OMNI
CORRUPTION USA
Compiled by Dick
Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology
http://omnicenter.org/donate/
Contents: Corruption USA July 25, 2016
Corruption History USA
Zephyr
Teachout, Corruption in America
Paul
Street, Modern Scandals USA Foreign and Domestic
Corruption Today
Fitrakis
and Wasserman, 2016 Vulnerable Voting Machines and GOP
Governors (Fran)
Janine
Jackson Interviews Brendan Fischer, No Limit on Money in Politics:
Wisconsin Campaign Corruption
Janine
Jackson Interviews Lee Fang on Revolving Doors and Bribing
Government Officials
Resistance
End Citizens
United
Weissman, Public Citizen: Transparency of Political Contributions by Federal Contractors
Weissman,
Public Citizen: Financial Services
Conflict of Interest Act (S. 1779, H.R. 3065)
Roth, MSNBC:
Public Wants Its
Representatives to Fight Corruption
CORRUPTION USA: HISTORY
The Citizens
United decision was not merely bad law; it was bad for politics, and
displayed an even worse understanding of history. Americans from James Madison
onward have argued that it is possible for politicians and citizens alike to
try to achieve a kind of public good in the public sphere. The traditional view
is not naive — it does not assume that people are generally public regarding.
It assumes that the job of government is to create structures to curb
temptations that lead to exaggerated self-interest. It certainly recognizes the
power of self-interest; but instead of endorsing it, the traditional American
approach makes it government’s job to temper egocentrism in the public sphere.
The traditional conception implicates difficult questions: What is
self-orientation and public orientation, and what is the public good? But it
does not discard these distinctions because they are difficult ones to parse. A
classical American approach engages the complexity. Like liberty, speech or
equality, corruption is an important concept with unclear boundaries. It refers
to excessive private interests in the public sphere; an act is corrupt when
private interests trump public ones in the exercise of public power and a
person is corrupt when they use public power for their own ends, disregarding
others.
Like liberty, speech or equality, corruption
is an important concept with unclear boundaries.
Corruption in America is my effort to fill in the history that Citizens
United ignored. It provides a previously neglected story of the use of
the concept in American law and a much-needed account of the different kinds of
meanings attached to it throughout the political life of the country. I show
that for most of American history, courts remained committed to a broad view of
corruption. The book draws primarily upon the texts used by lawyers: the
Constitutional Convention, cases and statutes. It shows how, starting in the
late 1970s, everything began to change around this issue.
The
Supreme Court, along with a growing subset of scholars, began to confuse the
concept of corruption and throw out many of the prophylactic rules that were
used to protect against it. This rejection has led to an overflow of private
industry involvement in political elections and a rapid decline in the civic
ethic in Congress and the state houses. The old ideas about virtue were tossed
out as sentimental, but the old problems of corruption and government have persisted.
Interest-group pluralists who reject these ideas do not, I believe, have an
answer to the problem of corruption and in fact have been part of the problem.
The
contemporary era is full of proverbial diamond-encrusted gifts, although they
are less likely to come from the king of France. Instead, they come from the
lords of highly concentrated, monopolistic industries who, like the king of
France in 1785, have an intense and personal interest in the political choices
of the legislative branches and a casual disregard for the civic process.
Candidates
are dependent upon the gifts of wealthy individuals in the form of campaign
contributions and businesses in the form of independent political expenditures.
The impulse to resist these presents is a deeply American one, going all the
way back introduction to the founding. But in order to protect this resistance,
we will need tools and approaches that are alien to the modern law and economic
transactional understandings of corruption.
A criminal law “War on Corruption” is arguably
like the wars on drugs or terror — nearly impossible to win in arraignments.
The
book argues that prophylactic rules designed to limit temptations are not a
backwater but a cornerstone of what is best in our country. In our modern prosecutorial
culture, one might be tempted to think that white-collar bribery laws, which I
categorized as “corrupt intent” laws, would be the appropriate tool for
fighting corruption. But they are problematic. If a bribery statute is narrowly
drawn (or interpreted), it covers only brazen, unsophisticated exchanges and
does not actually solve problems of money being used to influence policy and
undermine representative government. A narrow law will punish only clumsy
politicians like William Jefferson, who hid his rolls of cash in a freezer.
More
broadly interpreted corrupt intent laws are troubling for the opposite reason:
since they proscribe giving a “thing of value” with “intent to influence”
governmental action, they can be used to punish political enemies. By their
terms, they can even cover a politician’s promise to help a teachers’ group in
exchange for an endorsement. A criminal law “War on Corruption” is arguably
like the wars on drugs or terror — nearly impossible to win in arraignments.
Corruption
is far better fought through changing basic incentive structures. This might
seem intuitive to anyone involved in politics, but the majority of the current
Supreme Court openly prefer bribery laws to prophylactic campaign spending
limits: one of their justifications for striking down campaign finance rules is
that corrupt intent laws provide better protection.
A deeper understanding of the tradition of
corruption can enrich our civic culture and our laws.
I
seek to enrich the way American judges, scholars and citizens imagine the
concept of corruption and its relationship to our legal system. The book
challenges four commonly held misconceptions: that corruption law began in the
post-Watergate era, that criminal bribery law is the dominant sphere in which
corruption law plays out, that bribery law is coherent and consistent and that
quid pro quo is the heart of corruption law. A deeper understanding of the
tradition of corruption can enrich our civic culture and our laws.
If
the Supreme Court can better remember our past, it might overturn dozens of
cases that have limited the capacity of elected legislatures to make their own
experiments in democracy. And if we, as citizens, can remember our past, it
could augment the way we think about our founding principles. What if we could
add “anti-corruption” to citizens’ sense of national identity?
From
Watergate to Deflategate (or) Mistakes v. Crimes
One useful measure of a political
culture’s moral level is the nature
of what counts as a terrible outrage, disgrace, or scandal in that culture. The
Vietnam War – really an imperial
U.S. war on Vietnam and neighboring countries – has a bad reputation in the
United States. That’s a good thing, no doubt, but consider the main reason for
the war’s poor standing in the nation’s collective memory. It’s not because the
U.S. “crucifixion of South Asia” (as Noam Chomsky aptly described it at the
time) was a monumentally immoral and imperial crime that killed from 3 to 5
million Southeast Asians (along with 58,000 U.S troops) between 1962 and 1975.
