Capitalism in America, Part 2

Dear Friends,

In my last post, I said that capitalism as practiced in the United States has failed us both economically and politically, but deferred the discussion of its failure politically to this post.  The United States is supposed to be a democratic republic, i.e. a country where the majority rules except as limited by its constitution.  In the United States, our constitution has always contained a number of very un-democratic features.  Some of these features have been removed, e.g. slavery and only white male landowners can vote.  Others continue to exist, e.g. the Electoral College and each state gets two Senators.  In recent decades, gerrymandering by both major parties and voter suppression, primarily by Republicans have been added to these structural impediments to make the United States even less of a democratic republic.  Capitalism has failed us politically because as it is practiced in the United States, capitalism protects and enhances the money and power of the already rich and powerful at the expense of all the others and has, therefore, encouraged this movement away from a true democratic republic.

Electoral campaigns in the United States are bribery contests.  They are not at all democratic.  According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of American adults who contribute to a political party, campaign or organization has grown from 11% in 1992 to 15% in 2016 and 32% of households with income over $150,000 make such a contribution compared to just 7% of those with family income of less than $30,000 (here).  Making political contributions is for the wealthy.  According to Open Secrets, only 0.68% of US adults made political contributions in excess of $200 in 2016.  Of the $4,533,700,000 in political contributions in 2016, $2,606,200,000 or 57.5% were given by just 45,129 people or 0.018% of US adults.  The Open Secrets website has lots of very interesting and disturbing data (here).  If you have time, take a look.

There can be no logical or intellectually honest argument that our elected officials are not impacted by the people who make big contributions more than they are by those who make little or no contributions.  Consider for example that in the days leading up to the passage of Trump's tax bill, somewhere around 55% of the American people we opposed to the law and about one-third were in favor of the law.  Nevertheless, Congress passed it because the big Republican donors demanded it.  Or consider that when the FCC repealed the net neutrality rules 80+% of Americans were in favor of keeping them, including over 70% of Republicans, but the big Republican donors demanded the repeal.   I could go on and on, but you can provide examples of your own.

While there is some debate around the edges of the amount of influence of money in our elections, there is a clear consensus that it is extremely influential, particularly in state and local races.  Capitalism in the United States has led to gross inequality in both income and wealth and hence power, including the ability to contribute to and hence influence the outcome of elections.  Capitalism has allowed rich donors the ability to unduly influence local elections which has enabled state legislatures to gerrymander both state and congressional districts.  This gerrymandering in recent elections has led to the Republicans winning far more seats in state legislatures and Congress than the number of people voting for them (in the aggregate) would justify.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from an Associated Press analysis (here):

The AP scrutinized the outcomes of all 435 U.S. House races and about 4,700 state House and Assembly seats up for election last year using a new statistical method of calculating partisan advantage. It’s designed to detect cases in which one party may have won, widened or retained its grip on power through political gerrymandering.The analysis found four times as many states with Republican-skewed state House or Assembly districts than Democratic ones. Among the two dozen most populated states that determine the vast majority of Congress, there were nearly three times as many with Republican-tilted U.S. House districts.Traditional battlegrounds such as Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and Virginia were among those with significant Republican advantages in their U.S. or state House races. All had districts drawn by Republicans after the last Census in 2010.The AP analysis also found that Republicans won as many as 22 additional U.S. House seats over what would have been expected based on the average vote share in congressional districts across the country. That helped provide the GOP with a comfortable majority over Democrats instead of a narrow one.

While gerrymandering often has racial overtones because people of color tend to vote for candidates from the Democratic Party, voter suppression efforts lead by state legislatures are more overtly racial and with the same effect to keep the rich (primarily white) in power.

