News Release Archive - 2012

ThinkProgress is reporting: “Although a small number of ballots remain to be counted, as of [November 7], votes for a Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives outweigh votes for Republican candidates [in contested races, including some Democrat-on-Democrats races in California]. Based on ThinkProgress’ review of all ballots counted so far, 53,952,240 votes were cast for a Democratic candidate for the House and only 53,402,643 were cast for a Republican — meaning that Democratic votes exceed Republican votes by more than half a million. …”

ROB RICHIE [email]
Richie is the executive director of FairVote. He said today: “Representative democracy demands a level playing field, but U.S. House elections do not have one. Today there is a significant structural advantage for the Republican Party grounded in elections relying on single-member district, winner-take-all voting rules.

“In this year’s elections, for example, Democrats are likely to win more popular votes than Republicans in contested U.S. House elections. But Republicans will win a comfortable House majority, and FairVote estimates that Democrats would have needed to win 55% of the national vote to earn a House majority.

“Incumbency and campaign spending present challenges to Democrats, but the core problem is structural. When ordering districts by their partisan leanings, the median district is 52% Republican. Obama’s share of the vote was likely less than his national vote share in 240 districts this year and greater in only 195. That translates into Republicans having an advantage over time in 45 more districts. Although this bias has existed for decades, rising polarization and less ticket-splitting has resulted in the defeat of most of the more conservative Democrats who were able to win in Republican-leaning districts.

“The bottom line is that House elections are not as responsive as they should be. The great majority of incumbents are invulnerable to defeat, as evidenced by the fact that FairVote last July projected 333 winners and saw them all win this week. Now, with the bias of the current system, House leaders can be less responsive to shifts in popular support.

“FairVote proposes a statutory change, explained in its interactive map at http://www.FairVoting.Us. It would replace single-member districts with multi-seat districts and elect representatives with American forms of proportional representation. Doing so would remove the overall bias in the system and make every House Member more accountable to their constituents.”

Voice of America reports: “Exit polls suggested Asian Americans overwhelmingly voted for President Barack Obama in Tuesday’s election that handed the incumbent Democrat a second term in the White House. Preliminary national exit poll data suggested that 73 percent of Asian Americans voted for President Obama, while only 26 percent supported his Republican rival, Mitt Romney.”

MIRIAM YEUNG [email]
Yeung is the executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum. Addressing the election turnout, she said: “According to exit polls, Asian American and Pacific Islander support for President Obama increased to 73 percent from 61 percent in 2008. This increase was foreshadowed in the recent National Asian American Survey that found that those who identified women’s rights, healthcare and education as important issues overwhelmingly identified Obama as being closer to their views over Republican candidate Mitt Romney. Still, American political parties often overlook AAPI voters.

“AAPI voters clearly stated [in the election] that access to quality, affordable healthcare, including reproductive care, must be protected. … We voted based on the values and principles our communities live by – that all Americans deserve equality, justice, and the opportunity to build strong families and succeed. Those goals can only be achieved when we have representation that is reflective of our diverse communities. The election in Hawaii of Mazie Hirono to the U.S. Senate is a prime example. As the first woman to represent Hawaii in the Senate and the only woman of color to join the Senate – Hirono is making history and forging a path for our collective future. She is joined by three strong Asian and Pacific Islander women in the U.S. House, Grace Meng (N.Y.), Tammy Duckworth (Ill.), and Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii), and by Mark Takano (Calif.), the first openly gay Asian Congressman.”

THOMAS FERGUSON [email]
Ferguson is professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, senior fellow of the Roosevelt Institute, and contributing editor at AlterNet. He said today: “Now that it’s over, it’s time to take stock. All counts are incomplete, but something like 116 million votes were cast. The presidential election alone cost about $2.6 billion, or a bit more than $22 dollars per vote. But that money wasn’t spread evenly over America; in battleground states like Ohio, the sums per voter were much larger.

“Now look at the exit poll in today’s New York Times. Yes, indeed, Obama did very well among women, Latinos, and African-Americans. But in sharp contrast to 2008, the partisan split along income lines is huge. Obama’s vote percentage declines in straight line fashion as income rises. He got 63 percent of the votes of Americans making less than $30,000 and 57 percent of those making between $30,000 and $50,000. Above $50,000, the Other America kicks in. Romney won 53 percent of the votes of Americans making between $50 and a $100 thousand and 54 percent of the votes of Americans making above $100,000. The Democrats’ poor showing in the House elections — they way under-performed for a party that had lost so many seats two years before — probably reflects a substantial Republican advantage in money, including the famous Superpacs, some of which poured resources into Congressional races. It was surely also affected by the White House’s reluctance to spend time and resources trying to elect Democratic House candidates. As the President negotiates for a Grand Bargain in the face of the Fiscal Cliff, these are realities that are worth pondering.”

