Tag Archives: Democracy

The Criminals Who Poison Our Elections

Posted on by

Anybody with the sense God gave a goose understands that Republican efforts to stamp out voter fraud are really an attempt to reduce the number of Democratic voters. Here’s what’s been happening in Georgia:

[The Republican] Secretary of State publicly accused the New Georgia Project in September of submitting fraudulent registration forms. A subsequent investigation found just 25 confirmed forgeries out of more than 85,000 forms—a fraud rate of about 3/100ths of 1 percent [in decimal terms, that’s a rate of 0.000294].

Meanwhile, a group of civil rights lawyers filed a lawsuit claiming that thousands of registration forms submitted this summer still haven’t been recorded in Georgia’s voter database, “nearly all of them belonging to people of color in the Democratic-leaning regions around Atlanta, Savannah and Columbus”. State and county officials, however, said they have already processed all of the applications sent to them by the October 6 registration deadline, and anyway, there is no state law that requires properly-submitted registrations to be processed by any particular date. A local judge has declined to intervene, citing a lack of proof that the registrations have gone missing.

Then there is this detailed report from Al Jazeera America:

Election officials in 27 states, most of them Republicans, have launched a program that threatens a massive purge of voters from the rolls. Millions, especially black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters, are at risk. Already, tens of thousands have been removed in at least one battleground state, and the numbers are expected to climb…

At the heart of this voter-roll scrub is the Interstate Crosscheck program, which has generated a master list of nearly 7 million names. Officials say that these names represent legions of fraudsters who are not only registered but have actually voted in two or more states in the same election — a felony punishable by 2 to 10 years in prison.

How does this Crosscheck program work? You can appear on the list as a suspected felon if your first and last name matches the first and last name of someone who voted in another state:

The actual lists show that not only are middle names commonly mismatched and suffix discrepancies ignored [such as Jr. or Sr.], even birthdates don’t seem to have been taken into account. Moreover, Crosscheck deliberately ignores Social Security mismatches, in the few instances when the numbers are even collected.

A statistical analysis revealed that African-Americans, Hispanics and Asian-Americans appear on the list much more often than their percentage of the population would indicate, while white Americans appear less often. The reason is that there is less variety in the names of certain ethnic groups, and among those groups are African-Americans, Hispanics and Asian-Americans, groups that all tend to vote for Democrats. (By the way, you can enter your own name at the Al Jazeera America site and see if you’re right to vote may be challenged.)

If you’ve watched enough Fox News, you might conclude that the hordes of Democrats who poison our elections by illegally voting in more than one state don’t use the same birthdates or Social Security numbers when they register to vote in this state and that, so why bother matching on those criteria?

Or you might infer that America does indeed have a criminal element bent on interfering with the electoral process. Unfortunately, the most crafty and dangerous members of this criminal conspiracy are Republican officials whose job it is to administer elections.

PS — Paul Krugman wrote an excellent column the other day called “Plutocrats Against Democracy”. I suggest reading the whole thing, which isn’t very long. It ends this way:

But now you understand why there’s so much furor on the right over the alleged but actually almost nonexistent problem of voter fraud, and so much support for voter ID laws that make it hard for the poor and even the working class to cast ballots. American politicians don’t dare say outright that only the wealthy should have political rights — at least not yet. But if you follow the currents of thought now prevalent on the political right to their logical conclusion, that’s where you end up.

The truth is that a lot of what’s going on in American politics is, at root, a fight between democracy and plutocracy.

Professor Krugman is an optimist. He thinks the plutocrats haven’t already won.

Political Corruption in America, Then and Now

Posted on by

Zephyr Teachout is a law professor at Fordham University. She recently ran against Governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary, a quixotic venture if her goal was to become the Governor of New York. Her more realistic goals included calling attention to Cuomo’s political shenanigans, highlighting ways to improve our politics and maybe selling a few copies of her book (we all have to eat).