No, the Vietnam War’s bad name results from the fact that the crime is
understood to have been a humiliating failure, costing tens of thousands of U.S
lives, stirring up mass protest, and damaging the credibility of U.S. foreign
policy in a blundering but supposedly well-intended “mistake” that ended with
the North Vietnamese sweeping into Saigon.
A similar moral cluelessness mars the national U.S. memory of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s invasion
and occupation of Iraq. It is commonplace by now for many U.S. politicians
on both sides of the nation’s partisan divide to refer to the absurdly named
Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) as “a mistake.” What you won’t hear except on the
mostly excluded margins of U.S. media and politics culture is serious reference
to OIF as immoral, imperial, and/or criminal. Such descriptions are wholly
appropriate for a transparently illegal war of unprovoked invasion driven by
blatantly petro-imperial, racist, and commercial imperatives. Granted
advance approved in Congress by then US Senator Hillary Clinton and many other
hawkish Democrats, including Reille Hunter’s future sex-scandal partner John
Edwards (then a US Senator from North Carolina), this astonishing imperial
transgression killed as many as 1 million Iraqis, injured and displaced
millions more, and devastated social and civil infrastructure across
Mesopotamia. Still, the invasion can be discussed as a “mistake” only in the
same sense as Vietnam: as a well-intended policy that didn’t work.
Much the same vapid moral
nothingness surrounds the debates over the U.S. military and CIA’s use of
“enhanced interrogation” (torture)
techniques and murderous drone
strikes across the Muslim world in the wake of the 9/11/2001 jetliner
attacks. The disputes are mainly about whether or not these terrible,
arch-criminal tools of repression actually work or not in the so-called war on
terror, more accurately described as a war
of terror. The fact that these outrageous methods and weapons have
immorally traumatized, maimed, crippled, and killed human beings on a mass
scale is beside the point, for Uncle Sam is never a criminal. “The United
States,” Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright explained in
1999,”is good. We try to do our best everywhere.”
Watergate
v. COINTELPRO
The infamous Watergate Scandal is
another case in point. It was a petty burglary of the Democratic Party’s
national headquarters in 1972 by a handful of thugs working for the Republic
National Committee. It became a giant national media obsession that led to the
resignation of U.S. President Richard Nixon. And it was nothing compared to
COINTELPRO. As the leading left US intellectual Noam Chomsky explained 25 years
ago:
“at the
exact same time that Watergate was discovered, there were exposures in the
courts and through the Freedom of Information Act of massive F.B.I. operations
to undermine political freedom in the United States, running back to Roosevelt
but really picking up under Kennedy. It was called ‘COINTRELPRO’ [short for ‘Counterintelligence Program’], and it
included a vast range of things….the straight Gestapo-style assassination of a
Black Panther leader [Fred Hampton];…organizing race riots in an effort to
destroy black movements; …
attacks
on the American Indian Movement, the women’s movement, you name it…fifteen
years of F.B.I. disruption of the Socialist Workers Party – that meant regular
F.B.I. burglaries, stealing membership lists and using them to threaten people,
going to businesses and getting people fired from their jobs and so on. That
fact alone…is already vastly more important than…a bunch of Keystone Kops
[breaking] into the Democratic National Committee headquarters one time. The
Socialist Workers Party is a legal political party after all…And this wasn’t
just a bunch of gangsters, this was the national political police; that’s very
serious….In comparison to this, Watergate is a tea party” (Chomksy, Understanding
Power [New
Press, 2002], 118).
Very
serious, that is, to anyone who cares about basic civil liberties. It wasn’t
terribly serious as far as the Washington Post and other Watergate-obsessed corporate
media institutions were concerned, which is why you will get blank stares
(“Coinwhatmo?”) when you mention “the COINTELPRO scandal” to all but a few
Americans.
Missiles,
Coups, and Mass Murder vs. Cigars and a Stained Dress
Watergate
and even COINTELPRO were small crimes compared also to Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon’s transgressions abroad, including
in Nixon’s case the secret, mass-murderous bombing of Cambodia (leading to the
rise of the proto-genocidal Pol Pot regime there) and US coordination and
support of a fascistic military coup that overthrew the democratically elected
Chilean government of the Salvador Allende and killed thousands of workers and
activists in 1973. During the televised Watergate hearings, nobody in the
reigning mass media or in Congress bothered to mentioned that Nixon had carried
out “one of the most intense bombings campaigns in history in densely populated
areas of a peasant country [Cambodia], killing maybe 150,000 people” (Chomsky, Understanding
Power, 120).
Watergate was also a much smaller
crime than the Reagan administration’s
Iran-Contra cockup. That scandal involved elite US military, White House,
and intelligence officials illegally funding the right-wing Nicaraguan
terrorists known as the Contras by covertly selling missiles to Iran.
Reflecting the U.S. Establishment’s sense that Sixties-inspired press freedom
and independence had gone far enough with the Watergate coverage, corporate
media chieftains agreed not to pursue the Iran-Contra Scandal to the point
where another criminal U.S. President might have had to resign – this time over
a matter that was explicitly problematic for the notion that US foreign policy
is always conducted with good and noble intentions.
Thanks in no small part to that
agreement, the next biggest scandal in the official U.S. memory after Watergate
involves not the murder of thousands of Nicaraguan peasants but rather the
unseemly soiling of a young White House staffer’s blue dress with Bill
Clinton’s well-travelled DNA. Clinton currently enjoys remarkably high
popularity in the U.S. He does so with no small assistance from a corporate
media that helped nearly force his resignation in the face of a monumental
presidential scandal two decades ago. So what brought Clinton to the brink of
defenestration from the Oval Office: passing the arch-regressive and
corporatist North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) over and against his campaign
promises not to do so?; pushing and signing the vicious elimination of poor
families’ prior entitlement to minimal federal cash assistance in the name of
“welfare reform” while embracing endemic corporate welfare and pushing through
the deadly de-regulation of high finance?; humiliating Russia, criminally
bombing Serbia (on falser pretexts), and otherwise generating a New Cold War
with Russia that helped crush hopes for a desperately needed diversion of
resources from the bloated Pentagon System to the meeting of human and social
needs?; imposing the savage “economic sanctions” that killed more than a
million Iraqis? No, what almost proved Clinton’s undoing was the childish
Monica Lewinsky cigar and fellatio fiasco – one of Wild Bill’s copious sordid sexual
escapades – and the silly lies he told about his private skullduggery.
