Author: Tom Sullivan

The last competent man in America
by Tom Sullivan

Something noticed in watching Donald Trump’s interview with NBC News correspondent Katy Tur the other night: he rarely closes his lips except to make certain consonant sounds.

Perhaps it’s just to signal everyone that he’s not done talking, as if he ever is. According to Donald Trump, he gets the biggest crowds, he gets the most standing ovations, he gets great reviews, he’s made a lot of money, and he has great relations with other countries. Furthermore, we have leaders that don’t know what they’re doing, we have stupid negotiators, he knows how to negotiate, etc. He’s the last competent man in America.

“Trump makes demagoguery his campaign strategy” reads a later headline at All In with Chris Hayes. He’s an oratorical train wreck from which the public and the press cannot look away.

Two polls this week put Trump at the head of the Republican pack, and with a four-point lead over Jeb Bush in North Carolina.

GOP primary voters will love this guy. He can out-bluster Fox talking heads. When Tur cited Pew research data on illegal immigrants, that they commit less crime than others, Trump trumps with “You’re a very naive person” and “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” The Donald is right. The data is wrong. Full speed ahead.

Which was Dana Milbank’s point the other day. “Trump is the Republican Party,” he wrote:

Anti-immigrant? Against Common Core education standards? For repealing Obamacare? Against same-sex marriage? Antiabortion? Anti-tax? Anti-China? Virulent in questioning President Obama’s legitimacy? Check, check, check, check, check, check, check and check.

Martin Longman at Ten Miles Square blog concurs:

I’ve spent 10 years trying to convince you that this is exactly what the Republican Party has become. But I couldn’t get people to shun the GOP the way they are suddenly shunning Donald Trump and the Confederate Flag. Milbank is right. Trump didn’t invent any of this. He’s just exploiting it in a way that’s a little more obvious than the way that Rick Santorum and Lindsey Graham and Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz have been exploiting it.

If the GOP thinks they are better or even substantially different from Trump, they’re simply mistaken. He’s giving the people what they have been conditioned to want…

A jerk. Eric Schwitzgebel, professor of philosophy at University of California, Riverside has a theory of jerks:

Picture the world through the eyes of the jerk. The line of people in the post office is a mass of unimportant fools; it’s a felt injustice that you must wait while they bumble with their requests. The flight attendant is not a potentially interesting person with her own cares and struggles but instead the most available face of a corporation that stupidly insists you shut your phone. Custodians and secretaries are lazy complainers who rightly get the scut work. The person who disagrees with you at the staff meeting is an idiot to be shot down. Entering a subway is an exercise in nudging past the dumb schmoes.

We need a theory of jerks. We need such a theory because, first, it can help us achieve a calm, clinical understanding when confronting such a creature in the wild. Imagine the nature-documentary voice-over: ‘Here we see the jerk in his natural environment. Notice how he subtly adjusts his dominance display to the Italian restaurant situation…’

The GOP might want to hire Schwitzgebel as a consultant.

Revenge of the Midas cult
by Tom Sullivan

The troika didn’t take well to Greek voters telling them where they could stick their austerity. Rebels from the country that invented democracy last week seemed poised to jump into their X-wing fighters and … okay this is really going off the rails. Or maybe not.

Creditors counterattacked and tightened their grip. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras now seems ready to accept more austerity with no write-down of his country’s debt, something voters soundly rejected just last Sunday:

“Each one of us shall be confronted with his stature and his history. Between a bad choice and a catastrophic one, we are forced to opt for the first one,” Tsipras said in a speech before his party’s lawmakers, according to local media. “It is as if one asks you for your money or your life.”

It’s just slightly less than Bond-villianish. The Washington Post reports that the deal includes “phasing out a subsidy for poor pensioners and privatizing sprawling state industries.” The voters have spoken and were ignored.

At the Guardian, George Monbiot examines how the financial powers have built a colonial empire that essentially renders democracy moot. (Throughout, I’m citing the referenced version of this piece from Monbiot’s blog.):

Consider the International Monetary Fund. The distribution of power here was perfectly stitched up: IMF decisions require an 85% majority, and the US holds 17% of the votes. It’s controlled by the rich, and governs the poor on their behalf. It’s now doing to Greece what it has done to one poor nation after another, from Argentina to Zambia. Its structural adjustment programmes have forced scores of elected governments to dismantle public spending, destroying health, education and the other means by which the wretched of the earth might improve their lives.

