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News Release Archive - Electoral Issues

Why It’s So Hard to Get Off the “Fiscal Cliff”: Big Money and the 2012 House Elections

December 27, 2012

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 are the authors, with Jie Chen, of “Revealed: Why the Pundits Are Wrong about Big Money and the 2012 Elections,” just out on AlterNet. Their piece is particularly timely as Congress debates whether and how to raise taxes and cut spending on the edge of the “fiscal cliff.” They write: “It is impossible to assess precisely the totality of money’s influence on the 2012 elections, but notions that it did not matter can be immediately dismissed. The evidence we have reviewed suggests exactly the opposite. … [A] virtual straight line relationship existed between Democratic candidates’ shares of total political money and their showing against their Republican opponents. …

“[We examined] spending differences between Democrats and Republicans in two types of races that should have had better than average chances of being winnable by both parties in 2012. The first involves districts in which a new Republican candidate won for the first time in the 2010 landslide; the other is the smaller subset of those races in which the GOP winner either ousted an incumbent Democrat or defeated a Democrat running in an “open seat” race. Both kinds of districts show heavy Republican advantages in average total spending compared to their Democratic opponents.”

Ferguson and Jorgensen observed today that a substantial portion of GOP funds came from groups like Americans for Prosperity, Freedom Works, or the Club for Growth that were critical of House Speaker Boehner’s “Plan B.” “The evidence is that these little piggies went to market,” Ferguson said. “The GOP problem is that they didn’t all go to the same market.” Jorgensen added that funds from such organizations “totaled many millions of dollars,” though he noted that reporting was not yet complete.

Filed Under: ,

Laid Off Steelworker in Anti-Romney Ad Doesn’t Want Obama Either

July 17, 2012

Donnie Box was featured in a Priorities USA Action ad outside a shutdown plant: “Romney and Bain Capital shut this place down. They shut down entire livelihoods. They promised us a health care package, they promised to maintain our retirement program, and those are the first two things to disappear. This was a booming place, and (On screen: Mitt Romney and Bain Capital made MILLIONS on the deal. Reuters, 1/6/12) Mitt Romney and Bain Capital turned it into a junkyard, just making money and leaving. They don’t live in this neighborhood. They don’t live in this part of the world.” See:

MIKE ELK, mike at inthesetimes.com, @mikeelk
A reporter for In These Times magazine, Elk just wrote the piece “Laid Off Steelworker in Anti-Romney Ad Says He Is Not Voting for Obama,” which states: “For nearly the past year, the United Steelworkers has been attacking Romney’s record at Bain Capital, citing the experience of their former members who were negatively affected during Romney’s tenure there. The sympathy these laid off Steelworkers generated in the media eventually led to Democrats such as President Barack Obama picking up the attacks, despite the misgiving of major party figures like Bill Clinton.

“The United Steelworkers’ initial accusations regarding the GS Technologies plant closing have proven explosive enough to potentially derail Romney’s presidential bid. Their effectiveness also suggests labor’s new strategy of doing its own political actions separate from the Democratic Party is starting to pay off. …

“Despite appearing in an ad for the pro-Obama Super PAC Priorities USA, denouncing Romney’s role in the GS Technologies plant closing, Box, a lifelong Democrat, says he won’t be voting for the first time since 1971 because he has lost faith in politicians.

“‘I could really care less about Obama,’ says Box. ‘I think Obama is a jerk, a pantywaist, a lightweight, a blowhard. He hasn’t done a goddamn thing that he said he would do. When he had a Democratic Senate and Democratic Congress, he didn’t do a damn thing. He doesn’t have the guts to say what’s on his mind.’

“Box’s refusal to vote for Obama shows the challenges that organized labor faces in convincing its members to vote for Democrats. Many union members like Box feel the party hasn’t pushed hard enough for jobs bills or labor law reform while making sure to pass trade pacts, like the South Korea Free Trade Agreement, which the AFL-CIO and the United Steelworkers opposed.”

Filed Under: Tagged With: Bain Capital, corporations, elections, Mike Elk, Mitt Romney,

As Disclose Act Fails in Senate, FEC Quietly Removes Files on Big Ticket Donors

July 17, 2012

The Washington Post reports today: “The Senate failed Monday to advance legislation that would require independent groups to disclose the names of contributors who give more than $10,000 to independent groups for use in political campaigns.”