“The
People Who Own the Place”: Clinton v. Edwards and Nixon
Clinton has been forgiven and
redeemed in the “mainstream” U.S. media and politics culture. Such exoneration
will never be extended to John Edwards.
The reasons for this contrast include the particularly twisted nature of
Edwards’ baby-Daddy transgression (committed while Elizabeth Edwards struggled
with ultimately terminal cancer) and his subsequent bizarre cover-up. At the
same time, however, crazy John Edwards committed an even more unpardonable sin
in the corporate-managed “democracy.” He campaigned eloquently, passionately,
and perhaps even sincerely against the moneyed elite and corporate-financial
domination of both of the nation’s leading political organizations. Whether he
meant it or not, candidate Edwards went off the reservation on concentrated
wealth.
The more
interesting Clinton comparison is with Nixon.
Reflecting on why Nixon was removed from the White House over the “triviality”
of Watergate, Chomsky noted that Nixon “made a lot of powerful enemies” when he
tore apart the post-World War II Bretton
Woods system. The Bretton Woods framework established the U.S. dollar as
the global reserve currency fixed to gold and placed restrictions on import
quotas and the like. It made the U.S. the world’s banker, in essence. When
Nixon took the nation off the gold standard, suspended the convertibility of
the dollar, and raised import duties, he messed with “the people who own the
place.” Leading “multinational corporations and international banks relied on
the [Bretton Woods] system, and they did not like it being broken down”
(Chomsky,Understanding Power,
119). This elite anger over Nixon’s move was evident in the Wall
Street Journal and
other elite business venues, suggesting strongly that more than few powerful
people were happy to see Nixon go.
Clinton, it should be remembered, stayed carefully
obedient to the nation’s corporate and financial masters. The “people who own
the place” occupied key positions and maintained hegemonic influence in his
militantly neoliberal, NAFTA-signing administration. As Charles Ferguson notes
in his useful book Predator
Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America (2012), Clinton’s “economic and regulatory
policy was taken over by the [financial] industry’s designated drivers – Robert
Rubin, Larry Summers, and Alan Greenspan…[and] investment bankers were given
clear signals that they could behave as they wished.”
Deflategate
vs. Militarism Promotion
A revealing episode in the United
States’ rich history of selective public outrage comes from the world of
sports. Look at the high-profile media scandal that emerged before the most
recent Super Bowl merged over supposedly shocking revelations that the National
Football League (NFL) champion New England Patriots manipulated the
air-pressure of game footballs in accord with the preferences of their
quarterback Tom Brady. “Deflategate” is a minor matter even on purely athletic
and sportsmanship grounds but it has received enormous media attention and
popular discussion over the last seven months. It is now the biggest NFL
scandal ever.
In reality, however, two other NFL-related scandals would deserve
considerably more attention in a morally serious culture. The first is the
NFL’s campaign to undermine and discredit recent path-breaking medical research
showing beyond reasonable doubt that the frankly vicious and super-violent game
sold by the massively profitable and powerful league has a pervasively
crippling and deadly impact on the brains of many of its players from top
professional ranks down, This is no small moral matter given the extreme
popularity of football in the US, where the more than 1.1 million high school
students and more than 90,000 college students play the brain-damaging sport
each year.
The second scandal has to do with
recent reports that NFL teams have
received millions of dollars from the US
Defense Department in exchange for honoring US troops and veterans in
on-field ceremonies and on stadium screens before and during games. There’s
something more than a little distasteful about the NFL taking cash to salute
the nation’s military personnel. The league, after all, is rolling in profits
thanks in no small part to its cozy relationship with Washington. Thanks to its
highly favored status with Washington, it functions as a de facto legal
monopoly. It is classified as a 501(c)6 and therefore pays no taxes. No wonder
the billionaires who own all but one of the league’s teams (the Green Bay
Packers belong to 360,584 stockholders) all make handsome profits on their
franchises (no other major U.S. sports league can say that). Surely, one might
imagine, these uber-wealthy beneficiaries of corporate welfare would not need
to be paid to throw some love at “our troops” – at the people who are sent off
to kill, maim, die, and suffer horrible injuries in the names of “freedom” and
“civilization.” But no, football barons must have their pound of flesh even for
that little bit of “giving back” to the military “heroes” – something that
militaristic Republican politicians like John McCain (R-AZ), Jeff Flake (R-AZ),
and Chris Christie have called “disgraceful” and “outrageous.”
Note, however, what is not a
scandal in the national coverage and commentary, trapped in the usual moral quicksand of American Exceptionalism,
which dictates that the United States and above all its military and its wars
are inherently good and noble: the federal government takes millions of
taxpayer dollars to invest in promoting
the imperial militarism that produces mass-murderous crimes like the U.S.
invasions of Vietnam and Iraq and the torture and drone strikes that have
helped push untold masses of Muslims into the arms of the Islamic State and
other extremist Islamist groups. If the taking of the taxpayer money by
explicitly commercial, profit-seeking football capitalists is scandalous, so is
the giving of it by the purportedly higher-minded Pentagon. The Defense
Department spends the public money with the intention of advancing its ability
to garner recruits and continued lavish taxpayer funding s for its murderous
activities across a war-ravaged planet in which the U.S. accounts for nearly
half of all military spending.
Poor
Folks’ Welfare v. Rich Folks’ Welfare
Still,
it’s good, I suppose, to see any scandal emerge that focuses some attention,
however briefly, on federal payouts to the rich. In the U.S. for many decades,
“mainstream” media and politics culture has advanced the noxious notion that
there is something scandalous about the comparatively tiny percentage of
resources the United States government spends on assistance to the poor. This
poisonous and reactionary sentiment helped drive Bill Clinton (and Newt
Gingrich’s) aforementioned welfare “reform” (elimination), a Dickensian policy
that has proved calamitous for the nation’s many millions of impoverished
Americans in the current century. Meanwhile, U.S. government welfare remains
all too quietly alive and well, free of scandal – for the wealthy corporate and
financial Few, that is. As the leading U.S. business paper BloombergBusiness candidly informed its elite
(and therefore safe) readers two years ago, reporting on research from the
International Monetary Fund:
“the largest U.S. banks aren’t
really profitable at all…the billions of dollars they allegedly earn for their
shareholders [are] almost entirely a gift from taxpayers…The top five banks –
JPMorgan, Bank of America Corp, Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co,. and
Goldman Sachs Group Inc…the banks occupying the commanding heights of the U.S.
financial industry – with almost $9 trillion in assets, more than half the size
of the U.S. economy – would just about break even in the absence of corporate
welfare. In large part, the profits they report are essentially transfers from
taxpayers to their shareholders.”