The same programme is imposed regardless of circumstance: every country the IMF colonises must place the control of inflation ahead of other economic objectives; immediately remove its barriers to trade and the flow of capital; liberalise its banking system; reduce government spending on everything except debt repayments; and privatise the assets which can be sold to foreign investors.

Politically, the conservative political project of the last several decades has been to roll back the 20th century: those advances that helped the middle class grow more comfortable and minorities marginally more politically powerful. (In the U.S.: Social Security, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, etc.) Financially, the conservative project seems to be to mine the middle class and public assets to reclaim what the world’s financial elite believes is rightfully theirs. Not only wealth and assets, but control. Monbiot continues:

Consider the European Central Bank. Like most other central banks, it enjoys “political independence”. This does not mean that it is free from politics; only that it is free from democracy. It is ruled instead by the financial sector, whose interests it is constitutionally obliged to champion, through its inflation target of around 2%. Ever mindful of where power lies, it has exceeded this mandate, inflicting deflation and epic unemployment on poorer members of the eurozone.

For some time I have used “economic cult” to describe their perspective. It is a little bit Midas, a little bit Ayn Rand, a little bit multi-level marketing. Like the real estate bubble and the financial crash. Those who got in early made out like the bandits they are. Day to day, there are the rigged markets for which no one seems to go to jail. The players are not only too wealthy for that, but too well-connected to be punished by the political system. They are the system. Monbiot:

The Maastricht treaty, establishing the European Union and the euro, was built on a lethal delusion: a belief that the ECB could provide the only common economic governance that monetary union required. It arose from an extreme version of market fundamentalism: if inflation was kept low, its authors imagined, the magic of the markets would resolve all other social and economic problems, making politics redundant. Those sober, suited, serious people, who now pronounce themselves the only  adults in the room, turn out to be demented utopian fantasists, votaries of a fanatical economic cult.

All this is but a recent chapter in the long tradition of subordinating human welfare to financial power. The austerity now imposed on Greece, brutal as it is, is mild by comparison to earlier versions. Take, for example, the Irish and Indian famines, both exacerbated (in the second case caused) by the doctrine then known as laissez-faire, but which we now know as market fundamentalism or neoliberalism.

Or the Midas cult. It is a group driven by an avaricious compulsion to turn everything it touches into gold. Members only. Others it keeps on a short leash, as I’ve written before:

Post-Reagan, deregulated capitalism has long looked like something out of Mary Shelley or science-fiction films, a creature we created, but no longer control. Billionaires and their acolytes see only its benefits, but as Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm says in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, “Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running, and then screaming.” Where once We the People held capitalism’s leash, now we wear the collar.

Whether it’s turning your child’s education from a shared public cost into a corporate profit center; or turning the principle of one-man, one-vote into one-dollar, one-vote; or carbon tax credits and accounting tricks for addressing rising sea levels; questioning the universal application of a business approach to any human need or problem prompts the challenge, “Do you have something against making a profit?” A more subtle form of red-baiting, this ploy is supposed to be a conversation stopper. Yes? You’re a commie. Game over.

Maybe not. This game hasn’t played out yet. (Now where did I park my X-wing?)

“This is our Selma!”
by Tom Sullivan

On Monday at 8 a.m. EDT, the North Carolina NAACP chapter takes NC Gov. Pat McCrory and the cheerfully nicknamed VIVA voter suppression act to court:

On July 13, a federal court in Winston-Salem will hear North Carolina NAACP v. McCrory, our lawsuit to reverse North Carolina’s unconstitutional and immoral voter suppression law. North Carolina’s law is the first and the worst since the 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Our voting rights, gained because people stood up despite great consequences in Selma and across the South, have been compromised. Now we must march!

The outcome of this historic case in North Carolina will have an impact on voting rights across the nation. This is a battle for voting rights for all of us. We will not surrender the most fundamental right of a democracy: the right to vote. 
 Just like in Selma, we must march!

