Rigging the Electoral System for the Rich

Wednesday, April 9, 2014 by OtherWords
Either through electoral channels or a constitutional amendment, the American people must fight back against Supreme Court rulings like Citizens United and McCutcheon.
by Marge Baker


A poll conducted late last year found that more than seven in ten voters think our election system is “biased in favor of the candidate with the most money.

While nothing about this number is surprising — except, perhaps, that it’s not even higher — it does reveal the depth of cynicism characterizing Americans’ perceptions of our political system. We believe, correctly, that the system is rigged for the rich.
Especially in the wake of this month’s McCutcheon v. FEC Supreme Court decision that allowed our country’s wealthiest to dump even more money directly into our elections, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the enormity of America’s money in politics problem.

But as always, the biggest dangers create the biggest opportunities for change. With the McCutcheon ruling, the Supreme Court added fuel to an already awakened giant — a nationwide movement to reclaim our democracy that’s gaining steam like never before.

More than 150 events took place in 41 states and the District of Columbia the day the ruling came out, with activists pushing for a full range of long and short-term solutions.

A stream of rally photos showed thousands of committed citizens who are rejecting cynicism and pushing for change.

Of course, one avenue toward reducing the extent to which money is distorting politics is the courts themselves. When we cast our ballots in the last presidential elections, some of us were thinking about the connection between who we elect as president and the outcomes of campaign finance cases decided by the Supreme Court.

But not everyone recognizes that there’s a direct link. When you vote for a president, or for a senator, you’re not only electing those people for their term of office; in many ways, their most lasting legacy is who they will nominate and who gets confirmed to sit on our nation’s judiciary.

A change in the composition of the Supreme Court could have massive implications for our democracy. Both Citizens United v. FEC, the infamous case that opened the door to unlimited corporate political spending, and this month’s McCutcheon v. FEC were decided 5-4 with strong dissents. Some sitting justices have spoken out against Citizens United since it was decided.

It’s important for voters to know that our democracy was upended by a single vote. Justices Breyer and Ginsburg went out of their way to issue a separate statement in a 2012 Montana corporate spending case calling into question whether “in light of the huge sums currently deployed to buy candidates’ allegiance, Citizens United should continue to hold sway.”

As we elect new presidents who appoint new justices – and elect new senators who confirm or reject them – we can help turn the tide back toward restoring the constitutional power of the American people to impose reasonable limits on money in politics, a power demolished by the arch-conservatives on the Roberts Court.

Another equally important and parallel change effort we should be supporting is the push for a constitutional amendment to overturn Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United and McCutcheon. Constitutional amendments are, and should be rare — reserved for the direst circumstances.

But with the power of regulating our elections and protecting our democracy stripped away from “We the People,” this is one of those moments. Everyday Americans and elected officials across the country agree: More than 16 states and 500 towns and cities have already gone on record in support of an amendment that would overturn these cases.

And 149 Members of the House and Senate are now on record in support of constitutional remedies. Such an amendment would establish an important bulwark against future right-wing Supreme Courts.

Whether by changing the court or changing the Constitution, the decisions that have gutted our campaign finance laws have got to go. Our democracy is too valuable to be undermined by a court interested in protecting wealthy special interests at the expense of the rest of us.

New American Reality: An Empire beyond Salvation

Thursday, April 10, 2014 by Common Dreams
by Ramzy Baroud

US Secretary of State John Kerry couldn’t hide his frustration anymore as the US-sponsored peace process continued to falter. After 8 months of wrangling to push talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority forward, he admitted while in a visit to Morocco on April 04 that the latest setback had served as a ‘reality check’ for the peace process. But confining that reality check to the peace process is hardly representative of the painful reality through which the United States has been forced to subsist in during the last few years.

The state of US foreign policy in the Middle East, but also around the world, cannot be described with any buoyant language. In some instances, as in Syria, Libya, Egypt, the Ukraine, and most recently in Palestine and Israel, too many calamitous scenarios have exposed the fault lines of US foreign policy. The succession of crises is not allowing the US to cut its losses in the Middle East and stage a calculated ‘pivot’ to Asia following its disastrous Iraq war.

US foreign policy is almost entirely crippled.

For the Obama administration, it has been a continuous firefighting mission since George W. Bush left office. In fact, there have been too many ‘reality checks’ to count.