The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting: “A measure that would require most foods made with genetically engineered ingredients to be labeled in California was losing early Wednesday.”

MICHELE SIMON [email], @MicheleRSimon
Simon is a public health lawyer, president of Eat Drink Politics and author of Appetite for Profit: How the food industry undermines our health and how to fight back. She said today: “Prop 37 was attacked by a massive disinformation and propaganda campaign waged by the likes of Monsanto and PepsiCo, who out-spent the Yes side by 6 to 1. It’s hard to beat lies and deception, with the money to spread them.” Simon wrote the piece “California Newspaper Editorial Boards Spread False Claims and Faulty Logic on Proposition 37.”

MARTIN LEE [email]
Lee is the author of the new book Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana — Medical, Recreational and Scientific and the director of Project CBD, a medial science information service. He is also co-founder of the media watch group FAIR. He said today: “Residents of Colorado and Washington made history on Election Day by voting to legalize the adult use of marijuana. It could mark the beginning of the end of marijuana prohibition. From a historical perspective, marijuana prohibition is an aberration. For thousands of years men and women in many cultures have used cannabis as a folk medicine and a source of fiber and oil.

“It wasn’t until well into the 20th century that U.S. legislators and their international counterparts imposed a global ban on ‘the evil weed.’ The first antimarijuana laws in the United States were primarily a racist reaction against Mexican migrants. After millions of middle class Americans began smoking the herb in the 1960s, marijuana became the central focus of a deceitful war on drugs, a venal and destructive policy that fostered crime, police corruption, social discord, racial injustice and, ironically, drug abuse itself, while impeding medical advances and economic opportunities. The drug war that President Richard Nixon set in motion would escalate under Ronald Reagan and his Oval Office successors. Reefer madness has nothing to do with smoking marijuana — for therapy or fun or any other reason — and everything to do with how the U.S. government has stigmatized, prosecuted, and jailed users of this much maligned and much venerated plant. The fact that a disproportionate number of black and Latino youth are arrested and jailed for marijuana possession is reason enough to end the war on drugs.”

The South Florida Business Journal is reporting: “Voting controversies are continuing on Election Day in South Florida. …Amid reports that some absentee ballots in Broward are being rejected for lacking a signature, Miami-Dade has reiterated the importance of signing inside the red box on the back of the envelope. …A lawsuit settled with the Florida Democratic Party gave voters to the ability to cast in-person absentee ballots on Election Day in Broward and Palm Beach counties and extended the hours to do so, according to The Miami Herald.”

CHRIS KROMM [email]
Kromm is the executive director of the Institute for Southern Studies and publisher of Facing South/Southern Exposure. He said today: “Three big themes are emerging in the South this election. One, the battle over the right to vote is reaching a fever pitch. Changes in voting laws in Florida, Tennessee, Virginia and other states are having a big effect on who can and can’t vote. We’re hearing reports of people having to wait in line for three or four hours to vote — an issue made worse by cuts to early voting and state election budgets. Second, record-setting amounts of special interest money are flooding into this year’s elections and could have a big impact, especially in state-level races. Lastly, whatever the outcome, it’s clear the Southern electorate is changing — it’s younger, more racially diverse, more urban. This new Southern electorate will only grow in the future. But it’s also the very same voters who are most hurt by the attack on voting rights in the South.”

Slate just published the piece “Is Occupy Wall Street Outperforming the Red Cross in Hurricane Relief?”

See #OccupySandy

LAURA GOTTESDIENER [email]
Gottesdiener is author of A Dream Foreclosed: The Fight for a Place to Call Home forthcoming from Zuccotti Park Press. She just wrote the piece “After Sandy, Communities Mobilize a New Kind of Disaster Relief.”

MICHAEL PREMO [email]
Featured on Democracy Now this morning, Premo is an organizer with Occupy Sandy.

NATHAN SCHNEIDER, [in NYC], [email]
Schneider is editor of the website Waging Nonviolence.

SARAH JAFFE [email]
Jaffe just wrote the piece “Power to the People.”

