Tag Archives: Class Warfare

Garry Wills on Who’s Afraid of the Pope

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Garry Wills is one of America’s leading intellectuals. He’s now 80 years old and has had a brilliant career, but he’s still going strong. From the New York Review of Books blog:

Now, as the pope prepares a major encyclical on climate change, to be released this summer, the billionaires are spending a great deal of their money in a direct assault on him. They are calling in their chits, their kept scientists, their rigged conferences, their sycophantic beneficiaries, their bought publicists to discredit words of the pope that have not even been issued: “He would do his flock and the world a disservice by putting his moral authority behind the United Nations’ unscientific agenda on the climate,” they say. They do not know exactly what the pope is going to say in his forthcoming encyclical on preserving God’s creation, but they know what he will not say. He will not deny that the poor suffer from actions that despoil the earth. Everything he has said and done so far shows that Francis always stands for the poor.

Those who profit from what harms the earth have to keep the poor out of sight. They have trouble enough fighting off the scientific, economic, and political arguments against bastioned privilege. Bringing basic morality to the fore could be fatal to them. That is why they are mounting such a public pre-emptive strike against the encyclical before it even appears…..

The real issue here is not science vs. ignorance, or the UN vs. xenophobia, or my 97 percent of experts against your 3 percent. It is a case of the immensely rich few against the many deprived poor. The few are getting much of their wealth from interlocking interests that despoil the earth. The fact that the poor get poorer in this process is easily dismissed, denied, or derided. The poor have no voice. Till now. If the pope were not a plausible voice for the poor, his opponents would not be running so scared. Their fear is a testimony to him.

More here.

Money and Politicians, Plus Judges

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ThinkProgress reports that the Supreme Court sensibly ruled, in a 5-4 decision, that a state can restrict lawyers’ campaign contributions to judges. Chief Justice Roberts explained why:

States may regulate judicial elections differently than they regulate political elections, because the role of judges differs from the role of politicians. Politicians are expected to be appropriately responsive to the preferences of their supporters. Indeed, such “responsiveness is key to the very concept of self-governance through elected officials.” The same is not true of judges. In deciding cases, a judge is not to follow the preferences of his supporters, or provide any special consideration to his campaign donors. A judge instead must “observe the utmost fairness,” striving to be “perfectly and completely independent, with nothing to influence or control him but God and his conscience.” As in White, therefore, our precedents applying the First Amendment to political elections have little bearing on the issues here.

So a majority of the Court agreed that it’s important for judges not to be influenced by campaign contributions, because judges are expected to serve the public good. Does that mean it’s acceptable for politicians to be influenced by campaign contributions, since they’re expected to serve the interests of whoever gives them money?

The obvious problem with Roberts’s explanation is that politicians should serve the public good as much as judges. A President is supposed to serve the national interest. Senators are supposed to serve the national interest and the interests of their particular states. Politicians are only supposed to do little favors for people who give them money. Otherwise, we’d say the politicians were for sale!

After all, we vote anonymously so that nobody, not even the candidates, know who we voted for. That makes sense, because how a particular person voted shouldn’t matter to a politician who represents “the people”.

But doesn’t that suggest that campaign contributions (assuming they’re legal at all) should be anonymous too? Politicians shouldn’t know who gave them money or spent money on their behalf, because they’re not supposed to be influenced by such things. They’re supposed to make their decisions on the merits, not reward the rich people or groups who paid for their campaigns. Nor should politicians be able to extort contributions by threatening anyone.

Anonymous campaign funding was the subject of a 2004 book called “Voting With Dollars” written by two law professors. They argued that all voters should be given government-financed “gift cards” that could only be used to finance presidential campaigns. Last year, two political scientists called for making all campaign contributions anonymous, even those made by major donors:

Indeed, if we think about all the ways transparency helps contributors and candidates put pressure upon each other, it is clear that reporting contributions can make matters worse. Suppose, then, that we turned out the lights? What if we let Adelson and Shaun McCutcheon spend their money on politics but not take credit for their “generosity”? What if we made all campaign contributions and independent expenditures anonymous — and made sure they stayed anonymous?

I don’t know if it’s possible to design a system that would guarantee anonymity. If people contributed to a general fund from which payments were made to their candidates of choice, it would be difficult for the contributors to see that they’d made a specific contribution to a particular candidate without their having the ability to share that information with the candidate in question. Maybe it would be enough to make it illegal to communicate the source of donations or “independent” spending, as the political science professors suggest.  

In addition to reducing the number of favors politicians did for their major contributors, anonymity would theoretically reduce the amount of money in politics too. Presumably, some of the wealthy would limit their spending if they couldn’t expect something in return. Of course, even anonymous contributions won’t solve the Big Money problem. Fixing that will require a majority on the Supreme Court that doesn’t equate unlimited political spending with free speech.