The book is Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United. The snuff box was a diamond-encrusted gift that Louis XVI gave to our ambassador to France. “Citizens United” is the recent Supreme Court decision allowing corporations and other organizations to influence elections as much as possible by spending unlimited amounts of money.

From a review of Corruption in America by the journalist Thomas Frank:

Today’s [Supreme Court] understands “corruption” as a remarkably rare malady, a straight-up exchange of money for official acts. Any definition broader than that, the justices say, transgresses the all-important First Amendment. Besides, as Justice Anthony Kennedy announced in the Citizens United decision, the court now knows that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption” — a statement that I guess makes sense somehow in law-land but sounds to the layman’s ear like the patter of a man who has come unzipped from reality….

Our current Supreme Court, in Citizens United, “took that which had been named corrupt for over 200 years” — which is to say, gifts to politicians — “and renamed it legitimate.” Teachout does not exaggerate. Here is Justice Kennedy again, in the Citizens United decision: “The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach. The government has ‘muffle[d] the voices that best represent the most significant segments of the economy.’ ”

You read that right: The economy needs to be represented in democratic politics, or at least the economy’s “most significant segments,” whatever those are, and therefore corporate “speech,” meaning gifts, ought not to be censored. Corporations now possess the rights that the founders reserved for citizens, and as Teachout explains, what used to be called “corruption becomes democratic responsiveness.”

Being “unzipped from reality” aptly describes much of our politics, including a series of decisions by our Republican-dominated Supreme Court.

Did it matter that the Supreme Court helped George Bush get elected in 2000, which made it possible for him to be reelected in 2004? David Cole, writing in the New York Review of Books, reminds us:

… when Justice [Sandra Day] O’Connor announced her retirement and Chief Justice Rehnquist died in office in 2005, President Bush, not Al Gore or a successor, had the privilege of appointing two new justices and shaping the Court for years to come. Had a Democratic president been able to replace Rehnquist and O’Connor, constitutional law today would be dramatically different. Affirmative action would be on firm constitutional ground. The Voting Rights Act would remain in place. The Second Amendment would protect only the state’s authority to raise militias, not private individuals’ right to own guns. Women’s right to terminate a pregnancy would be robustly protected. The validity of Obamacare would never have been in doubt. Consumers and employees would be able to challenge abusive corporate action in class action lawsuits. And Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which struck down regulations on corporate political campaign expenditures and called into question a range of campaign spending rules, would have come out the other way. But it was not to be.

Returning to Thomas Frank’s review of Zephyr Teachout’s book, it’s hard to believe that political lobbying used to be shameful, even criminal, not a multi-billion-dollar industry:

Once upon a time, lobbying was regarded as obviously perfidious; in California it was a felony; and contracts to lobby were regarded as reprehensible by the Supreme Court. Here is a justice of that body in the year 1854, delivering the court’s decision in a case concerning lobbyists and lobbying contracts:

“The use of such means and such agents will have the effect to subject the state governments to the combined capital of wealthy corporations, and produce universal corruption, commencing with the representative and ending with the elector. Speculators in legislation, public and private, a compact corps of venal solicitors, vending their secret influences, will infest the capital of the Union and of every state, till corruption shall become the normal condition of the body politic, and it will be said of us as of Rome —omne Romae venale [in Rome, everything is for sale].”

Well, folks, it happened all right, just as predicted. State governments subject to wealthy corporations? Check. Speculators in legislation, infesting the capital? They call it K Street. And that fancy Latin remark about Rome? They do say that of us today. Just turn on your TV sometime and let the cynicism flow.

And all of it has happened, Teachout admonishes, because the founders’ understanding of corruption has been methodically taken apart by a Supreme Court that cynically pretends to worship the founders’ every word. “We could lose our democracy in the process,” Teachout warns, a bit of hyperbole that maybe it’s time to start taking seriously.

Considering how money pollutes our politics, and how gerrymandering, vote suppression, low turnout (especially among the young and the poor) and the Constitution itself skew the results, the idea that America is an oligarchy, not a democracy, doesn’t sound hyperbolic at all.  