By “corporate welfare,” Bloomberg
Business meant
not just the massive bailouts the big banks received after helping crash the
economy in 2008 and 2009, but also and above all the reduction of their
borrowing costs by the federal government’s policy of loaning them money at low
to zero interest rates.
It isn’t just in the financial
sector, of course, where big, politically influential corporations receive
giant government subsidies and protection, all free from the tough-love “free
market discipline” of “welfare reform.” The aforementioned Pentagon System is itself a giant form of corporate welfare for
high-tech U.S. and other global corporations, one of countless ways in
which the federal government funds and protects Big Business, including the
highly subsidized and super-profitable fossil fuel firms who are leading
humanity over the cliff of radical anthropogenic climate change, Funny how that
never quite makes it to real scandal status in the U.S. – no more than the
millions killed abroad as “collateral damage” by the U.S. Empire, particularly
in the oil-rich Middle East.
CORRUPTION TODAY
ELECTION CORRUPTION USA 2016: VOTING MACHINES
Donald Trump. (photo: Bill Clark/Roll Call)
Will
GOP Swing State Governors Strip & Flip Donald Trump Into the White House?
By Bob Fitrakis &
Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
24 July 16
Voting Machines Can Be Manipulated
s the Democratic Convention opens in
Philadelphia, there’s just one one clear message that matters from the
Republicans: Donald Trump will be within ten points of Hillary Clinton in the
fall election.
Thus, unless the Democrats do something about
the issue of election protection, it will be within the power of key GOP swing
state governors to give Donald Trump the presidency.
For all its problems, the wildly disorganized
and fractious gathering in Cleveland all boiled down to Trump’s final speech.
It was rambling and often incoherent. But it delivered the classic strongman
message: You need ME to protect you.
Given the chaos, violence, and injustice of
imperial America in 2016, that message is almost certain to sell with enough
Americans to keep Trump close enough to Hillary Clinton to allow the election
to be electronically stripped and flipped.
In 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama was able to
overcome these barriers with a huge popular margin in more states than the GOP
could reasonably steal.
This year, in a close election, given how the
mechanics of our election system operate, the decision of who will enter the
White House will be in the hands of the GOP governors of such swing states as
Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa and Arizona.
Those will be the only six votes that really
count in November. Should all or most of these governors (with their GOP
Secretaries of State) flip the vote count for Trump, he will likely has a lock
on the White House.
Two major “strip and flip” forces can doom the
Democrats in 2016.
First, the GOP stripping of millions of
suspected Democrats from the voter roles is proceeding. As Greg Palast reports
in his brilliant new film, “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy – a Tale of Billionaires
and Ballot Bandits,” computer programs coordinated by Kris Kobach, Kansas’s GOP
secretary of state, are being used to disenfranchise millions of mostly
African-American, Hispanic and young citizens.
As exposed by Palast, the stripping technique entered
the computer age in 2000, when Florida governor Jeb Bush dropped more than
90,000 blacks and Hispanics from the registration rolls in an election
ultimately decided by 537 votes.
In 2004 the Ohio GOP stripped more than 300,000
inner city voters in an election decided by 118,775 officially, though more
than 90,000 votes still remain uncounted.
Palast shows that in 2016, the Democratic
constituency will be electronically stripped of millions of voters in at least
two dozen key states, easily enough to make the difference in a close election.
But if that isn’t enough to put Trump in the
White House, the final count can be flipped with computerized “adjustments”
made in the dark hours of election night.
In both Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004, electronic
manipulation put and kept George W. Bush in the White House.
In 2016, well over half the votes will be cast
on electronic voting machines. Most of these are ten years old or more. All can
be easily manipulated by their owners, which are private corporations, primarily
Warren Buffett’s ES&S.
The courts have ruled that the software on these
machines is proprietary. So there is no effective public monitoring or
accountability of the tallying process. At the end of election day, if they are
in agreement with each other, the governor and secretary of state can make the
vote count pretty much whatever they want.
In a close election, the six key swing states
electronically available to the GOP are likely to comprise more than enough
votes to swing the Electoral College. The question is: will their governors
give those electoral votes to Trump?
Florida’s governor is the far-right Rick Scott.
After 2000, Florida reformed the secretary of state position used by Katherine
Harris to help Jeb Bush put George W. Bush in the White House. But the
governor’s power over the vote count remains potentially decisive. Florida also
has a key Senate race involving Marco Rubio, which gives the GOP an added
incentive
North Carolina has also made adjustments to its
vote count system, and has a Democratic secretary of state. But its
disenfranchisement measures are legendary and could be decisive.
Michigan, Iowa and Arizona could all be
strip-and-flip locks for the GOP.
So as always, Ohio may be the key. Governor John
Kasich has made very clear his disdain for Donald Trump. But the US Senate race
pits his good friend Rob Portman against the former Democratic governor Ted
Strickland. Kasich may be willing to throw Trump under the bus. But he and his
secretary of state, Jon Husted, will be strongly committed to sending Portman
back to the Senate.
Thus they won’t want the unlikely discrepancy of
a GOP Senate victory alongside a GOP presidential loss.
Whatever the case, no matter how many hundreds
of millions are spent on this campaign, no matter how many thousands of hours
the bloviators blab about this issue or that, when push comes to shove, this
election will be decided on election night by the swing state governors and
secretaries of state who have their hands on the electronic vote count.
Thus the smart money would be on Donald Trump
entering the White House in January 2017.