We should try to remove the influence of money from politics, but money will always equate to power.  Our form of capitalism protects and enhances the wealth (and therefore power) of the already rich (white) and prevents all others from achieving a level of income or wealth to challenge the economic and political status quo.  We need to constrain our current capitalism so that it provides for true equality of opportunity which is the only way that we will be able to say that capitalism as practiced in the United States is an economic system that advances the economic interests and provides better living conditions for all in a sustainable manner.  How to accomplish that result is the topic of another post.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal

Why our country needs Bernie Sanders

Dear Friends,

Our political system is broken and corrupt.  The old saying that the world is run by those who show up is no longer true with respect to our political system.  Now the correct saying is that the United States is run by those who show up and those with money, and we are not sure for the moment which of those two groups will win.

Even I was shocked by the recent article in The New York Times reporting that 158 families have given half of all contributions to the 2016 Presidential elections so far (here).  Although I should not have been shocked since I already knew that the Koch brothers were planning on spending as much if not more than either of the two major political parties for 2016 election cycle.  Congress does not represent the interests of the people.  It represents the interests of the oligarchs who fund the process and pay the lobbyist.  Just one example is the power of the gun lobby, fronted by the NRA.  Consistently +90% support background checks and a majority support stronger gun control legislation, yet Congress will not even give new laws consideration.

How does Congress get away with not taking action on things that the vast majority of Americans want and support?  People do not vote and big business spends billions of dollars to buy the system.  In the 2014 midterm elections only 36.4% of eligible voters actually voted.  It was the worst turnout percentage since 1942.  The United States ranks 31st out of 34 top industrialized democratic countries even using our 2012 Presidential year election (53.6%).  Belgium was first with 87.2%.  If Americans had voted in the same percentage as the Belgians in 2012, there would have been 200 million votes cast instead of only 129 million.  That is 71 million more voters.  Just to put that in perspective, President Obama beat Mitt Romney in the popular vote by 5 million; President Obama got 65.4 million votes.  Just think what would have happened if those other 71 million people had voted.

There are a lot of what are referred to as safe districts.  According to Chris Cillizza's analysis after the 2012 elections in the Washington Post (here), 38% of all Congressional seats are "safe"; that is to say the current incumbent won by at least 67%.  Clearly gerrymandering has had a big impact on the creation of these safe districts and while both parties have gerrymandered districts, the Republicans have done a much better job.  The Republicans have also been able to enact voter suppression legislation at the state level.  But Republicans also do a much better job of getting out their supporters to vote.  Higher voter turnout has always helped Democrats.  Getting everybody to vote would certainly make those "safe" districts much less safe particularly when you consider that the incumbents have moved so far right to protect themselves against Tea Party primary challengers.

People do not vote because they see no reason to vote.  The Democratic Party during my lifetime has been on a steady move to the right, accelerated under the Clinton administration.  Remember in 1960, the last year that President Eisenhower was President the highest income tax bracket was 91% and the country was doing very well economically.  This move to the right has coincided with increased political contributions by big business and the very wealthy, accelerated by the Citizen's United decision.  The Democratic establishment disowned Obamacare rather than educating the people about the good that it would do.  The Democratic establishment has and continues to pursue a strategy of being Republican light because they are too uncomfortable with real change and bold ideas.

The October 19th "All in with Chris Hayes" had a segment about the electability of a democratic socialist (Bernie Sanders).  The two guests were John Nichols who was not endorsing Bernie Sanders but who has great confidence in the American people's ability to embrace new and bold ideas and ended with the idea that perhaps the person with the boldest ideas will be the winner.  The other guest was Matt Bennett a Clinton supporter and advisor who could not imagine changing the narrative that the Republicans have crafted that government is bad and cannot solve the problems.  If you accept the Republican narrative, you have lost the battle.  Here is link to that segment.  It is very thought provoking.

Hillary Clinton is at best an incrementalist.   She will not dramatically increase the number of people voting.  Bernie Sanders has clearly demonstrated that he can and is getting some of those 71 million people that did not vote to become involved in politics because there is a difference between a political revolution and more of the same establishment politics.  Money can only be defeated by huge voter turnout and engagement, and Bernie is the only candidate with a chance to do succeed.  He can get this country headed back to being a democracy.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal

Three Threats to Our Democracy

Dear Friends,

Our democracy is facing three significant threats, which I believe are interconnected.  They are control by a small economic elite, voter disenfranchisement and declining education.  These three threats create a vicious circle of declining opportunity, centralized control among a few, increasing economic disparity and voter suppression.