The just-published piece “Revealed: Key Files on Big Ticket Political Donations Vanish at the Federal Election Commission” by Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen states: “We have discovered that sometime after January of this year, the FEC deleted a whole set of contributions totaling millions of dollars made during the 2007-2008 election cycle. The most important of these files concern what is now called ‘dark money’ — funds donated to ostensible charities or public interest groups rather than parties. These non-profit groups — which Washington insiders often refer to generically as ’501(c)s,’ after the section of the federal tax code regulating them — use the money to pay for allegedly educational ‘independent’ ads that run outside conventional campaign channels. Such funding has now developed into a gigantic channel for evading disclosure of the donors’ identities and is acutely controversial. In 2008, however, a substantial number of contributions to such 501(c)s made it into the FEC database. For the agency quietly to remove them almost four years later with no public comment is scandalous. It flouts the agency’s legal mandate to track political money and mocks the whole spirit of what the FEC was set up to do. …

“We are on the outside looking in. We cannot say for sure who decided to make the deletions or why. But one fact is telling: the missing files include essentially all those of one type in particular — donors to the so-called ’501(c) 4′ ‘charitable’ organizations now in the eye of the storm over dark money.”

Ferguson said today that “It’s ironic that this article came out on the day that an effort to force disclosure of secret funds failed in the Senate.” Jorgensen observed that “campaign finance regulation is weak as it is; it’s vital that the FEC rapidly take steps to fix the situation we discovered.”

THOMAS FERGUSON, thomas.ferguson at umb.edu
Ferguson is professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, senior fellow of the Roosevelt Institute, and contributing editor at AlterNet.

PAUL JORGENSEN, pjorgensen at ethics.harvard.edu
Jorgensen is a Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.

Filed Under: Tagged With: corporations, Paul Jorgensen, Thomas Ferguson,

“Show Me Your Papers”-Based Immigration Policy

June 26, 2012

MARGARET HU, mhu at law.duke.edu
Hu is an assistant professor at Duke Law School. She just wrote a piece titled “Arizona v. U.S. & SB 1070: Baking Discrimination Into Immigration Policy” on the American Constitution Society blog, which states: “In Arizona v. U.S., the Supreme Court only upheld Section 2(B) of the highly controversial Arizona immigration law, also known as SB 1070 (Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070). Three other provisions of SB 1070 were struck down. Upholding Section 2(B), however, is problematic because it preserves the provision of the bill that invites state and local law enforcement to engage in racial profiling.

“Section 2(B) is known as the ‘your papers please’ or ‘show me your papers’ provision of the highly controversial law. Some are reassured that the Court recognized that the constitutionality of the ‘show me your papers’ provision of SB 1070 might be reconsidered at some point. The Court suggested the question is now whether Section 2(B) might create a problem of racial discrimination in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, and other constitutional problems. In other words, Section 2(B) is not going to be thrown out now, before the law is implemented. But, if the law results in racial profiling, the Court said that this question could be dealt with in the future, when the evidence surfaces.

“Unfortunately, 25 years of immigration law experimentation with ‘show me your papers’ policies have demonstrated that the future consequences of this provision can already be predicted: Section 2(B) will likely lead to widespread discrimination.

“Those U.S. citizens and lawful immigrants who may ‘look or sound foreign’ are likely to be the target of scrutiny, simply based upon their appearance. And because states may now perceive that they have the green light to bake ‘show me your papers’ requirements into state immigration law, the racial profiling problems stemming from a ‘show me your papers’-based immigration policy will likely worsen.”

MAEGAN ORTIZ, mamitamala at gmail.com, @mamitamala
Maegan Ortiz is publisher of VivirLatino. She just wrote the piece “The Mixed Bag S.B. 1070 SCOTUS Decision and the White House Response,” which states: “I am not surprised by the decision and I question if there is as large an impact because of the decision. Federal policy, specifically Secure Communities and 287(g) have basically empowered law enforcement to stop those they suspect of being undocumented. This, contrary to what many like to say, was not about civil or human rights. It was about asserting Federal power and we have seen federal power under President Obama help create record-breaking deportation numbers. The precedent for racial profiling of Latinos, the precedent for amping up criminalization of immigrant communities has its roots in federal policy.”

JEFF BIGGERS, jrbiggers at gmail.com
Biggers’s next book is State Out of the Union: Arizona and the Final Showdown Over the American Dream. He wrote the piece “SB1070 backlash isn’t over: The Supreme Court’s decision to strike down most of Arizona’s immigration law won’t slow the movement it provoked.”

