Month: July 2015

The  “Augean Stables” — How Corruption Has Amended the Constitution

by Gaius Publius

Not something you don’t already know if you’re a regular reader of these pages, but it’s becoming more and more mainstream to deliver a radical* analysis of government in the U.S. That’s why I found the following so interesting — the source is former U.S. Senator and former presidential candidate Gary Hart. And believe me, this is a radical analysis.

But first, two definitions. The Augean Stables is a reference to the Fifth Labor of Hercules, one of the Twelve (click to read the context). The task was to clean the king’s stables, which housed 1,000 cattle and which hadn’t been cleaned in 30 years, the life of the man who owned it. Cleaned of what? Surely you know:

The fifth Labour of Heracles (Hercules in Latin) was to clean the Augean (/ɔːˈdʒiːən/) stables. Eurystheus [the king assigning the tasks to Hercules] intended this assignment both as humiliating (rather than impressive, like the previous labours) and as impossible, since the livestock were divinely healthy (immortal) and therefore produced an enormous quantity of dung (ἡ ὄνθος). These stables had not been cleaned in over 30 years, and over 1,000 cattle lived there. However, Heracles succeeded by rerouting the rivers Alpheus and Peneus to wash out the filth.

The second definition — corruption. Most think of corruption as an outcome that’s perverted for the sake of money. Hart, correctly, says, Not so:

From Plato and Aristotle forward, corruption was meant to describe actions and decisions that put a narrow, special, or personal interest ahead of the interest of the public or commonwealth. Corruption did not have to stoop to money under the table, vote buying, or even renting out the Lincoln bedroom. In the governing of a republic, corruption was self-interest placed above the interest of all—the public interest.

Corruption is “self-interest placed above the interest of all,” or in some cases, one’s legal or contractual obligation. Thus, for example, some college football referees and refereeing groups are obviously corrupt. When Conference A plays Conference B using Conference B’s referees, and year after year the bad calls go Conference B’s way, especially with the game on the line, the referees are corrupt.

Are they betraying their obligation for money? No, likely not. Are they betraying their obligation in order to satisfy animus against Conference A, or to make sure the “home teams” win? That’s an obvious explanation, and by this definition (and mine), that’s corrupt.

Or take another situation. By this definition, the Supreme Court since at least 2000 and likely before has acted corruptly, if the definition is “self-interest placed above the interest of all.” No legal analysis of Bush v. Gore passes the “upholds the interest of all” test — the Republicans on the Court simply put a Republican (the home team candidate) in the White House because they could. Nor do the major decisions around money and corporate rights, like Citizens United or even Buckley v. Valeo, the 1976 Burger Court decision that lifted restrictions on campaign contributions, and its follow-up, First National Bank of Boston vs. Bellotti, whose majority opinion was authored by Lewis Powell, of the infamous Powell memo.

By this definition — perverting an outcome to benefit a group in which one has a personal interest — the Supreme Court acted corruptly in the cases above. Likely corrupt in Buckley, Citizens United, and First National Bank of Boston. Certainly corrupt in Bush v. Gore, where Republican justices favored a Republican candidate for president over a Democratic one on no defensible grounds. They weren’t metaphorically “corrupt,” with the quotes. They were corrupt by definition.

Gary Hart on the Systemic Corruption of the U.S. Government

Hart’s piece is an interesting Time magazine essay, and also a long section from his new book, The Republic of Conscience (I don’t support Amazon, so no Amazon link). I don’t want to quote a ton of it, since its main argument is likely familiar to you. But he makes a systemic point in a way that seems original; that is, he puts pieces together to make a bigger whole than most of us were aware of. For example, it’s likely that the “army of lobbyists” we all hate aren’t a perversion of government — they are government.

A few notable sections (all emphasis mine):

Gary Hart: America’s Founding Principles Are in Danger of Corruption

Welcome to the age of vanity politics and campaigns-for-hire. What would our founders make of this nightmare?

Four qualities have distinguished republican government from ancient Athens forward: the sovereignty of the people; a sense of the common good; government dedicated to the commonwealth; and resistance to corruption. Measured against the standards established for republics from ancient times, the American Republic is massively corrupt.