Join us in Winston-Salem on July 13 at 5:00 p.m. for a Mass Moral Monday March for Voting Rights.  

This is Our Selma!

Activists believe Winston-Salem was chosen as the venue for hearing the case because its small size. Few observers will get inside and no audio or video feed will be available. The NAACP will nonetheless hold a press conference at 8 a.m. at the courthouse, plus other events during the day, prior to the planned march led by Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, president of the North Carolina NAACP and leader of the weekly Moral Monday marches.

Republicans in the legislature appear nervous about the case. After hundreds of citizens spoke against the law at State Board of Elections forums held across the state, the legislature amended the law to loosen the ID requirements just weeks ahead of the July hearing. Think Progress:

[V]oters who lack the an ID will still be able to cast a ballot, but only if they sign an affidavit swearing they fall into one of the acceptable categories of reasons they couldn’t obtain a government photo ID: a lack of transportation, disability or illness, lost or stolen photo ID, a lack of a birth certificate or other documents to obtain a photo ID, work schedules or family responsibilities. The voter would also need to present an “alternate form of identification,” the last four digits of their Social Security number, and their date of birth.

That is, they swapped out some of the barricades against voting for hoops.

Yet the voter ID provision — which does not allow for the use of student IDs — is just one piece of the sweeping voting law overhaul that the state passed just weeks after the Supreme Court struck down a cornerstone of the Voting Rights Act. The law also eliminated same-day voter registration, cut a full week of early voting, barred voters from casting a ballot outside their home precinct, ended straight-ticket voting, and scrapped a program to pre-register high school students who would turn 18 by Election Day.

University of California law professor Richard Hasen, of Election Law Blog, described the law in 2013, saying:

It rolls into a single piece of legislation just about all of the tools we’ve seen legislatures use in recent years to try to make it harder for people to register and vote.

On Monday, we’ll see if we can’t roll it back.

“Victimless punishment”
by Tom Sullivan

Wall Street might be licking its wounds after yesterday’s hours-long trading shutdown, but for former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder the future is looking rosy.

Holder has gone back to his old D.C. law firm, Covington & Burling, where he can once again work to keep the rich and powerful from facing justice — just what he did for the Obama administration, but with a better pay package. Covington even held an office in its new building for him. Lee Fang wrote on Monday:

Holder’s critics charge that he made a career out of institutionalizing “Too Big to Prosecute” rules within the department. In 1999, as a deputy attorney general, Holder authored a memo arguing that officials should consider the “collateral consequences” when prosecuting corporate crimes. In 2012, Holder’s enforcement chief, Lanny Breuer, admitted during a speech to the New York City Bar Association that the department may go easy on certain corporate criminals if they believe prosecutions may disrupt financial markets or cause layoffs. “In some cases, the health of an industry or the markets are a real factor,” Breuer said.

In decamping the DoJ for Covington, Holder reinforces how thoroughly socialized Justice has become around business — in the Grover Norquist sense. But with Justice functioning as a kind of training school, DoJ attorneys with higher-paying aspirations learn more than how not to pee on the office furniture. David Dayen writes:

Holder is at least the sixth former Justice Department official who landed at Covington after leaving law enforcement. In addition to Breuer, Mythili Raman, who also ran the criminal division, went to Covington, as did partner Steven Fagell and special counsels Daniel Suleiman and Aaron Lewis. Holder’s Justice Department appears to have been a farm team for white-collar criminal defense, where the money gets made protecting illicit corporate actors.

Matt Taibbi elaborates:

Holder doesn’t look it, but he was a revolutionary. He institutionalized a radical dualistic approach to criminal justice, essentially creating a system of indulgences wherein the world’s richest companies paid cash for their sins and escaped the sterner punishments the law dictated.

Taibbi details “five pillars” of that revolution, including failing to win “a single conviction in court for any crimes related to the financial crisis,” the concept of “collateral consequences” noted above, and ways to soften punishments for financial crimes:

Holder doubtless seriously believed at first that in a time of financial crisis, he was doing the right thing in constructing new forms of justice for banks, where nobody but the shareholders actually had to pay for crime. You’ve heard of victimless crimes; Holder created the victimless punishment.

