Politics, Part (-isan) 2, Appendix

[Game Theory: I've Tried Subtlety]

Looks like someone's been paying attention, confirming my thesis that the Democrat's 2010 election loss really had nothing to do with their policies and their serious legislative successes in the last congress; it was all about the new sources of money Citizens United allowed into the process. Hey, when the rules change, you can gripe and moan, but you've still got to keep playing.
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These guys want to make the process more open. Good luck with that!
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Speaking of money in the process, Open Secrets is a pretty good place to keep an eye on that; it's been in my Links role for a long time.
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Here's another breakdown showing that this was the most expensive mid-term election in history. And here's another.
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Can you imagine spending over $140 million dollars of your own money (dynastic wealth)? And losing! Meg Whitman did.
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Chief rasslin' mama spent around $50 million of her own smackeroos, too, and got pinned on a ten count. Tough break. Too bad the fix wasn't in! Can you imagine Vince McMahon preening around Capitol Hill on C-Span?
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Karl Rove's American Crossroads and other shadow groups spent upwards of a quarter billion dollars on the election. Much of that was off-the-books, using anonymous donors who were able to make unlimited donations, bypassing the traditional party structure, and was used specifically to oppose and attack Democratic Party candidates.
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Commenter Charles F. Oxtrot points us to a dialogue on the continuity of the Citizens United decision with the tradition of the Supreme Court's Constitutional jurisprudence on corporate rights. And he is not wrong. You may enjoy it here or here or here:


But it is more complicated than that. There are counterstreams and oblique strategies that can be employed on this issue, as there are on most issues. I'll reserve that discussion for a future set of posts, and I hope Mr. Oxtrot will join in. (Welcome! Hope you don't mind my re-posting your work.)
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On another of my points, here's an anti-Libertarian Primer.

Politics, Part (-isan) 2

(cont'd from previous posts)

In the previous two posts in this series, I've argued that the most significant political changes in the last election have to do less with the shift of power from the Democratic party to the Republican party in the House and Senate and more with: (a) a shift in the Constitutional balance of power from the Executive to the Legislative branch, and (b) the increased influence of private, corporate sources of money on the political process after the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision—an assertion, by the way, of Judicial branch power.

It is merely a historical accident that the Rs stands to benefit from both these trends at the present time. Given other circumstances, the Ds could just as easily capitalize on both changes. In fact, I would argue, if they don't organize to take advantage of both aspects of the current situation, they stand to lose even more of the power they managed to gain in the 2008 election come 2012.

The former trend (a), I argue, is, at base, a good thing, representing a shift away from what I felt to be the authoritarian tendencies of the Bush administration. The second trend (b), on the other hand, hides a decidedly more disturbing shift. Let me explain.

In a recent interview with Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC's "The Last Word," Congressman Ron Paul (father of Senator-elect Rand Paul—named, by the way, after the Congressman's favorite 'philosopher') made the following statements:

"Individuals have rights. You don't have rights because you belong to a group. Property rights are identical to personal liberty and social liberties."

and

"Property rights is liberty."

(This last statement by Rep. Paul is not reflected in the transcript but can be heard at minute 16:30 here.)

Ron Paul is the presiding spirit of the Tea Party and the Libertarian wing of the Republican party. Here he boils his philosophy down to the slogan level. It is an effective and persuasive formulation—at least for some. Freedom and liberty are the catchwords of the present-day right wing. And here they are defined exclusively in terms of property rights.

As an aside, when you hear a Libertarian, or a modern-day conservative, speak about liberty or freedom, know this: they are speaking about freedom from government. Not the freedom to pursue happiness or any such fuzzy, substantive concepts. It is strictly a "non-interference," "don't mess with my stuff" type of liberty.

On the Libertarian view, only individuals have rights. And there are no individual human rights which are not also property rights. And vice versa. So, for example, animals, the environment, and groups (women, non-property owners, labor, gays, slaves, African-Americans, immigrants, the poor, etc.) as such, have no rights other than in their own bodies—which, of course, can be alienated or expropriated in the free market. Animals do not even have a right to their own bodies; they cannot hold property. No one owns the environment, and, until someone does, it is fair game for exploitation as a matter of individual property rights and an unfettered market place. And group rights only derive from the rights of individuals therein. There is no such thing as 'social justice'.

The liberty you have is commensurate with the property you own; and the property you own is the fruit of your labor which is an extension of your body. This is the idealistic, idealized basis of the Libertarian philosophy. And it simply makes no sense in the real world.

What we've seen in recent years is a trend toward an amassing of wealth in fewer and fewer individuals and, more significantly, in larger and larger corporate entities.

