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Hacker-Pierson Winner-Take-All Politics

Graphing an American story: the Bill Moyers website shows a graph derived from Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson and their excellent book “Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer–and Turned its Back on the Middle Class.” The book itself is worth a read, while the graph, electronically upgraded so when you move your mouse pointer over different features of the graph (like the downward arrows at along the top), pop-ups appear and give some of the historical context to explain how income was  dramatically elevated for the top 1% while that for the bottom 90% changed very little. The graph uses the dollar value in 2008 to illustrate gains for the top 1 percent, while the bottom 90% have been flat-lined for 38 years. The period covered is from 1970 to 2008, so it included the decline and fall of The New Deal and the rise and dominance of the neoliberal financial agenda. During that period of flat-lining for everyone else,  the top 1% of wage earners started in 1970 at more than $ 318,000 and by 2008 they tipped the scales at more than $905,000. The graph covers the presidencies of Nixon all the way through to GW Bush; a few of the facts along the way included Reagan’s firing of PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization), which began the steep downward decline in union representation in the United States work force and the introduction of supply-side economics, the idea that lowering taxes actually increases Federal Revenue: the execution of this concept pushed the Reagan budgets into deep debt. Before Reagan, America was the biggest creditor nation in the world and after Reagan, we were the biggest debtor country on the planet. If a graph about income distribution can make you angry this one should do the trick. We now have a culture where the neoliberals consider most Americans to be a bunch of losers, with a small number of winners based strictly on income; since the most recent recession/depression, we have done nothing to change this hostile dynamic, and, as we all know, this trend continues unabated and will not change until we change it. By change, I don’t mean just recovering what we lost during the current recession/depression, but making gains in such a way that everyone in our culture can be treated as a stakeholder, living a life with the expectations of someone who is living in a wealthy country that cares for its citizens, not the soundbite, throw-away culture that we have created by chasing the illusory objective of winning the lottery. This graph does not illustrate the creation of new wealth–that is not what happened–the differences between the 1% and the 90% were created by the transfer of wealth from the middle and lower classes to the wealthy. It does not reflect creativity, but exploitation and it cannot continue. Our current version of casino capitalism has failed to create a just and decent society and, if anything, the Tea Party members are merely the most recent victims, even though they are too obliging for comfort.  We need to demand changes in the way we grow, educate and care within our society. We need a new revolt!

Michael Klare on America as the new Third World petro-state. If you still have energy left after reading about our wage history from the 1970s on, then you won’t want to miss Michael Klare’s article in Tomdispatch which appeared today. Klare discusses how Big Oil has exhausted its search for oil reserves in Third World countries and is increasingly focused on North America as the new epicenter of oil and gas exploration. But to be successful in this new enterprise the major oil companies will have to roll back years of regulatory restrictions that have prevented oil and gas drilling because of environmental concerns. Of course the environmental concerns were precipitated by disastrous oil spills that did extensive environmental damage, like that in Santa Barbara in 1969, the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 and the Macondo blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.   Using their influential weight in the art of political persuasion, Big Oil is intent on unraveling these restrictions as they lay an aggressive  strategy to establish North America as another Third World energy source. One component to their motivation for refocusing on North America is the increasing resistance that Third World countries have against giving Big Oil a blank check for extracting their oil while trampling on the environment. Oddly enough this resistance to unfettered access to Third World oil has been created by more democratic or socialist governments who either nationalize their oil reserves or demand a far larger share of the oil wealth extracted from their oil fields. Thus, in North America, we can expect a far more intensive push from the oil companies in the coming months and the high cost of gasoline will keep pressure on any U.S. President to continue giving out leases for oil exploration even on our most environmentally sensitive regions that have heretofore been off limits. As Klare puts it, “in the process, as has so often been the case with Third World petro-states, the rights and wellbeing of local citizens will be trampled underfoot.” Will we allow oil companies to run roughshod over our national parks and other Federal lands that have long been considered off limits to these interests? Are we willing to reverse the long-standing taboos against oil exploration in sensitive regions in order to serve the interests of economic arguments and our failure to engage in a more robust development of alternative energy sources?

None of us expect that North America will become another Nigeria, which has been described by NY Times writer Adam Nossiter as (quoting from Klare’s article) “the Niger Delta, where the [petroleum] wealth underground is out of all proportion with the poverty on the surface, has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years by some estimates.” But do we carry with us today, the same capacity for public outrage that we demonstrated over the Exxon Valdez oil spill (where today you can put a shovel into the nearby shoreline and see oil oozing around the shovel mark)? And will it make any difference who is elected President and who controls Congress in this coming debate? The oil companies see our internal weakness in the form of a bad economy and deep concerns about our economic future and they see the opportunity to strike while the iron is hot, while we are disarmed and confused.  Oil exploration will be pushed as a source of new jobs and the model of North Dakota, with the lowest unemployment in the country as a result of their oil reserves, will make it difficult for any politician to resist, especially if the environmental lobby remains on life support. It seems that in the present climate, Big Oil may have the upper hand.  Congress has already banned the EPA from regulating the controversial method of hydro-fracking in which huge quantities of water and toxic chemicals are forced under pressure to release oil and gas and the growth of this technique is unparalleled as a potentially dangerous source of contamination to our water supply.  We cannot allow energy companies to make decisions about threats to our health and safety and yet this is precisely what Big Oil is pushing to achieve in this coming election. If the oil industry gets their way, then as Micheal Klare would say, stay tuned for the Third Worldification of the North American continent. To win this war we will first have to mobilize and declare one of our own.