All of which allowed the big banks to get bigger, their rich executives to get richer, and “Eric Holder himself to crash-land into a giant pile of money upon resignation.”

Sleazy work if you can get it.

Catapulting the propaganda
by Tom Sullivan

Ted Cruz is bringing in some techsperts. POLITICO (we spell our name in all caps, see?) reports that the GOP’s scary clown has hired an analytics firm owned in part by the family of hedge fund manager Robert Mercer, who funds several Cruz-supporting, super PACs:

Cambridge Analytica is connected to a British firm called SCL Group, which provides governments, political groups and companies around the world with services ranging from military disinformation campaigns to social media branding and voter targeting.

So far, SCL’s political work has been mostly in the developing world — where it has boasted of its ability to help foment coups.

Their secret weapon? “Psychographics.” Makes you wonder why the GOP presidential field hasn’t already gay married Cambridge Analytica.

That last link takes you to a 2005 Slate story about SCL and how, in a pitch sounding “like a rejected plot twist from a mediocre Bond flick,” its “ops center” could spread disinformation through the media to stop a smallpox outbreak. Propaganda, you say? Nah!

“If your definition of propaganda is framing communications to do something that’s going to save lives, that’s fine,” says Mark Broughton, SCL’s public affairs director. “That’s not a word I would use for that.”

[snip]

If SCL weren’t so earnest, it might actually seem to be mocking itself, or perhaps George Orwell. As the end of the smallpox scenario, dramatic music fades out to a taped message urging people to “embrace” strategic communications, which it describes as “the most powerful weapon in the world.” And the company Web page offers some decidedly creepy asides. “The [ops center] can override all national radio and TV broadcasts in time of crisis,” it says, alluding to work the company has done in an unspecified Asian country.

Of course, Cambridge Analytica is not SCL Worldwide, and that sort of thing sounds so un-American.

Cambridge Analytica has also done campaign work for Republicans Sen. Thom Tillis and Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, as well as for the North Carolina Republican Party. And for Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who would never advocate a coup.

One can only hope
by Tom Sullivan

In his post-Greek referendum analysis, Howard Fineman sees echoes of the past:

It’s a new echo on a global scale of the politics of a much earlier, but in some ways remarkably similar, era in the U.S. As the U.S. became a continental economy in the late 19th century, with vast new hordes of wealth built in railroads, coal, electricity and communications, a political backlash arose. The new “money power” was judged too big and uncontrollable: an engine not of prosperity, but of inequality and corruption. The backlash launched America’s Progressive movement, which among other reforms pushed laws to rein in the power of big corporations in the interests of ordinary people.

Now that the planet’s economies have essentially become one, and the world’s top dozen banks control $30 trillion in assets, the callous demands of a new and even larger “money power” is starting to spark a worldwide backlash.

The International Monetary Fund, writes Fineman, has become since its founding “something akin to a collection agency” for private banks. Still, it is not clear yet whether the backlash Fineman sees is real or apparent.

The corruption of democracy by this system (or perhaps the subjugation of democracy to it) is beginning to filter into the public consciousness. When TV stations in Georgia start doing investigations of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), opinion is beginning to move. The ugliness of this system is becoming ever more apparent to the public at large.

Grexit: The Iceland Cometh
by Tom Sullivan

Quite a blow for Merkantilism today. #Greferendum— Stephanie Kelton (@StephanieKelton) July 6, 2015

The final tally was a 61-39 landslide for the No’s. The Wall Street Journal and other outlets called the Greek referendum “divisive.” Like Bush’s 2000 win was a mandate.

All I could think of all day was Iceland. A big middle finger to creditors. Throw a few bankers in jail. It was as bracing as Iceland’s winters. Less than a decade later, Iceland is doing fine, thank you, said
President Olafur Ragnar Grimmson in 2013:

“Why are the banks considered to be the holy churches of the modern economy? Why are private banks not like airlines and telecommunication companies and allowed to go bankrupt if they have been run in an irresponsible way? The theory that you have to bail out banks is a theory that you allow bankers enjoy for their own profit, their success, and then let ordinary people bear their failure through taxes and austerity. People in enlightened democracies are not going to accept that in the long run.”