From Plato and Aristotle forward, corruption was meant to describe actions and decisions that put a narrow, special, or personal interest ahead of the interest of the public or commonwealth. Corruption did not have to stoop to money under the table, vote buying, or even renting out the Lincoln bedroom. In the governing of a republic, corruption was self-interest placed above the interest of all—the public interest.

By that standard, can anyone seriously doubt that our republic, our government, is corrupt? There have been Teapot Domes and financial scandals of one kind or another throughout our nation’s history. There has never been a time, however, when the government of the United States was so perversely and systematically dedicated to special interests, earmarks, side deals, log-rolling, vote-trading, and sweetheart deals of one kind or another.

What brought us to this? A sinister system combining staggering campaign costs, political contributions, political action committees, special interest payments for access, and, most of all, the rise of the lobbying class.

Worst of all, the army of lobbyists that started relatively small in the mid-twentieth century has now grown to big battalions of law firms and lobbying firms of the right, left, and an amalgam of both. And that gargantuan, if not reptilian, industry now takes on board former members of the House and the Senate and their personal and committee staffs. And they are all getting fabulously rich.

Gargantuan numbers of lobbyists with gargantuan amounts of money. There’s a point where corruption of government on that scale systemically changes government itself.

The “Big Three” Lobbying Conglomerates Are a “Fourth Branch of Government”

For Hart, the movement of office-holders and their staffs between lobbying firms and government is not a “revolving door” to government; that revolving door is government. Hart makes his point by looking at the lobbying firm WPP, the largest of three giant lobbying conglomerates. WPP isn’t just a lobbying firm, it’s an international conglomerate of firms that wields enormous power and wealth.

Consider — WPP has been eating up lobbying firms the way Macy’s, Inc. eats department stores or Darden eats restaurant chains. At some point, you simply own the business you’re in, and the size of your operation changes the nature of the game itself.

Hart on how lobbying at this scale changes our government:

[T]he largest [lobbying “predator” (his term)] by far is WPP (originally called Wire and Plastic Products; is there a metaphor here?), which has its headquarters in London and more than 150,000 employees in 2,500 offices spread around 107 countries. It, together with one or two conglomerating competitors, represents a fourth branch of government, vacuuming up former senators and House members and their spouses and families, key committee staff, former senior administration officials of both parties and several administrations, and ambassadors, diplomats, and retired senior military officers.

WPP has swallowed giant public relations, advertising, and lobbying outfits such as Hill & Knowlton and BursonMarsteller, along with dozens of smaller members of the highly lucrative special interest and influence-manipulation world. Close behind WPP is the Orwellian-named Omnicom Group and another converger vaguely called the Interpublic Group of Companies. According to Mr. Edsall, WPP had billings last year of $72.3 billion, larger than the budgets of quite a number of countries.

With a budget so astronomical, think how much good WPP can do in the campaign finance arena, especially since the Citizens United decision. The possibilities are almost limitless. Why pay for a senator or congresswoman here or there when you can buy an entire committee? Think of the banks that can be bailed out, the range of elaborate weapons systems that can be sold to the government, the protection from congressional scrutiny that can be paid for, the economic policies that can be manipulated.

The lobbying business is no longer about votes up or down on particular measures that may emerge in Congress or policies made in the White House. It is about setting agendas, deciding what should and should not be brought up for hearings and legislation. We have gone way beyond mere vote buying now. The converging Influence World represents nothing less than an unofficial but enormously powerful fourth branch of government.

To whom is this branch of government accountable? Who sets the agenda for its rising army of influence marketers? How easy will it be to not only go from office to a lucrative lobbying job but, more important, from lucrative lobbying job to holding office?

When one lobbying firm has billings of nearly $75 billion, you can “buy committees,” not just individual votes; and you can “set agendas” rather than just pass laws.

Now consider that “revolving door” again. Is that a door out of government and back into it, or is it a door into another branch of government, one where policy decisions also get made?