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman’s Strip & Flip Selection of 2016: Five Jim
Crows & Electronic Election Theft is at www.freepress.org,
along with The Fitrakis Files. Harvey Wasserman’sAmerica
at the Brink of Rebirth: The Organic Spiral of US History is at
www.solartopia.org.
Reader Supported News is
the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely
granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
‘There Is Effectively No Limit on Money in
Politics’
CounterSpin interview
with Brendan Fischer on Wisconsin campaign corruption. By Janine Jackson. Jul272015
Via FAIR 7-29-15
(cc image: DonkeyHotey)
Janine Jackson
interviewed Brendan Fischer of the Center for Media and Democracy about
Scott Walker’s campaign finance case for the July 24 CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Listeners will remember 2011 efforts to
recall Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in the wake of his frontal assault on labor
rights. In 2012, an investigation was launched into illicit coordination
between Walker’s recall-fighting campaign and a number of wealthy conservative
groups. The investigation closed this week, but elite media are much more keen
to tell us what that means for Walker than what it means for Wisconsin–not to
mention constitutionally incapable, it would seem, of seeing past the balance
of power between Republicans and Democrats to consider that between the
political machinery and the people. Here to help us sort through the court’s
ruling and its potential effects is Brendan Fischer. He’s general counsel for
the Center for Media and Democracy; they are based in Wisconsin. He joins us
now by phone from Washington, DC.
Welcome to CounterSpin,
Brendan Fischer.
BF: Thanks for having me.
JJ: Well, it sounds as though the charge was that
Walker actively sought to skirt finance laws and that the ruling is: Yes, he
did, but it’s OK? I mean, help us to understand exactly what happened here.
BF: That’s about right. Walker was accused of
coordinating with outside groups, namely Wisconsin Club for Growth and
Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce. And these are groups that, after
the US Supreme Court’s ruling inCitizens United, can accept unlimited
secret donations, and Walker’s campaign is still bound by campaign finance
limits that the US Supreme Court has consistently upheld.
And the reason that
coordination matters so much is because if a candidate can coordinate directly
with a group that takes secret unlimited donations, then the campaign
contribution limits that still apply to candidates go out the window, and it
basically means that there is really effectively no limits on money in politics
any longer. And the Wisconsin Supreme Court threw out the rule that limited
coordination between candidates and outside groups and they said that the
mere omission of words like “vote for” or “vote against” in a coordinated ad put
them beyond the reach of Wisconsin campaign finance law.
JJ: It’s important to underscore that money can
come from organizations to the candidate. The candidate will know exactly who
sent him that big check; the people who won’t know are the public.
BF: Yeah, that’s exactly right; and the evidence
that prosecutors gathered in this investigation and that has been
made public is very troubling. There is a mining company CEO that secretly
donated $700,000 to a group working with the Walker campaign. After the
election, Walker prioritized the mining bill that the company wanted. But at
the time that the bill was being debated in the Wisconsin legislature, the
public had no idea that the company had donated $700,000 to a group working
directly with the Walker campaign.
There was also an
example of a chain hardware store owner who gave $1.5 million to this group
working with the Walker campaign and in turn, he received $1.8 million in tax
credit from the jobs agency that Walker chairs; as well as a significant drop-off
in enforcement by the Department of Natural Resources, which enforces
environmental laws. These are just two examples among many, of secret
contributions to a group working directly with the Walker campaign, that the
public had no idea was happening, but Walker had full knowledge of.
JJ: Just want to bring you back for a
second, to what is ostensibly the First Amendment point here. Because the whole
thing hinges on the fact that these dark money groups are not making ads that
say “vote for Scott Walker,” they’re making so-called “issue ads.”
This is what the court
said was the important distinction. They are making ads that don’t point
towards a particular candidate. Is it your sense that that’s just not a
meaningful distinction in theory? It certainly seems not to have been
meaningful in practice.
BF: It’s not meaningful at all; and it goes well
beyond what any state or federal court has ever held. Up to this point, no
court has ever held that the mere omission of words like “vote for” or “vote
against” means that coordination is perfectly acceptable. The critical element
of the court’s holding in Citizens United was independence.
They claimed–I would say questionably–that independent spending poses little
risk of corruption because, by definition, it is not coordinated. Once
coordination is present, it’s no longer independent. But the Wisconsin Supreme
Court ignored that fact and they went well beyond what any court has ever held
in opening the floodgates to secret money in politics.
JJ: Well, a big part of this story, and what makes
it all feel so kind of claustrophobic, is the fact that the Wisconsin Supreme
Court justices, who decided the case, are themselves elected, and their
elections are bankrolled by the same groups, some of them, like Wisconsin Club
for Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, that coordinated with
Walker and that challenged the law. I mean, it really kinda hurts your brain.
BF: Yeah, that is certainly the most distressing
thing about this decision. The court never should’ve heard this case at all. So
Wisconsin Club for Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the two
groups that Walker is accused of coordinating with and that were parties to
this case, are also the dominant spenders on Wisconsin Supreme Court elections.
By our accounting, they’ve spent together over $10 million electing the
court’s four-justice conservative majority; and that raises serious questions
of conflicts of interest.
Particularly because
two of the justices, Justice David Prosser and Justice Michael Gableman, were
elected by very slim margins. So it’s fair to say that but for the $3.6 million
that Wisconsin Club for Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce spent
supporting David Prosser in the 2011 race, Prosser would not be on the bench.
And we can say something similar about Gableman: He won his race by only 20,000
votes, and if WMC hadn’t spent around $2.75 million on Gableman’s race, he also
wouldn’t be on the bench. So these justices would not be on the bench were it
not for the spending by the exact same groups that were sitting in front of
them in court.
JJ: Yes, well, finally I’m going to refer
folks to your piece at PRWatch.orgthat talks about the role of the
right-wing echo chamber, the right-wing media machine, in all of this,
which was significant. But I would like to ask you about what many folks think
of the mainstream or centrist media and the way they approach these issues.
Because, you know–you’d hope that, if nothing else, journalists would be
compelled by this use of the First Amendment as actually a weapon of secrecy;
but what we get instead is the Washington Post, for example, on
July 17 describing these groups that don’t have to disclose their donors, and
they say, “These groups are not supposed to directly coordinate with political
campaigns, but many have found workarounds.”