But Greece is not Iceland, as the Washington Post noted on Saturday – even as the authors’ prediction on the vote went awry on Sunday:

The stakes are high. They are perhaps higher for Greece than they were for Iceland. While at the time the cost of accepting the repayment terms was quantifiable for Icelanders (calculated as approximately $17,000 per person), there’s no easy way to know what voting either way will mean for Greeks. The choices being put to them are costly either way and, sadly, Greece’s economic woes seem unlikely to be resolved anytime soon — even if voters say yes in the referendum. Icelanders said no to their creditors and seem now, four years later, on a sure enough economic footing again that they deliberately withdrew the application for EU membership they submitted in the midst of the Icesave crisis. Yet Greece faces a much larger, longer economic battle, even if it yields to the current bailout conditions.

Well, Greek democracy stood up to the central bank technocrats. Democracy — governance by the people — is so inconvenient for “Merkantilism” that way. The bankers, thus, have behaved like loan shark enforcers with Greece. So in a performance worthy of a Republican presidential debate, the Troika demanded the poors of Europe pay their debts in a way they wouldn’t expect big banks to. Almost as if they learned that from watching Wall Street banks insist homeowners with underwater mortgages keep paying, while the banks themselves received bailouts. For me, but not for thee. Gotta keep the poors and their democracy in line or they get uppity, like Iceland, dontcha know.

Early moves in Asian markets do not indicate any panic, according to the Financial Times.

This morning, Paul Krugman responds to what the financial press (naturally) describes as a “Greek tragedy.” He writes that Europe actually dodged a bullet:

Of course, that’s not the way the creditors would have you see it. Their story, echoed by many in the business press, is that the failure of their attempt to bully Greece into acquiescence was a triumph of irrationality and irresponsibility over sound technocratic advice.

But the campaign of bullying — the attempt to terrify Greeks by cutting off bank financing and threatening general chaos, all with the almost open goal of pushing the current leftist government out of office — was a shameful moment in a Europe that claims to believe in democratic principles. It would have set a terrible precedent if that campaign had succeeded, even if the creditors were making sense.

What’s more, they weren’t. The truth is that Europe’s self-styled technocrats are like medieval doctors who insisted on bleeding their patients — and when their treatment made the patients sicker, demanded even more bleeding.

Greek voters’ answer to another round of bleeding was a big middle finger.

How is this still a thing?
by Tom Sullivan

In Texas, they still think the Obama is planning to invade. Jade Helm 15 is coming. In Bastrop, Texas, some fear martial law and a white apocalypse. Using a variant of Fox News’ “some say” the county GOP chair tells the New York Times, “in the minds of some, he was raised by communists and mentored by terrorists.” Former mayor Terry Orr explains:

“People think the government is just not on the side of the white guy,” Orr said.

The current Bastrop mayor, Kenneth Kesselus, who also supports Jade Helm, agrees. Kesselus said the distrust is due in part to a sense that “things aren’t as good as they used to be,” especially economically. “The middle class is getting squeezed and they’ve got to take it out on somebody, and Obama is a great target.”

Others in town see the paranoia as “the logical outcome” (if the word even applies) of a political climate where “the state’s Republican leaders have eagerly stoked distrust of the federal government, and especially of Obama.”

But also, the memory of a defeated people runs deep.

Politico’s Michael Lind looks at how much America’s sense of its own exceptionalism is the South’s, and not in a good way. Poverty, lack of social mobility, and racial polarization are more pervasive there. And violence:

Southern violence also goes a long way toward explaining the exceptional violence of the United States in general compared to otherwise similar countries. The pre-modern “culture of honor” continues to exist to a greater degree in the South. White Southerners are more likely than white northerners to respond to insults with increased testosterone and aggression, according to social scientists. According to the FBI in 2012, the South as a region, containing only a quarter of the population, accounted for 40.9 percent of U.S. violent crime.

That’s a statistic to widen your sleepy eyes. Lind continues:

Compared to other Americans, Southerners disproportionately support sanctioned violence in all of its forms, from military intervention abroad to capital punishment to corporal punishment of children. According to Gallup, Southern households have a far higher rate of gun ownership (38 percent) than households in the East (21 percent), Midwest (29 percent) or West (27 percent).

