This is really scary....We need to contiue to work for our democracy

Will E-Voting Machines Owned by His Buddies Give Mitt Romney the White House?

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman

Electronic voting machines owned by Mitt Romney's business buddies and set to count the votes in Cincinnati could decide the 2012 election.
The narrative is already being hyped by the corporate media. As Kelly O'Donnell reported for NBC's Today Show on Monday, October 8, Ohio's Hamilton County is "ground zero" for deciding who holds the White House come January, 2013.
O'Donnell pointed out that no candidate has won the White House without carrying Ohio since John Kennedy did it in 1960. No Republican has ever won the White House without Ohio's electoral votes.
As we document in the e-book Will the GOP Steal America's 2012 Election? (www.freepress.org) George W. Bush got a second term in 2004 thanks to the manipulation of the electronic vote count by Ohio's then-Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. Blackwell served as the co-chair of the state's committee to re-elect Bush/Cheney while simultaneously administering the election.
The widespread use of electronic voting machines from ES&S, and of Diebold software maintained by Triad, allowed Blackwell to electronically flip a 4% Kerry lead to a 2% Bush victory in the dead of election night. ES&S, Diebold and Triad were all owned or operated by Republican partisans. The shift of more than 300,000 votes after 12:20 am election night was a virtual statistical impossibility. It was engineered by Michael Connell, an IT specialist long affiliated with the Bush Family. Blackwell gave Connell's Ohio-based GovTech the contract to count Ohio's votes, which was done on servers housed in the Old Pioneer Bank Building in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Thus the Ohio vote tally was done on servers that also carried the e-mail for Karl Rove and the national Republican Party. Connell died in a mysterious plane crash in December, 2008, after being subpoenaed in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal lawsuit focused on how the 2004 election was decided (disclosure: we were attorney and plaintiff in that suit).
Diebold's founder, Walden O'Dell, had vowed to deliver Ohio's electoral votes---and thus the presidency---to his friend George W. Bush. That it was done in part on electronic voting machines and software O'Dell happened to own (Diebold has since changed hands twice) remains a cautionary red flag for those who believe merely winning the popular vote will give Barack Obama a second term.
This November, much of the Ohio electorate will cast its ballots on machines again owned by close cronies of the Republican presidential candidate. In Cincinnati and elsewhere around the state, the e-voting apparati are owned by Hart Intercivic. Hart's machines are infamous for mechanical failures, "glitches," counting errors and other timely problems now thoroughly identified with the way Republicans steal elections. As in 2004, Ohio's governor is now a Republican. This time it's the very right-wing John Kasich, himself a multi-millionaire courtesy of a stint at Lehman Brothers selling state bonds, and the largesse of Rupert Murdoch, on whose Fox Network Kasich served as a late night bloviator. Murdoch wrote Kasich a game-changing $1 million check just prior to his winning the statehouse, an electoral victory shrouded in electronic intrigue. The exit polls in that election indicated that his opponent, incumbent Democrat Ted Strickland, had actually won the popular vote.
Ohio's very Republican Secretary of State is John Husted, currently suing in the US Supreme Court to prevent the public from voting on the weekend prior to election day. As did Blackwell and Governor Robert Taft in 2004, Husted and Kasich will control Ohio's electronic vote count on election night free of meaningful public checks or balances
Hart Intercivic, on whose machines the key votes will be cast in Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, was taken over last year by H.I.G. Capital. Prominent partners and directors on the H.I.G. board hail from Bain Company or Bain Capital, both connected to Mitt Romney. H.I.G. employees have contributed at least $338,000 to Romney's campaign. H.I.G. Directors John P. Bolduk and Douglas Berman are major Romney fundraisers, as is former Bain and H.I.G. manager Brian Shortsleeve.
US courts have consistently ruled that the software in electronic voting machines is proprietary to the manufacturer, even though individual election boards may own the actual machines. Thus there will be no vote count transparency on election night in Ohio. The tally will be conducted by Hart Intercivic and controlled by Husted and Kasich, with no public recourse or accountability. As federal testimony from the deceased Michael Connell made clear in 2008, electronically flipping an election is relatively cheap and easy to do, especially if you or your compatriots programmed the machines.
So as the corporate media swarm through Ohio, reporting breathlessly from "ground zero" in Cincinnati, don't hold your own breath waiting for them to also clarify that the voting machines in what may once again be America's decisive swing state are owned, programmed and tabulated by some of the Romney campaign's closest associates.
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of Will the GOP Steal America's 2012 Election?, an e-book.