PETER RUGH [email]
Rugh has been writing for Waging Nonviolence. He said today: “Since the storm, thousands of volunteers have stepped up to provide food, water, blankets, medicine, medical treatment, housing and comfort to New Yorkers where basic social infrastructure has collapsed. Many of those hardest hit by Sandy are those who have already been hit by the financial crisis and the crisis of poverty, racism and unemployment inherent in the system itself. Occupy Sandy’s emergency relief efforts are just that, attempts to ease the suffering of those in an emergency that has been inflicted upon by a system that values profit over planet and people. To end the crisis that is the rule of the 1%, the Sandy of everyday life, a social and economic transformation that democratically enables the 99% is necessary. Occupy Sandy exemplifies the highest virtue of the Occupy Wall Street movement; solidarity.”

Rugh wrote the piece “Building an Environmental Movement as Radical as Reality Itself”

CHRIS WILLIAMS [email]
Williams is author of Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis and a professor of physics and chemistry at Pace University. He recently wrote the piece “Frankenstorms and Climate Change: How the 1% Created a Monster.”

He said today: “In point of fact, the whole reason why the candidates don’t want to discuss climate change is precisely because of the economy, specifically the U.S. economy, which depends, as no other in the world, on fossil fuel energy. …

“And those representatives of the elite will sponsor and push policies which favor their class, not ours. And if those policies contradict a broader reality, such as calling into question the very stability of the entire planetary climate system, so be it.

“Which means that I’m far more interested in working with people, forging alliances and building a climate justice movement with anyone who wants to fight against the ruling elite in the intervening 1,460 days, before the next competition between two representatives of the corporate 1%, than I am in whether someone is voting for the lesser of two evils on November 6.

“In those struggles, I’m far more likely to be doing that by linking arms with the Young Evangelicals for Climate Action than I am with Obama and his coterie of Democratic Party operatives.

“For many environmentalists, it seems easier to imagine the end of the world than it does the end of the economic and social system known as capitalism. Not only do I disagree with that as a premise, if we don’t get rid of capitalism, there won’t be much of a world left to imagine.

“Therefore, even as we build a broad-based movement to fight for real reforms within the system, to slow down the monster of runaway, fossil-fueled capitalism that is creating Frankenstorms and much else in the way of ecological and social devastation, we need a vision for a completely different social system.

“This means locating the practical and ideological operation of capitalism and environmental degradation within a unified framework that requires its replacement with a system based on cooperation, real democracy, sustainable production for need and the earth held in common trust by all the people in the interests of future generations.

“Only then, by that revolutionary social change, can we hope to avoid cataclysmic dismemberment of global ecosystems via anthropogenic climate change.”

THOMAS FERGUSON [email]
PAUL JORGENSEN [email]
Ferguson is professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, senior fellow of the Roosevelt Institute, and contributing editor at AlterNet. Jorgensen is assistant professor of political science at University of Texas, Pan American and Non-Resident Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center at Harvard.

They co-authored a just-released piece: “Massive Surge of Republican Money in Last Ditch Effort to Sink Obama,” which states: “For 2012, the scariest thing about 2000 is the evidence that a flood of highly concentrated Republican money in the very last week of that campaign gave G.W. Bush a decisive edge in the battleground states — and that contrary to reports in the national media, there are signs that history may be about to repeat itself.

“The little known 2000 story is meticulously laid out in a study by Richard Johnston, Michael G. Hagen, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, ‘The 2000 Presidential Election and the Foundations of Party Politics.’ Trailing in the final weeks of the campaign, Al Gore began aggressively attacking Bush on Social Security. Helped along by news trends in the (free) mass media that the three scholars carefully track, and matching or even sometimes exceeding the Bush campaign’s ad buys, Gore rallied. He started climbing in the polls.

“But in the final week of the campaign, Bush’s Golden Horde of campaign contributors unrolled their mighty bankroll, sinking most of the money into battleground states. As the three scholars observe, the result was a natural experiment, in which part of the country was saturated with political money while the rest was only lightly sprinkled. The outcome was ruinous for Gore. …

“Big Money’s most significant impact on politics is certainly not to deliver elections to the highest bidders. Instead it is to cement parties, candidates, and campaigns into the narrow range of issues that are acceptable to big donors. The basis of the ‘Golden Rule’ in politics derives from the simple fact that running for major office in the U.S. is fabulously expensive. In the absence of large scale social movements, only political positions that can be financed can be presented to voters. On issues on which all major investors agree (think of the now famous 1 percent), no party competition at all takes place, even if everyone knows that heavy majorities of voters want something else. …

“The true influence that large donors wield in American elections is chronically underestimated. … Especially where Democrats are concerned, the myth of small donors is a powerful instrument of miseducation.”

