Kochsuckers et al. say: “Voters Move Over, It’s Not Your Election!”

Money Men Say, Voters Move Over, It’s Not Your Election!

Appalled at the chaotic GOP presidential race and the ascendancy of Trump and Cruz, those with the gold want to rule.

by Bill Moyers, Michael Winship

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/01/23/money-men-say-voters-move-over-its-not-your-election

David Brooks is a worried man.

Like many establishment Republicans, the conservative columnist for The New York Times sees the barbarians pouring through the gates and fears for both his party and the republic. Hail, Trump! Hail, Cruz! It’s enough to send a sober centrist dashing through the Forum in search of a cudgel.

There was Brooks on a recent edition of the PBS NewsHour, his angst spilling out across the airwaves like fog from a nightmare: “I wish we had gray men in suits,” he told Judy Woodruff, conjuring in some nostalgia-minded the courtly cabal of well-heeled businessmen who drafted war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower to run for president as a Republican.

“We don’t have that,” Brooks continued. “But the donor class could do something.”

Ah, yes. The donor class! Those deep pockets flung open even wider by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision just six years ago, permitting the richest of the rich to pour even more of their fortunes into control of our electoral process. Brooks was saying openly what many of them are thinking privately: Only we can save the party from the megalomania of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and protect our precious status quo.

How best to do this? Brooks suggested that panicked “state legislators who are Republicans, congressmen, senators, local committeemen” should join with the donors “so they don’t send the party into suicide.” Makes sense — many of those very same folks already are deep in hock to the donors, their contributions often laundered via entities with high-falutin’ names – ALEC, for one, the American Legislative Exchange Council that lends a helping corporate hand to legislators eager to write favorable laws, provide tax breaks, dismember public employee unions and privatize government services.

Game’s over, voters: The oligarchs will decide this election.

As Brooks’ vision of a coup unfolded, the donors and their allies would handpick their candidate, “winnowing the field.” He reiterated his NewsHour lamentations with a New York Times column headlined “Time for a Republican Conspiracy!”

So let’s get this straight: One of the most prominent of Republican elites in the country, who has even been touted as President Obama’s “favorite pundit” (we’re not making this up!), is calling on the donor class to rescue the party from the rabble. Game’s over, voters: The oligarchs will decide this election.

For that’s what they are: a small, unbelievably wealthy group of the powerful and privileged who already have a tighter grip on our nation, its government, politics and economy than the rapacious robber barons of our first Gilded Age. Brooks and like-minded elites believe they must be trusted to do the right thing. Let them be the Deciderers.

Count billionaire Charles Koch among them. He recently told Stephen Foley of the Financial Times that he was “disappointed” by the current crop of Republican presidential candidates and especially critical of Trump and Cruz. “It is hard for me to get a high level of enthusiasm,” he said, “because the things I’m passionate about and I think this country urgently needs aren’t being addressed.”

Koch said that he and his well-oiled machine had given each of the candidates a list of issues it wants addressed but “it doesn’t seem to faze them much. You’d think we could have more influence.” In other words, if you’re going to spend $900 million on this election, as Koch and his cronies plan to do, shouldn’t you get what you paid for?

Yes, we know: money can’t always buy an election. If it could, Mitt Romney would just be finishing his first term as president. Or Jeb! Bush, whose super PAC runneth over with $100 million in cash, would be leading the pack. So far he’s not even been able to get his silver foot on the first rung of the ladder.

But to the oligarchs, bankrolling an election campaign isn’t all that it’s about. They contribute now for the day when the electioneering is over and the governing resumes. That’s when their investment really begins to pay off.

In the words of the veteran Washington insider Jared Bernstein, senior fellow at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and former chief economic advisor to Joe Biden, “There’s this notion that the wealthy use their money to buy politicians; more accurately, it’s that they can buy policy.” Environmental policy, for example, when it comes to energy moguls like the Kochs. And tax policy.

Especially tax policy.

Bernstein was quoted in one of the most important stories of 2015 – an investigation by The New York Times into how tax policy gets written. Unfortunately, this complex but essential report appeared between Christmas and New Year’s and failed to get the attention it deserves.

Here’s the heart of it.

With inequality at its highest levels in nearly a century and public debate rising over whether the government should respond to it through higher taxes on the wealthy, the very richest Americans have financed a sophisticated and astonishingly effective apparatus for shielding their fortunes. Some call it the ‘income defense industry,’ consisting of a high-priced phalanx of lawyers, estate planners, lobbyists and anti-tax activists who exploit and defend a dizzying array of tax maneuvers, virtually none of them available to taxpayers of more modest means…

Operating largely out of public view — in tax court, through arcane legislative provisions and in private negotiations with the Internal Revenue Service — the wealthy have used their influence to steadily whittle away at the government’s ability to tax them. The effect has been to create a kind of private tax system, catering to only several thousand Americans.