Workarounds? I mean, “I’m supposed to pay my taxes but I
found aworkaround.” You know? I can’t help but feel that mainstream
media play some role in normalizing this kind of behavior.
BF: Yeah. I think that the groups involved in this
case have gotten away with a lot. If you read the mainstream media, you may not
know that this entire investigation was actually led by a Republican. So even
as Walker and his allies described this as a partisan witch hunt or some sort
of political payback, they conveniently ignore the fact that the investigation
has been overseen by a Republican, involved the participation of both
Republican and Democratic district attorneys across the state. And you might
not know that this was not really a questionable area of law. Back in 1999,
another Wisconsin Supreme Court justice named Jon Wilcox, who’s no longer on
the bench, was fined $60,000 for engaging in basically the same type of
issue-ad coordination as Walker. So, this was not a workaround; this was just a
broad assertion by groups that thought they could get away with it.
Janine Jackson is the
program director of FAIR and the host of CounterSpin.
Hear the interview
with Brendan Fischer on SoundCloud:
‘You Can Legally Bribe a Government Official’
CounterSpin interview
with Lee Fang on Washington's revolving door
Janine Jackson
interviewed investigative reporter Lee Fang about Washington’s revolving door
for the July 24 CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: When Eric Holder first joined law firm
Covington & Burling in 2001, he was coming from a stint as deputy attorney
general under Bill Clinton. So it’s no wonder that when Holder went to the
Obama administration as attorney general, the folks at Covington kept his seat
warm.
And indeed, for many,
Holder’s seamless slide from theoretically prosecuting big banks to defending
big banks from prosecution is a common-sense phenomenon only the hopelessly
naïve would bother to decry. He’s a lawyer, what do you expect? was the
substance of many a comment –of what comment there was, because, again, this
latest glimpse of the porous tissue between regulator and regulated went down
as no news at all for most of the press.
Our next guest does
find that revolving door newsworthy. Investigative journalist Lee Fang has been
talking about money and politics for years; he’s a co-founder of RepublicReport.org and writes at The Nation as
well as The Intercept. He joins us by phone from the Bay Area.
Welcome back to CounterSpin,
Lee Fang.
Lee Fang: Hey, Janine. Thank you so much for having me.
JJ: Well, tell us first, if you would, a little
bit about Covington & Burling. Who are they and who are some of their
clients?
LF: Covington & Burling is a Washington, DC,
law firm that also engages in lobbying; it’s got an extensive practice that
hires former members of Congress, their staff, former federal
officials—including of course, Eric Holder—and it represents major
corporations. So the firm has helped negotiate settlements for corporations that
have been accused of wrongdoing, they’ve also helped secure legislation for
their corporate clients and they’ve done a number of regulatory and lobbying
acts that help provide their clients with special access to politicians.
JJ: And some of those clients have included some
of the largest banks.
LF: Yeah, that’s right. You know, a few years
ago, Reuters had a greatinvestigation that showed that Covington & Burling
has not only represented the big banks—Bank of America, CitiGroup, JP Morgan,
Wells Fargo—but they played a really special role in the foreclosure crisis,
helping these banks set up a mortgage company that helped create a document
trail. When banks have attempted to foreclose on companies and they have to
produce these documents showing that they have a chain of title, then this
third party company, known as MERS, produced these documents, in many cases
falsified these documents, and Covington’s role, actually, in the late
’90s—they provided the legal documentation to create MERS on behalf of Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac.
The New York Times depicts
Eric Holder’s departure from the Justice Department. (photo: Zach Gibson/NYT)
JJ: Well, in thumbnailing Holder’s tenure as
attorney general, folks like the New York Times said, “His
Justice Department wrested huge fines from banks, including JP Morgan Chase,
Barclays and CitiGroup,” but seen another way, Holder by some lights didn’t so
much try and fail to prosecute big banks as succeed in protecting them.
LF: That’s right. As the inspector general of the
Justice Department found, under Holder the Justice Department actually deprioritized
mortgage fraud in their US attorney offices in New York, California and
elsewhere. So there was a systemic attempt to shift the blame for the mortgage
and financial crisis in 2008. Instead of the big banks, there were only
criminal prosecutions of some small-time lenders and mortgage professionals,
but the big banks that really had the responsibility behind the financial
crisis, there was no effort to make any criminal referrals that we know of
publicly and, of course, there were no prosecutions of any of the large banks
responsible for the crisis.
JJ: Well, when you talk about Eric Holder going
from Covington & Burling to the White House back to Covington & Burling
back to the White House back to Covington & Burling, the response from many
could be summed up, I think, as “duh.” I mean, some of us don’t forget 1992
Hillary Clinton saying, “For goodness sakes, you can’t be a lawyer if you don’t
represent banks.”
And the idea is kind
of: This is just how the game is played, what’s your problem?
For me, it’s not as if
we’re asking reporters to feign surprise or feign ingenuousness, but you can’t
present just kind of winking at the cynicism of it all as though that meant the
same as interrogating it, or explaining who is hurt and who is helped. Obviously,
real people are involved here.
LF: That right. I think this is not just a scandal
for the Justice Department in that so many of the officials, not just Holder,
but his top deputy Lanny Breuer also returned to Covington & Burling after
serving for a few years in the Obama administration—this is a scandal for the
media.
One of the perhaps
most cynical and and most prevalent ways that you can legally bribe a
government official or an elected official is to wait to give them a
multi-million dollar check, not while they’re in office, but as soon as they
retire. So if a politician helps a bank or an oil company, that oil company
can’t directly buy them a boat or give them a million-dollar check. But if they
wait until that official retires from office, as soon as they step out the door
of Congress and find an employment contract with a lobbying firm or a big bank,
then they can accept a multi-million-dollar payday; and so it’s simply delayed
bribery, in my perspective.
But because this has
become so routine, that this happens every day, whether it’s a member of
Congress or a high level regulator, or in this case, the head of the Justice
Department, this has become such a function of life in Washington, DC, it’s no
longer a scandal in the eyes of many reporters. In a sense they condone this
behavior, because in some of the exit interviews that Holder gave, reporters
who had that special access to Eric Holder, they didn’t ask him about this
dynamic, they didn’t ask him how much he’s being paid, they didn’t ask him about
the ethics issues of going back to work for a big bank lobbying firm given his
role in refusing to criminally prosecute these banks. You know the onus lies on
the reporters and the media outlets that fail to ask these questions.