Bob Fitrakis is a Political Science Professor in the Social and Behavioral Sciences department at Columbus State Community College. He and Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, including Did George W. Bush Steal America's 2004 Election?, As Goes Ohio: Election Theft Since 2004 , How the GOP Stole America's 2004 Election & Is Rigging 2008, and What Happened in Ohio

more Bob Fitrakis

Harvey Wasserman's Solartopia Green Power & Wellness Show is at www.progressiveradionetwork.com, and he edits www.nukefree.org. Harvey Wasserman's History of the US and Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth are at www.harveywasserman.com along with Passions of the PotSmoking Patriots by "Thomas Paine." He and Bob Fitrakis have co-authored four books on election protection, including How the GOP Stole America's 2004 Election, at www.freepress.org.

As we all know the Republicans would love to do away with any social safety net, as John Nochols from the Nation Magazine states in this article.

Top GOP Senate Candidate Just Says It: 'Do Away With Medicare, Medicaid'

by John Nichols

Paul Ryan admits that he’s an “end Medicare as we know it” candidate.
But, somehow, we are not supposed to think that he would actually end the popular and successful healthcare program for the elderly, as well as related Medicaid programs for the poor and people with disabilities.
The “as we know it” part provides a sort of cover, as least in the eyes of a media that is more inclined toward stenography than journalism.
Never mind that Ryan, a fanatical reader of government-can-do-no-good fanatic Ayn Rand, goes positively wide-eyed when he starts talking about how desperately he wants to downsize government—and shift control of healthcare and retirement programs to the insurance and Wall Street interests that so generously fund his campaigns. We’re not supposed to talk about the long-term crony-capitalist scheme of certain Republicans to do away with government programs that work so that private-sector profiteers can come in and create programs that don’t work—except for private-sector profiteers.
Never mind that the Republican nominee for vice president has a long history of decrying Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in Randian terms such as “collectivist” and “socialistic.”
Never mind that Ryan has griped that “Social Security right now is a collectivist system. It’s a welfare transfer system.”
Never mind that, as recently as 2010, Ryan dismissed Medicare and Medicaid as part of a “socialist based system” that needs to be replaced.
The red flags are not supposed to go up until someone actually says they want to, you know, “do away with Medicaid and Medicare.”
Never mind that, even now, Ryan complains about how America is being overwhelmed by “takers” (citizens who claim benefits to which they are entitled) and the “welfare state” (Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid).
Only when a candidate starts talking about ending entitlement programs—as in “doing away” with them—can we be serious about the immediate threat those programs actually face.
Meet Tommy Thompson, former Republican governor of Wisconsin, former Bush-Cheney administration secretary of health and human services, former candidate for the Republican nomination for president and mentor to Paul Ryan.
Speaking to a Tea Party group while campaigning for Wisconsin’s open US Senate seat, Thompson recounted how he “reformed” welfare in Wisconsin.
Back in the 1990s, Thompson said he wanted to “end welfare as we know it.” In fact, he replaced the program with a classic combination of high-government spending, lots of patronage appointments and rising poverty.
Now, Thompson has dropped the “end welfare as we know it” pretense. He brags that he finished off “one of the entitlement program.”
And he’s gunning for a couple of other entitlement programs.
Which ones?
You guessed it: Medicaid and Medicare.
Declaring that he wants to “change Medicare and Medicaid like I did welfare,” Thompson asked a May gathering of the Lake Country Area Defenders Of Liberty in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin: “Who better to and who better than me, who’s already finished one of the entitlement programs, to come up with programs to do away with Medicaid and Medicare?”

The video has only now surfaced and its a blockbuster -- especially in the aftermath of the release last week of a similar video that saw Republican presiential nominee Mitt Romney dismissing 47 percent of Americans as a "dependent" class unworthy of Republican consideration.
Just to repeat: a top Republican Senate candidate has been caught on video talking about how he would “DO AWAY WITH MEDICAID, AND MEDICARE.”
Just to repeat: “DO AWAY WITH MEDICAID, AND MEDICARE.”
It should be understood that Thompson is no fringe-dwelling Todd Akin. As the longtime Republican governor of a swing state, he’s worked with every GOP president since Ronald Reagan, and he oversaw social programs for the Bush-Cheney administration. This year, he’s one of his party’s premier recruits in the fight to retake the Senate. Indeed, the race between Thompson and Democratic Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin could decide which party controls the chamber.
Thompson is, as well, closely aligned with Paul Ryan. The Senate candidate’s ties to Ryan’s politically connected family go back to when the Republican vice-presidential nominee was a child. Thompson has been a Ryan booster from the very beginning of the younger Wisconsinite’s career in electoral politics—when Thompson was the powerful governor of the state and Ryan was organizing his first Congressional bid.
When Thompson joined the Bush-Cheney Cabinet, he and Ryan kept regular company in Washington. They look forward to working together when Thompson becomes the point man on entitlement debates in a Republican-controlled Senate and Ryan is the Romney White House’s chief liaison to Capitol Hill.
The voters will have something to say about that, however.
If they want to preserve Medicaid and Medicare, they will remember that, while Ryan may add the “as we know it” spin, Thompson gets to the heart of the matter when he says it is the intention of these “reformers” to “do away with Medicaid and Medicare.”

© 2012 The Nation

Published on Friday, September 14, 2012 by Consortium News

Romney’s Jaw-Dropping Incoherence

by Robert Parry

For all his supposed business competence, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney is running a campaign of jaw-dropping incoherence, mixing some of the most dishonest rants from right-wing talk radio with focus-group worries about health care and the economy even if they clash with conservative principles.Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. (Photo credit: mittromney.com)
You saw this at the Republican National Convention, which was almost fully devoted to gross distortions of President Barack Obama’s positions – like the endless repetition of his out-of-context quote, “You didn’t build that” – combined with complaints that Obama had not intervened enough in the economy to create more jobs, even in contradiction of the GOP’s supposed love of “free markets.”
Now, Romney has pounced on a well-meaning – though ultimately unsuccessful – effort by the U.S. embassy staff in Cairo to tamp down anger caused by an incendiary anti-Muslim video that appeared designed to elicit the kind of violent rage that is now sweeping the Middle East.
Seemingly without regard for the delicate circumstances, Romney issued a statement that transformed the embassy’s criticism of the video into an expression of sympathy by the Obama administration for the protesters who attacked U.S. diplomatic outposts in Egypt and, fatally, in Libya. However, to make his point stick, Romney had to reverse the actual chronology of events.
Here is how the chronology actually went: Early on Tuesday, the U.S. Embassy in Egypt sought to calm tensions by issuing a statement condemning “the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.”
Despite the embassy’s message, hours later, mobs of angry protesters attacked the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. In Benghazi, the assault involved weapons which led to the deaths of U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens and three of his aides.
Shortly after 10 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “I condemn in the strongest terms the attack on our mission in Benghazi.”
However, Romney saw an opening to hammer home his beloved theme that President Obama “apologizes for America.” Disregarding the actual chronology, i.e. that the message by the U.S. Embassy in Cairo preceded the mob attacks, Romney put out a statement at 10:24 p.m., which declared: “It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”
Romney’s statement ignored Secretary Clinton’s stern words, which represented the first official response from a senior member of the Obama administration. However, rather than correct his mistake on Wednesday, Romney expanded on his criticism of the embassy officials in Cairo and implicitly defended the offensive video.
Romney said, “the Embassy of the United States issued what appeared to be an apology for American principles. That was a mistake.” The principle that Romney appeared to be defending was the right to grossly ridicule someone else’s religion, while ignoring a competing American principle, tolerance of the religion of others.
On Wednesday afternoon – after his own somber and stern response to the attacks on the U.S. diplomatic outposts – President Obama said in an interview that “Governor Romney seems to have a tendency to shoot first and aim later.”
A Troubling Pattern
But Romney’s problem appears to be somewhat different. Both during the Republican primaries and since he nailed down the GOP nomination, he has demonstrated a readiness to say whatever he thinks will help him politically without regard to its truthfulness or its fairness.
While it’s common for politicians of all stripes to stretch the truth now and then, Romney has taken that behavior to a new level. He lies, distorts and misrepresents in a wholesale fashion, not the occasional retail fib that is more typical. Then he refuses to apologize as if accountability is not for him.
Earlier in Campaign 2012, Romney even won some grudging respect for his skill as a liar. On April 16, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote: “Among the attributes I most envy in a public man (or woman) is the ability to lie. If that ability is coupled with no sense of humor, you have the sort of man who can be a successful football coach, a CEO or, when you come right down to it, a presidential candidate. Such a man is Mitt Romney.”
Cohen cited a Republican debate during which former House Speaker Newt Gingrich accused Romney’s SuperPAC of running dishonest attack ads. Romney claimed that he hadn’t seen the ads but then described – and defended – the content of one.
Cohen wrote: “Me, I would have confessed and begged for forgiveness. Not Romney, though — and herein is the reason he will be such a formidable general-election candidate. He concedes nothing. He had seen none of the ads, he said. They were done by others, he added. Of course, they are his supporters, but he had no control over them. All this time he was saying this rubbish, he seemed calm, sincere — matter of fact.
“And then he brought up an ad he said he did see. It was about Gingrich’s heretical support for a climate-change bill. He dropped the name of the extremely evil Nancy Pelosi. He accused Gingrich of criticizing Paul Ryan’s first budget plan, an Ayn Randish document. … He added that Gingrich had been in ethics trouble in the House and [Romney] ended with a promise to make sure his ads were as truthful as could be. Pow! Pow! Pow! Gingrich was on the canvas.
“I watched, impressed. I admire a smooth liar, and Romney is among the best. His technique is to explain — that bit about not knowing what was in the ads — and then counterattack. He maintains the bulletproof demeanor of a man who is barely suffering fools, in this case Gingrich. His [Romney’s] message is not so much what he says, but what he is: You cannot touch me. I have the organization and the money. Especially the money. (Even the hair.) You’re a loser.”
Economic Distortions
Other commentators have made the same point about Romney and his readiness to seize on any distortion relating to President Obama if it helps reinforce one of Romney’s campaign themes.