It is axiomatic in the Libertarian view that those who hold more property have more personal and social liberties. Conversely, those who hold no private property have no personal and social liberties. A natural imbalance is bound to exacerbate over time as more and more rights and liberties accrue to the wealthier members of society by virtue of their power, and more and more rights and liberties (and thus private property) dissipate from the less well-off who are less able to defend them.

How, in the Libertarian society, do individuals gain more liberty? They band their properties together and purchase more property rights via the form of a corporate entity. The sole purpose of a corporation is to make a profit for its owners, i.e., to increase their contractually-limited collective rights and liberties. The corporate vehicle provides them with, for example, limited liability from their collective wrong-doing. It absolves them, under the guise of bankruptcy and reorganization, from paying their outstanding debts. And as a side matter, practically speaking, corporate entities are better able to assert and defend their rights and liberties in the judicial system by virtue of their access to the necessary capital it takes to pay the sort of extensive legal bills it takes to obtain the results they desire.

The Libertarian watchword is small government, and this has become the mantra of much of the new House majority (how genuine an expression of their underlying goals it is is a question for another post). The aim is less regulation of corporate profit-making, i.e., more corporate liberty and, thus, the concentration of more property in corporate hands. That is to say, the desired result is that these corporate persons may exercise more and more of these rights (i.e., accumulate more property) without interference from the government—executive, judicial, and legislative. That means without the necessary checks on their ability to assert their rights ad lib against those who have less property (and, thus, less liberty and less rights) AND against the public good.

The Libertarian society has no room for nor a concept of the public good. Thus, everything from public streets and roads to public parks and natural resources and air space to the military, police, and fires department is subject to expropriation from the public sphere and, indeed, should be privatized. I've sketched one way in which this particular scenario might play out here.

The U.S. Supreme Court has held that a corporation is considered a 'person' under the U.S. Constitution; that, for First Amendment 'free speech' purposes, money is speech; and that corporations may contribute unlimited amounts of money to political campaigns. This is a disturbing trend, one that the Libertarian ideology—despite its homely, individualistic, idealized self-image—merely serves to perpetuate.

For this reason, Libertarianism, though it claims to be grounded in individual property rights, cannot and should not be differentiated from corporatism.

This, then, represents the third trend in the American political landscape we've seen coming to a head in this latest election: the radical corporatist shift of the government, supercharged in unprecedented fashion by the influx of corporate money into political campaigns resulting from the second trend noted above.

Politics, Part (-isan) 1

In my previous post, I looked at Tuesday's election in structural governmental, or Constitutional terms, concluding: the most significant, and long-lasting, power shift tokened by this election was not the change of party majority in the House of Representatives, it was the re-ascendance of the Legislative branch of government after eight years of the imperious, if not imperial, Executive under the Bush/Cheney administration. I've still seen no one who grasps this very important LIBERAL principle.

This may mean added oversight and even, if the new House Republican majority gets too full of themselves, impeachment. That's a political fight. And the R's are much better at it than the D's who could not muster the courage to challenge that mighty 'War President' whose abuses of power and potential war crimes and crimes against humanity, inter alia, drove his popularity down into the low to mid twenty percent range by the end of his term. That doesn't mean that such a structural shift isn't a good one. It is good for democracy. Presidents should not be allowed to rule by fiat.

Today, I want to look at why the Democratic Party failed so spectacularly Tuesday. After his party gained majority status in 2006, President Obama swept to power in 2008 against a preposterous opposition (Palin/McCain). The ground for this was laid by the DNC's and, specifically, Howard Dean's 50-state strategy. They ran a consistent campaign and put up serious candidates practically everywhere; they energized the base and the youth vote and raised funds dollar-by-dollar from sources previously untapped—the internet, small contributors, etc. Once Obama became the titular head of the party, Dean was ousted and the campaign strategy changed. As a result, the D's were out-gunned by money, message, and enthusiasm in this last election.



The R's tapped unprecedented sources of money in the wake of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. This is where their "tidal wave" lay. It had nothing to do with their policies. In fact, their two major policy principles (besides, of course, ousting President Obama in 2012) contain a contradiction so glaring that even the most obtuse media pundit should be able to drive a high-speed rail line through it. Principle 1: Extend the Bush tax cuts permanently; Principle 2: Balance the budget/cut the deficit. Can you spot the inconsistency?

The R's won because they were better organized and raised way more money. It's as simple as that. They had so much money, they nearly split wide open trying to get their hands on it—an issue I plan to address in my next post on this topic. And if the D's plan on retaining the Senate and the Presidency in 2012, they better start last year raising enough money so they can start some serious fundraising, getting their precinct leadership in order, recruiting good candidates EVERYWHERE, crafting their message, preparing their legislative strategy to exploit the contradictions and conflicts in their opponent's ranks, etc.

This, of course, is just the politics of it. More importantly, of course, for the good of the country, President Obama needs to focus on creating jobs and improving the economy, and he needs to get his party behind him. As the party of good governance, I think the D's can do it. But they shouldn't expect the electorate to reward them merely for a job well done; the Republicans are much better campaigners. The Democrats, if they want to keep their jobs, need to demonstrate how much they really want them. They need to bring the passion.

Politics

As you may or may not know, the United States had a mid-term political election yesterday. The office of the presidency was not up for grabs, but the entire House of Representatives, one-third of the Senate, numerous state governorships, and state legislatures were. It was an exercise in our particular form of democratic government in the normal course of things. And that's a good thing.

Today, there's a lot of hue and cry about the outcome and what it means for the future of this country and its two mainstream political parties. The Republican Party gained control of the House of Representatives. The Democratic Party retained control of the Senate—just barely.

None of the post-mortem coverage I've seen (and I'm open to correction), however, seems to grasp the full measure of the change the last two years has wrought on our political system.

Yes, there have been accomplishments by the Obama administration and the Democratic majority in Congress. And they are of debatable merit. Yes, the Republicans have reorganized as the minority party-in-opposition and seemed to have found new life. But analyzing yesterday's election results in terms of its effects on the two political parties misses the point.

As practically everyone of consequence acknowledges, this country—and quite possibly the world as a whole—narrowly missed slipping into another Great Depression as the presidency of George W. Bush stumbled to the finish line of its eight year incumbency. President Obama's supporters like to give him credit for averting this catastrophe, and there is some credibility to this argument. But it is a difficult thing to sell to the American electorate and clearly did not hold sway yesterday.

What goes unacknowledged by virtually everyone is the other crisis we averted in the wake of the Bush presidency: namely, the rise of the imperial presidency.

Let's start with some background. President Bush and, even more so, Vice President Cheney attempted to use the disastrous terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to expand the powers of the Executive to a practically unheard-of degree. They shoved the so-called PATRIOT Act through a rubber-stamp Republican majority Congress in the dead of night. They dictated legislation to their shills on any number of other occasions, and the Democratic minority did not act as a party-in-opposition. They were cowed into submission by calls of treason and cowardice and most likely blackmail by the minions of a self-declared 'War President'. They were bullied and conned into ceding to the Bush administration exclusive power to determine if this country should invade a bystander country. The Bush administration adventured into armed conflict by fiat. It spent billions of dollars on PR (Hill & Knowlton, anyone?) to trumpet its policies and bash its opponents—something to which, I might add, the Obama administration seems allergic. It populated the judicial benches with cronies and allies who adhered to its vision of virtually limitless executive power. It submitted deceptive budgets designed to foster its agenda and make it appear to be fiscally sound—its two 'wars' were, for example, specifically kept off-budget. The Bush administration co-opted legitimate journalists and pundits and used FoxNews as its communications arm, and it used threats of removing access to information from those in the mainstream press it couldn't co-opt if they criticized the president. It engaged in illegal warfare, torture, and further crimes against humanity and world order. It engaged in character assassination and political destruction of those who dared call attention to its lies (Valerie Plame, anyone?) and fraud.

This brief summary only begins to touch on the eight-year effort by President Bush to consolidate power in the Executive Branch of the U.S. government. The first six years of the Bush presidency, in particular, was characterized by the machinations of a shrewd political organization whose every move was calculated to enhance its party's dominance. The current president, by contrast, has not rammed its own legislative initiatives down the throat of Congress. Virtually all of the initiative has been ceded to Congress. And this is as it should be.

Our Constitution envisions three balanced branches of government. During the Republican Bush years, the balance tipped heavily in favor of the Executive branch. We have not seen such an imbalance since the times of FDR or Lincoln, legitimate war presidents. President Obama, by all indications, seems to working to restore the correct balance. It is a slow process. And a thankless one. It cannot help but make him seem weak. It does not "excite the base."

Yet, this is why this mid-term election is encouraging. Sure, the party I favor lost some seats. But that power shift is de minimis compared to the real shift in power we are seeing (or not seeing, as the case may be) between the Executive and the Legislative branches. Let the issues play out in Congress. That's the way our system is supposed to work. That's where we're supposed to fight it out. That's where true bottom-up change can come.

I think too many on the left want to counterbalance the strongman Bush with a strongman of their own. I believe that is wrongheaded. The stronger the presidency, the greater the tendency toward authoritarianism. Being a liberal, historically, means opposing a strong executive—in whatever form it takes: monarchy, feudalism, heriditary nobility, fascism, dictatorship, totalitarianism, religious establishmentarianism, etc. So, call me a liberal; just make sure you know what you're talking about when you do.

And yes, on that score, yesterday's election results were not all that bad. Historic turnout for mid-term elections just indicates that we are beginning to see a resurgence in the Legislative branch of government. And that means it's time to roll up your sleeves and get your representatives to do their job, i.e., representing your interests.