News Release Archive - 2008

JOHN R. MacARTHUR
MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of the new book “You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America.”

MacArthur said today: “Obama’s number one bundler is Goldman Sachs. He is advised on economics by Robert Rubin, the extremely wealthy director and senior counselor of Citigroup, the former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, and as Clinton Treasury Secretary, a great deregulator who deserves some of the blame for the current financial collapse. In his book, ‘The Audacity of Hope,’ Obama talks about how much he likes investment bankers, how bright and liberal they are. So calling Obama a socialist is like calling Harper’s Magazine a media conglomerate.

“But the McCain camp’s calling him a socialist might actually help Obama, since these days everybody is a socialist of sorts, even Robert Rubin. Respectable opinion is taking socialism very seriously. However, Obama’s socialism only goes so far. Pressed by John Edwards early in the campaign, he said he favored changing the tax code to tax hedge fund partners’ income as personal income, instead of at the lower capital gains rate. Since Edwards dropped out, he’s pretty much stopped talking about the issue and the relevant bill is stalled in committee. Nowadays, Obama is mainly talking about raising the capital gains rate from the current 15 percent to 25 percent, but for a hedge funder, 25 percent is a lot better than 39.6 percent, which is where Obama wants to raise the top marginal income tax rate. Obama, like Bush and McCain, certainly does favor socialism for … Wall Street, since he strongly backed the Treasury bailout bill.”

MacArthur recently wrote the article “Americans Unwilling to Face Reality.”

RICHARD WOLFFMonthly Review’s first issue in 1949 featured an essay by Albert Einstien titled “Why Socialism?”

Wolff said today: “A long-standing confusion and debate over socialism has served to enable all sorts of arrangements to be given that name. Anyone actually familiar with the history of socialism knows that, and thus knows that to use the word itself requires that the user define and justify which of the alternative definitions the user has chosen to deploy.

“In many European countries today, socialism means a large role for the government in its economic affairs. In the USSR and China, socialism has meant an even larger role such that the government owns and operates many industries. More abstractly, socialism has often been defined as state (or ‘social’) ownership of means of production and state planning with both distinguished from capitalism defined as private ownership of means of production and markets. Finally, Marx himself was particularly focused on the internal organization of production (inside the enterprises) where he distinguished capitalism as an organization in which a mass of workers produced a surplus (an output whose value exceeded what was paid out for inputs and for the labor power of the workers) that a tiny number of other people (boards of directors in modern corporations) appropriated and distributed to keep such a capitalism going. Marx then distinguished capitalism from communism quite simply as an alternative organization of production inside enterprises such that the workers displace capitalist boards of directors and instead become, collectively, their own board of directors.

“Re: Obama. He has endorsed precisely none of these major definitions of socialism: not Marx’s focused on the social organization of the surpluses in production, not the Soviet or Chinese models of state ownership of most industries, and not the European notion/model of significant state intervention (e.g. state production of gas, oil, transport; state subsidization of education and national health care; subsidized housing, and so on).”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

LAWRENCE NORDEN
Norden is the director of the Voting Technology Project at the Brennan Center for Justice. The Brennan Center, Common Cause and Verified Voting recently issued a 50-state report card that grades each state on its preparedness for election system breakdowns.

Norden said today: “There’s no question that in the last few years, election officials around the country have made dramatic improvements that will make it much less likely that voters are disenfranchised due to voting system failures. Unfortunately, there is still much work to be done to ensure that every voter will get to vote and every vote will be counted if something goes wrong with voting systems on Election Day.”

The report recommends: “Election officials [should] have backup measures in place — like emergency paper ballots and sound ballot counting procedures — to ensure the integrity of the vote. … Of the 24 states that use voting machines, eight states, including Colorado and Virginia, have no guidance or requirement to stock emergency paper ballots at the polls. In contrast, 12 states, including Ohio and North Carolina, recommend emergency paper ballots to be given to voters if machine failures are causing long lines.”

ADAM FOGEL
Fogel is the director of FairVote. He said today: “FairVote surveyed 96 out of 134 Virginia city and county election officials and found that the state does not have a standardized method for allocating poll booths, which may cause long lines on Election Day. Long lines are often caused by an inadequate number of poll booths and have plagued voters, particularly in lower-income neighborhoods, in the past several election cycles.”