That “private tax system” couldn’t have happened without compliant politicians elected to office by generous support from the donor class. As the right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife put it: “Isn’t it grand how tax law gets written?”

Sam Pizzigati knows how it happens. He’s been watching the process for years from his perch as editor of the monthly newsletter Too Much! Reminding us in a recent report that “America’s 20 richest people — a group that could fit nicely in a Gulfstream luxury private jet — now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population combined, a total of 152 million people,” Pizzigati concludes that one reason these and other of America’s rich have amassed such large fortunes is that “the federal tax rate on income in the top tax bracket has sunk sharply over recent decades.”

So here’s the real value of all that campaign cash and lobbying largesse: underwriting a willingness among legislators and government officials to bend the rules, slip in the necessary loopholes and look the other way when it comes time for the rich to hide their fortunes.

This is the status quo to which the donors cling so tightly and clutch their pearls at the prospect of losing. But now, with Trump seemingly ascendant, some of those who might have been relied on to support a donor revolt are betraying Brooks’ call for a coup, weakening in their resolve and beginning to think that maybe the short-fingered vulgarian isn’t such a bad idea. Despite his populist brayings, they hope, he might well be brought into their alliance.

Which brings to mind a line from the movie version of the musical Cabaret. In pre-Third Reich Germany, the decadent Baron Maximilian von Heune is talking with the British writer Brian Roberts, explaining why the elite have allowed this Hitler fellow to get a jackboot in the door. “The Nazis are just a gang of stupid hooligans, but they do serve a purpose,” he says. “Let them get rid of the Communists. Later we’ll be able to control them.”

We all know how well that turned out.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Journalist Bill Moyers is the managing editor of Moyers & Company and BillMoyers.com. His previous shows on PBS included NOW with Bill Moyers and Bill Moyers Journal. Over the past three decades he has become an icon of American journalism and is the author of many books, including Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues, Moyers on Democracy, and Bill Moyers: On Faith & Reason.He was one of the organizers of the Peace Corps, a special assistant for Lyndon B. Johnson, a publisher of Newsday, senior correspondent for CBS News and a producer of many groundbreaking series on public television. He is the winner of more than 30 Emmys, nine Peabodys, three George Polk awards and is the author of three best-selling books.

Michael Winship, senior writing fellow at Demos and president of the Writers Guild of America-East, was senior writer for Moyers & Company and Bill Moyers’ Journal and is senior writer of BillMoyers.com.

Liberals No Longer Amused by Bernie Sanders’ Presidential Campaign

by Kevin Gosztola

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/01/21/liberals-no-longer-amused-bernie-sanders-presidential-campaign

The objective of the week for liberals appears to be to make clear Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is some kind of pariah. Despite how his candidacy has transformed into a phenomenon over the past months, establishment liberals maintain the U.S. senator from Vermont should not be considered a “serious” candidate. They believe it would be a huge mistake if a Democrat with unapologetic socialist leanings won the nomination, especially over Hillary Clinton.

But these cases against Sanders are really arguments against citizens voting their conscience. The uncertainty and dismissiveness toward Sanders serves to silence any critics of the corporate-driven politics entrenched in the Democratic Party. It suggests a fear that Democrats might actually stand against corporate power for a change.

"What [the liberal establishemt] argument really amounts to is an argument that Democratic Party politicians and the operatives who run their campaigns would be uncomfortable with talking openly about socialism because that would alienate the corporate interests they have cozied up to in order to win elections."

The New York Times reports “alarmed Hillary Clinton supporters” are warning Sanders “would be an electoral disaster who would frighten swing voters and send Democrats in tight congressional and governor’s races to defeat.” Supporters cast Sanders as “unelectable” and attempt to present him as the Republicans’ favored nominee because super political action committees run by operatives like Karl Rove would supposedly prefer to see the Republican nominee run against Sanders.

Liberal columnist Jonathan Chait published what is being touted as the definitive case against Sanders. Another liberal columnist, Michael Cohen, penned a shrill op-ed for The Boston Globe, entitled “Bernie Sanders doesn’t know how politics work.” Vox’s Matt Yglesias urged Democratic voters to take Sanders “seriously,” by which he means it is time to recognize all Sanders has to offer America is “half-baked” plans and populist slogans.

This rhetoric fits a playbook the American liberal class has followed for the past decades. As writer Chris Hedges argued, “The liberal class’ disposal of its most independent and courageous members has long been part of its pathology.” After World War I, and especially after World War II, corporations gradually sought more and more control of the state. Corporations now hold government completely captive and the liberal class, which “purged itself of the only members who had the fortitude and vision to save it from irrelevance,” bears some responsibility.

Those in power expect liberals to police others on the left who would threaten their supremacy. So, when a political elite such as Clinton is faced with a formidable opponent, liberal pundits wittingly or unwittingly devise arguments for why Americans should vote against their interests and support someone who would likely manage government in a manner suitable for the corporate state.

Chait has had off-the-record meetings with President Barack Obama, where he gets to flatter himself with the fact that a president trusts him to represent his views in columns written for Americans. So, let’s focus on deconstructing some of Chait’s arguments against Sanders.

The White House’s favored pundit confesses he does not support Sanders’ policy vision, but even if he did, it would be an “unusually poor time” to make this policy vision the “centerpiece of a presidential campaign.” Democrats, who support Sanders, “risk losing the presidency by embracing a politically radical doctrine that stands zero chance of enactment even if they win.”

Back in October, Chait called Clinton the “all-but-certain Democratic nominee,” and he is panicking because his certainty was wrong. How Chait can claim to know what stands “zero chance of enactment” when he so misjudged the potential of Sanders’ campaign is flabbergasting. But the argument, which most deserves to be challenged, is the notion that Sanders imperils Democrats’ chances in the 2016 election at each level of government because politicians will have to defend his socialist leanings.

Citizens are not managers of democracy. They do not need to concern themselves with political strategy and cynical concepts like “electability.” To the extent that voting actually matters, a citizen’s job should be to vote their conscience. After voting, citizens should participate or return to direct actions and grassroots organizing, which can grow movements that provide the momentum to make enacting policies Sanders supports possible.

Chait refuses to contemplate the role grassroots organizations might play during a Sanders presidency. He does, however, acknowledge Sanders has mobilized a “mass grassroots volunteer army.” Yet, Chait maintains Obama organized volunteers on a larger scale than Sanders, “tried to keep his volunteers engaged throughout his presidency, and that “failed,” which is not true.

Once Obama was elected in 2008, as Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson reported, “Obama’s grass-roots network effectively went dark for two months after Election Day, failing to engage activists eager for their new marching orders.” David Plouffe, Obama’s former campaign manager, took the network and made it a part of the Democratic National Committee.

“The move meant that the machinery of an insurgent candidate, one who had vowed to upend the Washington establishment, would now become part of that establishment, subject to the entrenched, partisan interests of the Democratic Party. It made about as much sense as moving Greenpeace into the headquarters of ExxonMobil,” according to Dickinson.

What about the idea that Sanders poses an “enormous obstacle” because Americans respond to “socialism” with “overwhelming negativity”?

Such an argument rests upon a legacy of red-baiting and hysteria toward all things labeled socialist or left-wing. The negativity would not necessarily be impervious to the proposals of Sanders if he was the nominee and the news media had no choice but to constantly cover and discuss his socialist-leaning plans.

Most Americans think the wealthy pay “too little in federal taxes” and back a tax hike. A majority supports a single-payer healthcare option. Citizens want programs like Social Security expanded, not cut. Half of Americans support government funding of federal campaigns to address the problem of corporate and special interest influence in elections.

What Chait’s argument really amounts to is an argument that Democratic Party politicians and the operatives who run their campaigns would be uncomfortable with talking openly about socialism because that would alienate the corporate interests they have cozied up to in order to win elections.

To demonstrate this is the case, read this glorious excerpt from the Times about how petrified the Democratic National Committee is by Sanders:

House Democrats got a taste of those challenges last fall. As many of their candidates met in Washington with consultants, donors and reporters, word leaked that Mr. Sanders was to give a speech explaining what it means to be a democratic socialist. “We had candidates and consultants calling us, emailing us, saying: ‘What do we say about this? How do we explain this?’” recalled a House Democratic official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to intervene in the presidential race.

The official drafted a mock question-and-answer memo.

“Senator Sanders has caught fire in the Democratic primary. He is a democratic socialist. Are you a democratic socialist?” went one of the questions. “No,” was the recommended response.

Another question asked the difference between a Democrat and a socialist. Candidates were urged to express pride in being a Democrat but also belief in capitalism and small businesses, “the engine of our economy.”

Democrats, along with President Obama’s administration, have spent the last eight years protecting capitalism from populist calls for reform, which would diminish the power and influence of corporations. The Affordable Health Care Act was a prime example, where Medicare for All was immediately taken off the table, and the political party manipulated citizens into believing requiring private insurance companies to offer insurance to all consumers was the best that could be accomplished.