RFM

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In today’s New York Times, columnist Paul Krugman comments on the Florida “Stand Your Ground”  law, that allows a citizen to kill another person without fear of arrest if they argue that they were under attack. This is the law that now shields George Zimmerman in the Florida shooting death of 17 year old Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman claims self-defense under the Stand Your Ground law and so far, he has not been arrested or charged, though an investigation of this case is now underway. Krugman points out that the law was promoted by ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council). The bill passed in Florida was germinated by ALEC, as one of their many templates designed to curb our democracy and privatize our public functions. The law was first promoted by the National Rifle Association (NRA), and has found fertile ground in many other states, that have either passed or are considering this kind of law for which ALEC provides the I-will-do-it-for-you kit.  Not only does the Florida law prevent criminal prosecution against someone claiming that they had to use lethal force for their own protection, but it also bars civil suit actions against the defendant on the part of family members of the deceased. It is simply a vigilante law, giving individuals the cover that they used to get by putting on white robes and masks–now they can act with impunity as individuals. Whether racial motives were involved in this senseless shooting remains to be established. Although the shooting took place on February 26th, 2012, the progressive arousal of public opinion has created a national focus about the incident and hopefully about the needless law drafted by ALEC and the NRA. I have commented on ALEC most recently in relationship to their promotion of the voter-ID laws that many states are now considering and before that on their strategy for these laws and on history Professor William Cronon’s experience when he revealed the role of ALEC in writing laws in Wisconsin (“McCarthyism in Madison“). With Governor Walker in Wisconsin and its Republican controlled House and Senate, the state has proven to be fertile ground for ALEC’s template laws. Common Cause has identified 22 U.S. Congressional members who received support from ALEC, while House Majority Leader Eric Cantor failed to report a contribution from ALEC that he has recently acknowledged.

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In the politically polarized climate of today, bad state laws come in parallel, descending on us all at once, while good or better state laws germinate in a more serial fashion, vetted through the crucible of experience and politics, sometimes one state at a time and often beginning with California (proposition 23). At least that used to be the case.  Any time you see odious, right-wing movements, like the Voter-ID laws that have sprung up like a new invasive weed, you can safely assume that ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) had something to do with their creation. ALEC is an organization that gets 98% of its resources from corporate lobbying groups: they tailor the same bill for each state and in that way form a kind of national parallel legislative conspiracy–a real one–they attempt to unify the country through rigid, simultaneous right-wing laws that further tip the political scale towards their capitalist, neoliberal objectives. Using ALEC as a resource, right-wing legislators don’t even have to draft bills on their own, because ALEC provides them with a bill template that can presented and passed with little modification. I have written about  ALEC previously, including a brief description of their assault on creating and passing laws to deny voters rights. But the origin of the push for photo-ID as a requirement for voting has an insidious, almost incomprehensible origin–all from the right of course.

Lou Dubose, writing in The Washington Spectator has reported on how Voter-ID laws got started. The origin of this idea came from Mark “Thor” Hearne, a lawyer who had worked for the Bush-Cheney political campaign. Hearne founded the American Center for Voting Rights. This center produced a 72 page report entitled “Vote Fraud, Intimidation & Suppression in the 2004 Presidential Election.” The document was submitted to a House committee chaired by Ohio Congressman Bob Ney (who later went to prison over the Jack Abramoff scandal). The report did not include any documented examples of voter fraud, yet it recommended that states should adopt government issued photo-ID at the polls and for any voter seeking to vote by mail or through an absentee ballot. The Center soon closed its doors and Hearne returned to private practice. Hearne’s report had a much longer shelf live than that of his American Center for Voting Rights. Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund and Heritage Foundation Fellow Hans von Spakovsky began promoting photo-ID as an essential state protection against the undocumented cases of voter fraud. Republican state party officers began promoting photo-ID laws to defend against voter fraud, without providing evidence that this was a problem.  In 2009 ALEC drafted a model legislative bill that would serve as a template for Republican legislators to bring such bills into legislative reality. By 2011, Republicans in 38 states introduced legislation that would make state-approved photo-ID cards a requirement to vote. Seven states signed such bills into law, including Alabama, Florida, Kansas, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin. These laws were assembled on the fast track–no state required photo-ID had existed before 2006. In the election of 2012, the states which have implemented photo-ID laws for voting will provide 171 electoral votes, 63 percent of what is needed to win the Presidency. How pervasive is voter fraud? A Loyola Law School professor (Justin Levitt) who works with the Brennan Center for Justice has gathered evidence on polling place voter fraud. As he says “I keep an open door” “I think I’m up to 11 or 12 possible attempts that people have pointed to across the country since 2000. During that time about 400 million ballots have been caste in the general elections. It does not sound like voter fraud at the polls is a major problem, but note that the historic origins of this issue were created by fiction working inside a bubble. Evicence-based legislative action has never been the strength of the modern Republican party. As you can imagine, most of these bills were passed in states where Republicans had control of state houses and the governorship–the trifecta for quickly getting conservative bills passed. The one exception to this general rule was Rhode Island who passed their voter-ID law with a Democratic legislature.

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