Fogel added: “Students hoping to vote on campus in Virginia may be disappointed. Thirty-two of the jurisdictions surveyed have a community college or university and of those, only two will have on-campus polling locations for November.” Previous state readiness reports prepared by FairVote include Missouri, New Mexico and Colorado.

REBECCA WILSON
Wilson is a co-director of Save Our Votes. She said today: “The 2004 and 2006 general elections in Maryland were accompanied by very long lines, with voters in some locations waiting for hours to vote. Many may leave without having the opportunity to cast a ballot, or may decide not to go to the polls when they hear news reports of long lines. Measures that could ease election-day congestion, such as early voting or no-excuse absentee voting, have been blocked by Maryland’s courts. A study by physicist William Edelstein predicts that many Maryland polling places could again experience wait times of greater than two hours this November.”

Wilson added: “The best way to ensure an efficient election and to avoid disenfranchising voters would be for Maryland’s State Board of Elections to authorize the use of emergency ballots to prevent or reduce long lines. Other states, such as Ohio, have already taken this prudent step to ensure that all voters will be able to cast a ballot on election day.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020, (202) 421-6858; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

JENNY FLANAGAN
Flanagan is the executive director of Colorado Common Cause. She said today: “The State of Colorado should accept registration applications that contain all necessary identifying information, but lack a checkmark in a superfluous box. Currently, the state is treating these applications as ‘incomplete.’ If this policy goes unchanged, thousands of eligible Colorado voters could be denied their rights. This indefensible policy unfairly punishes a significant portion of the Colorado electorate over an unnecessary technicality. Coloradans did their part by filling out voter registration forms with all the information necessary to confirm their identities and in compliance with training manuals put out by the SOS [Secretary of State] office. Now, election officials need to do their part to ensure these people’s votes count on election day. … These applications include all the necessary information for establishing eligibility and should therefore be counted.”

BOB FITRAKIS
Based in Ohio, Fitrakis co-wrote the article “Critical U.S. Supreme Court Ruling Against Rovian GOP Vote Meddling May Prove Temporary.” He said today: “The GOP has sued Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, demanding that she release to county boards of elections lists of registered voters whose information does not precisely match government data bases. The right to vote of such registrants — by most estimates as many as 200,000 in Ohio alone — could then be challenged on a case-by-case basis. By all accounts, the discrepancies are usually caused by typographical errors in numbers entered for the Social Security administration and the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. Rarely do such discrepancies indicate fraudulent behavior or illegitimate registrations. … Last week the Supreme Court ruled that the Republicans ‘are not sufficiently likely to prevail’ in their argument that such discrepancies pose a significant threat to the legitimacy of the electoral process. The Court also ruled that the GOP had no standing as a private organization to file such a suit.”

Fitrakis added: “The idea of massive fraud by voters continues to be proven as a hyped-up myth. The Cincinnati Enquirer has provided a detailed analysis of Ohio’s more than 8 million registered voters and found that problems involving illegitimate voting are minimal. … Since 1953, only six Ohioans have been sent to prison for voter fraud, according to the Columbus Dispatch.”

Background: The Clevelend Plain Dealer reports: “After the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed an Ohio Republican Party lawsuit seeking to force Brunner to cross-check about 700,000 newly registered voters this year against a state driver’s license database, Republican fundraiser David Myhal re-filed a similar case in the Ohio Supreme Court. … A federal judge, whose earlier ruling in an Ohio elections case was overturned on Friday by the U.S. Supreme Court, has kicked a similar Republican lawsuit against Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner out of his court and back to the Ohio Supreme Court.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

AP is reporting this morning: “Testimony is on tap today by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. He’s to talk about the economic outlook before members of the House Budget Committee.”

ROBERT AUERBACH
Auerbach is professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He was an economist with the House Committee on Financial Services during the tenure of four Federal Reserve Chairmen: Arthur Burns, William Miller, Paul Volcker, and Alan Greenspan. He wrote the recently released book Deception and Abuse at the Fed: Henry B. Gonzalez Battles Alan Greenspan’s Bank.