As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman noted earlier this year, Romney’s whole campaign is based on a cynical belief that Americans suffer from “amnesia” about what caused the nation’s economic mess and that they will simply blame President Obama for not quickly fixing it.
To illustrate the point last April, Romney staged a campaign event in Ohio at a shuttered drywall factory that closed in 2008, when Bush was still president and when the housing market, which had grown into a bubble under Bush’s deregulatory policies, was collapsing.
Krugman wrote: “Mr. Romney constantly talks about job losses under Mr. Obama. Yet all of the net job loss took place in the first few months of 2009, that is, before any of the new administration’s policies had time to take effect. So the Ohio speech was a perfect illustration of the way the Romney campaign is banking on amnesia, on the hope that voters don’t remember that Mr. Obama inherited an economy that was already in free fall.”
Krugman added that the amnesia factor was relevant, too, because Romney is proposing more tax cuts and more banking deregulation, Bush’s disastrous recipe. In other words, Romney’s campaign is based on the fundamental lie that the cure for Bush’s economic collapse is a larger dose of Bush’s economic policies.
Romney’s speech at the shuttered drywall factory in Ohio was a precursor to a similar misrepresentation at the Republican convention when Rep. Paul Ryan, Romney’s vice presidential running mate, blasted Obama over the fact that a GM plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, which stopped production under President Bush, had not been reopened – as if it were suddenly the role of the federal government to make such detailed decisions for corporations.
The convention itself was a remarkable exercise in dishonest propaganda, focusing on two accusations against Obama that lacked any credibility. One was the repeated use of the misplaced antecedent in the “you didn’t build that” quote. Obama’s “that” clearly referred to roads, bridges and other public infrastructure that help business, not to individual businesses, as Romney and the Republicans pretended.
The other was a racially tinged claim that Obama had gutted the work requirement in welfare reform when his administration responded to a bipartisan request from some governors to give them more flexibility to make the work requirement more effective.
Wild Talk
Both lines of attack originated in the world of talk radio – and then were adopted by the Romney campaign. But Romney’s dishonest attack lines sometime merge with his own ever-shifting positions on key issues.
For instance, on Sunday, Romney seemed to reverse his oft-stated pledge to repeal all of the Affordable Care Act, known as “Obamacare.” In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Romney said he would keep some of its popular provisions, such as the ban on insurance companies denying coverage for preexisting conditions, though presumably without the individual mandate to buy insurance, which makes the reform economically feasible for insurance companies.
Of all people, Romney surely understands this link between mandates and preexisting conditions since he addressed that issue as governor of Massachusetts in passing “Romneycare,” which became the model for “Obamacare.” However, just as voters were trying to figure out Romney’s new position on health care, he reverted back to his previous promise to repeal “Obamacare” in its entirety.
Then, on Tuesday and Wednesday, Romney’s flailing efforts to land a knock-out blow on Obama went to new extremes amid unrest in Egypt and Libya over a provocative video produced in California and posted on “YouTube,” presenting the Prophet Muhammad as a buffoonish sex pervert and sadistic mass murderer.
Regarding the Egyptian-Libyan unrest, Romney appears to have jumped out front on his own, sensing that the statement from the Cairo embassy bolstered his dubious claim that Obama “apologizes for America,” a central point in Romney’s neocon-oriented book, No Apology.
But the emerging problem for Romney is that he has now developed a reputation for making any wild allegation that he thinks might rile up his conservative “base” or score some points against President Obama, no matter how reckless the words might be.
Romney’s behavior, particularly since his poll numbers have begun sinking over the past two weeks, is leading to a dangerous new narrative for him, that he is not simply an accomplished liar but that he may be mentally unstable, incapable of differentiating between fact and fiction.
Mitt’s Meltdown
New York Times columnist Gail Collins touched on this emerging theme in her Thursday column, entitled “Mitt’s Major Meltdown,” in which she says Romney “could do anything he wanted during this campaign as long as he sent out signals that once he got in the White House he was not likely to be truly crazy. …
“It didn’t seem to be a lot to ask, but when the crisis in the Middle East flared up, Romney turned out to have no restraining inner core. All the uneasy feelings you got when he went to London and dissed the Olympic organizers can now come into full bloom. Feel free to worry about anything. That he’d declare war on Malta. Lock himself in a nuclear missile silo and refuse to come out until there’s a tax cut. Hand the country over to space aliens.
“Here is the Republican candidate for president of the United States on Wednesday, explaining why he broke into a moment of rising international tension and denounced the White House as ‘disgraceful’ for a mild statement made by the American Embassy in Cairo about the importance of respecting other people’s religions:
“‘They clearly — they clearly sent mixed messages to the world. And — and the statement came from the administration — and the embassy is the administration — the statement that came from the administration was a — was a statement which is akin to apology and I think was a — a — a severe miscalculation.’”
If running a national campaign – with all its challenges and frustrations – is a test for how someone might serve in the pressure-cooker job as President of the United States, Mitt Romney may be in the process of demonstrating that he is unfit for the post that he seeks.

© 2012 Consortium News

Report indicates race was behind immigration law

Great reporting by the Arizona Republic and great work by the American Civil Liberties Union, showing what many progressive voices have been saying.

Emails Show Arizona Immigration Law Racially Motivated

Br Alia Beard Rau , Arizona Republic

21 July 2012

he American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona has released thousands of e-mails that it says proves Arizona's controversial immigration law was racially motivated.

The e-mails, acquired through a public records request to the state Legislature, are to and from former senator Russell Pearce, who authored Senate Bill 1070.

The ACLU included dozens of those e-mails as part of a legal filing this week, asking U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton to prevent a key part of SB 1070 from going into effect.

The e-mails from Pearce in the court documents include statements like, "Can we maintain our social fabric as a nation with Spanish fighting English for dominance ... It's like importing leper colonies and hope we don't catch leprosy. It's like importing thousands of Islamic jihadists and hope they adapt to the American Dream."

They include statistics such as "9,000 people killed every year by illegal aliens," and "the illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that's two-and-a-half times that of non-illegal aliens."

Pearce did not return calls seeking comment. While all the e-mails were sent from Pearce's personal or legislative e-mail address, it is unclear if they were all his own words or if some of the statements were taken without attribution from other individuals.

Email Excerpts

These are excerpts from e-mails Russell Pearce sent from 2006 to 2011. The American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona acquired about 10,000 pages of e-mails from legislative staff via a public records request.

"The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that's two-and-a-half times that of non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the U.S."

"The birth rate among illegal immigrants is substantially higher than the population at large."

"Last week, Denver's illegal aliens sang our national anthem in Spanish and bastardized the words of OUR country's most sacred song."

"Battles commence as Mexican nationalists struggle to infuse their men into American government and strengthen control over their strongholds. One look at Los Angeles with its Mexican-American mayor shows you Vincente Fox's general Varigossa commanding an American city."

"They create enclaves of separate groups that shall balkanize our nation into fractured nightmares of social unrest and poverty."

"Corruption is the mechanism by which Mexico operates. Its people spawn more corruption wherever they go because it is their only known way of life."

"Tough, nasty illegals and their advocates grow in such numbers that law and order will not subdue them. They run us out of our cities and states. They conquer our language and our schools. They render havoc and chaos in our schools."

"We are much like the Titanic as we inbreed millions of Mexico's poor, the world's poor and we watch our country sink."

(The following was taken from an e-mail with the subject What's a racist?)

"I'm racist because I don't want to be taxed to pay for a prison population comprised of mainly Hispanics, Latinos, Mexicans or whatever else you wish to call them."

"I'm a racist because I believe the News Media has a duty to tell us the names and race of criminals."

"I'm a racist because I object to having to pay higher sales tax and property tax to build more schools for the illegitimate children of illegal aliens."

"I'm a racist because I dislike having to push one for English and/or listening to a message in Spanish."

"Factual is not racial. Realism is not racism. The new definition of racist is anyone winning an argument with a liberal, minority, pacifist, bible banger, or moron."