RICK UNGAR [email]
Ungar is a contributor to Forbes.com, and appears as the liberal voice of the “Forbes on Fox” television show and as a political pundit on other Fox network programs. He recently wrote the op-ed, “Romney Family Investment Ties To Voting Machine Company That Could Decide The Election Causing Concern.” It states:

“A test conducted in 2007 by the Ohio Secretary of State revealed that five of the electronic voting systems the state was looking to use in the upcoming 2008 presidential election had failed badly, each easily susceptible to chicanery that could alter the results of an election. …We learn that one of the companies whose machines had failed was none other than Hart Intercivic.

“It turns out that Hart Intercivic is owned, in large part, by H.I.G. Capital — a large investment fund with billions of dollars under management — that was founded by a fellow named Tony Tamer. While it is unclear just how much H.I.G. owns of Hart Intercivic, we do learn that H.I.G. employees hold at least two of the five Hart Intercivic board seats.

“Tony Tamer, H.I.G.’s founder, turns out to be a major bundler for the Mitt Romney campaign, along with three other directors of H.I.G., who are also big-time money raisers for Romney. Indeed, as fate would have it, two of those directors — Douglas Berman and Brian Schwartz — were actually in attendance at the now infamous “47 percent” fundraiser in Boca Raton, Florida.

“But wait — if you’re feeling a bit ill now, you’ll want to get the anti-acids ready to go because it’s about get really strange.

“To everyone’s amazement, we learn that two members of the Hart Intercivic board of directors, Neil Tuch and Jeff Bohl, have made direct contributions to the Romney campaign. This, despite the fact that they represent 40 percent of the full board of directors of a company whose independent, disinterested and studiously non-partisan status in any election taking place on their voting machines would seemingly be a ‘no brainer.’ And finally, we learn that H.I.G. is the 11th largest of all the contributors to the Romney effort.

“Numerous media sources, including Truthout, are reporting that Solamere Capital — the investment firm run by Mitt Romney’s son, Tagg, and the home of money put into the closely held firm by Tagg’s uncle Scott, mother Anne and, of course, the dad who might just be the next President of the United States — depending upon how the vote count turns out, in our little tale, in the State of Ohio—have shared business interests with H.I.G. either directly or via Solamere

“While I am not suggesting conspiracies or that anyone would get involved in any foul play here, most particularly the GOP candidate for President, how is it possible that so many people could exercise so much bad judgment?

“The sanctity of voting in America is supposed to be one of our most important virtues.

“So, why would these individuals who serve on the board of directors of Hart Intercivic go out of their way to make a contribution to any political candidate given the critical importance of their company remaining above reproach when it comes to the political process? And why would those who run the company that owns Hart Intercivic be giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to a political candidate? And why would a political candidate and his family have a financial relationship with a company that owns a chunk of the voting machine company that will be counting the actual votes given to that political candidate or his opponent?”

RICHARD WINGER [email]
Editor of Ballot Access News, Winger said today: “In the November 2012 election across the U.S., in 39.9 percent of all state legislative districts, there is no Democratic-Republican contest, because either the Democrats, or the Republicans, didn’t nominate any candidate. The United States, for legislative elections, suffers from undercrowded ballots, not overcrowded ballots. Yet certain states continue to keep in place severe ballot access laws that make it exceedingly difficult for minor party and independent candidates to get on the ballot. These laws are especially harsh, for legislative candidates, in Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Mexico, North Carolina, and especially North Dakota. This year North Dakota has a complete absence of minor party and independent candidates on the ballot for the legislature.

“In the United States, for over a century, powerful political forces have sometimes tried to find a legal method to keep competition to the Democratic and Republican Parties off the ballot. For example, in 1931, Florida passed a law defining ‘political party’ to be a group that polled 30 percent of the vote in the last presidential election, and deleting all methods for a new party or an independent candidate to get on the ballot.

“Fortunately, in 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment do not permit states to exclude all opponents of the major parties from the ballot.

“Now, however, opponents of minor parties and independent candidates have found a new way to keep the November ballot confined to just Democrats and Republicans. They are working to implement ‘top-two primary’ systems. They have succeeded in Louisiana, Washington, and California, and an initiative to create the system in Arizona is currently leading in the polls.

“We know from the experience of Louisiana, Washington, and California, that top-two open primary systems are fatal to minor party participation in the general election. There have been almost 100 elections for federal and state office under top-two systems in those states, in which minor party members ran and there were at least two major party members running. In every single instance, the minor party member failed to advance to the November election. When that happens, minor parties are unable to campaign in the general election season, when the public is most interested in hearing political ideas. Unfortunately, on October 1, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge against the Washington state top-two system, leaving minor parties in a difficult position to fight top-two systems in court.”