In part, the southern cavalier never came to terms with the South’s defeat and the blow to his sense of natural superiority, not just over former slaves, but over Yankees. Old times there may not be forgotten, but some things must not be mentioned.

Civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson wants to erect markers commemorating those who died in nearly 4,000 lynchings (primarily of blacks, but also of other minorities and immigrants) across America between the end of Reconstruction and 1950. In Germany, they use dialogue to come to terms with the Holocaust, but when it comes to the horrors of “systematic domestic terrorism” in America, Stevenson says, “We don’t want to talk about it; we don’t even want to think about it.” The L.A. Times explains:

So far, the lynching marker project has been slow going. While there has been some support, Stevenson has also met with what he calls “low-level hostile, menacing resistance.”

“What do you want?” one writer asked him, as Stevenson recalls it. “I’ll tell you what you should get: A .357 beside the head.”

Bill Rambo, director of the Confederate Memorial Park and Museum, which hangs the flag on I-65, says Southerners are proud of the banner. As for the markers, he said many whites were lynched, too: “Who’s talking about them?”

Q.E.D.

Sellin’ the big nothin’
by Tom Sullivan

There is an emotional scene at the end of the movie First Blood. Rambo, the decorated war veteran with post-traumatic stress, is breaking down.

He tells his best friend – his only friend – how since leaving the army his life has gone to hell.

He shouts, “For me, civilian life is nothin’. In the field, we had a code of honor. You watch my back, I watch yours. Back here there’s nothin’.”

That nothin’ is what our elites are sellin’.

Oh, our leaders love them some troops in uniform. They put their hands over their hearts, get all solemn, and snap to attention when soldiers pass. They may even think they mean it. But the values they praise in the military are not the values by which they (and we) have organized an economy that no longer serves us. We serve it.

Inside the base perimeter, training instills esprit de corps. Teamwork. All for one, one for all. Self-sacrifice. We give medals for it. Leave no one behind. A code of honor.

But outside in Anytown, USA? Screw you, I’ve got mine. Anyone “out of uniform” is unworthy. Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Stop picking my pocket. Everyone for himself.

Why is that? What is that?

Inside the perimeter (so the advertising goes), it’s values and honor. Outside? Dog eat dog. Profits before people. Nothing personal, just business.

This side of the line? Leave no one behind. That side? Nothin’.

The values we laud as honorable in our military – the best America has to offer – apply inside the perimeter for the few, for the chosen. But outside? Organizing government around that same code is subversive, contemptible, and dangerous.

What is that?

How did we get from all Men are created equal and caring for the general welfare to this wasteland of the soul and call it virtue? Perhaps it is a carryover from a time when in America, on one side of a line the same man could be free and on the other side a slave.

President Barack Obama’s eulogy for the slain Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney spoke of grace:

According to the Christian tradition, grace is not earned. Grace is not merited. It’s not something we deserve. Rather, grace is the free and benevolent favor of God — (applause) — as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings. Grace.

But there is no United States of Grace. As much as we enjoy telling ourselves this country is uniquely blessed of God, we have constructed for ourselves and given ourselves over to an economic system where grace has no place and kinship has no worth. Those we carefully circumscribe within neat, safe boundaries. Inside the church: grace. Outside the church? Contempt for “the least of these.” Inside: unearned blessings, handouts from God. Outside? Handouts breed weakness. The poor deserve being left behind.

Why is that? What is that?

This is not to suggest a union of church and state. Those who think they want it would not stand for their government or their economic system serving the least of these as their holy book recommends. Thus, the system we have constructed bears little resemblance to the ideals therein. There are too many backs we have no interest in watching, and we are too falsely proud to allow them to watch ours.

Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of Daily Kos once explained how he went into the army as a Republican and came out a Democrat. He described his time in the artillery this way:

The military is perhaps the ideal society — we worked hard but the Army took care of us in return. All our basic needs were met — housing, food, and medical care. It was as close to a color-blind society as I have ever seen. We looked out for one another. The Army invested in us…

The Army taught me the very values that make us progressives — community, opportunity, and investment in people and the future. Returning to Bush Senior’s America, I was increasingly disillusioned by the selfishness, lack of community, and sense of entitlement inherent in the Republican philosophy.