He said today: “The billions of dollars taxpayers are paying to bail out banks, especially the trillion-dollar superbank financial holding companies, should not obscure the need to fix underlying and continuing causes of the financial crisis. Under Alan Greenspan’s leadership of the Federal Reserve Bank, the nation’s central bank, it had a defective bank examination process. …

“One root cause of poor regulation of banks by the Federal Reserve is the underlying conflicts of interest at the 12 Federal Reserve Banks. Two-thirds of the board of directors in each of these Fed banks are voted onto the boards by the banks in the district. So the bankers are charged with regulating themselves.

“The Congress should immediately obtain the minutes of the Board of Directors meetings and the Board of Governors to see if the heads of the trillion-dollar superbanks that were on the boards of directors of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and other district Fed Banks have recused themselves from participating in any regulatory decisions in which their firms were participating. Bailout loans to banks should be at penalty rates with no coercion to take such loans. There should be an independent regulator, independent of the banks it regulates, staffed by experts in accounting, digital information systems, and fraud detection.

“Even Ben Bernanke, the present chairman who is working diligently to organize the bailout, seems oblivious to the recent history of his bureaucracy. Last month he assured the Senate Banking Committee that the Office of the Inspector General at the Federal Reserve was ‘very effective.’ That was a serious misstatement and a bad omen for understanding the problems of regulating the trillion-dollar superbanks.

“The Fed’s Office of Inspector General has been a farce, operating at the mercy of the leaders of the bureaucracy the IG investigates. The Board of Governors, the Fed’s central command, set up the IG office in 1987 with the provision that the ‘Chairman can prohibit the Inspector General from carrying out or completing an audit or investigation, or from issuing a subpoena, if the Chairman determines “that sensitive information is involved.”‘”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020, (202) 421-6858; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

MAX FRAAD WOLFF
Wolff is an instructor at the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the New School University. He is a frequent contributor to Huffington Post, Asia Times and The Indypendent. He cites a disconnect between the economic crisis and the lack of meaningful discussion in the presidential race: “We are still talking tax cuts — despite a forecast of a $1 trillion budget deficit. We are still talking energy independence — despite the fact there is no chance of that.”
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DEBORAH MENKART
Executive director of the D.C.-based group Teaching for Change, Menkart is co-author of Putting the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching. She said today: “It was unfortunate to hear both Obama and McCain endorse the actions of D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, though Obama made important points about No Child Left Behind being an unfunded mandate and the need to provide meaningful supports for teachers. Rhee’s approach, on the other hand, has been almost exclusively punitive, firing teachers and principals and closing schools. What’s missing is a plan to improve the quality of instruction through professional development or other critically needed supports for quality teaching.”

The right-wing Washington Spectator is calling for Rhee to be the next Secretary of Education. The A-section of the Washington Post features a story that notes: “At events this year, [Rhee] has said that McCain has been the stronger candidate on education issues.” Meanwhile, the Metro section of the Post features the story “Rhee Fires Shepherd Principal, Raising Questions About Vetting.”

MARIO MURILLO
Murillo is associate professor of Communication at Hofstra University in New York (where last night’s debate was held), and the author of Colombia and the United States: War, Unrest and Destabilization. He is currently living in Colombia, finishing a book about the indigenous movement and its uses of community media.
He said: “Listening to the debates online from my home in Bogotá on the same day that Colombian security forces were shooting at indigenous protesters in southern Colombia makes one realize how little knowledge people in the U.S. have of this troubled country. John McCain talks about the Uribe regime as ‘the best ally of the U.S. in the hemisphere’ that deserves a free trade agreement with Washington, demonstrating quite clearly how disconnected he is from the reality on the ground here, and how much he represents another eight years of Bush policies in the Americas. It’s a good thing that Obama recognizes the long history of attacks against the trade union movement in this country, but he needs to be updated about the major contradictions surrounding the Uribe government, including its links with paramilitary death squads on the U.S. State Department’s terrorism list. The popular movement is screaming out as we speak, and nobody up north seems to be listening!”