It is one thing to vote for Hillary Clinton and other Democrats, who are more than happy to serve the moneyed elite, if you actually believe in what she stands for as a presidential candidate. But it is quite another thing to delude people into voting for her simply because it is your view that Bernie Sanders’ vision is difficult to make a reality. That position accepts the status quo and embraces a politics of low expectations, where the best elected officials can do is triage the effect of wealth and power becoming more and more concentrated in the hands of the few.

Copyright FDL Media Group ©, All Rights Reserved.

Kevin Gosztola is managing editor of Shadowproof Press. He also produces and co-hosts the weekly podcast, Unauthorized Disclosure. Follow him on Twitter: @kgosztola

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Sanders' Medicare-for-All Plan Takes Aim at For-Profit Healthcare System

It is 'time for our country to join every other major industrialized nation on Earth and guarantee health care to all citizens as a right, not a privilege.'

by Deirdre Fulton

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/01/18/sanders-medicare-all-plan-takes-aim-profit-healthcare-system

Just before Sunday's Democratic primary debate in South Carolina, Bernie Sanders released the details of his Medicare-for-All universal healthcare proposal, saying it is "time for our country to join every other major industrialized nation on Earth and guarantee health care to all citizens as a right, not a privilege."

The plan (pdf), also known as single-payer healthcare, builds on the successes of both Medicare and the Affordable Care Act (ACA), "eliminating expensive and wasteful private health insurance," and saving taxpayers money by "dramatically reducing overall health care costs and bringing down skyrocketing prescription drug prices which are far greater in the United States than in any other country."

According to the Sanders campaign:

The shift to universal health care would be paid for with a 2.2 percent health care premium (calculated under the rules for federal income taxes); a 6.2 percent health care payroll tax paid by employers; an estate tax on the wealthiest Americans and changes in the tax code to make federal income tax rates more progressive.

Under the plan, individuals making $250,000 to $500,000 a year would be taxed at a rate of 37 percent. The top rate, 52 percent, would apply to those earning $10 million or more a year, a category that in 2013 included only the 13,000 wealthiest households in the United States.

An academic analysis (pdf) released alongside the proposal shows that it would save $6 trillion over the next 10 years compared to the current system.

"Instead of being held hostage to a corporate system based on profits and price gouging, with Sanders' Medicare-for-All plan we can finally have a system based on patient need."
—RoseAnn DeMoro, National Nurses United

"The net savings from single payer come from reduced spending on administrative activities, in both private insurers and providers’ offices, reduced spending on monopoly prices for pharmaceuticals and medical devices, and a slowdown in the growth of spending because of controls on administrative costs and drug prices," University of Massachusetts Amherst economics professor Gerald Friedman states in the analysis.

Friedman's calculations show that the typical family earning $50,000 a year would save nearly $6,000 annually in health care costs. "The average working family now pays $4,955 in premiums for private insurance and spends another $1,318 on deductibles for care that isn’t covered," the campaign said in a statement. "Under Sanders' plan, a family of four earning $50,000 would pay just $466 per year to the Medicare-for-all program."

Heralding his plan during Sunday's debate, Sanders "spoke to Democratic heroes and liberal values," Paul Waldman wrote at the Washington Post.

"What a Medicare-for-all program does is finally provide in this country health care for every man, woman and child as a right," Sanders said. "Now, the truth is, that Frank Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, do you know what they believed in? They believed that health care should be available to all of our people."

He continued:

Do you know why we can’t do what every other...major country on Earth is doing? It’s because we have a campaign finance system that is corrupt, we have super PACs, we have the pharmaceutical industry pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into campaign contributions and lobbying, and the private insurance companies as well. What this is really about is not the rational way to go forward — it’s Medicare for all — it is whether we have the guts to stand up to the private insurance companies and all of their money, and the pharmaceutical industry. That’s what this debate should be about.

Sanders' chief rival Hillary Clinton, who has gone on the attack regarding single-payer in recent weeks, has taken a more narrow view, focused on defending the ACA and "making it work." But Sanders notes that even under the ACA, 29 million are still uninsured and millions more are "underinsured"—unable to afford high co-pays or deductibles.

"Instead of being held hostage to a corporate system based on profits and price gouging, with Sanders' Medicare-for-All plan we can finally have a system based on patient need, with a single standard of quality care for all, regardless of ability to pay, race, gender, age, or where you live," said National Nurses United executive director RoseAnn DeMoro in a statement on Monday. "That's a beautiful thing."