JJ: I almost feel as though it’s a sign of
savvy to show that you’re not outraged, that you’re not disturbed at this sort
of shenanigan, you know? That’s kinda what makes you a “serious” reporter in
some ways. Which is disheartening.
LF: Sure, it’s part of the dynamic of being a beat
reporter that if you ask these kind of unflattering questions, you lose access,
you get shuffled around. So to be a successful beat reporter, you have to ask
only tangential questions, or questions that make the interviewee—cast them in
a positive light, I suppose.
A lobbyist for Pepsi is now chief
of staff of the Senate
Agricultural Committee, which oversees school lunch programs and nutritional
guidelines.
JJ: And just so folks know that we’re not using
Holder as an example because he’s so rare, this kind of porousness happens at
all levels. For example, before you were writing about Holder, you were writing about this guy Stephen Sayle from
Chevron and his new job.
LF: That’s right. A top lobbyist for
Chevron, Stephen Sayle is now a senior staff member for the House Committee on
Science, which oversees science policy for the federal government. This is a
lobbyist, Mr. Sayle, who has helped Chevron beat back regulatory efforts that
rest on federal science, whether it’s on the ozone or on climate change.
And now that he is
overseeing the Science Committee, he has a unique opportunity to shift not only
policy that governs the way that federal science is used to implement pollution
regulations, he also has an opportunity to help with the Science Committee’s
kind of investigation of climate scientists: Over the years, the House Science
Committee has brought in various scientists to quiz them on climate science and
other issues that are very controversial now given the EPA’s pursuit of
regulations that affect the fossil fuel industry.
But that isn’t a
unique dynamic. In the last two Congresses, we’ve seen an unprecedented
wholesale change in the senior staff positions in Congress, and I’m referring
to the chief of staff, which reports directly to a member of Congress or
senator, or the staff director position, and that’s the position that oversees
either a committee or a subcommittee. In almost every single position for staff
director, we’ve seen lobbyists for the relevant industry take those spots.
So for the
Agricultural Committee, which oversees school lunches and nutrition guidelines,
we now have a Pepsi lobbyist who is overseeing that committee. In the Senate
Armed Services Committee, which oversees military spending, we have a lobbyist
for the trade group that represents Lockheed Martin and Boeing now leading that
committee. So from committee to committee, whether it’s on chemical safety,
whether it’s on pollution or on school lunches, we have lobbyists for the
industries affected now running the show from the inside.
JJ: It certainly sounds like a story to me,
but it’s not if you think it’s just business as usual.
LF: Certainly, and this gets back to the culture
of Washington, DC. If you work in the public interest, if you kind of sacrifice
your career to helping the public good, working at a small think tank or at an
academic research position or in a public interest organization, you’re kind of
seen as a loser. You’re not invited to the big parties, you’re not featured in
the glossy magazines. But if you’re a political player, the big media outlets
celebrate you; you’re kind of seen as a winner in the big social circles in
Washington, DC. And as a kind of side effect of this entire dynamic, when you
take these positions, whether it’s with Chevron or with another company, and
then move into positions of power, your friends in the media do not consider this
a scandal.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with journalist Lee Fang;
his recent article on Eric Holder appeared on The
Intercept. You can find them online atFirstLook.org. Lee Fang, thank
you very much for joining us this week onCounterSpin
LF: Janine, it was a pleasure. Thank you so much
for having me.
Related
RESISTANCE
Co-Sponsor@EndCitizensUnited.org admin@endcitizensunited.org via bounce.bluestatedigital.com
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6:11 PM (19 hours ago)
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The Supreme
Court’s Citizens United ruling is one of the worst
judicial decisions in history. Groups like the Koch Brothers are now free
to buy elections and undermine our democracy.
Help us reach 25O,OOO citizen co-sponsors for a Constitutional Amendment
to overturnCitizens United:
Supporter: Dick Bennett
Co-Sponsor: PENDING (click to sign) >>
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Dick --
It’s been more than 5 years since the Supreme Court’s fateful decision
in Citizens United v F.E.C. Since then we’ve seen:
-- The rise to power of Charles and David Koch
-- The invention of the “SuperPAC”
-- The unconstricted flow of money into our elections
What’s happening before us is a fundamental erosion of our democracy. Big
money groups -- most prominently those on the far right -- are seizing more
and more control of America’s electoral system.
This was painfully evident in the 2014 Elections. Right wing groups were
dominant spenders in elections both small and large -- and it paid dividends
through a massive Republican wave.
Regardless of whether you lean right or left in your politics, we can’t allow
ourselves to have a system that’s up for sale to the highest bidder.
We need change...but it won’t be easy. Amending the Constitution is a major
undertaking. To start, we need tens of thousands of citizens like you to
stand up in support of this movement.
Dick, will you join us now and add
your name as a citizen co-sponsor for a Constitutional Amendment to overturnCitizens
United? >>
http://act.endcitizensunited.org/Co-Sponsor
We need your support. And we thank you for it.
-EndCitizensUnited.org
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Dick,
In 2010, the year Citizens United was
decided, our race cost more than $30 million: the most expensive in the
country.
Fast forward to 2014. A Senate race cost $100
million.
You don’t need to be a lawyer to see what’s
happening: The amount of “dark money” in politics is exploding, and it’s a
direct result of Citizens United.
All that "dark money" doesn’t just
look like corruption; it is corruption. We need to stand up and
take action to demand that Congress overturn Citizens United and
put elections back in the hands of everyday Americans. Will you add
your name?
There’s a reason why we’ve recently had one of
the least productive Congresses in modern American history: A small group of
ultra-wealthy donors are driving the conversation in Washington, donors whose
agenda has nothing to do with the needs of middle-class families.
Citizens United has fundamentally changed the complexion
of our democracy, and we need to end it before it’s too late. Stand
with us today to demand Congress overturn Citizens United.
Thank you,
Michael
Weissman, Public Citizen: Urge Pres. Obama to Require
Transparency of Political Contributions by Federal Contractors
Robert Weissman, Public Citizen via uark.edu
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9:46 AM (32 minutes ago)
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Dick,
Right now.