No code. No honor. Just the emptiness of the self, and an economy structured to make a few impossibly rich while leaving the rest behind. ISIS finds the concomitant sense of isolation fertile ground for recruiting.

At the end of First Blood, Rambo starts crying. Watching, maybe we do, too. Because we know he’s right. “Back here there’s nothin’.”

That nothin’ is what our elites are sellin’.

Maybe it’s time Americans stopped buyin’.

Ich bin ein Tar Heel
by Tom Sullivan

Atlantic‘s Emma Green cites attorneys David Boies and Theodore Olson on the effect Citizens United has had on local races across the country. The two debated the effects at the Aspen Ideas Festival this week. But let’s begin, as she does, quoting Norm Ornstein:

Loads of money—mostly conservative—went into judicial-retention elections in the last cycle in Florida, following a similar experience in 2010 in Iowa and Illinois. We saw similar efforts on a smaller scale in other states, including Wisconsin and Michigan. All had a ton of attack ads. Those efforts have exploded in the 2014 elections. In North Carolina, where repeal of the state’s Judicial Campaign Reform Act by the right-wing legislature opened the door to a further explosion of campaign spending, and where the GOP sees retaining a majority on the court (ostensibly, but risibly, nonpartisan) as a key to their continued hegemony in politics, the Republican State Leadership Committee spent $900,000 on an unsuccessful primary campaign to unseat Justice Robin Hudson, and will target Court of Appeals Judge Sam Ervin IV in his second attempt to move to the Supreme Court (the first one, in 2012, cost $4.5 million or more).

Ervin won that Supreme Court seat (defeating incumbent Robert N. Hunter, Jr.) as did incumbent Democrats Hudson and Cheri Beasley in these officially nonpartisan elections.

In Aspen, Ted Olson, who represented Citizens United lobbying firm, began:

“The more speech we have, the better—that’s what the Framers of the Constitution thought,” he said. One of the key disagreements in Citizens United is whether money counts as speech—the Court accepted Olson’s argument that it does. “It might be nasty speech, it might be unpleasant speech it might make you uncomfortable. The answer to that is the marketplace of ideas.”

But Boies argued that the Supreme Court mischaracterized the effect that money has on politics. In its opinion, he said, the Court argued that there’s a danger of corruption “with respect with contributions to political candidates, but there is less of a danger with regard to independent expenditures. Who knows that? That’s not something that courts are well-designed to determine.” The Court’s argument follows, he said, if you believe that making political donations is the same as making political statements, but “if you believe that speech and money are different … that money enables speech, but is not speech itself, and if you believe that people really are different [from corporations], then the syllogism breaks down.”

The ads run against Robin Hudson were particularly nasty. But having lost those three NC Supreme Court races last November, Republicans (and Olsen) might well argue that speech won and that the money was not as big a danger as Boies believes. But the money failed here only through some smart, effective campaigning and boots on the ground.

Democrats held those two seats on the court and Ervin won his by running as a team, by representing each other at their events as they crisscrossed the state. Plus, the state party (otherwise considered in disarray) instituted a smart “Blue Ballot” campaign that put easily and cheaply reproduced literature in the hands of volunteers in smaller counties across the state. The Blue Ballot featured judges prominently. Sometimes boots on the ground trump money in the bank.

Republicans were not pleased. One who got in our faces outside the Board of Elections here accused us of cheating because we advertised a list of Democratic judges in the officially nonpartisan election. But Democrats supported members of the party openly, and were not shy about it. Republicans mask their list of judicial candidates with a “conservative judges” label.

Having failed in November, North Carolina Republicans next gambit for gaining an edge in the courts was to pass a bill to provide for retention elections. (Ted Cruz, anyone?) You can bet the money will flow freely ahead of those elections as well.

Turnout will be key in 2016, something Howie has something to say about. (And perhaps Gaius here later.) In the meantime, if people don’t think the money has an impact, let them come to North Carolina.