Nevertheless, quixotic or not, I’m still going to vote in a couple weeks for the Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate (he’s sure to win) and the House (she’s sure to lose), as well as for bail reform and more environmental funding. It’s the least I can do.

Let Me Tell You What Those Other People Want

Posted on by

How to blog when it’s hard to type: copy and paste Paul Krugman!

In today’s column, he points out how people who claim to speak for “the market” are usually speaking for themselves:

We have been told repeatedly that governments must cease and desist from their efforts to mitigate economic pain, lest their excessive compassion be punished by the financial gods, but the markets themselves have never seemed to agree that these human sacrifices are actually necessary. Investors were supposed to be terrified by budget deficits, fearing that we were about to turn into Greece — Greece I tell you — but year after year, interest rates stayed low. The Fed’s efforts to boost the economy were supposed to backfire as markets reacted to the prospect of runaway inflation, but market measures of expected inflation similarly stayed low….

… markets are practically begging governments to borrow and spend, say on infrastructure; … financing for roads, bridges, and sewers would be almost free.

….the next time you hear some talking head opining on what we must do to satisfy the markets, ask yourself, “How does he know?” For the truth is that when people talk about what markets demand, what they’re really doing is trying to bully us into doing what they themselves want.

The same applies to politicians and pundits who love to tell us what “the American people” want. Unless they’re quoting public opinion polls (like the ones that always say the American people want less military spending and higher taxes on the rich), they’re speaking for themselves.

Conspiracy Theories, Plausible or Not

Posted on by

Last year, a company called Public Policy Polling asked 1,247 registered voters in the United States their opinions regarding what the company called “conspiracy theories” (although some of the questions, such as “Do you believe aliens exist, or not?” don’t necessarily refer to conspiracies). Here are some of the more interesting questions and answers, beginning with the least popular “theories”. The poll, which is described here, had a margin of error of 2.8%.

1) Do you believe that shape-shifting reptilian people control our world by taking on human form and gaining political power to manipulate our societies, or not?

11% of the respondents said Yes or weren’t sure (happily, that means 89% said No).

2) Do you believe that the exhaust seen in the sky behind airplanes is actually chemicals sprayed by the government for sinister reasons, or not?

13% said Yes or weren’t sure (not surprisingly, 87% said No).

3) Do you believe the moon landing was faked, or not?

16% said Yes or weren’t sure.

4) Do you believe Paul McCartney actually died in a car crash in 1966 and was secretly replaced by a lookalike so the Beatles could continue, or not?

19% said Yes or weren’t sure.

5) Do you believe the United States government knowingly allowed the attacks on September 11th, 2001, to happen, or not?

22% Yes or weren’t sure.

6) Do you believe media or the government adds secret mind-controlling technology to television broadcast signals, or not?

30% Yes or weren’t sure.

7) Do you believe global warming is a hoax, or not?

49% Yes or weren’t sure.

8) Do you believe a UFO crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, and the US government covered it up, or not?

53% Yes or weren’t sure (21% said Yes).

9) Do you believe that a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government, or New World Order, or not?

53% Yes or weren’t sure (but 28% said Yes).

10)  Do you believe there is a link between childhood vaccines and autism, or not?

54% Yes or weren’t sure (20% said Yes).

11) Do you believe the Bush administration intentionally misled the public about the possibility of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to promote the Iraq War, or not?

56% Yes or weren’t sure (44% said Yes).

12) Do you believe that there was a conspiracy (whether or not it included Lee Harvey Oswald) behind the assassination of President Kennedy?

75% Yes or weren’t sure (although I rephrased the question to make it consistent with the others).

One might conclude from some of these results that an uncomfortably large percentage of the American electorate is absolutely nuts. However, we should keep in mind what David Hume said about miracles. If someone claims to have seen a miracle, it’s much more likely that he or she is lying or confused than that a miracle actually occurred. Likewise, if roughly 10% of voters are open to the possibility that shape-shifting reptiles walk among us or that those vapor trails up in the sky are a government plot, we should conclude that many who gave those answers were either confused about the question or messing with the pollsters.