We have our very best chance to severely disrupt Citizens United since
the moment the United States Supreme Court handed down that abominable ruling
more than five years ago.
But we have some hard work to do.
Right now.
HERE’S WHERE THINGS STAND:
Thanks to a campaign spearheaded by Public Citizen, President Obama is thinking
about requiring all federal contractors to disclose how much they spend trying
to influence elections.
Don’t mistake this for some bureaucratic triviality.
Our taxpayer dollars go to thousands of companies — including most of the
largest corporations — that supply the government with everything from pencils
to toilet seats to nuclear submarines.
And, because of Citizens United, those corporations can secretly
spend literally as much as they want supporting (or attacking) politicians.
However, with an executive order from the president requiring transparency, we
can prevent Big Business from corrupting our democracy with all that dark
money.
Right now.
HERE’S HOW WE GOT THIS FAR:
Over the past few months, Public Citizen and our allies have made a major push
to win White House support for this much-needed rule.
We’ve collected more than 600,000 petition signatures in support of dragging
the dark money out of the shadows.
Last week — on the anniversary of another horrid Supreme Court campaign finance
ruling, McCutcheon v. FEC — we held a rousing demonstration in
front of the White House (and brought all those petitions to deliver to
President Obama).
With allies, we also organized rallies in 50 cities around the country — from
Honolulu, Hawaii, to Concord, New Hampshire — in support of the executive
order.
Those are absolutely stunning numbers.
But we have more to do.
Right now.
HERE’S HOW WE WIN:
In the weeks ahead, we’re going to:
· Direct thousands of calls to the White House
from concerned citizens across the country demanding presidential action on
political spending by corporations that do business with the government.
· Organize members of Congress to add their
voices to the nationwide grassroots demand for disclosure. Constituents across
the country will contact their representatives and senators — by email, by
phone and in person — and urge them to ask President Obama to act.
· Provide policymakers our detailed and
technical expertise to back up the push for an executive order.
· Build on our success in generating media
support for contractor disclosure — including a recent column published
by The New York Times.
· Use social media tools to engage more and more
Americans in this critical opportunity.
© 2015 Public Citizen • 1600 20th Street, NW /
Washington, D.C. 20009 • unsubscribe
Financial Services
Conflict of Interest Act (S.
1779, H.R. 3065), and it would block corruption by jamming the “revolving door”
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Hillary. Bernie.
O'Malley. Jeb.
Dick,
This is tremendous news.
An anti-corruption bill that Public Citizen worked closely with
congressional lawmakers to draft is now a major issue in the presidential
election.
Hillary Clinton is for it.
Bernie Sanders is for it.
Martin O’Malley is for it.
It’s the Financial
Services Conflict of Interest Act (S. 1779, H.R. 3065), and it would
block corruption by jamming the “revolving door” between Wall Street and
agencies that are supposed to regulate Wall Street.
Your members of Congress should be for it too. Urge your
representative and senators to co-sponsor the bill.
Even if you’ve already emailed your congressmembers about this issue, it will
help if you email them again.
In a recent speech, Jeb Bush also voiced support for revolving-door reforms.
The Financial Services Conflict of Interest Act would block the revolving
door by:
·
Banning corporations
from offering special “golden parachute” bonuses to CEOs or other employees
who take jobs at federal regulatory agencies that oversee the same companies.
·
Prohibiting senior
staff of federal regulators from taking any official action that directly and
substantially benefits a corporation or client they worked for in the past
two years — or any corporation where they seek future employment.
·
Requiring any financial
sector regulator to wait two years after leaving public service before taking
a corporate lobbying job or even assisting in a lobbying campaign.
Senator Elizabeth Warren has noted that the Financial Services
Conflict of Interest Act is “a bill any presidential candidate should be able
to cheer for.”
Let’s make sure the lawmakers who are currently in office and are able to
make a difference right now are cheering too.
Tell your members of Congress: Support the Financial Services
Conflict of Interest Act.
Thanks for taking action!
Onward,
Robert Weissman
President, Public Citizen
© 2015 Public Citizen • 1600 20th Street, NW
/ Washington, D.C. 2000
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Public Wants Its Representatives to
Fight Corruption
Fighting corruption polls off the charts
12/03/13
11:15 AM—UPDATED 12/03/13
04:52 PM
A huge majority of Americans favor aggressive measures to stem
the influence of money in politics, according to new poll results. The survey
also suggests that framing the issue as an effort to fight corruption could
help win even more support for the cause.
The poll, commissioned by the group represent.us and
obtained exclusively by msnbc, found that 90% of respondents said they’d
support a law that imposes tough new campaign finance laws. When “campaign
finance” was changed to “corruption,” that figure rose to 97%, with 72%
saying they would strongly support such laws.
There was essentially no partisan difference on the issue: 82%
of Democrats and 83% of Republicans said reducing corruption is important.
Other results offer similar takeaways: 71% of
respondents—including nearly 80% of independents—said the election system is
biased in favor of the candidate with more money. And 51% believe most
politicians are corrupt.
The poll also tested the popularity of some potential reforms,
giving respondents a menu of 11 options and asking them to pick three.
Forty-seven percent picked barring politicians from taking money from
industries they regulate—an additional sign, perhaps, that the potential for
corruption is at the heart of voters’ concerns about money in politics.
Thirty-seven percent picked dramatically reducing the amount of money lobbyists
can give to candidates and parties, while 31% picked putting tough limits on
super PACs.
Represent.us wants legislation that
would reduce the power of money in politics, and seeks to reframe the issue
around the corruption idea. “Corruption is un-American” reads the tagline
on its
website. Among the group’s advisers are Lawrence Lessig, the
Harvard professor and internet activist, and former Federal Elections
Commission chair Trevor Potter.
The poll results come at a time of uncertainty for efforts to
limit the role of money in politics. The issue has long polled relatively well,
but has struggled to gain traction on Capitol Hill, where many incumbents are
wary of changing the rules of a game that has worked to their advantage.
Meanwhile, in the wake of the 2010 Citizens
United decision, more money than ever is flowing into
elections, much of it undisclosed. And the Supreme Court could be poised to
strike down another key pillar of campaign-finance law in McCutcheon v. FEC.
END OMNI CORRUPTION NEWSLETTER #1 (see campaign finance newsletters)