Murillo just wrote the piece “History Repeats Itself for Indigenous Communities Under Attack in Colombia.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

TOVA WANG
Wang is the vice president for research at Common Cause. She said today: “It is unfortunate that some would seek to distract us from the real work that needs to be done to ensure a fair election in which every eligible voter can cast a ballot and all the ballots are counted. While there is simply no evidence of voter impersonation fraud at the polling place, there is ample evidence of real people’s votes that may go uncounted due to unfair practices of voter purging and other vote suppression tactics. Ultimately all this underscores the need for a system in which the government shoulders its fair share of the responsibility to ensure that Americans are properly registered and stay registered.”

RICK HASEN
Hasen is the William H. Hannon Distinguished Professor of Law at Loyola Law School. He said today: “So even if Mickey Mouse is registering, he is not showing up on election day to cast ballots, and so far as I am aware, there have been no cases of phony voter registrations leading to the casting of votes in any election that have been on any large scale — much less affected the outcome of elections. So we should all agree that those who submit fraudulent voter registration forms should be punished criminally, but that such activity is not going to affect the outcome of the presidential election. … But cries of voter fraud allow for harsh purging of voters from the rolls. Because of decentralization of election authority and a lack of administrative competence or will, the rolls are inaccurate in many states. Careless purging — driven by unsubstantiated fears about voter fraud — can lead to many eligible voters being incorrectly removed from the polls.”

Background: In an op-ed published last year, Hasen wrote: “But perhaps most importantly, the idea of massive polling-place fraud (through the use of inflated voter rolls) is inherently incredible. Suppose I want to swing the Missouri election for my preferred presidential candidate. I would have to figure out who the fake, dead or missing people on the registration rolls are, then pay a lot of other individuals to go to the polling place and claim to be that person, without any return guarantee — thanks to the secret ballot — that any of them will cast a vote for my preferred candidate. Those who do show up at the polls run the risk of being detected and charged with a felony. And for what – $10? Polling-place fraud, in short, makes no sense. The Justice Department devoted unprecedented resources to ferreting out fraud over five years and appears to have found not a single prosecutable case across the country. … The idea that there is massive polling-place voter fraud has, perhaps irrevocably, entered the public consciousness. It has infected even the Supreme Court’s thinking about voter-ID laws. And it has provided intellectual cover for the continued partisan pursuit of voter-ID laws that may suppress minority votes.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

ROBERT RICHTER
Richter is an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker and was political director for CBS News from 1965 to 1968. He notes that McCain has repeatedly invoked his record in the Vietnam War during the campaign, but that the effect of bomber pilots like McCain and of the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign has not been sufficiently scrutinized.

Richter recently wrote the piece “McCain: War Hero or War Criminal?” which states: “I will never forget how stunned I was when Gen. Telford Taylor, a chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials after World War Two, told me that he strongly supported the idea of trying the U.S. pilots captured in North Vietnam as war criminals — and that he would be proud to lead in their prosecution.

“An ardent opponent of the Vietnam conflict, Taylor spoke with me in the fall of 1966 when I was looking into producing a documentary on this controversy for CBS News, where I was their National Political Editor. While he did not mention any pilot’s name, then U.S. Navy Lieut. Commander John McCain, who was captured a year later, would have been among the group Taylor wanted to prosecute. …

“Taylor’s argument was that their actions were in violation of the Geneva conventions that specifically forbid indiscriminate bombing that could cause incidental loss of civilian life or damage to civilian objects. Adding to the Geneva code, he noted, was the decision at the Nuremberg trials after World War Two: military personnel cannot defend themselves against such a charge with a claim that they were simply following orders. …

“Anti-war critics at the time claimed that despite the Pentagon’s assertion that only military targets were bombed, U.S. pilots also had bombed hospitals and other civilian targets, a charge that turned out to be correct and was confirmed by the New York Times’ chief foreign correspondent, Harrison Salisbury.