Filed Under: Tagged With: immigration, Jeff Biggers, Maegan la Mala, Margaret Hu, SB1070,

Middle Class Wealth Plummets

June 12, 2012

The New York Times reports: “The recent financial crisis left the median American family in 2010 with no more wealth than they had in the early 1990s, erasing almost two decades of accumulated prosperity, the Federal Reserve said Monday. The median family, richer than half of the nation’s families and poorer than the other half, had a net worth of $77,300 in 2010, down from $126,400 in 2007, the Fed said. The crash of housing prices explained three-quarters of the loss.”

WILLIAM K. BLACK, blackw at umkc.edu
Available for a limited number of interviews, Black is now an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One. He was the deputy staff director of the national commission that investigated the cause of the savings and loan debacle. He said today: “The facts are in, and we now know that the ongoing crisis represents by far the most expensive epidemic of fraud in history. It was an epidemic of fraud that the FBI first warned of in 2004 — and predicted that it would cause a financial ‘crisis.’ It was an epidemic that Chairmen Greenspan and Bernanke could have ended with a stroke of their pens by heeding the pleas to ban liars’ loans. And it is an epidemic led by elite bankers with total impunity. A staggering percentage of homeowner wealth was stolen and destroyed by the elite frauds. Attorney General Holder, Chairman Bernanke, and Secretary Geithner should resign and be replaced by those who will insure that no man is above the law.”

CHUCK COLLINS, Bob Keener, bob at wealthforcommongood.org
Collins, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and long-time inequality activist. He was born into the 1 percent. His brand new book is called, 99 to 1: How Wealth Inequality is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do About It. Collins said today: “The economic meltdown, triggered by reckless financial speculation and extreme wealth inequality, has cost the middle class two decades of economic prosperity. Reducing wealth and income disparities is key toward rebuilding an economy that works for the 100 percent.”

See Collins’ recent piece: “99 to 1: How Wealth Inequality is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do About It.”

MATTEA KRAMER, mattea at nationalpriorities.org
Kramer is a research analyst for the National Priorities Project, which is just releasing a book A People’s Guide to the Federal Budget.

Kramer said today: “This is compounded by a federal income-tax system riddled with tax breaks that largely benefit wealthy Americans. Thus, even as middle-class wealth has eroded in recent years, the federal government handed a $4.4 billion housing subsidy to the top 1 percent of Americans in 2011. That diverted tax dollars away from long-term investment in the middle class, such as tuition support for higher education.”

Filed Under: , Tagged With: Chuck Collins, economy, income inequality, Mattea Kramer, William K. Black,

U.S.-Mexican Border: A New Front of the War on Terror?

June 7, 2012

TODD MILLER, toddmiller70 at hotmail.com
Todd Miller has researched and written about U.S.-Mexican border issues for more than 10 years. He just wrote the article, “Bringing the Battlefield to the Border, The Wild World of Border Security and Boundary Building in Arizona,” which states: “William ‘Drew’ Dodds, the salesperson for StrongWatch, a Tucson-based company, is at the top of his game when he describes developments on the southern border of the United States in football terms. In his telling, that boundary is the line of scrimmage, and the technology his company is trying to sell — a mobile surveillance system named Freedom-On-The-Move, a camera set atop a retractable mast outfitted in the bed of a truck and maneuvered with an Xbox controller — acts like a ‘roving linebacker.’

“As Dodds describes it, unauthorized migrants and drug traffickers often cross the line of scrimmage undetected. At best, they are seldom caught until the “last mile,” far from the boundary line. His surveillance system, he claims, will cover a lot more of that ground in very little time and from multiple angles. It will become the border-enforcement equivalent of New York Giants’ linebacking great, Lawrence Taylor.

“To listen to Dodds, an ex-Marine — Afghanistan and Iraq, 2001-2004 — with the hulking physique of a linebacker himself, is to experience a new worldview being constructed on the run. Even a decade or so ago, it might have seemed like a mad dream from the American fringe. These days, his all-the-world’s-a-football-field vision seemed perfectly mainstream inside the brightly-lit convention hall in Phoenix, Arizona, where the seventh annual Border Security Expo took place this March. Dodds was just one of hundreds of salespeople peddling their border-enforcement products and national security wares, …[and] one of more than a hundred companies scrambling for a profitable edge in an exploding market.