Does an International Lobbying Firm Serve One Nation’s Interest or Many?

And a final question: If the lobbying firm is international, with international clients and governmental “targets,” are its interests “American” in any way? If not, how compromised are those who take its money?

Where are its [WPP’s] loyalties if it is manipulating and influencing governments around the world? Other than as a trough of money of gigantic proportions, how does it view the government of the United States?

Why would not WPP act to modify the laws of one country to serve the interests of clients in another? And I’ll ask again, are those who take its money compromised by the international goals of these mega-firms?

“Purchasing” Candidates and Office-Holders — Even Former Senators Are Saying It

Just as “corruption” is not a metaphor when it comes to decisions like Bush v. Gore, “buying” and “sponsoring” candidates and office-holders — the way soap is bought and race cars are sponsored — is not a metaphor, at least according to Hart:

The advent of legalized corruption launched by the Supreme Court empowers the superrich to fund their own presidential and congressional campaigns as pet projects, to foster pet policies, and to represent pet political enclaves. You have a billion, or even several hundred million, then purchase a candidate from the endless reserve bench of minor politicians and make him or her a star, a mouthpiece for any cause or purpose however questionable, and that candidate will mouth your script in endless political debates and through as many television spots as you are willing to pay for. All legal now. …

The five prevailing Supreme Court justices, holding that a legal entity called a corporation has First Amendment rights of free speech, might at least have required the bought-and-paid-for candidates to wear sponsor labels on their suits as stock-car drivers do. Though, for the time being, sponsored candidates will not be openly promoted by Exxon-Mobil or the Stardust Resort and Casino but by phony “committees for good government” smokescreens.

I think he’s literally correct. In the old days, it didn’t take much money to wholly own a back-bench Congress person from coal country, say, and one coal company, if big enough, could do it. But the major office-holders had to be funded by competing interests. Now you can tag several  presidential candidates, at least on the Republican side, with the single name of their “benefactor.”

For example:

• Marco Rubio — Sponsored by Norman Braman & (he hopes) Sheldon Adelson
• Scott Walker — Sponsored by the Koch Brothers
• Ted Cruz — Sponsored by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer
• Rick Santorum — Sponsored by Foster Friess
• Rand Paul — Sponsored by [this slot available]

And so on. Joe Biden’s been called the “Senator from MBNA,” and Chuck Schumer the “Senator from Wall Street.” Seems right. In cases of such complete “sponsorship” I agree that wearing of badges should be required. Partial sponsorship could be handled like NASCAR jackets.

But this treats a serious problem too lightly. Remember, I said this was a radical analysis. In fact, by this practice we’re actually amending the Constitution — not the one as written; the one as practiced.

The Other Way to Amend the Constitution

All constitutions and all systems of laws are amended in two ways, by formal agreement (legal process) and by informal agreement. In England, the second ways is in fact the primary way their “constitution” is amended.

In the U.S., if both parties enforce a law in the same way, even though that way deviates from the way the law is written, the law is amended until forced back to its original form in practice. Thus:

Under Reagan–Bush I that circle expanded to include their top cabinet officers, like Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger. Under Bush II–Obama it includes all money-center bankers and former senators (and outright crooks) like Jon Corzine.

And so on. Now we can add one more:

Was TPP drafted first in these mega-firms before being negotiated between nations? There aren’t many other ways to convene 600 lobbyists (pdf).

Cleaning the Augean Stables

Back to Hart’s essay and where we started, with the Augean Stables. The way out of this mess, if Greek myth is any indicator, is not incremental. You can’t shovel your way out. Remember, that’s a 1,000-cattle stable, and in our case a literal army of lobbyists. With a mere shovel, we’d be buried to our necks before the fourth toss of filth out the window.

How did Hercules clean his stable? He diverted a river and ran the whole mess out to sea in one pass. There’s a word for that equivalent in government life — radical change, and it comes in several forms.

I recommend the peaceful kind, like backing this guy for president. Click to support; you can adjust the split at the link.

* Did you know that “radical” means “going to the root or source”?