Per the logic of the once powerful pro-Israel Washington-based neoconservatives, the invasion of Iraq was a belated attempt at regaining initiative in the Middle East, and controlling a greater share of the energy supplies worldwide. Sure, the US media had then made much noise about fighting terror, restoring democracies and heralding freedoms, but the neo-cons were hardly secretive about the real objectives. They tirelessly warned about the decline of their country’s fortunes. They labored to redraw the map of the Middle East in a way that they imagined would slow down the rise of China, and the other giants that are slowly, but surely, standing on their feet to face up to the post-Cold War superpower.

But all such efforts were bound to fail. The US escaped Iraq, but only after altering the balance of power and creating new classes of winners and losers. The violence of the invasion and occupation scarred Iraq, but also destabilized neighboring countries by overwhelming their economies, augmenting militancy and creating more pressure cookers in political spaces that were, until then, somewhat ‘stable’.

The war left America fatigued, and set the course for a transition in the Middle East, although not the kind of transition that the likes of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had championed. There was no ‘New Middle East’ per se, but rather an old one that is in much worse shape than ever before. When the last US soldier scheduled to leave Iraq had crossed the border into Kuwait in Dec 2011, the US was exposed in more ways than one. The limits of US military power was revealed – by not winning, it had lost. Its economy proved fragile – as it continues to teeter between collapse and ‘recovery.’ It was left with zero confidence among its friends. As for its enemies, the US was no longer a daunting menace, but a toothless tiger.

There was a short period in US foreign policy strategy in which Washington needed to count its losses, regroup and regain initiative, but not in the Middle East. The Asia pacific region, especially the South China Sea, seemed to be the most rational restarting point, and for a good reason.

Writing in Forbes magazine in Washington, Robert D. Kaplan described the convergence underway in the Asia pacific region. He wrote, “Russia is increasingly shifting its focus of energy exports to East Asia. China is on track to perhaps become Russia’s biggest export market for oil before the end of the decade.”

The Middle East is itself changing directions, as the region’s hydrocarbon production is increasingly being exported there; Russia is covering the East Asia realm, according to Kaplan, as “North America will soon be looking more and more to the Indo-Pacific region to export its own energy, especially natural gas.”

But the US is still being pulled into too many different directions. It has attempted to police the world exclusively for its own interests for the last 25 years. It failed. ‘Cut and run’ is essentially an American foreign policy staple, and that too is a botched approach. Even after the piecemeal US withdrawal from Iraq, the US is too deeply entrenched in the Middle East region to achieve a clean break.

The US took part in the Libya war, but attempted to do so while masking its action as part of a larger NATO drive, so that it shoulders only part of the blame when things went awry, as they predictably have. Since the January 25 revolution, its position on Egypt was perhaps the most inconsistent of all Western powers, unmistakably demonstrating its lack of clarity and relevance to a country with a massive size and influence. However, it was in Syria that US weaknesses were truly exposed. Military intervention was not possible – and for reasons none of which were moralistic. Its political influence proved immaterial. And most importantly, its own legions of allies throughout the Middle East are walking away from beneath the American leadership banner. The new destinations are Russia for arms and China for economic alternatives.

President Barack Obama’s visit to Saudi Arabia in late March might’ve been a step too little too late to repair its weakening alliances in the region. Even if the US was ready to mend fences, it neither has the political will, the economic potency or the military prowess to be effective. True, the US still possesses massive military capabilities and remains the world’s largest economy. But the commitment that the Middle East would require from the US at this time of multiple wars and revolutions is by no means the kind of commitment the US is ready to impart. In a way, the US has ‘lost’ the Middle East.

Even the ‘pivot’ to Asia is likely to end in shambles. On the one hand, the US opponents, Russia notwithstanding, have grown much more assertive in recent years. They too have their own agendas, which will keep the US and its willing European allies busy for years. The Russian move against Crimea had once more exposed the limits of US and NATO in regions outside the conventional parameters of western influence.

If the US proved resourceful enough to stage a fight in the South China Sea and the East China Sea, the battle – over energy supplies, potential reserves, markets and routes – is likely to be the most grueling yet. China is not Iraq before the US invasion –broken by decades of war, siege and sanctions. Its geography is too vast to besiege, and its military too massive to destroy with a single ‘shock and awe’.

The US has truly lost the initiative, in the Middle East region and beyond it. The neo-cons’ drunkenness with military power led to costly wars that have overwhelmed the empire beyond salvation. And now, the US foreign policy makers are mere diplomatic firefighters, from Palestine, to Syria to the Ukraine. For the Americans, the last few years have been more than a ‘reality check’, but the new reality itself.