“As that buzzing convention floor made clear, the anything-goes approach to immigration enforcement found in Arizona — home to SB1070, the infamous anti-immigrant law now before the Supreme Court — has generated interest from boundary-militarizers elsewhere in the country and the world. An urge for zero-tolerance-style Arizona borders is spreading fast, as evidenced by the convention’s clientele. In addition to U.S. Border Patrol types, attendees came from law enforcement outfits and agencies nationwide, and from 18 countries around the world, including Israel and Russia. …

“More than one million migrants have been deported from the country over the last three and a half years under the Obama administration, numbers that surpass those of the Bush years. This should be a reminder that a significant, if overlooked, part of this country’s post 9/11 security iron fist has been aimed not at al-Qaeda but at the undocumented migrant. Indeed, as writer Roberto Lovato points out, there has been an ‘al-Qaedization of immigrants and immigration policy.’ And as in the Global War on Terror, military-industrial companies like Boeing and Halliburton are cashing in on this version of for-profit war.”

Filed Under: Tagged With: immigration, Todd Miller, war,

“Bain Actually Loves Dems”

May 29, 2012

DOUG HENWOOD, dhenwood at panix.com
Editor of Left Business Observer and author of the book Wall Street, Henwood just wrote the brief piece “Bain Actually Loves Dems,” which states: “All good Democrats are busily hating on Bain Capital right now. What they’re forgetting is how many Bain-affiliated political contributions have gone to Democrats.

“Plug the words ‘Bain Capital’ into an OpenSecrets.org search and you learn that while Bain people have lovingly contributed to their former CEO’s presidential campaign, almost three-quarters of their contributions to other candidates, 72 percent to be precise, have gone to Democrats. That’s a higher percentage to Dems than the AFL-CIO!”

“And among the top recipients are Dem headliners like Al Franken, Claire McCaskill, John Kerry, Mark Udall, Nancy Pelosi, and Sherrod Brown. They were also major contributors to the Democratic National Committee and the national Democratic party. There are very few Republican candidates on the OpenSecrets list, and no major gifts to the GOP itself.

“So [Newark, N.J., Mayor] Cory Booker’s defense of PE [private equity] against attacks by the Obama campaign has a very materialist explanation: PE titans like Bain have been funding Dems for ages — including Booker himself (e.g., ‘Cory Booker’s Bain Capital money‘). It was just a few years ago that HF [hedge fund] hotshot Paul Tudor Jones held a 500-guest fundraiser for Obama, back when ‘the whole of Greenwich’ (an epicenter of the industry) was behind him (‘Another top hedge fund chief backs Obama‘). Then he hurt their feelings with one intemperate use of the term ‘fatcats.’ But it’s not like Obama is about to expropriate the PE and HF types.”

A recent Bob Fitch memorial lecture by Henwood contains a broader critique of Wall Street and real estate support for many establishment Democrats. (Fitch was author of the book The Assassination of New York, which charged that elites seeking ever greater profits had effectively gutted New York City neighborhoods and productive economic sectors.)

Filed Under: , Tagged With: Bain Capital, corporations, Doug Henwood, economy, elections, Mitt Romney,

JPMorgan is Biggest Contributor to Senate Chair Calling Them to Testify

May 21, 2012


THOMAS FERGUSON, thomas.ferguson at umb.edu
Ferguson is professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and a senior fellow of the Roosevelt Institute. He just wrote the piece “Senate Banking Chair Calls Jamie Dimon to Testify: But JPMorgan Chase is His Biggest Contributor!” about Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Johnson of South Dakota announcing his panel would call JPMorgan Chase Chair Jamie Dimon.

Ferguson said today: “Four years ago, the failure of Lehman Brothers precipitated a world wide financial collapse. Now policymakers in Europe are weighing whether to let not a bank, but a whole country — Greece — go down the drain. We have been repeatedly told that American banks have so carefully hedged their European exposures that there is no reason to fear contagion from such a disaster. The JPMorgan Chase case raises fundamental questions about these breezy assurances and whether American bank regulators truly understand what our Too Big To Fail Banks are really up to. We cannot afford another expensive policy failure by our money-driven Congress: Senator Johnson’s committee needs to start posing searching questions not in weeks, but immediately, before American banks and their regulators are once again overtaken by events.”