A recent study by Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern (here) entitled "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" raises the spectrum that America is more like an oligarchy than a democracy.  I have to admit that I did not read the entire report and perhaps did not fully understand all that I read.  Nevertheless, I did understand this paragraph from the abstract.

The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism. 

I also did read completely an article in The New Yorker by John Cassidy entitled "Is America an Oligarchy?" (here).  That article ends with the following paragraph:

Me, too. There can be no doubt that economic élites have a disproportionate influence in Washington, or that their views and interests distort policy in ways that don’t necessarily benefit the majority: the politicians all know this, and we know it, too. The only debate is about how far this process has gone, and whether we should refer to it as oligarchy or as something else.

Of course our democracy has faced this threat many times in the past.  Doris Kearns Goodwin's book entitled The Bully Pulpit contains a wonderful history of the immense economic and political control of a few people in the heyday of the trusts before Teddy Roosevelt began to break them up.  After a period of time where anti-trust laws were obeyed and enforced, we are once again in an era where political and economic power are concentrated in the hands of a very few.

Voter suppression is also on the rise in the United States.  We have of course faced voter suppression in the past and been able to overcome it.  But clearly it is on the rise again today.  Norm Ornstein wrote an article in The Atlantic entitled "The U.S. Needs a Constitutional Right to Vote" (here).

In his article, Mr. Ornstein points out that the Constitution does not explicitly guarantee the right to vote.  I will simply quote a couple of paragraphs from his article.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, is leading to a new era of voter suppression that parallels the pre-1960s era—this time affecting not just African-Americans but also Hispanic-Americans, women, and students, among others.

 Voter suppression is nothing new in America, as the pre-civil-rights era underscores. But it is profoundly un-American. The Texas law, promoted aggressively by state Attorney General Greg Abbott, the GOP choice for governor in next year's election, establishes the kinds of obstacles and impediments to voting that are more akin to Vladimir Putin's Russia than to the United States.

The effort should be accelerated. We need a modernized voter-registration system, weekend elections, and a host of other practices to make voting easier. But we also need to focus on an even more audacious and broader effort—a constitutional amendment protecting the right to vote.
Many, if not most, Americans are unaware that the Constitution contains no explicit right to vote. To be sure, such a right is implicit in the Fifteenth, Nineteenth, and Twenty-Sixth amendments that deal with voting discrimination based on race, gender, and age. But the lack of an explicit right opens the door to the courts' ratifying the sweeping kinds of voter-restrictions and voter-suppression tactics that are becoming depressingly common. 

I could not have said it better.  I am proud to point out that my Representative in Congress, Keith Ellison, and another Representative have introduced a Constitutional amendment.  Of course, it will go nowhere with the Republicans in charge of the House.

The third threat is the decline of education in the United States.  Thomas Jefferson was very clear that we needed an educated electorate for our democracy to thrive.  Here are just a couple of his quotations on the subject.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

If you do not believe that education is rapidly declining in the United States just Google "decline of education in the United States".  You will find no shortage of studies and articles documenting the decline.  Clearly, Jefferson was right that you need an educated populace.  If we are to provide anything that approaches equality of opportunity, we need to provide a great education to people.

The problem is that even if we can take back the power from the economic elite (or oligarchs if you want to be more direct) and even if we can assure the right to vote, without an involved and educated electorate our democracy will fail.  Just as we have overcome threats from the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a few and voter suppression.  We can overcome the threat of the decline in education too.

We need to elect politicians that have the courage and the conviction to fight for all the people, and that will require getting people to vote.  So do whatever you can to get out the vote.  You will be helping to save our democracy.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal