the Pentagon's Office of General Counsel on the email. ...

Sotomayor Issues Challenge to a Century of Corporate Law - WSJ.com

Sotomayor Issues Challenge to a Century of Corporate Law - WSJ.com

WASHINGTON -- In her maiden Supreme Court appearance last week, Justice Sonia Sotomayor made a provocative comment that probed the foundations of corporate law.

During arguments in a campaign-finance case, the court's majority conservatives seemed persuaded that corporations have broad First Amendment rights and that recent precedents upholding limits on corporate political spending should be overruled.

But Justice Sotomayor suggested the majority might have it all wrong -- and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights flesh-and-blood people have.

Judges "created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons," she said. "There could be an argument made that that was the court's error to start with...[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics."

...

"A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible," Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in an 1819 case. "It possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it."

But as the Industrial Revolution took hold, corporations proliferated and views of their functions began to evolve.

In an 1886 tax dispute between the Southern Pacific Railroad and the state of California, the court reporter quoted Chief Justice Morrison Waite telling attorneys to skip arguments over whether the 14th Amendment's equal-protection clause applied to corporations, because "we are all of opinion that it does."

That seemingly off-hand comment reflected an "impulse to shield business activity from certain government regulation," says David Millon, a law professor at Washington and Lee University.

"A positive way to put it is that the economy is booming, American production is leading the world and the courts want to promote that," Mr. Millon says. Less charitably, "it's all about protecting corporate wealth" from taxes, regulations or other legislative initiatives.

Subsequent opinions expanded corporate rights. In 1928, the court struck down a Pennsylvania tax on transportation corporations because individual taxicab drivers were exempt. Corporations get "the same protection of equal laws that natural persons" have, Justice Pierce Butler wrote.

From the mid-20th century, though, the court has vacillated on how far corporate rights extend. In a 1973 case before a more liberal court, Justice William O. Douglas rejected the Butler opinion as "a relic" that overstepped "the narrow confines of judicial review" by second-guessing the legislature's decision to tax corporations differently than individuals.

Today, it's "just complete confusion" over which rights corporations can claim, says Prof. William Simon of Columbia Law School....

Appeals court overturns campaign finance rules - Yahoo! News

Appeals court overturns campaign finance rules - Yahoo! News

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By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press Writer – Fri Sep 18, 2:23 pm ET

WASHINGTON – Independent advocacy groups will be able to spend more money to try to influence federal elections under a decision Friday from a federal appeals court that overturned rules limiting nonprofits' campaign spending.

Three judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington agreed with Emily's List, a nonprofit that backs women Democratic candidates who support abortion rights, that the regulations limited free speech rights.

The Federal Election Commission enacted the rules in 2005, after concerns were raised about the amount of unlimited "soft money" contributions used to fund attacks in the 2004 election.

The FEC said nonprofits would have to pay for political activities involving federal candidates using limited "hard money" contributions. Individuals are only allowed to donate up to $5,000 annually to a nonprofit that indicates it plans to use the money to support or oppose a federal candidate.

"The First Amendment, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, protects the right of individual citizens to spend unlimited amounts to express their views about policy issues and candidates for public office," the court ruling said. The First Amendment also "safeguards the right of citizens to band together and pool their resources as an unincorporated group or nonprofit organization in order to express their views about policy issues and candidates for public office." ...

New CIA Docs Detail Brutal "Extraordinary Rendition" Process

New CIA Docs Detail Brutal "Extraordinary Rendition" Process
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The document provides a step-by-step manual for extraordinary renditions.

The process starts with "capture shock." The detainee is subject to a medical examination prior to his flight. During the flight, the detainee is securely shackled, and is deprived of sight and sound through the use of blindfolds, earmuffs and hoods.

The detainee is "in the complete control of Americans." The detainee is stripped naked and shaved. A "series of photographs are taken of the HVD while nude." A medical officer and a psychologist play key roles in the process (though their professional ethics rules would prohibit such conduct.)

All of these practices are carefully engineered to facilitate the interrogation process. Nudity, sleep deprivation and dietary manipulation are used as standard preparatory steps. It then details the standard "corrective techniques:" these are a series of physical assaults labeled with innocuous titles like insult slap, abdominal slap, facial hold and attention grasp. "Coercive techniques" used include: walling (slamming a prisoner's head against the wall, with some protective measures to avoid severe injuries), water dousing, the use of the stress position (known to the inquisition as the strapado, to the Germans in World War II as Pfahlbinden), wall standing (referred to by the NKVD and KGB as stoika) and cramped confinement. Because of substantial redactions, it seems unlikely that this list is complete.

None of this information is surprising. In fact it all tallies perfectly with the description of the renditions program that can be derived from the report prepared by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which used the appropriate legal designation for these techniques: "torture." ...