Also see Ferguson’s piece on Congress and money in the Financial Times.

See Johnson’s information from the Center for Responsive Politics at OpenSecrets.org

Filed Under: , Tagged With: corporations, economy, Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan, Thomas Ferguson, Tim Johnson,

Bilking the Poor: America’s Poverty Taxes

May 17, 2012

Multibillonaire Pete Peterson’s Fiscal Summit concluded on Tuesday with a stand for no-compromise austerity and Speaker of the House John Boehner laying out the case for massive spending cuts. Yesterday the Senate voted down budget proposals that would have slashed Medicaid, cut SNAP, voucher-ized Medicare, and shrunk most other domestic human needs programs. At the same time, these proposals protect and even increase the military budget and cut taxes for those at the top. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that nearly two-thirds of those proposed program cuts would hit low-income people disproportionately.

But authors Barbara Ehrenreich and Gary Rivlin argue that any discussion of the safety net and poverty alleviation has to include the ways that local and state governments and private enterprise actively prey on the poor.

BARBARA EHRENREICH, via Beth Schulman, barbara.ehrenreich at economichardship.org,
Ehrereich is the author of “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” and is most recently the founder of the just-launched Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which supports innovative journalism on poverty . In her report “Preying On the Poor,” released today by TomDispatch, she writes: “Before we can ‘do something’ for the poor, there are some things we need to stop doing to them. … The amounts extracted from the poor by the private and public sector are comparable to the amounts ‘given’ to the poor through the safety net. It’s not just the private sector that’s preying on the poor. Local governments are discovering that they can partially make up for declining tax revenues through fines, fees, and other costs imposed on indigent defendants, often for crimes no more dastardly than driving with a suspended license.”

She said today: “I am surprised by the size of these numbers, and made all the more impatient with the standard liberal discourse on poverty. We can’t go on talking about poverty without talking about how it is being manufactured and intensified all the time.”

GARY RIVLIN, grivlin at mindspring.com
Journalist and author of five books, including “Broke USA,” and co-editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project with Ehrenreich, Rivlin just wrote the piece “America’s Poverty Tax,” where he reports on the exorbitant fees the poor and the working poor pay because they have lousy credit or because they have no savings. Rivlin said today: “The numbers show it’s very expensive to be poor.” The article states: “Add up all the profits pocketed by all those payday lenders, check cashers, subprime auto lenders, and other Poverty, Inc. enterprises and divide it by the 40 million households the Federal Reserve says survive on $30,000 a year or less. That works out to around $2,500 per household, or a poverty tax of around 10 percent.”

Filed Under: , Tagged With: Barbara Ehrenreich, corporations, economy, Gary Rivlin, poverty,

Majority Favors Cutting Military Budget

May 15, 2012

Discretionary Spending Areas (Billions of Dollars)

STEVEN KULL, skull at pipa.org
Kull is director of the Program for Public Consultation, a joint program of the Center on Policy Attitudes and the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and lead author of the recently released study “Consulting the American People on National Defense Spending.”

He said today: “Three quarters of respondents favored cutting defense as a way to reduce the deficit, including two thirds of Republicans as well as nine in ten Democrats. …

“Other polls on defense spending have mostly asked simply whether respondents favor or oppose defense cuts, and generally found smaller numbers favoring cuts. This suggests that Americans generally underestimate the size of the defense budget and that when they receive balanced information about its size they are more likely to cut it to reduce the deficit. …

“The area cut by the greatest percentage was nuclear weapons, which respondents reduced an average of 27 percent (Republicans 18 percent, Democrats 35 percent). The area that was cut the most in dollar terms was for existing ground force capabilities which was cut an average of $36.2 billion (Republicans $23.8 billion, Democrats $44.5 billion) or 23 percent.

“What is striking is that it appears that the American people, unlike Congress, are able to thoughtfully recognize the validity of arguments both for and against cutting defense spending and still come to hard and even bold decisions.

“Eight in ten favored cutting the Obama administration’s proposed budget of $88 billion for 2013 war spending in Afghanistan. Overall, on average it was cut 40 percent or $35 billion.”

Note: Respondents were queried about “defense” spending, not “military” spending, which likely would have drawn even less support.

Filed Under: , Tagged With: budget, Defense Spending Cuts, Defense Spending Poll, Discretionary Spending Areas, military, military spending, Military-Industrial Complex, Public Opinion Defense BUdget, Steven Kull,
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