Radically yours,

GP

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Keeping the help from getting all uppity
by Tom Sullivan

Eliminating tenure is only one front in the effort to rationalize the academy. Writing for Al Jazeera, Mark LeVine looks beyond the Midas Cult’s effort to housetrain the academy:

For academics lucky enough to have tenure at an “R-1 research university” — one with “extensive” doctoral level graduate programs and support for faculty research as well as teaching — the erosion of traditional tenure protections is damaging because it threatens not only academic freedom but research and teaching that contribute hundreds of billions of dollars to U.S. GDP.

Undermining that investment would seem counter to the goal of turning every public resource into gold. Yet as we have seen with the astronomical amounts of money it is willing to throw at elections, the Midas Cult is willing to spend what it takes (and to sacrifice others) to stop the contagion of critical thinking that might threaten its dogma. Clearly, this is not about money. It is about ideology. Whatever the fiscal arguments for attacking the academy, it is not as if the cost of funding academics is that expensive (emphasis mine):

Indeed, upwards of a quarter of faculty with doctorates live below the poverty line — eight percentage points higher than the national average for all Americans. Think of this in the context of the American dream, where dedication and education are supposed to ensure a piece, however modest, of the American dream. If 10 years of intensive college and graduate study can’t even get a person a better salary than the average Walmart cashier, there is something profoundly wrong.

The Walmartization of higher education is of course part and parcel of the larger McDonaldization of American society, which devalues broad skill sets and critical thinking in favor of consumer-driven “choice” and a cheap and controllable workforce. As anthropologist Sarah Kendzior asks in perhaps the most viewed article in the history of Al Jazeera English, what does it mean when education has gone from being the great path out of poverty to being “a way into it”?

Cultists don’t need educated thinkers or researchers. Until education can be fully automated, all it needs is education delivery drones. And frankly, there is no reason cultists should have to pay for education in America anymore. As I wrote in 2011:

In the Atlantic’s “The Rise of the New Global Elite,” Chrystia Freeland describes the super-rich as “a nation unto themselves,” more connected to each other than to their countries or their neighbors. Freeland writes that “the business elite view themselves increasingly as a global community, distinguished by their unique talents and above such parochial concerns as national identity, or devoting ‘their’ taxes to paying down ‘our’ budget deficit.” Thomas Wilson, CEO of Allstate, explains that globalization means, “I can get [workers] anywhere in the world. It is a problem for America, but it is not necessarily a problem for American business …” Why should it be?

In a global economy driven more and more by bottom-line thinking, public education is just another community expense the elite would rather not bear, isn’t it? The rich can afford private schools for their children and have little need for educated workers in the multiple cities where they own houses. How much education do gardeners and waiters really need anyway?

Why should the global elite pay taxes to educate the children of those below their station? Why pay to educate workers when they can import them on H-1B or L-1 visas and pay them less than American workers? As Allstate’s CEO implied, their companies can easily set up shop in India, Indonesia or China. Globalization means multinational corporations can simply swoop in and exploit an educated workforce in countries that have already incurred the sunk costs of developing that resource. And multinationals get to pay those foreign workers less to boot. Whether here or abroad, why not just let somebody else pay taxes for educating other people’s children?

Besides, educated workers only get uppity, and whether they realize it or not, “permanent faculty … are in fact part of the laboring classes.” At least in the view of the Midas Cult. LeVine concludes:

The threats to academic freedom and shared governance posed by a system of largely contingent academic labor are obvious. If you’re treading water around the poverty line and have no guarantee of a job three months down the line, you are going to be very reluctant to teach any subject that might challenge students or the powers that be in your community, whether it’s science that is literally verboten to discuss — such as climate change in Wisconsin — “divisive” ethnic studies in Arizona or “anti-Semitic” Palestinian history almost anywhere.

Get some shuffle into it, Jackson. [timestamp 10:35].