A Great Piece by John Nichols

Supreme Court Extends Power of Corporations to Buy Elections

by John Nichols

The U.S. Supreme Court may still retain some familiarity with the Constitution when it comes to deciding the nuances of cases involving immigration policy and lifetime incarceration. But when it comes to handing off control of American democracy to corporations, the court continue to reject the intents of the founders and more than a century of case law to assure that CEOs are in charge.The US Supreme Court, writes Nichols, has clearly chosen sides as it makes corporate domination of elections easier and easier while at the same time placing further restrictions on how labor unions can spend.
Make no mistake, this is not a "free speech" or "freedom of association" stance by the court's Republican majority. That majority is narrowing the range of debate. It is picking winners. To turn a phrase from the old union song, this court majority has decided which side it is on.
The same court that in January, 2010, ruled with the Citizens United decision that corporations can spend freely in federal elections -- enjoying the same avenues of expression as human beings -- on Monday ruled that states no longer have the ability to guard against what historically has been seen as political corruption and the buying of elections.
The court's 5-4 decision in the Montana case of American Tradition Partnership v. Bullock significantly expands the scope and reach of the Citizens United ruling by striking down state limits on corporate spending in state and local elections. "The question presented in this case is whether the holding of Citizens United applies to the Montana state law,” the majority wrote. “There can be no serious doubt that it does.”
Translation: If Exxon Mobil wants to spend $10 million to support a favored candidate in a state legislative or city council race that might decide whether the corporation is regulated, or whether it gets new drilling rights, it can. But why stop at $10 million? If it costs $100 million to shout down the opposition, the court says that is fine. If if costs $1 billion, that's fine, too.
And what of the opposition. Can groups that represent the public interest push back? Can labor unions take a stand in favor of taxing corporations like Exxon Mobil?
If it costs $100 million to shout down the opposition, the court says that is fine. If if costs $1 billion, that's fine, too.
Not with the same freedom or flexibility that they had from the 1930s until this year. Last Thursday, the court erected elaborate new barriers to participation in elections by public-sector unions -- requiring that they get affirmative approval from members before making special dues assessments to fund campaigns countering corporations.
How might it work? If Wal-Mart wanted to support candidates who promised to eliminate all taxes for Wal-Mart, the corporation could spend unlimited amounts of money. It would not need to gain stockholder approval. It can just go for it.
But if AFSCME wants to counter Wal-Mart argument, saying that eliminating taxes on out-of-state retailers will save consumers very little but will ultimate undermine funding for schools and public services, the union will have to go through the laborious process of gaining permission from tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of members. And, even then, it will face additional reporting and structural barriers imposed by the court.
Campaign finance reformers had held out some hope that states might be able to apply some restrictions on corporate spending, as Montana did with its one-hundred year old law barring direct corporate contributions to political parties and candidates. That law, developed to control against the outright buying of elections by "copper kings" and "robber barons," was repeatedly upheld. Until now.
Now, says Marc Elias, one of the nation's top experts in election law,“To the extent that there was any doubt from the original Citizens United decision broadly applies to state and local laws, that doubt is now gone,” said Marc Elias, a Democratic campaign lawyer. “To whatever extent that door was open a crack, that door is now closed.”
There may still be a few legislative avenues left for countering the "money power" of the new "copper kings" and "robber barons." But they are rapidly being closed off by a partisan high court majority.
That's why U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who has emerged as a leading proponent of moves to amend the U.S. Constitution to restore the rule of law in elections, says: “The U.S. Supreme Court’s absurd 5-4 ruling two years ago in Citizens United was a major blow to American democratic traditions. Sadly, despite all of the evidence that Americans see every day, the court continues to believe that its decision makes sense."
When billionaires can "spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy this election for candidates who support the super-wealthy," argues Sanders, "this is not democracy. This is plutocracy. And that is why we must overturn Citizens United if we are serious about maintaining the foundations of American democracy.
Sanders says he will step up his efforts to enact a constitutional amendment to overturn not just the Citizens United ruling but the democratically disastrous rulings that extend from it.
“In his famous speech at Gettysburg during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln talked about America as a country ‘of the people, by the people and for the people.’ Today, as a result of the Supreme Court’s refusal to reconsider its decision in Citizens United, we are rapidly moving toward a nation of the super-rich, by the super-rich and for the super-rich," explains Sanders. "That is not what America is supposed to be about. This Supreme Court decision must be overturned.”

© 2012 The Nation

John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. His most recent book is The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition. A co-founder of the media reform organization Free Press, Nichols is co-author with Robert W. McChesney of The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again and Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy. Nichols' other books include: Dick: The Man Who is President and The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism.