On the other hand, if shape-shifting reptiles do control many of the world’s governments, that would explain a lot. And I for one say “Welcome to our reptilian overlords!”.

(Note: that’s supposed to be a giant insect in the picture behind Kent Brockman, but somebody decided to add a guy’s face.)

A couple of these poll results are more troubling. Half of us think that global warming is a hoax or are open to that possibility, and a similar percentage think that vaccines do or may cause autism. It’s understandable why some might think that the experts are mistaken about global warming, but to believe that thousands of scientists are or could be conspiring to mislead the rest of us is incredibly dumb and also likely to impede efforts to address the problem. Similarly, one might wonder if there is a possible link between vaccines and autism, but to take that idea seriously enough to ignore the medical consensus and not vaccinate one’s children is both foolish and dangerous.

There’s a natural tendency to be skeptical about whatever the official story is. None of us want to be taken in by the powers that be. Governments, corporations and supposed experts lie more than they should and conspiracies do sometimes occur. There’s also nothing wrong with keeping an open mind on controversial topics when there is evidence on both sides.

So I’m comfortable being with the skeptical majority who think people in the Bush administration lied about those weapons of mass destruction or at least decided it wasn’t worth knowing the truth. I’m also comfortable saying that Lee Harvey Oswald may have participated in a conspiracy or been used by one. I think he acted alone but wouldn’t be surprised either way (unless Vice President Johnson had something to do with it – that would be a big surprise). The good news is that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld can’t do much damage anymore and anyone who was involved in the Kennedy assassination is probably gone or will be soon.

A probably unrelated note: Having been on the Central Coast of California for the past week or so, I can report that the state has not completely dried out. In fact, casual observation revealed very little evidence of the major drought they’re having. Shops in one small town were directing everyone to some new portable toilets on the main street, and the outdoor showers at one of the beaches were turned off. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the drought is a hoax being carried out by conspiring reptilian shape-shifters, but you never know.

Political Polarization and Us

Posted on by

The Pew Research Center has issued a study on America’s increasing political polarization. There’s been the usual disagreement about what the study really means, but it’s clear that Democrats and Republicans have moved further apart in recent years. And it shouldn’t be a surprise that 82% of “consistent liberals” say they believe in compromise, compared to 32% of “consistent [so-called] conservatives”.

Norman Ornstein discusses the Pew findings at The Atlantic. He’s absolutely right that Republican politicians and their media colleagues are most to blame for the increasing polarization of recent years, and that Democratic voters moving further to the left has mainly been a reaction to the increasingly insane behavior of the right.

He also responds to the notion that both sides are equally to blame:

Does it matter whether the polarization, and the deep dysfunction that follows from it, is equal or not, including to the average voter? The answer is a resounding yes. If bad behavior—using the nation’s full faith and credit as a hostage to political demands, shutting down the government, attempting to undermine policies that have been lawfully enacted, blocking nominees not on the basis of their qualifications but to nullify the policies they would pursue, using filibusters as weapons of mass obstruction—is to be discouraged or abandoned, those who engage in it have to be held accountable.

Saying both sides are equally responsible, insisting on equivalence as the mantra of mainstream journalism, leaves the average voter at sea, unable to identify and vote against those perpetrating the problem. The public is left with a deeper disdain for all politics and all politicians, and voters become more receptive to demagogues and those whose main qualification for office is that they have never served, won’t compromise, and see everything in stark black-and-white terms.

One solution to this problem might be to elect Democratic demagogues who won’t compromise, if we could find enough of them to make a difference. But a government composed of politicians on the left and right who won’t compromise would be even more dysfunctional than the government we already have.

That seems to leave electing more reasonable people as the best solution, so many reasonable people that the nuts can’t gum up the works. Until we have a Democratic President, a Democratic majority in the House and a Democratic supermajority in the Senate, we’re probably screwed. And even then we’ll have to worry about the damn Supreme Court.

(PS — So it was a hiatus after all.)