“In late 1966 Salisbury described the widespread devastation of civilian neighborhoods around Hanoi by American bombs: ‘Bomb damage … extends over an area of probably a mile or so on both sides of the highway … small villages and hamlets along the route [were] almost obliterated’. …

“In one of his autobiographies McCain wrote that he was going to bomb a power station in ‘a heavily populated part of Hanoi’ when he was shot down. …

“When I passed along Gen. Taylor’s comments to my network superiors the program was scrapped: too hot to handle. Instead Air War Over the North was telecast, about ‘precision bombing’ North Vietnam military targets by U.S. pilots.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

NJOKI NJOROGE NJEHU
SOREN AMBROSE
Co-coordinator of Africa Jubilee South, based in Nairobi, Kenya, Njehu said today: “Governments are bailing out the banks — profit-making institutions — hundreds of billions were found instantly for them. Meanwhile, the debt crisis has continued to devastate life around the world. The G8 has promised to act but has done precious little. Many of the indebted countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America are unable to provide clean water, health services and education, but are being compelled to pay back debts to Western institutions. So the hypocrisy and double standards in the global economy are again in evidence. The G8 don’t want to see banks fail, but it’s acceptable to see children die from preventable diseases because of poor infrastructure. It’s a matter of what generates political will.

“Also, when you had the financial crisis in Argentina, or when you had the Asian financial crisis, bailing out the banks was one of the things that was forbidden, so it’s very much a case of ‘do as I say, not as I do’ from the G8.”

Ambrose is manager of the Africa program for the Bank Information Center.

DORENE ISENBERG
Isenberg is chair of the economics department at the University of Redlands and co-editor of Seeking Shelter on the Pacific Rim: Financial Globalization, Social Change, and the Housing Market.

She said today: “From the beginning of the New Deal until 1980, the U.S. financial system was both functionally and prudentially regulated. Since 1980, the de-regulated U.S. financial system has been allowed to function under the motto: the market knows best. As we’re now seeing, this market is really a multitude of financial businesses, and these businesses have been operating for their own self-interest. The unregulated financial market may know best how to serve its own interest, but it has no idea how to operate to produce a fair and equitable result for all who are affected by its actions. As we have now seen, the individualistic actions of mortgage brokers and investment banks produced incredible gains for them and incalculable risk and losses for the rest of us. The financial system cannot be allowed to continue to operate on this premise of ‘the market knows best.’

“The bailout by the federal government offers us a real possibility to kick-start a re-regulation that will produce a financial sector that operates with the goal of ‘citizens know best.’ We need to create a financial sector that operates to meet the funding needs for affordable housing, that promotes green growth and sustainable economic development, and finances the reconstruction of our cities’ deteriorating infrastructure; not one that creates the next great high fee, high risk financial asset. When the market is ruled by self-interest, unbounded profits and untethered executives’ pay become the goal. Starting with the bailout and now our bank re-capitalization, we have the ability to produce a financial sector whose goal is to finance the development of a healthy sustainable economy.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

ALEX KEYSSAR
Keyssar is the Stirling Professor of History and Social Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and the author of the book “he Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. He said today: “Once again we seem to be finding a pattern where allegations of fraud are being mobilized as a rationale to construct new barriers to voting. Fraud is a serious matter, but in our recent history the far more prevalent problem has been the creation of procedural obstacles to the ballot box for legitimate, eligible citizens.”
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MARK CRISPIN MILLER
Miller is a professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, and author of Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform and Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008. Miller said today: “The GOP has used the myth of Democratic ‘voter fraud’ not just to cloud the issue, but to justify the passage of Jim Crow legislation, like the photo ID law in Indiana, the birth certificate requirement in Pima County, Arizona, and other measures meant to disenfranchise voters by the tens of thousands.”

HARVEY WASSERMAN
Wasserman is co-author of the books What Happened in Ohio? and As Goes Ohio. He stated today: “With Ohio once again the pivotal state that could decide the presidency, the GOP is attacking the thousands of registrations submitted by the grassroots organization ACORN. Though the vast bulk of these registrations are legitimate, ACORN is legally required to also submit those that are faulty, giving the GOP an excuse to attack them all. The Republicans are also attacking the Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, who has reformed the electoral process throughout the state and has won critical court victories making it easier and safer for Ohioans to vote, and to have their votes fairly counted, as they were not in 2004.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167