Surprising Number of Unregulated Chemicals Found in Food

Thursday, April 10, 2014 by Civil Eats
GRAS Out
by Twilight Greenaway

If you don’t recognize all the high-tech ingredients available in food and drinks these days, you’re not alone. Some of these new additions—such as glucosamine hydrochloride, gamma-amino butyric acid (GABA), or soy isoflavone extract—might show up in product marketing, while others, such as milk protein concentrate, will not. But whether new food additives are being promoted or not, a report released this week by the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC) says their novelty isn’t the only reason we should be paying attention.

In fact, a fairly large loophole allows chemicals and other new food and drink additives to bypass review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) because of a law passed in 1958. The law, which was intended to apply to common food ingredients like vinegar and vegetable oil—items that everyone could agree were safe to eat—allowed companies to deem ingredients in their products GRAS, or “generally recognized as safe.” Since then, the GRAS designation has continued to allow food companies to add ingredients to products without the need for FDA approval.

NRDC and others take issue with who is doing the “recognizing.” You see, while chemical companies have the option to offer up new additives for review by the FDA, they can also just call them GRAS and quietly start using them. And while the latter is considered the responsible thing to do, it’s increasingly less common.

NRDC looked closely at a list of companies, most of which have names like NutraGenesis, Biocell Technology, and NuLive Science and make additives that appear in things like energy drinks and sports bars—the relatively new gray area where supplements and food overlap. They found 275 chemicals from 56 companies, which, “appear to be marketed for use in food based on undisclosed GRAS safety determinations.”

“We took ingredients lists and matched them against FDA databases of regulated additives and we found a large number of additives on those ingredients lists that didn’t appear anywhere,” NRDC Senior Scientist and co-author of the report, Maricel Maffini, told Civil Eats. By process of illumination, she and her team were able to identify a list of so-called “self-determined GRAS ingredients.”

However, Maffini added, “We’re a research team, consumers don’t have the time or resources to do that.” In total, NRDC estimates that about 1,000 of the 10,000 additives used in food today have been added more or less on the down low by companies that don’t want to go through an official review process, don’t want their process known by competitors, or don’t want to face safety questions directly.

Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, Maffini and her co-authors got ahold of correspondence between a number of chemical companies and FDA staff members involved in review processes that resulted in withdrawals by the companies. If the FDA rejects a GRAS notice, it informs the company of its safety concerns and makes those concerns public. But if a company withdraws its request for review, the public is left in the dark.

In one example, Maffini and her team looked into a chemical called EGCG, made from an extract of green tea. “We found out the GRAS notice had been submitted to [the FDA] and withdrawn several times. However, it’s really popular in sports drinks, energy drinks, etc.,” she said.

“While the company was basically explaining that these types of purified chemicals were ‘just like green tea,’ FDA had concerns about EGCG,” Maffini said. In letters to the company, the agency pointed to studies that raised health questions, such as an association with fetal leukemia, and one paper that cited evidence that the chemical caused genetic damage in human cells.

And this is just one example. As the report reads, “companies found their chemicals safe for use in food despite potentially serious allergic reactions, interactions with common drugs, or proposed uses much greater than company-established safe doses.

Of course, NRDC isn’t suggesting that everything added to food under the GRAS rule is unsafe. The point is merely that, under the current system, there is no way for most consumers to know either way. And while many additives appear on ingredient lists, Maffini points out that when additives are used in “incidental” quantities, or included in categories like “natural flavors,” food companies have no obligation to disclose them.

NRDC has made a list of recommendations in the report, including that Congress require the FDA to be informed of GRAS determinations so it can confirm that each chemical’s use in food is, in fact, safe. The organization also wants to see the correspondence between FDA and the companies filing for GRAS review made public, even if they have been withdrawn. In other words, the group is pushing for a more transparent system all around. Until then, NRDC suggests that perhaps GRAS should stand for “generally recognized as secret.”

Science Stuff (Funnies)

8 Headlines the Mainstream Media Doesn’t Have the Balls to Print

Paul Buchheit
RINF Alternative News

The following are all relevant, fact-based issues, the “hard news” stories that the media has a responsibility to report. But the business-oriented press generally avoids them.

1. U.S. Wealth Up $34 Trillion Since Recession. 93% of You Got Almost None of It.

That’s an average of $100,000 for every American. But the people who already own most of the stocks took almost all of it. For them, the average gain was well over a million dollars — tax-free as long as they don’t cash it in. Details available here.

2. Eight Rich Americans Made More Than 3.6 Million Minimum Wage Workers

A recent report stated that no full-time minimum wage worker in the U.S. can afford a one-bedroom or two-bedroom rental at fair market rent. There are 3.6 million such workers, and their total (combined) 2013 earnings is less than the 2013 stock market gains of just eight Americans, all of whom take more than their share from society: the four Waltons, the two Kochs, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett.

3. News Sources Speak for the 5%

It would be refreshing to read an honest editorial: “We dearly value the 5 to 7 percent of our readers who make a lot of money and believe that their growing riches are helping everyone else.”

Instead, the business media seems unable to differentiate between the top 5 percent and the rest of society. The Wall Street Journal exclaimed, “Middle-class Americans have more buying power than ever before,” and then went on to sputter: “What Recession?…The economy has bounced back from recession, unemployment has declined..”

The Chicago Tribune may be even further out of touch with its less privileged readers, asking them: “What’s so terrible about the infusion of so much money into the presidential campaign?”

4. TV News Dumbed Down for American Viewers

A 2009 survey by the European Journal of Communication compared the U.S. to Denmark, Finland, and the UK in the awareness and reporting of domestic vs. international news, and of ‘hard’ news (politics, public administration, the economy, science, technology) vs. ‘soft’ news (celebrities, human interest, sport and entertainment). 

The results:

• Americans [are] especially uninformed about international public affairs.
• American respondents also underperformed in relation to domestic-related hard news stories.
• American television reports much less international news than Finnish, Danish and British television;
• American television network newscasts also report much less hard news than Finnish and Danish television.

Surprisingly, the report states that “our sample of American newspapers was more oriented towards hard news than their counterparts in the European countries.” Too bad Americans are reading less newspapers.

5. News Execs among White Male Boomers Who Owe Trillions to Society

The hype about the “self-made man” is fantasy. In the early 1970s, we privileged white males were spirited out of college to waiting jobs in management and finance, technology was inventing new ways for us to make money, tax rates were about to tumble, and visions of bonuses and capital gains danced in our heads.

While we were in school the Defense Department had been preparing the Internet for Microsoft and Apple, the National Science Foundation was funding the Digital Library Initiativeresearch that would be adopted as the Google model, and the National Institute of Health was doing the early laboratory testing for companies like Merck and Pfizer. Government research labs and public universities trained thousands of chemists, physicists, chip designers, programmers, engineers, production line workers, market analysts, testers, troubleshooters, etc., etc.

All we created on our own was a disdainful attitude, like that of Steve Jobs: “We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”

6. Funding Plummets for Schools and Pensions as Corporations Stop Paying Taxes

Three separate studies have shown that corporations pay less than half of their required state taxes, which are the main source of K-12 educational funding and a significant part of pension funding. Most recently, the report ”The Disappearing Corporate Tax Base” found that the percentage of corporate profits paid as state income taxes has dropped from 7 percent in 1980 to about 3 percent today.

7. Companies Based in the U.S. Paying Most of their Taxes Overseas

Citigroup had 42% of its 2011-13 revenue in North America (almost all U.S.) and made $32 billion in profits, but received a U.S. current income tax benefit all three years.

Pfizer had 40% of its 2011-13 revenues and nearly half of its physical assets in the U.S., but declared almost $10 billion in U.S. losses to go along with nearly $50 billion in foreign profits.

In 2013 Exxon had about 43% of management, 36% of sales, 40% of long-lived assets, and 70-90% of its productive oil and gas wells in the U.S., yet only paid about 2 percent of its total income in U.S. income taxes, and most of that was something called a “theoretical” tax.

8. Restaurant Servers Go Without Raise for 30 Years

An evaluation by Michelle Chen showed that the minimum wage for tipped workers has been approximately $2 an hour since the 1980s. She also notes that about 40 percent of these workers are people of color, and about two-thirds are women.

How We Can Fight Back Against the Supreme Court

Cenk Uygur  

Huffington Post
Host, 'The Young Turks'

04/04/2014

Let me start by quoting two great men and a crook that died the other day.

"The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite." -- Thomas Jefferson

When asked if his payments to politicians had worked,  

Charles Keating replied, "I want to say in the most forceful way I can: I certainly hope so."

When asked outside of Independence Hall if we have a republic or a monarchy, Benjamin Franklin replied, "A republic, if you can keep it."

Well, here we are, aren't we? Right at the point where we are about to find out whether we can keep it or not. The Supreme Court has decided that a small amount of people will get to control our entire political system. Which politician or political party can resist hundreds of millions of dollars put in at once? Maybe one person can resist, maybe one party can resist for a small period of time, but eventually they will succumb.

In Congressional races, 95 percent of the time the person with more money wins. It doesn't matter if they are a Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal. It doesn't matter what their ideas are or what their ideology is. It doesn't matter what they think at all. You have more money and you will win 19 out of 20 times.

Justice Anthony Kennedy destroyed our republic. We knew Alito, Scalia, Roberts and Thomas were corporate robots. We knew they were going to say disingenuously that corporations or billionaires pouring in millions into our politicians' pockets wouldn't lead to corruption. What an unbelievable joke. But it turns out that Kennedy was the biggest joke of all. He claims that millions in campaign donations won't even result in the appearance of corruption. Can anyone with a shred of intelligence honestly believe that?

So, it was nice while it lasted. Democracy at the national level is dead now. We have replaced it with an open auction. This will not at some future date lead to a worst case scenario. We're already living in that scenario.

You don't have to worry about the top 1 percent. Now, the 0.00024 percent of the country who donate over a $100,000 to politicians will rule us all. Because even the federal limit of $123,200 per election cycle has now been eliminated by the McCutcheon decision. They can now spend unlimited money "contributing" to our politicians.

So, how do we escape this worst case scenario? Congress is corrupt and the Supreme Court is even worse. Luckily, there is one thing above them -- the constitution. Every generation of Americans has amended the constitution so that we may have a more perfect union. Except one. Us.

We must get money out of politics. We must amend.

At The Young Turks, we already knew how bad the situation was because every political story we covered had the same exact answer -- find which side has more money and you'll know who is going to win. So, I founded Wolf PAC, which has only one, unstoppable mission -- amend the constitution to get the corrupting influence of money out of politics. We're not interested in awareness -- we're already quite aware of how screwed we are. We're not interested in consciousness raising or being a respected institution inside Washington, DC. We're interested in results!

I didn't pick the name Wolf PAC by accident. I picked it so we could be super aggressive. I don't want to negotiate with the power brokers in Washington; I want to tear them down. The lobbyists, the special interests, the donors and the politicians who cater to them are what's wrong with our country. They robbed us of our representative government. It's time we stood up and took it back. Let's over turn their apple cart.

Our founding fathers were geniuses. They put a certain provision in the constitution because they knew that a day like this would come. We have never had to use it yet. But we have threatened it many times and that threat has been incredibly effective just as many times. The clause is Article V of the constitution and it says that you don't necessarily need 2/3 of Congress to propose an amendment. You can have 2/3 of the states circumvent a corrupted Washington and propose a convention to get the same amendment. You don't need Washington at all. 34 states propose a convention for this specific issue. 38 states ratify that amendment. And we have our democracy back.

Now, this is the point in the movie when you say -- but that's impossible. The suffragist movement got women the right to vote when they couldn't vote in the first place. Now, that was impossible. And they still got it done.

In fact, four out of the last ten amendments were proposed by Congress because of the threat of an imminent convention. We can make these guys bend to our will. They're not supposed to be the boss of us. We are supposed to live in a democracy where we control our own fate. We are supposed to be the home of liberty. And we can be that again.

Let me tell you what we've done so far without anyone noticing. We have introduced a resolution calling for this convention in ten states and have over 100 state legislators sponsoring and supporting these resolutions all across the country. We have an army of 13,000 volunteers. We are legion and we are coming.

Tell me again what isn't possible.

We were told in Vermont that we had a zero percent chance of getting this resolution passed in the state Senate. That was a week before we got it passed 28-2. How did we turn the impossible into the inevitable? How did we get true bipartisanship on this issue? Well, we have over 90 percent of the American people on our side. Republicans, Democrats, libertarians and independents all agree on only one thing -- our national politicians are bought. When the bills are introduced we get a natural avalanche of support. At the state level, an army of citizens turn out to be hard to resist.

In one of the states where we had success, our volunteers got a politician to do something he didn't want to do. The pressure of angry, concerned citizens clearly switched his position. One of those volunteers wrote me an email afterward and said, "It feels so good to get the power back."

We have gone for so long without being able to affect the course of our government, we have gone so long feeling powerless that we have forgotten what our birthright is. We are born free men and women in this country. If we rise up together, we can be that again.

Join us. Join the fight. Get up, let's get them back!