Better than they deserve

by digby

not an uncommon example of humanity in SC: Leroy Smith helps white supremacist to shelter & water as heat bears down. pic.twitter.com/GoF23r3mRe

— Rob Godfrey (@RobGodfrey) July 18, 2015

Via TBOGG:

Saturday afternoon in South Carolina, white supremacists, KKK members, neo-Nazis, Confederate treason sympathizers, and other white people known as the Republican “base” or “potential Donald Trump vice presidential candidates” showed up to wave the confederate flag and just be their normal badass racist selves.

As might be expected, since they advertised their intentions in advance , it went about as well as secession did beginning back in 1860.

Here’s the story.

“The GOP field … is a hot pile of climate-denying garbage”

by digby

Lindsay Abrams at Salon surveyed the GOP field. None of them believe the scientific consensus and so obviously they don’t have any plans to deal with it. But there are nuances within their denialism. My favorite is this one from Mike Huckabee when asked if climate change is a national security issue: “A beheading is much worse than a sunburn”.

So there you go.

I don’t know about you but I find this even more disturbing than the fact that Donald Trump insulted John McCain.

Hypocritical sanctimony

by digby

This wasn’t just some rich clown, it was the whole party:

NEW YORK (CNN) — Delegates to the Republican National Convention found a new way to take a jab at Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry’s Vietnam service record: by sporting adhesive bandages with small purple hearts on them.

Morton Blackwell, a prominent Virginia delegate, has been handing out the heart-covered bandages to delegates, who’ve worn them on their chins, cheeks, the backs of their hands and other places.

Blackwell is president of the Leadership Institute, an educational foundation he founded in 1979. According to its Web site, the institute prepares conservatives for success in politics, government and the news media.

Kerry was a decorated Navy officer in Vietnam who became a prominent antiwar activist upon his return home. A group calling itself “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” has accused Kerry of lying to win combat decorations in Vietnam, including the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart.

And last week, former Sen. Bob Dole, the party’s 1996 presidential nominee, brought more attention to the allegations when he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “With three Purple Hearts, he never bled that I know of. And they’re all superficial wounds.”

Dole apologized for the remark the next day after a personal call from Kerry, saying that before taping the interview, “maybe I should have stayed longer for brunch somewhere.”

Donna Cain, an Oregon delegate, wore a purple heart bandage on her wrist.

“Probably a lot of people are handing them out because they are very symbolic,” she said.

Only Republicans can be war heroes.

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Seems to be a meme

by digby

119,039 people like this. pic.twitter.com/qW0vIRhk3U

— Imraan Siddiqi (@imraansiddiqi) July 18, 2015

Sadly, he’s not the only one bringing this up.

Sunday funnies

by digby

Oh lord, how true:

I wrote about Tom Tomorrow’s kickstarter here.  If you haven’t heard about it, click here! It’s amaaaaazing. 

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Don’t feed the Iran trolls


by digby

I wrote about the GOP’s reaction to the Iran deal for Salon a couple of days ago.

I ran down the whole field. Let’s just say nobody was saying “give peace a chance.” I conclude with this:

Motivating the top 1%
by Tom Sullivan

Whenever the subject of tax rates comes up, we never lack for pundits to argue that raising taxes on the highest earners will remove their incentives for working hard. What we do lack is 1) an explanation for why the motivations of the 1% are such a fixation and, 2) evidence to support the assumption-packed “hard work” claim.

The first unsupported assumption is that top earners make more money because they work “harder.” Harder how or harder than whom remains unspecified.

A second assumption is that money is more powerful than all other incentives for working hard, including raw competitiveness, achieving a sense of autonomy, mastery and purpose. You think what drove Steve Jobs most was money?

Raising top marginal tax rates, say pundits, will hurt the economy because top earners will stop working and creating jobs (a third unsupported assumption). In libertarian fantasy, maybe, but that’s not what real people do.

A final assumption is that working “hard” is a public good we should not discourage – if not explicitly encourage – through public policy. If so, why all the concern about the work ethic and compensation of a mere 1.4 million Americans when no matter how much worker productivity surged over the last 30 years, 240 million working-age Americans’ incomes remained flat. Shouldn’t incentivizing their hard work be of greater public concern than just the few at the top?

—DH