The Riot, the Police and Some Music

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I spend a lot of time on a web forum devoted to a certain great musician. Because some of the site’s visitors have ties to Baltimore, the riots and the effect they’re having on the city are being discussed — in a thread supposedly devoted to something else. Emotions obviously run high in such situations, which partly explains why one person who says he lives in Baltimore called for “the police and National Guard to show no mercy”.

I didn’t want to get into this topic on a musician’s website, but it eventually seemed necessary to add another point of view:

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Since what’s been happening in Baltimore keeps being discussed, here’s something from The Atlantic:

Justice demands that participants in the riots are identified, arrested, and charged with whatever crimes they committed. Their unjustifiable violence endangered innocents, destroyed businesses, and harmed the economic future of largely black neighborhoods; they earned the frustrated contempt of Baltimore’s mayor and members of its clergy and strengthened the hand of the public-safety unions that are the biggest obstacles to vital policing reforms.

But a subset of Baltimore police officers has spent years engaged in lawbreaking every bit as flagrant as any teen jumping up and down on a squad car, however invisible it is to CNN. And their unpunished crimes have done more damage to Baltimore than Monday’s riots. Justice also requires that those cops be identified and charged, but few are demanding as much because their brutality mostly goes un-televised. Powerless folks are typically the only witnesses to their thuggery. For too long, the police have gotten away with assaults and even worse. The benefit of the doubt conferred by their uniforms is no longer defensible.

I didn’t realize until today that putting handcuffed suspects in the back of police vans without strapping them in and then driving with sudden stops and starts and making sharp turns so that the suspects get bounced around is common enough in cities like Baltimore and Philadelphia to have been given names like “rough ride” and “nickel ride”.

People have been paralyzed and otherwise injured in both cities and won millions of dollars in damages. The investigation isn’t over, but it’s reasonable to assume that this is how Freddie Grey had his spine and larynx destroyed while he was driven around the city in the back of a police van, before he fell into a coma and died.

The Atlantic article concludes:

I believe it is as necessary now as it was in 1968 [when Martin Luther King Jr. spoke about such things] to simultaneously insist upon the following: that riots are to be condemned; that they are inextricably bound up with injustices perpetrated by the state; and that it is a moral imperative for us to condemn both sorts of violence.

The whole article [by Conor Friedensdorf], which isn’t very long, is here.

The Soul Stirrers with Sam Cooke, “Stand By Me Father”, the early 60s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weYZt3FAqi4

Ben E. King, “Stand By Me”, 1961
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwZNL7QVJjE

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Well, it’s a music site so it seemed best to stay somewhat on topic.

“A corrupt, unresponsive and plutocratic disaster”

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Elias Isquith writes about politics here and there. He’s got a good article at Salon about Congress passing legislation (for example, fixing Medicare payments to doctors) now that the Senate Republicans are in charge and have decided to let the government function. This burst of productivity isn’t necessarily good news:

Not a single one of these initiatives, you’ll notice, could be fairly described as progressive. They’re not necessarily conservative, either. What binds them together, instead, is that their strongest supporters are all very wealthy — and most of them are corporate. That’s usually the case with bills that survive today’s Congressional gauntlet; they ignore the people altogether, and are sometimes even against the public interest. Without fail, though, they’re supported by the kind of lobbyists and organizations with so much money (and so few principles) that they’re happy to donate to whomever holds power at the moment. Et voilà! bipartisanship.

So long as the structural flaw of the Constitution that [Senator Mitch McConnell] exploited — the accountability gap [I’d call it a link] between the functioning of the government and the public’s evaluation of the president — is not amended, any president who hopes to do something for the 99 percent without a super-majority in Congress is destined to fail. American government will remain a corrupt, unresponsive and plutocratic disaster.

The whole article is here.

A Bit More on the Cost of Health Insurance

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A Vox article cites a report from the Center for American Progress that helps explain why many employees who get health insurance at work don’t like the Affordable Care Act and believe it’s causing the cost of health insurance to go up:

In recent years, the growth in overall health care costs has slowed dramatically. But for millions of Americans with employer-sponsored insurance…, this slowdown is illusory. From 2008 through 2013, the average annual growth rate of employees’ monthly premium contributions and out-of-pocket expenses, adjusted for inflation, was more than double that of average annual growth in real per-capita national health care spending, which was less than 2 percent per year. This growth has also outpaced employers’ costs of offering these benefits by more than 40 percent.

Employees experiencing higher health care costs tend to blame the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, even though the law largely leaves the employer-based system alone….The actual reason why employee and employer costs are increasing at different rates is because employers have, over time, shifted greater responsibility for health care expenses to their employees through higher deductibles, higher copayments, and higher coinsurance—a practice that began long before the passage of the ACA. Other employers pay smaller shares of their employees’ health care premiums….

In other words, almost everyone in the health care system is realizing savings, but employees’ costs are rising.

Or as Vox puts it, in still other words:

Your company’s health insurance costs are going down. But yours are going up.

This is in addition to many companies incorrectly telling their employees that the ACA is to blame for rising costs.