Vote on Tuesday

This Coming Tuesday is a very important date for all who believe in democracy and progress. It is imperative that Portuguese-Americans get out and vote.
It is imperative that liberals don't stay at home.
Look at this great artcle by Robert Freeman:

Published on Sunday, October 31, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
If You Want More Debt Vote Republican
by Robert Freeman

One of the most successful deceits of the past thirty years is that Republicans are the party of "fiscal discipline." In fact, Republicans are the party of fiscal wreckage. Simply put, Republicans love deficits and debt. They have buried the country with them. They expand them with orgiastic fervor every time they get the chance. Until we come to grips with this simple truth we will never gain control of our fiscal destiny.

In 1980 the national debt stood at $1 trillion. Over the prior 204 years, the nation paid for the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the build-out of an entire continent, the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam, and the better part of the Cold War. And through all that, we still only borrowed $1 trillion.

But over the next 12 years of relative peace and prosperity, Republicans Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush would quadruple the national debt, to $4 trillion. They did it by dramatically lowering taxes on the wealthy and furiously expanding government spending. This isn't even economics, it's arithmetic: bring in less income while spending more money, and the result is debt. Mountains of it.

Bill Clinton reversed the Republicans' destructive formula, raising taxes on the rich and cutting spending to 17.4% of GDP, a level not seen in 30 years. The result was the longest economic expansion in American history. More than 20 million jobs were created, another record, while the stock market tripled. Most importantly, Clinton produced the first budget surpluses since 1969, handing George W. Bush a $140 billion surplus.

Bush immediately returned to the tried-and-true deficit producing policies of Reagan and his father. He lowered taxes on the wealthy through a $1.6 trillion giveaway in which 50% of the gains went to the top 1% of income earners, his "base" as he called them. And he expanded spending to 20% of GDP by initiating two wars, lying to pass a $600 billion giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry, and more.

Again, bring in less income, spend more, and the result is debt. Under Bush's catastrophic economic stewardship, the national debt more than doubled, from $5.6 trillion to over $12 trillion while producing the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression.

A Republican has occupied the White House for 26 of the past 40 years. Not once in any of those years has any Republican president mustered a single balanced budget. So, the fact that Republicans love deficits and debt and expand them whenever they get the chance is not an ideological or political construct. It is the empirical, manifest conclusion of their own policies and actions. Those are the facts.

Less well understood is why this is so. But like the record itself, it is important that Americans know why it is that Republicans love debt. The reasons are two-fold and straightforward.

The first and most important reason Republicans love debt is that they make more money when there's more debt outstanding. The wealthy, after all, are lenders. They would prefer everybody-governments, companies, individuals-be up to their eyeballs in debt. That way they can charge everybody obscenely high rates of interest, as they do the desperately poor who use payday lending facilities with interest rates in the hundreds of percent a year.

The wealthy will collect almost $4 trillion in interest payments in the U.S. this year-27% of the entire $15 trillion GDP going to pay interest! And that's a time of extreme slack in the economy. As the economy recovers and demand for borrowed money increases, rates will rise. Imagine the obscene interest the country will be forced to pay on its $14 trillion national debt when the U.S. government itself becomes a payday borrower!

Which points to the second reason Republicans love debt. At some point it becomes so onerous it will bankrupt the government. This will make it impossible for the government to carry out its essential functions. It will have to sell off assets to its creditors, just as it is doing now, to raise money.

The same wealthy interests who caused the nation to go bankrupt will then buy up public resources at pennies on the dollar. That's how foreclosure sales work. They will then sell the services from those resources back to the public at monopoly rates. We see this around the country where thousands of cities and dozens of states are already selling off essential assets in exchange for a one-time infusion of cash.

Arizona selling off its state-house. Michigan selling the bridge to Canada. States across the country selling their toll-roads, airports, prisons, water systems, parks, even police and fire departments. School districts selling their schools in the guise of making them "charters" when in fact, they are franchised corporate education providers: McSchools.

Privatization of everything is the goal, with no public sector. You can do it when you have bankrupted the government. This is Republican nirvana: the rich paying essentially no taxes; extracting trillions of dollars in interest payments from captive, maxed-out borrowers, public and private; and owning all the public resources (in addition to all of the private resources which they already own). How much better can it get?

The second advantage of bankrupting the government (at least from the vantage of Republicans), is regulatory. It leaves no institutional force in society capable of standing up to the concentrated power of big capital.

This is what made the recent financial meltdown possible: regulation had been gutted, allowing the predators to run amok through the economy. It is what enabled the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico: little or no regulation on the oil companies.

What Republicans want in the private sphere is untrammeled dominion over desperate workers. In the public sphere, they want the ability to cow the government to do its bidding and to transfer all governmental operations to private hands. Bankrupting the government through onerous debts is the surest way to do both, for who, then, can stand up for the interests of the public? Or for democracy, for that matter?

Republicans have gotten so good at drowning the country in debt they even baked it into Obama's administration. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, almost ninety percent of Obama's deficits are due to policies and events initiated by George W. Bush: massive tax cuts for the rich; two unendable wars; and-once again-the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression. Without these albatrosses Obama's budget would be almost in balance.

Republicans want nothing to do with policies that actually reduce deficits. If they did, they would have mustered more than a façade of concern over the past 40 years. But they haven't. And the most insufferable part of it all is their unctuous posturing about "fiscal discipline." It's like Heidi Fleiss posing as a model of moral probity, all the better to sucker more two-faced Johns into her bordello.

It was Cicero, in 45 B.C., who laid out the simplest formula in history for understanding such matters. They are the two most powerful words in political forensics: "Qui Bono?" Who benefits? When we answer this question and look at their record, we learn everything we need to know about Republicans and debt. All the rest of the posing is a sham. It's a shame the Democrats don't have the backbone to call this truth for what it is.

Robert Freeman writes on economics, history and education. His earlier pieces, "The Five Circles of Economic Hell," and “The U.S. is Facing a Weimar Moment,” were also published on CommonDreams. He can reached at robertfreeman10@yahoo.com.

Voter Intimidation at McDonald's

The story on Huffington Post about the letter a McDonald's franchise sent home with employees telling them that if they didn't vote for the Republicans they wouldn't have a raise is a about the worst I've seen in recent history.
This needs to be investigated by the authorities and a simple apology won't do. Moreover, this is another clear and unequivocal indication that the Republicans don't care for the average American and that folks are constantly voting against their own economic interests.
Portuguese-Americans, subdued by pulpit politics have also caved into the Republican message and are over and over again voting against their own economic interests.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/29/voter-intimidation-mcdonalds-republican_n_776187.html

WASHINGTON -- There may be something rotten at McDonald's -- and it's not a year-old Happy Meal.
The owner of a franchise in Canton, Ohio enclosed a handbill in employees' paychecks that threatened lower wages and benefits if Republicans don't win on Tuesday.
"As the election season is here we wanted you to know which candidates will help our business grow in the future," reads the letter. "As you know, the better our business does it enables us to invest in our people and our restaurants. If the right people are elected we will be able to continue with raises and benefits at or above our present levels. If others are elected, we will not. As always, who you vote for is completely your personal decision and many factors go into your decision."
The note ends with a list of candidates McDonald's believes "will help our business move forward." It names Republicans John Kasich for governor, Rob Portman for Senate, and Jim Renacci for Congress. With the letter was a biography of Renacci.
"The handbill endorses candidates who have in essence pledged to roll back the minimum wage and eviscerate the safety net that protects the most vulnerable members of our workforce," said Attorney Allen Schulman of Canton law firm Schulman Zimmerman & Associates, which received the documents from an employer who stepped forward. "But it's more than that. When a corporation like McDonald's intimidates its employees into voting a specific way, it violates both state and federal election law. It's no surprise to anyone that Ohio is a battleground state in this election, and for a multinational corporation like McDonald's to threaten employees like this is morally and legally wrong. This despicable corporate conduct is the logical extension of the Citizens United decision, which has unleashed corporate arrogance and abuse."
Schulman turned over the documents to local prosecutors, asking them to "investigate this matter for a criminal violation." Ohio election law specifically states that no corporation "shall print or authorize to be print...or post or exhibit in the establishment or anywhere in or about the establishment...handbills containing any threat, notice, or information that if any particular candidate is elected or defeated, work in the establishment will cease in whiole or in part, or other threats expressed or implied, intended to influence the political opinions or votes of...its employees."
On Friday, franchise owner Paul Siegfried apologized in a written statement, saying the communication was "an error of judgment on my part." "Please know it was never my intention to offend anyone," he added. "For those that I have offended, I sincerely apologize."
In a statement to The Huffington Post, Shirley Rogers Reece, general manager of McDonald's Ohio region, said, "We wholeheartedly respect diverse views and opinions, and our employees' right to vote. Our position is that every employee should make his or her own choice. McDonald's had no knowledge of this material being distributed. As independent business owners, our franchisees are responsible for matters regarding their own employees. The content of this material is not reflective of McDonald's position. We remain bipartisan on these matters. That said, while clearly this was poor judgment, we don't believe it was intended to offend anyone."